Society embodies inequality to benefit those with wealth
✒ THERE is a great hoax being played on our nation as its services and infrastructure crumble away, and that is that the rich are paying enough tax. This comes against the backdrop of last year’s report by the World Bank that all over the planet the divide between rich and poor is becoming grotesquely wide.
Britain is no different. When a businessman can give £10 million-plus to a political party, when a Premier League footballer can write off his £500,000 Rolls-Royce in an accident and the next day turn up in another £500,000 Rolls-Royce, when there are 14,000 second homes in Cornwall while thousands of locals are homeless, I think it is reasonable to conclude that the well-off are not paying enough tax – that so-called ‘Levelling Up’ has not even scratched the surface of making our society more equal.
The problem has always been that money bestows power. Just look at all the laws that benefit the well-off. Even the law itself has been corrupted by it, with the withdrawal of Legal Aid from the poorest. It is now generally considered that the law is a preserve of the rich. Is this ‘Levelling Up’?
Wealth within reason is a good thing, as it incentivises, but when it gets out of hand it corrupts because those it afflicts want more and more at the expense of the society they inhabit. All around the world this is happening. Around the country pubs are shutting, care homes closing, palliative care existing on charity, yet have you heard of one public school going bust? No, because they are a preserve of the rich, and so many of the system’s pupils go into government or politics to maintain the income and influence of the wealthy in a wonderfully self-sustaining arrangement, our betters keeping a selfish hold on the nation’s
❝❝ It is now generally considered that the law is a preserve of the rich. Is this ‘Levelling Up’?
purse strings for all but themselves.
No one should begrudge the rich their wealth, but when that wealth becomes extreme and is used to empower an elite at the expense of the many and undermine fairness to the point of affecting the economic and social development of the country then it must curbed and reined in for the benefit of all.
Peter Waverly
Penzance