The book 'From Democracy to Dictatorship' by Arun D Ellis

The Independents

You say ‘evasion’, I say ‘avoidance’

“Hello fellow Independents, my name’s Marissa Phillips, I’m a Tax Accountant” she smiled at the anticipated mock groans from the audience, “and I’ll be standing for Parliament in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.” She was easy on the eye, no doubt about that, one of those tall, effortlessly willowy women, ‘arm candy’ but she seemed to have a head on her shoulders so possibly worth the time taken to hear her out; this was demonstrated in the friendly applause from the floor. “I’m going to talk to you about the massive deception being wrought upon us; the myth that there is no money to support public services, to support the NHS, to fund proper state education, to provide social care for the less well off, that we are a 3rd rate nation unable to compete in the world.”

“It’s not that hard to expose the deception, although you wouldn’t believe it hearing the constant double talk, the economic mumbo jumbo coming from all parties.” she laughed lightly, “listening to them you’d think money, taxation, economics and government expenditure were the most complicated things in the world. Well they’re not; they make it sound complicated in the hopes they’ll convince us to leave them to get on with what they’re doing, without bothering to question anything. The shocking thing is that it works. Now, why is that?”

She paused and looked around the hall, waiting for a few moments to let the question sink in, “It works because we are predisposed to accept that it’s complicated, we believe in the concept that our leaders are special, that they are exceptional, that what they are struggling with is beyond our humble abilities to resolve. But we deceive ourselves,” she stopped, appearing to reflect, “or are we being deceived? I think they plant the seed and we allow it to grow. I think that they want us to believe that only they, the political class, can resolve the nation’s ills but in truth, it is they who make the problems in the first place. It is they who have set this country on its current course and they’ve done it for a reason… so, what is the reason?”

She pivoted 900 on skyscraper heels, and indicated their mentor, “Colin has said it’s all about money, it’s all about theft, it’s all about how the wealthy classes can extract as much money as possible from the system for themselves whilst leaving the rest of us and the country in a state of penury, it’s about creating a class of super rich by stealing from the state, by robbing the people of what’s rightfully theirs.”

“On the other hand, there are those who say that they are merely taking what is rightfully theirs, what they’ve earned by their own efforts” she scanned the room, ensuring she had their attention, “and I’ve met, worked with and worked for many of those in my time.”

She paused for a sip of water before continuing, “I’m a Tax Accountant as I said in my introduction and I’ve helped some of the richest people in the country use all the loopholes I could find to avoid paying tax.”

There was a collective gasp, she’d expected a reaction but this was a bit more tangible than a few people, it felt like the whole room had grown cold. She glanced over at Colin who nodded, Catherine smiled at her encouragingly and Maurice, the next one up, winked. She turned back to the audience, buoyed and feisty.

“Note, I said ‘avoid’ which is legal, not evade which is not. However…” she raised her hands to quell the rising tide of irritation emanating from the front rows, “however, tax avoidance on the scale to which these people have become accustomed is immoral, anti-social and repugnant and I quit my job six months ago for that very reason.”

She took a deep, shuddering breath then she continued “I know from 1st hand dealings that these people have no scruples, no loyalty and no conscience. They have quadrupled their wealth by investing in emerging markets and enslaving 3rd world workers whilst starving the UK of investment. They have off shored their bank accounts, registered companies abroad so that they don’t have to pay UK taxes and the political class has let them do this because it, more than any other section in society is willing to sell itself to the highest bidder…”

The applause returned; a light smattering at first then more focused; she was winning them round.

“But I get ahead of myself…Let’s consider the context here, let’s discuss the deception and the premise that comes with it: that the UK government can no longer support the services we have become used to, that government doesn’t have the funds anymore. Well the obvious question is... How can that be so? How can it be so?” she repeated, her hands outstretched, incredulity in every line of her body, “How can this country have less money now than it did just after the Second World War when we were virtually bankrupt? Yet at that time we could afford to establish the NHS which we are told today is too big to support.”

There were growls of support, and murmurs of ‘hands off our NHS’.

“The answer is simple, though you won’t find a single politician who will admit it, you won’t find one solitary MP who will tell the truth about the finances of the state and the reason is this; if they did then there would be a revolution.”

She turned to the panel and saw smiles of encouragement along the line, “It would be obvious to each and every one of us that the rich are sucking all the money out of our country before they desert us to live in their Caribbean paradises and we would REVOLT against it.”

The audience seemed shocked at the sudden vocal change on the word ‘revolt’, she’d seemed quite languid up until that point. Clearly she was more robust than she looked.

