Green Party Election Broadcast - Vote Green on 3rd May

This is the Green Party of England and Wales election broadcast for the local elections and the London Mayoral election on 3rd May this year - the London election is held using the Alternative Vote system; people can vote Green with their first preference and still have their vote counted if they make a second choice in the unlikely event that the Green candidate does not win outright in the first round. :-)

Largely under-reported if not entirely unreported by the main-party obsessed media is the fact that the decision by the Mayoral candidates and subsequently signals from the Government that leading politicians and candidates should publish their tax records came after a challenge from the Green Mayoral candidate, Jenny Jones, during a debate on the BBC2 Newsnight programme. This is something of an innovation for supposedly transparent British politics and can be seen in the second video below.

Imagine

The British tax authorities were accused by MPs yesterday of conniving with big businesses to help them avoid paying their tax. The biggest culprit appears to be Vodaphone - there are claims they have had up to £8 billions in tax written off by Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs - they deny this, but whatever the truth, they have been given a whole 5 years to pay £1.25 billion in long overdue, unpaid tax - with no interest to pay!

The head of the HMRC meantime, has enjoyed on average of one meal per week with the owners of the very businesses he is meant to be chasing up to pay their tax. I'm sure it was always a very tense soup course. We should be thankful that the activist group UKuncut is pursuing legal action to make big business pay its taxes - though it looks like it will be in for a long haul.

In total, HMRC has written off around £27 billions of tax due but not paid by corporations in the UK. Worse still though it that when you take into account the tax lost through legal but highly unethical methods like moving money offshore, the loss to the Treasury rises to around £75 billions or even more. This includes the family trust fund of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, so no conflict of interest there.  To put into context, the Government annual deficit for the current year could be cut by nearly 60% if these grasping spivs were made to cough up their due. But somehow they are excused on the basis that it would be damaging to the nation if enforcing their tax payments drove them away - apparently we would no longer have the benefit of their presence.

Really? What a shame. Much better to give disabled kids a hard time instead then.

MAKE THEM PAY!

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"Why don't they start with the bankers?"

The British Government has announced its programme of cuts in public spending today. Carefully crafting a wide range of substantial reductions in spending so that the average cuts per Government department come in at 19% over four years rather than Labour's planned 20%, the Con Dems betray the essential unity of the three main parties around a monetarist, free market agenda. Their little school boyish prank may make waves in the Westminster Village, a bit like waving condoms about in a Prefects' Room, but the impact on a wide range of poor and vulnerable citizens will be even worse than feared, with £7 billions more than expected off disability payments - £50 per week taken from people on Incapacity Benefit for more than 12 months - and a 50% reduction in the social housing budget. At the same time, precisely nothing is done to tackle the massive tax evasion and corporate tax exemptions that plague Britain.

So amidst the gloom, it was good to see this video (below) of Green Party leader Caroline Lucas MP railing passionately against the cuts as socially damaging and economically illiterate - worsening the crisis of the deficit rather than tackling it. Clearly angered by the Chancellor's approach, she calls for action on investment in sustainable jobs and action against tax evasion. Government led spending on a range of activities such as improving public transport and developing renewable energy would pay dividends in a multiplicity of ways - generating jobs and tax revenue, cutting the deficit, reducing our dependence on foreign energy and cutting our carbon emissions.

This type of Keynesian economic theory,on which the "Green New Deal" is based, used to be the economic orthodoxy that worked for a coherent society. By contrast, Monetarist theory adopted by right wingers in the 1970s onwards changed that - placing economic objectives above social ones and seeking to reduce government involvement in the economy and socirty as a whole. As Nigel Lawson, Thatcher's Chancellor, explained on BBC Radio 4 last night, "I wasn't much bothered about damaging solidarity and social cohesion." All he was bothered about was creating space for tax cuts for the wealthy and a chance to flog off the national assets.

As the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats contemplate the biggest sale of public assets ever, as well as cutting deep into the welfare state, the Con Dem regime is emerging as one of the most avowedly ideological governments in British history, rolling back the shrinking public sector further than Mrs Thatcher ever dared imagine.

At least, hearing Caroline Lucas' speech, there is clearly a voice in Parliament showing that there IS an alternative to an agenda that turns citizens into numbers and shuts its eyes to real human suffering. Let's hope it keeps getting louder. And heard.