IN advance of the Tory budget on Wednesday, where chancellor Osborne is due to announce even more savage austerity cuts, the charity Oxfam has released a report showing that Britain’s ‘privileged minority’ have been steadily amassing billions at the expense of the working class.
The report, ‘Ending the Era of Tax-Havens’ highlights the way in which the very wealthiest one per cent of the population of Britain, a mere 60,000 people, are increasing their wealth at a spectacular rate.
According to figures from the Swiss bank Credit Suisse, Oxfam has calculated that the total net wealth of people in Britain has increased from £6 trillion to £10 trillion over the past 15 years. In this period the top 1% increased their wealth collectively to £2.4 trillion, an increase of 79%, which represents an average of £3.7 million for every one of them.
This 1% of the filthy rich creamed off 26 pence of every pound of wealth created while the country’s poorest, 30 million people, got just 7 pence. The poorest 10% in Britain saw their wealth increase from £1,100 to just £1,600 in the 15 years.
Pointing to the use of tax havens by the wealthy, Oxfam said that cash was being funnelled on a massive scale to ‘secrecy jurisdictions’ like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda resulting in the loss of £5 billion a year in taxes.
‘It’s simply not right that a tiny group of individuals hoovers up so much of the UK’s growing prosperity while barely any trickles down to those who have least,’ said Mark Goldring, Oxfam chief executive, adding: ‘Currently, a privileged minority are able to hide billions offshore away from tax authorities, which unfairly increases the burden on the rest – especially people who are already struggling to get by.’
An increase of just £500 in the ‘wealth’ of the poorest over 15 years is not a sign of ‘growing prosperity’, when inflation is taken into account this represents a massive increase in poverty levels something that Oxfam itself recognises in the report when it points to figures showing that a record number of people are forced to rely on food banks just to survive.
The thrust of Oxfam’s report was to call for the Tory chancellor, George Osborne, to use Wednesday’s budget to ‘clamp down’ on corporate tax dodging by ending ‘the secrecy that allows tax dodgers to get away without paying their fair share, robbing the UK – and poor countries – of vital revenue that could help fund public services and provide a strong safety net for most vulnerable’.
Appeals to the Tories to help the working class at the expense of the bankers and capitalists who comprise the 1% are useless. On Sunday Osborne defended in a BBC interview his decision to cut the Personal Independence Payments made to disabled people – cuts that mean hundreds of thousands of the most disabled face losing up to £150 a week – in order to save £1.2 billion.
At the same time as 650,000 of the most vulnerable face cuts to benefits the money saved will go towards tax cuts for the high earners! Osborne insisted on the Andrew Marr show that these savage cuts were necessary to ‘improve the economic conditions’ in the UK, he said ‘Yes, times are tough. The fiscal situation is a difficult one.’
In these ‘tough times’ for capitalism the working class is going to pay by seeing its wages, benefits and welfare services smashed while the only conditions Osborne and the Tories are remotely interested in improving are those of the 1% of parasites who are living off the backs of the working class.
Appeals to the Tories are worse than useless. The only thing to be done is to demand that the TUC answer Osborne’s attacks with a general strike to kick out the government and replace it with a workers government that will expropriate the bankers and bosses and go forward to a socialist society where production is for the equal benefit of all.