She took another sip of water, “Let’s consider how the process actually works or, should I say, is meant to work. Fact: Government has no money, any government has absolutely no money, for the simple reason that governments don’t make anything and they don’t sell anything. Ergo, everything they set in motion is a cost to the nation and it has to be paid for by the nation.” She paused and looked round the hall, “That’s where taxation comes in, that’s what taxation is all about, that’s why they take our money in the first place and why they take it in direct taxation, at source. The simple truth is that the government can only spend what it raises by way of taxation.” She paused again, “and it is a system that works or at least it worked in the past. However, in the last few decades those revenues have shrunk, the government has raised fewer funds via taxation.”

“Now, here…” she said, narrowing her eyes, trying to get her timing right, “here is where it all gets a bit murky or at least where they try to make it opaque so you won’t ask, why?....Why, at a time when there is more money than ever before floating around in the UK, when the number of UK billionaires stands at 73, and the country is richer than it’s ever been in its history, when there so many people in the country of working age, when there are more taxes foisted on us than ever before, why is it that the government says it doesn’t have the funding to carry on paying for things like the NHS?”

She stopped talking for a moment, obviously struggling, she drank from her glass and refilled it, then coughed, her emotional attachment to the argument becoming clear to all, “Why can’t we afford the social care bill? Why must we charge our children for the higher education that we had for free? We managed to afford it whilst we were still paying off the national debt for the Second World War, when there were fewer people in this country eligible to pay tax, when there were fewer taxes; no VAT for instance, less duty on petrol, cigarettes, alcohol. Why is it, that at a time when there was less money in the system as a whole, the government had more to spend than it does now, when there is more money in the system as a whole? Why? …Why?”

Marissa paused to look around the hall and waited for her words to settle into every corner, find a place in each mind. People started cheering and calling out “Why?”

She allowed the noise to peak before she started to wave for silence, “the answer’s simple, the answer’s obvious, logical, a child could tell you the answer yet we constantly allow the politicians to deceive us, to delude us, to lie to us, to paint a false picture for us. We let them tell us that we as a people are too greedy, that we have priced ourselves out of a job, that we expect too much of the NHS, that the NHS itself has become too expensive, that we pay too many people Social Benefits, that there are more old people weighing the state down with pensions, that we are a nation of scroungers living in million pound houses paid for by benefits, that we can’t compete with rising economic power houses like China and India but they LIE!”

More applause and cheering from the hall.

“They LIE, I tell you!” she thundered, her slight frame trembling, “They lie; and when you realise the truth you will be shocked at of the depth of duplicity involved, the magnitude of the sheer greed involved, the despotism it represents, the evil psychopathic nature it hides, the blatant manipulation that has been occurring, the involvement of the politicians, our politicians who are meant to represent the will, the wishes, the needs of the people, at the realisation that believing in the integrity of the political class is totally naive for they are by nature deceitful, scheming, egotistical, self serving tyrants.”
The audience was with her now; the applause self-sustaining, ripples dying away as new clapping started so that the effect was a constant sigh of sound.

She waved for quiet, “Back in the 50s there were rich people but they weren’t obscenely rich and there were poor people but they weren’t destitute. Everything was more equal; everyone paid tax and everyone paid their fare share, result, the government had more than enough money to spend. There was little personal debt, people took pride in owning what they had and many people lived in council houses or privately rented accommodation. That’s how it works when the money is evenly distributed, that’s how societies grow, and that’s how cultures develop. I’m not saying it was perfect but it appeared fair; and this continued and took us into the 60s.”

She glanced round the hall, noting the nods of agreement for her assessment of the situation in those times, “However by the early 70s the ordinary person was being encouraged to ‘buy’ their own home. The enthusiasm with which this was taken up was due partly to the lack of affordable rented accommodation, and partly to the promise of ownership. There was promulgation in 95% mortgages, a relaxation of checking mechanisms on actual earnings; the multipliers were relaxed to enable previously ineligible couples to borrow heavily.”

She took a breath and continued briskly, “By the late 70s we were starting to feel the pinch; old inefficient factories, competition from Japan and Germany who’d had massive post-war US investment in new ‘fit for purpose’ build. We’d had hospitals for so long those buildings needed replacement; the UK infrastructure needed reinvestment, revitalising, a little TLC. What we got in the 80s was a wicked evil person who said it was all the workers doing; it was they who were to blame for the lack of investment and the threats of foreign competition. She told everyone that there was no such thing as society; that it was everyone for him or herself; that the prize belonged to those best able to ‘get on their bikes’ and grasp it. This individualist premise was supported by a political determination to unpick the seams of society, to unravel the threads that hold people together, to break the bonds of unity that encourage generosity of spirit and altruism. Once that selfish argument took hold the weak became a sniveling millstone, the poor a grasping nuisance, the old an unloved burden. Added to that, the selloff of council houses had a two-fold effect reducing social housing stock and increasing home ownership amongst people to whom that level of debt had been hitherto unthinkable. Home became an investment rather than somewhere to put down roots and bring up a family; a ‘buy and sell’ commodity and we became nomadic in an attempt to attain wealth, more money-oriented and less family focused.”

