When moral standing is made homeless

Knowing when you are there

Like mine, I could imagine that many minds are filled with one type of regret or the other, where an unfortunate lack of insight at an opportunity we find ourselves in is not used to any benefit until we have left that position.

The power of hindsight reveals how we have misused both opportunity and responsibility, when that unique situation we were presented with offered more than we realised we could do.

A friend tried to contextualise this with people who have been in power, position, and providence, who failed to understand what they could do to change, improve, or give enduring value to things and on their exit have resorted to writing memoirs about how they were unable to do things they were so uniquely able to do, when they were in that position.

Perfect vision outside power

However, this extends into other spheres of existence how when not endued with power, much is said, but when those who saw so clearly out of power assume power, the realities dictate everything that borders on hypocrisy and worse.

How one can soon forget the moral standing that comes with position that you are left defending the indefensible and justifying the unjustifiable.

Much as a critique of our current government is difficult, it can be encapsulated in the recent resignation last week of the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (Minister for Homelessness and Democracy) whose brief and responsibilities need detailing for context and understanding.

• Homelessness and rough sleeping
• Housing delivery and strategy engagement
• Homeownership and homebuying process
• Supported housing and domestic abuse
• Elections policy and delivery
• Planning casework

A total lack of awareness

It just so happens that as she was pushing reforms through the parliamentary process, she ran afoul of the protections she was seeking to put in place. She evicted her tenants on the pretext of needing to sell her property, only to put the property back on the rental market, a couple of weeks later, at a hiked-up rate.

She might protest that she had done nothing wrong and every idea that this was rank hypocrisy might have been an unfortunate coincidence of realising her property could not be sold for the asking price, leaving her no other option but to access the rental market again, but other lives are unravelled and upturned, I dare say, landlord greed entered the fray.

Invariably, she created an untenable situation for herself in government, that the only recourse was to tender her resignation. You cannot superintend a law where appearances suggest that it is one law for others whilst you find yourself outside the ambit of the same law being promulgated.

Then taxes went up again

Moreso, I can remember in March 2024, the current Prime Minister then in opposition lamented that we had reached the highest tax burden in 70 years, only for them to gain power in July 2024 to find a £20 billion black hole.

That has instigated another tax hike that might take the burden to the highest in about a century, but how amnesia has overwhelmed any reckoning or memory. [BBC News: Tory Budget 2024: Is the tax take the highest for 70 years?] [BBC News: Labour Budget 2024: Key points at a glance]

Meanwhile, that was £45 less, per month, on my take home pay when it all took effect, and they are not yet done with the proposed tax rises. It just looks like the black hole is getting bigger. [BBC News: Reeves must raise tax to cover £41bn gap, says think tank] [The Guardian: Reeves and Starmer to prepare ground for tax rises in a difficult autumn budget]

Let’s talk for the voiceless

It is easy to talk in opposition, when in power, reality bites and the choices to be made are more impactful and far-reaching than they let on. Let us not delude ourselves, our politicians are in the same game of trade-offs, beholding to some with great influence and less so to those without a strong voice.

Except if you were a tenant of Rushanara Ali who were fortunate to have their distress amplified enough to force the minister’s hand, you are like many, on your own. [BBC News: Homelessness Minister Rushanara Ali quits over rent hike claims]

The responsibility of having opportunity and being in power is a great one, we often fail to make it easier for those who gave us that opportunity to do something significant.

Tax Credits: The Toffs are making it tough

All buses gone

One morning when I was still living in Amsterdam, I walked up to the bus stop one morning to catch a bus to the train station one my way to work.

Until, that morning, we had 5 buses going from that bus stop in different directions going to the train station that no one had to wait more than 10 minutes for a bus to come by. However, no bus came, or the only other bus that did was not going to the station.

One cursory view of the bus timetables showed that all buses from that stop to the station had been cancelled. I was later to learn that the buses were cancelled because there was a new tram service going to the train station, only that the said tram service was another 6 months away from coming into service.

