Corbyn taxes — you’d only work for him
It’s crazy time in the world. The U. S. president is handing secrets to the Russians. North Korea is playing nuclear chicken. CBC tweeters holding incorrect views are subject to group shaming sessions. Makes you want to retreat to an earlier, imaginary time when life was simpler, and better.
Enter Jeremy Corbyn, unreformed ’ 60s socialist, who is proposing just that for British voters willing to mark their ballots for his Labour Party. Under a manifesto released Tuesday, Labour proposes to return time to the halcyon days of yore, when unions held sway across the land, the government owned everything ( and ran it badly), and taxes left rich people sobbing hopelessly in their manors.
Should Corbyn become prime minister following the June 8 election, he pledges to renationalize industries laboriously removed from the public purse over the past 50 years, jack tax rates back towards the confiscatory levels of the past — when rock stars fled the country to avoid being fleeced — penalize any firm paying wages the party considers “excessive” and spend almost $90 billion on a generous array of state benefits, financed with loans or punishing new levies.
It would, said Corbyn, let people “live their lives with the dignity they deserve.”
Railways would be nationalized, again. The country’s nine water companies would become publicly owned. The Royal Mail would once again be government- run. The energy supply would move towards state ownership.
Parking at hospitals would be free. University would be free. Daycare for two- to- four year olds would be free. Home energy bills would be capped. There would be four new public holidays a year. A limit on public employee wages would be dropped. Billions more would be poured i nto health, schools and welfare.
It would be paid for with stinging new taxes. Anyone earning over $ 217,000 a year would pay a 50 per cent tax rate. Earnings above $ 140,000 would pay 45 per cent. The corporate rate would rise from 19 per cent to 26 per cent. A tax on private health plans would increase almost 70 per cent. A “fat cat” tax would be imposed on companies that, in the government’s estimation, pay “excessive” amounts: 2.5 per cent on salaries over $ 580,000 and 5 per cent on $880,000 or more. Labour unions would be strengthened, an inheritance tax would be increased, the minimum wage would be increased and a minimum annual pension increase guaranteed.
The manifesto immediately inspired comparisons to earlier eras of Labour idealism, most of which turned out badly. To the 1980s, when leader Michael Foot — like Corbyn a throwback to earlier days who was mocked for his bohemian eccentricities — prompted a breakaway faction to quit the party and sent waves of voters fleeing to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives. To the 1970s, when hapless governments quaked before intransigent unions, garbage went uncollected on the streets and ruthless strike action reduced the industrial power supply to three days a week. To the 1960s, when income taxes topped out at 98 per cent and George Harrison composed “The Taxman,” a Beatles tune that warned: “My advice for those who die/Declare the pennies on your eyes.” And to the 1950s, the last time taxes represented a share of the economy as high as Corbyn proposes.
Though Labour maintains the spending is all accounted for, there are obvious holes. No one could say what the various national- izations would cost, except that it would likely be in the hundreds of billions. In a BBC interview, John McDonnell, the shadow finance minister, couldn’t identify the size of the deficit, eventually offering a figure at least $28 billion too high. In an earlier interview, Corbyn’s shadow home secretary said a plan to hire 10,000 additional police officers would cost $ 530,000, or $53 per officer. Challenged, she fumbled through papers, eventually correcting the figure to “about 80 million” pounds ($141 million), still far below the actual starting salary for British police officers.
Even Corbyn seemed unfamiliar with his platform, promising to end a freeze on entitlements, only to reverse the pledge minutes later. Party elders rejected the deluge of criticism that followed, noting they’d been forced to put the program together quickly when Prime Minister Theresa May unexpectedly called the snap election.
Corbyn supporters — he still retains fierce support in the leftist wing of the party — ignored the blinkered history of Britain’s postwar experiment with an overgenerous welfare state, when entire industries disappeared under the dead hand of bureaucratic mismanagement and union obstinacy. To help sell his plan, Corbyn recruited Andrew Murray, a member of an aristocratic banking family (his father held the Scottish title ‘ Slains Pursuivant of Arms’), who rejected the family heritage to join the communist party, and once dismissed the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo as “minute” compared to the ravages of imperialism. Murray, whose first job was with a Soviet news agency and who kept a photo of Vladimir Lenin in his office at the country’s largest trade union, gave up his 40- year communist membership just last year. Notorious for once praising North Korea and warning that Israel was “digging its own grave,” Murray’s hiring as communications boss was seen by some as a move to shore up Corbyn’s future as leader should he be crushed in the June election.
He may need it. Most onlookers still anticipate an easy victory for Theresa May’s Tories, who leads polls by 15 percentage points despite some recent Labour gains. Corbyn has refused to discuss whether he will step down if he loses the vote. He may draw succour from Murray’s mother, the daughter of a British Lord who served as Governor of Madras, whose family motto included the assertion, “hope is unbroken.”
Or he could retreat to an ashram and console himself with thoughts of what might have been had he been able to put his vision in place:
” ‘ Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman
And you’re working for no one but me.”
EVEN CORBYN SEEMED UNFAMILIAR WITH HIS PLATFORM.