That means that TOMORROW is when Joel and I will be giving our salaries to charities, in protest against government greed, corruption and mismanagement. I’m going to add inhumanity to that – I’ll also be making a donation to RNLI following the deaths in the Channel last week.
Giving money away is a good thing to do if and when you can afford to, without fanfare. Indeed, we all know that some of the most generous people are those who, in human terms, can least afford it. Neither Joel nor I are good at the “attention seeking” thing, and on one level, drawing attention to what we are doing has made me squirm. But I wanted the focus to be not on what we are giving, but on the fact that by doing this, we are in effect deliberately withholding our tax from the government.
“But tax is a good thing!”
Yes, if used wisely. Too much of the time, though, this government is not doing that. Even if it is not the case for many MPs, even many Conservative MPs, the actual government seems to have no higher values than increasing personal wealth and power for themselves and their friends, with indifference to the needs of the most vulnerable in society. Whilst it was happy to remove the “temporary” £20 per week uplift in Universal Credit, its own MPs are claiming expenses to rent properties in London whilst letting out properties there which they already own. The Paterson affair showed that they were more than happy to turn a blind eye to MPs representing businesses. The focus of government expenditure was not on securing value for money, but on getting public money into the hands of friends and donors. The government spent up to £37bn on the “NHS” Test and Trace scheme. The British Medical Journal was pointing out its failures a year ago. The government’s own Public Accounts committee in March pointed out that it had failed in its central goal. Why the scare quotes on “NHS”? Because it was nothing to do with what people would understand the NHS to be! As recently as late November, consultants were still being paid over £1m a day on an average of £1100 per day.
It goes without saying that very few people working in the NHS are paid at that daily rate! NHS workers, along with most public sector employees (but not MPs!) have generally had their pay frozen for most of the last decade. The cost of a lot of the pay rises that the government was not willing to pay nurses and other NHS staff could be covered if the government had different priorities.
So we regard this protest as in effect massively increasing our tax rate to ensure that the charities, who we trust more than the government, get to decide how the money should be used.
Our protest is also to show that there’s a different way – generosity. We have no direct affiliation with it, but if you would like a better vision for society, I’d recommend Tom King’s work on the Generous Society.
Thank you for your patience with all the #denytaxdonate spam. It’s nearly over!!