This was some sort of forward-planning made without considering the impact and consequence on our community for the 6 intervening months where we had to find alternative convoluted arrangements to get to the train station, we had to wake up earlier and leave home earlier to make our connections because of this.

The travesty of tax credits

This brings me to the issue of the day in UK politics, the review of Tax Credits as proposed by the Chancellor of Exchequer. That Tax Credits exist in and off themselves is a travesty and a failing of the democratic capitalist model we have in the UK.

Tax Credits are neither taxes nor credits but a socialist means of supplementing the incomes of workers who are paid such atrociously low salaries in the public and private sector that they can hardly subsist on their incomes. In a way, our capitalist framework does not pay fully for the employment and utility of labour and the slack is taken up by the public purse in the quest to lift the poorly paid above the poverty line.

There are probably macroeconomic policies that can be put in place to make capitalism pay up in full for the cost of labour and expertise, allowing for a middle-class kind of existence, but no government has had the guts to stand up to business and demand they do the morally and ethically right thing about wages. In most cases, these businesses that leach of us to exist for the primary profit motive will howl about changes that cost them more when they are not even meeting their basic costs.

The truth is, we’re worse off

What the new Conservative government plans to do is to reduce the level of income at which people will qualify for the full in-work benefits over which the payments reduce and to limit the benefits towards children to a maximum of two.

We are told that changes to the living wage, higher tax payment thresholds, more subsidised childcare access and other tax jiggery-pokery will compensate for the loss of Tax Credits. The fact is like the transport situation I described earlier, nothing could be further from the truth.

Independent analysts and institutions have already determined that all taken together, up to 3 million families will be worse off, losing an average of £1,000 a year whilst saving the government up to £4 billion in their ideological quest to plug the deficit brought on by the financial system gone riot and the government using public money to save private financial atrocities for which no significant member of the financial community has been held accountable for.

The toffs are making it tough

In all, it is the poor and the low-income earners that have taken the bigger brunt of the austerity measures put in place to compensate for the ‘crimes’ of the City and rich investors, the squeeze is still on the poor without respite.

This might well be the Conservative government’s Poll Tax moment, but I guess not much can be said for the concern or consideration of a well-heeled governing class who have trust funds to last generations that the cries of anguish of the masses will only be an irritation to be blocked out in the comfort of their gilded and soundproofed castles.

This is not the Great Britain many signed up for, but that is the way things are. My transport situation was resolved in 6 months, the lives of people dependent on Tax Credits will not get better in the long run and that is a shame.

The need for fairness in taxes

Easy to file

I just filed my taxes with the Dutch tax authorities called Belastingdienst and if anything being the son of an accountant and having every mutation of the anti-accountancy gene in my being, they have the simplest tax filing system in the whole wide world.

It is all done electronically, you download a programme, install it and you just go through the sequence of filling in the numbers then use your DigID code to file the stuff – all done in under 20 minutes.

All you require are a number of Year Summary (Jaaropgave in Dutch) letters you get from your employer or employment agency, your mortgage lender, the community value of your home based on the assessment of your local government and a number of insurance details.

I do not complicate my tax filing with receipts of taxi rides and other little expenses, the time spent adding up pennies (cents) ends up losing you pounds (Euros).

When I looked at the summary of my returns I suddenly realised I was so much into the top tax band, it made me sick, I was paying so much at 52%.

Tax breaks away from home

Now, I moved to the Netherlands at a time when the UK Labour Party was introducing a new tax code called IR35 where as a self-employed owner of a company my income was to be taxed at source rather than after it had gone through the company – there was an exodus at a time when the UK needed IT personnel.

At the same time, the Netherlands had been attracting brains and skills for decades with what they called the 35% ruling which gave you the first 35% of your income tax-free before the local taxes apply.

At that time, you could claim back literally everything, soon after they closed a number of loopholes and reduced the tax break to 30% and most of those claims did not go through as easily as before.

The issue here when it comes to taxes is not that people do not like to pay taxes but that when taxes do not have an element of fairness, people who pay more tend to feel they are getting nothing back.

