In response to my What is Right post, John King made this comment.
I don’t agree entirely with John, as you can imagine!
No-one in this country has no money and many people are being taxed while they live below the poverty line. Each year £6,623 is spent by the government per person in England (more in Scotland and Wales and £8,898 in Northern Ireland). Imagine what you could do with that money — there is absolutely no doubt that a proportion of that could be returned to people (or not taken in the first place ideally) and no-one would be worse off because of it either financially or because of missing services.
Labour’s record on job creation is misleading. They’ve failed to break things as seriously as previous Labour administrations, I’ll grant you, but the whole world’s been experiencing an unprecedented boom and they were lucky that their illogical policies didn’t break the UK in that period. See Mark Adams’ and Dave’s excellent deconstruction of the arguments for a minimum wage.
It should be noted that during Thatcher and Major’s tenure, the number of people in poverty reduced. Also, during that time, the gap between rich and poor reduced. And since 1997 both those things have increased.
It’s also vehemently not a smoke screen — lower taxes are proven to create more and better-paid jobs. It’s not an ‘opinion’ I hold, it’s an internationally accepted fact outside of the confines of Europe.
On Council Tax, it is, in my humble opinion, a tax on those conscientious enough to save for a larger home. If you save to afford a larger home, you are taxed more as a punishment. There has to be a better solution, but I don’t have the answer, I must say.
One final point on “assuming that everybody has money in the first place”, no-one is required to be poor. Until Labour introduced tuition fees, there was no economic barrier to improving your lot and doing better than your parents. The wealth of each individual is, cruel as it may seem, a combination of merit, luck and determination. Saying to people that if they’re poor they should expect the same quality of life is actually a poke in the eye for all those people who work twelve hour days or two jobs to make ends meet.
This is a contributor to another problem that I was discussing with Miss Anon this evening: Quality of life in England is poor. If you work for an average wage you cannot afford to buy a small one-bedroom flat, you cannot run a car and you cannot afford to take international holidays (or certainly not all three of these). If you were on the average wage in many other parts of the world outside of Africa and the Middle East, you would find yourself living in relative luxury.
Now the question of why that is, is something that people can debate forever. I would suggest, though, that we in the UK assume that our healthcare provision should be as good as private healthcare provision in Greece or Mauritius — it’s not comparing like-with-like. The Government is singularly incapable of spending our taxes on healthcare in a way that provides value for money. Blair’s half-hearted attempts at introducing private providers to the health care provision available in the UK are a step in the right direction but there should be a more concerted effort.
The privatisation of dentistry which was done by sleight of hand, was not managed and so has resulted in a two-tier dentistry provision. If you have a reasonable wage your teeth will be acceptable and, if you’re on a below-average wage, your teeth will likely rot. This could have been avoided if all dentistry was privatised so that there was an incentive to make provision for the less well-off. If there was no NHS to fall back on, people would pay some of the money they are no longer paying into taxes, into an insurance scheme and have more left to save for retirement or spend — who can argue with that?
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