In his frank, fearless (and funny) column, Brian Reade calls on Labour to honour its working class roots and declare a war on child poverty by taxing the rich. He also wants climate change deniers to burn in Hell and he blasts a former chancellor as ‘thick and deluded’
The rich keep on getting richer … even during a cost of living crisis.
One of the biggest myths being pedalled by politicians is that “everyone is affected by the cost-of-living crisis”. They’re not.
If you’re well-off you’re doing incredibly well, and if you’re incredibly well-off you’ve never had it so good. Take the Royal Family, who were this week awarded a bumper 53% pay rise taking their annual taxpayer grants to £132m (£350m if you throw in security costs) despite them owning £22bn of assets. Gawd bless ’em. Then there’s the FTSE 100 CEOs whose average salary last year was £3.81m, a mere 109 times that of their average worker.
Between 2020 and 2022 alone, billionaire wealth in the UK increased by almost £150bn, a mind-boggling sum reflected in the latest Sunday Times Rich List which showed that the 350 wealthiest people in the UK now have a combined fortune of £759bn. So, even your pet lemming would be able to work out that not everyone in Britain is sweating on how to pay their gas bill. It’s become fashionable to tell luvvies to keep their woke political opinions between themselves and their Hampstead therapists, but actor and comedian Rob Delaney hit the mark this week when he told Big Issue: “The amount of money in this country is outrageous. The sheer square footage of empty flats owned by people who don’t live in this country? Come on now.
“When I hear Rachel Reeves say, there isn’t any money, we’re not morons. There is money. Take it. Make it happen. I’m not interested in equivocating or managing expectations. So say whatever you want, but make changes.” Labour loyalists have dismissed the seven MPs who this week voted to scrap the two-child benefit cap as performing a futile gesture. But surely removing the Labour whip from them for doing what Keir Starmer demanded – putting “country before party” – was even more futile. Because this government knows that at some point they will have to reverse George Osborne’s vindictive and ideologically-driven punishment of low-income families which has pushed 300,000 kids into poverty. Ask Labour grandee Gordon Brown what he thinks. Or the Archbishop of Canterbury. Or even Nigel Farage.
As Harold Wilson said, Labour is nothing if it is not a moral crusade, and a Cabinet containing many people who grew up in low-income households should make declaring war on child poverty that crusade. Victory would bring this nation untold benefits, including hacking away at the growing inequality that stunts economic growth. To achieve it they should consider a wealth tax, similar to ones already in place in Norway, Spain and Switzerland. It’s estimated that a modest levy on the top 1% of our wealthiest households could raise between £70bn and £130bn every year, and when you realise that the number of UK billionaires exploded from 15 in 1990 to 177 in 2022, there is clearly room to manoeuvre.
The massive rise in income from investments and dividends in recent years has seen the well heeled prosper. Applying National Insurance to that income could raise up to £24bn a year. The Tories label such talk the Politics of Envy. Considering how much they helped themselves and their rich friends to grow richer at the expense of our broken public services, I’d call it something else. How about the Politics of Sanity?
Climate change deniers deserve to burn in Hell
According to scientific data, last Sunday was the hottest day the world has endured since records began. Having just returned from a 40 degree heatwave in Kos, I don’t doubt it. Speaking to older residents on the island I learned that summers have never been as dangerously oven-like as the recent ones, with wildfires increasingly common. Does anyone agree that professional climate change deniers deserve to burn in Hell, and not, as will probably happen to their descendants, on Earth?
The Olympics lifts the lid on ‘thick and deluded’ politicians
Rachel Reeves was spot-on when she laughed at Jeremy Hunt’s claim that he had bequeathed her a sound economic legacy as “out of touch and deluded”. These Olympics remind me of similar comments I heard about the former Chancellor when London hosted in 2012. The creators of the opening ceremony which celebrated the NHS, the Jarrow March, the Windrush generation and mining communities, triggered fury from the Tories with an MP labelling it “leftie, multicultural crap”.
One of the London creative team told me that when they showed a preview to the Culture Secretary he gave a disgusted frown and asked to see the accolades to Britain winning the Second World War and Shakespeare. The stunned team told the man in charge of UK culture that the Olympics aren’t a celebration of killing your guests and, as for Shakespeare, the ceremony opened with a scene from The Tempest. That Culture Secretary was Jeremy Hunt. Can I add thick to deluded and out of touch?
Is a new drug-fuelled ‘Jaws’ film on the way?
High levels of cocaine, probably dumped into the Atlantic Ocean from illicit labs, have been found in the bloodstream of sharks off the coast of Brazil with scientists fearing this could change their behaviour. Does it mean we could be in for a fourth Jaws film in which, instead of sharks ripping humans limb from limb, they bore them to death by spouting non-stop, self-indulgent garbage?