If I had stayed in the UK, I would have been looking for an extra GBP 20,000 a year in taxes for a situation where the transport system would not have improved, where I still had to pay heavily for essential health services through insurance and where access to social services were restricted because I did not have a disadvantaged or poor profile.

Moving to the Netherlands with my career profile allowed me to take advantage of a tax break that can run for 10 years before one settles into the full Dutch tax whack.

Infiltrating tax havens

An interesting issue about the fairness of rates of tax is brewing in Europe, surreptitiously; the German secret service through bribery involving a large sum of money (€5 million or $7.3 million) and subterfuge obtained names of German citizens with bank accounts in Liechtenstein who presumably have hidden their wealth from the taxman at home.

They have been trying to obtain this information from Liechtenstein and they have been unable to break the confidentiality clauses that make the Liechtenstein banking system a favoured haven for who feel entitled to have greater percentage of their hard-earned wealth in their pockets than in the wasteful hands of big government.

In fact, it appears an informant had also offered some information about Britons to the UK tax authorities for a price, but they turned the offer down.

Tax fairness would defeat tax evasion

Now, they are accusing Liechtenstein of aiding and abetting tax evaders which is a rather grave if not scurrilous accusation.

Germany now plans to tighten the screws on European tax havens, because they presumably foster tax evasion.

Well, I think that attack plan is wrong headed, because the issue is not necessarily the legality of taxation, I am sure everyone would willingly pay their taxes; the problem is the fairness of the system of taxes.

Crown Prince Alois, the hereditary prince of Liechtenstein went to the crux of the matter when he said of the German system – “If it were a more direct democracy with a better tax system perhaps its citizens would not cheat”.

Hard words, but ones that have the bitter taste of the truth, most of the tax systems in Europe and the United States are warped, over-burdening, unfair and not delivering value for money for the people who contribute the most.

Liechtenstein is not the problem, they are not the tax evaders, Germany is the problem, their tax regime is burdensome and unfair leading their citizens to seek havens for their large incomes.

It is evidently a matter of human nature to find ways to circumvent a feeling of unfairness and if one has the means to implement the measures, they would; in this case in tax havens that have strict confidentiality laws.

A taxed purpose

Whilst tax provides a means of revenue generation for the government, it behoves the government to ensure the moneys go to activities in a prudent manner for managing infrastructure and services without wastefulness - wishful thinking.

I am not sure that taxing for redistribution of wealth is a fair thing, it penalises those who really do work hard to succeed and lets off those we might wrongly assume do too little to get ahead or do nothing at all but leech on the state having children irresponsibly and so on – a reactionary diatribe.

The aspect of repricing is general and based on consumption and representation which implies that “rulers tax citizens and citizens demand accountability” - is almost Utopian.

The only way we can hold people accountable for the way our taxes are spent is through elections that just get rid of politicians; we still retain the same mandarins.

For instance, in the UK, the government has committed over GBP 50 billion in taxpayer’s money in shoring up the Northern Dust and with nationalisation assumed for taxpayers twice that in liabilities and not one head has rolled in government or the government agencies that govern the banking system.

Reform and rewrite

In the end, the real work to be done is in addressing, reviewing and rewriting the tax codes of these countries, I do not think anything can justify paying anything near 50% in taxes.

I did at least three 220 hour months in 2007 and this was NOT for the government or so someone who sits at home each day expecting me to pay for their willingness to remain jobless and not take up opportunities where they have no other choices – I had work to do.

What would it take for governments and lawmakers to reform the tax code? People like me waving placards and persuading our representatives that have a bit of capitalist backbone to see the benefits of fairness in taxation rather than penalising us for being successful to make the less successful feel good.

Then I remember when someone racially abused me a few years ago by suggesting that we black people come to his country for welfare - the reality of my response just makes me angrier about taxes. “I probably pay more taxes than you earn in a year and that goes into the government to have idiots like you speak to me like that.” How true.

Other readings

Taxation in the United States – Complex

Federal Tax Reform