Take back the wealth!

Picture: @gewman

Tax Justice UK proposes increased taxes on top wealth and incomes (mainly on “capital gains” incomes) which could yield £60 billion a year, enough to restore the NHS and welfare benefits and to tackle the chaos in Special Educational Needs and Disabilities provision in schools.

That is only a corner of the big picture. Total economic output in the UK, i.e. the total value added by our labour everywhere in the economy, is, according to the very flawed but available GDP figures, about £3,000 billion a year, or about £50,000 per child, woman, and man in the whole population. £60 billion is only 2% of that, a marginal adjustment.

Around £600 billion goes to profits. Then there is interest and rents. And ultra-salaries which are really pay-outs from profits rather than wages for labour. If you doubt that, consider the £1,000 billion pay offered to Elon Musk for the next ten years by his cronies at Tesla. What his labour may or may not contribute to actual production at Tesla is doubtful: he has no engineering qualifications. But in any case he has not been making that contribution recently, because he has spent his time helping Trump, and then Tommy Robinson and the AfD in Germany.

Probably about half of the value added by our labour goes to the wealthy class and its immediate hangers-on. Some, of course, goes to small business people scarcely more prosperous than better-off workers. But the bulk goes to the top few who own and control most of the productive wealth built up by the labour of the majority.

Total household wealth in the UK is £12,000 billion. Wealth inequality in the UK is much bigger than income inequality. Although in fact its current trend is relatively stable, rather than escalating, it has risen in some periods recently (figures each year depend on the ratio of prices of shares, bonds, etc., to the prices of houses, which are the main form of wealth held by better-off workers). Income inequality is concentrated round the gap between the top 1% (most of whom have high incomes from wealth as well as big salaries and bonuses) and the rest of us.

To build a society with good public services and comfortable and secure living standards for all, to end capitalism’s taunting kaleidoscope of super-luxury alongside insecurity and exploitation, we need common ownership and democratic control of all the main concentrations of the productive wealth built up by the labour of the majority.