She allowed a few moments for that to sink in, then continued, “Accompanying this permission to abandon societal ethics came de-regulation and authorisation to off shore manufacturing to countries unfettered by social conscience, where people were treated as slaves, where wages were insignificant, where rents were negligible, where a bribe could give the greatest financial returns to the most unscrupulous who were willing to profit from the suffering of others.”

She paused and scanned the hall, “So what are the lies that are the instruments of this deception? One such lie is that we priced ourselves out of the manufacturing market so that employers had no choice but to go abroad. NOT TRUE – there is always a choice - the choice to be made was between excessive profit and employment of your countryman, and PROFIT won out.”

Her face was stern, “Another lie they fobbed us off with for years was that the resultant millions, rendered unemployed when manufacturing was taken from this country, could be absorbed into a service based industry; that we could pay each other for doing service jobs for each other…self-evidently not true if you look at the numbers of long-term unemployed.”

She made a negating gesture with her hand, chopping it through the air, her tone scornful, “It was never the case that a service industry could support a nation, it has never been the case, it could never be the case and there is no working model which could ever prove the case, it’s a LIE! And they knew it to be a lie when they spun it.”

“And they told the lie to buy them time; time to build the infrastructure of their new economic empires in the 3rd world, to allow them to ensure they would have the mechanisms in place to guarantee them high returns on their investments when the economic structures started to collapse in the west, here in the UK. Over the years they have created a massive pool of unemployed, so much so that the benefits bill is astronomic, they reduced wages to the extent that a middle class family struggles to get by with two earners and has massive debt, where a middle class family in the 50s only required one wage earner and had no debt; this is what they have achieved.”

She paused, “And these unscrupulous rich, the evil 1%, are so greedy that they don’t want to pay tax on their incomes, they don’t want to contribute to the British nation so they off shore their bank accounts or they register as domiciled abroad in countries where the tax laws are more lenient and they can bribe officials. They do all this so they can keep all the money to themselves; so that they can have five mansions, with swimming pools, tennis courts and hundreds of acres of land, apartments in Paris and New York, villas in the Antibes. So that they can have million pound yachts, private jets, so they can own a fleet of the most expensive cars, they do all of this so that they can have lots of everything, more than any individual could ever use or ever need or ever really want and they do it so that they can have not just millions but billions.”

She took a deep breath, then continued her voice shaking, “They don’t care about world hunger, they don’t care that workers in their factories are suffering, they don’t care that a child dies every 3 seconds of a preventable disease, they don’t care about the unemployed, they don’t care about health care and education for the masses, they don’t care about social benefits for those less able …they care about themselves because as a self opinionated politician once said, ‘there is no such thing as society’.”

More applause from the hall.

“And the net result of their greed for the UK? less people working, less companies manufacturing, less exports even though the companies producing products in the 3rd world are British owned or British funded, with the greedy psychopathic 1% hoarding all of the money … there is less taxable money in the system.”

She took a moment to gain her breath, accepting the applause with a smile. Colin approached the table, whispered something in her ear, causing her to smile more broadly. He sat down again.

“I need to wrap this up,” she said, with a quick look of apology at the Panel, “I’ve overrun a bit …. So to finish, because most of the money is now in the hands of the greedy 1% and they have worked it so that they either don’t pay tax or they pay a negligible amount of tax, the government has less money. That’s why the government can’t afford the NHS, that’s why the government can’t afford the social benefits bill, that’s why libraries are closing, that’s why students have to pay for their own education, that’s why our troops, our sons and daughters are starved of equipment that could save their lives in the field, that’s why we have such a huge national debt, that’s why we have austerity.”

She took a last look round the hall, “And make no mistake, we are NOT in this together… politicians in the main are all independently wealthy, they rub shoulders with the rich and the super rich. Our politicians have had a taste of vast wealth and power and they want more; and because they want more they have sold out the 99% for their 30 pieces of silver, they have sold their souls for greed, but we will not let them get away with it!”

The hall erupted with applause and cheers.

Hope you enjoy the book and have a nice week

Cheers Arun