There can be no doubt that the nation’s revulsion against awarding a £10,000 tax break to the top 1% of earners and no less than a £40,000 tax cut to 14,000 millionaires was dramatically sharpened by the fact that it was funded by depriving 4.5 million pensioners of £83 a week. But even if that [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Equality’
All the nastiest Tory prejudices you’ve always detested will be in this Budget
Mar 19th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.No doubt Osborne will never dare use his infamous phrase again “We’re all in it together”. If it was ever true, it was only till the rich wanted out, and as we now see in the run-up to this budget, that was almost immediately as soon as it had the slightest adverse impact on themselves. [...]
Who are the rich that Osborne is pandering to?
Mar 19th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.To give a tax break to people on more than £150,000 a year when the rest of the population, and above all the bottom half, are on the rack for a decade of austerity takes some doing. It shows more acidly than anything else could the sheer psychopathic mania of the ruling Tory elite for [...]
Tax cuts for the rich, benefit cuts & eviction for the poor
Mar 17th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.If Osborne wanted to be as provocative as possible (which he probably does, to appease the Tory right, his future backers for the leadership), he could hardly put together a more incendiary mix than cutting tax rates for the ultra-rich in the budget and then, 2 weeks later, impose swingeing cuts on some of the [...]
50p income tax? The rich should count their blessings
Mar 16th, 2012 by David Osler.Of course the 50p top rate of income is more important for its symbolism than its efficacy. The free market right should stop griping and thank their lucky stars that the last Labour government lacked the political courage required to reintroduce genuinely progressive taxation. If only they would count their blessings instead of counting their [...]
Better to be a banker than on workfare if you do something wrong
Mar 4th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Penalties, as the current bonus season reveals all too clearly, are still a matter of class. If you’re a young person 16-24 on a work experience programme promoted as ‘voluntary’, and you drop out even for good reason, you stood to lose two weeks’ benefit (until the government was forced to back down by public [...]
As Hester still gets £6m bonuses, the utterly destitute lose Social Fund
Feb 1st, 2012 by Michael Meacher.There are two different universes at Westminster, completely disconnected. One is about Hester who has sacked thousands and still presides over RBS languishing at a share price only half of what taxpayers paid for in the bailout, but who has already on top of his £550,000 salary (£10,575 a week) gained £11m in bonuses and [...]
Pay freeze to 2020 – unless you’re a banker
Jan 23rd, 2012 by Michael Meacher.By a striking coincidence turkey-fattening season in the City, otherwise known as bonus time, happens to be rolled out at the same time as the rest of the population is being told that the pay freeze, after last year’s big 4.2% drop in real wages, is now expected to last till 2020. However, for the [...]
Why does Labour find sado-masochism so appealing?
Jan 9th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.It is astonishing that sado-masochism, so beloved of the English upper classes in their sexual antics, is so infectious in the Labour Party, albeit in a very different context. There seems to be an obsession in some sections of the party that once the Tories go down the route of self-destructive austerity, we must at [...]
Cameron’s move on fat cats’ pay is just showbiz
Jan 8th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.First Cameron’s grandstanding: “We need to try give people a sense that we have a vision at the end of this of a fairer, better economy”. Then the idea: stop top people handing out hugely inflated salaries + bonuses + incentives + shares + share options to each other. Then the awareness that what has [...]
