Dear George Osborne
Today you said that welfare was ‘hugely expensive’.
You said this either because you are ignorant or because you’re lying. You must know that what is ‘hugely expensive’ at the moment is that the kind of economy you believe in has ground to a halt for reasons that are part of how it works. That’s to say, the bankers speculated and lost. The UK economy relies on the banking sector because your party took a strategic decision 30 years ago to shift the GDP away from manufacture towards the financial services. So the bankers’ crash has impacted on us all in two ways: we’ve bailed out the banks; the banks are in such trouble they are unwilling or unable to lend money to firms that could or would start expanding – so there is little or no growth, which means that the government revenues are not sufficient.
On top of this the superrich go on working the fiddles which enable them to deprive us of their due tax: they do it through tax avoidance, tax havens and finding non-dom status for themselves or their partners – business or husbands and wives. On top of this, they have just received a tax cut on their personal incomes, and get tax relief on their pensions.
So you say that welfare is ‘hugely expensive’. Now, I wonder if you could calculate for us how ‘hugely expensive’ the rich are for us. How ‘hugely expensive’ has it been for us that the bankers could sell each other debt and speculate on foreign housing bubbles they knew nothing about? How hugely expensive per minute is it for us that the superrich avoid paying so much tax with dodges and tax relief?
You are doing all you can to separate the paying of taxes from the welfare that most people in society want and need. You are trying to do all you can to dismantle the means by which we care for each other. You think that you can leave the business of schools, health, social care and pensions in the hands of the kinds of people who speculated the system to a standstill.
This would be the most ‘hugely expensive’ gamble of all, because it gambles with people’s lives and leaves people destitute and defenceless in the midst of your friends’ phenomenal wealth.
More and more people can see the dangerous and nasty strategy you’re working to. In the end, they will see that your policies and indeed, you yourself, are ‘hugely expensive’.
from
Michael Rosen
