Are we slaves?

IF it weren’t so serious it would be laughable reading the diametrically-opposed viewpoints in these columns about what is in reality trivia.

Nobody seems concerned that the UK national debt now stands at over £2.6 trillion, a figure that does not include future commitments for the likes of pensions which almost doubles the figure. That currently equates to a debt of approximately

£40,000 for every man, woman and child on these islands and exceeds the UK GDP.

We are one of the most heavilytaxed societies on Earth. I am in my seventies and retired, yet because of being entitled to both an occupational and an old age pension, which are not benefits but savings created from wages that I could have done with years ago, I now pay more in income tax than I get as a state pension. I pay council tax; I pay the highest energy costs in the civilised world, everything I buy or use has a tax applied to it. From the day when as a teenager and started to work part-time after school till today, all my income has a sizeable bite taken out of it before I actually lay hands on it. At the same time there ar families in the UK who pay no income tax because of how their wealth is managed and I personally know a family where nobody has worked for three generations, are as rich as Croesus and pay no personal tax.

One has to ask where all the money goes, when it is indisputable fact that the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, food banks are an accepted norm, public services are deteriorating and life expectancy is dropping. Who do we each owe £40K to? Who profits from the 4% of GDP that Westminster spends servicing the debt? I wonder how many of our representatives at Holyrood and Westminster were forced to turn their heating off last year or skip a meal so their kids could eat? The answer is none and that’s perhaps where the problem lies.

In reality despite all the razzmatazz associated with our system of governance the country still functions as it did when Harold got one in the eye, at best most of us are serfs, at worst slaves and we are obviously expendable. But in these columns we argue about a delayed ferry when a warship that cost £4 billion lies unusable in one of our lochs and most of the £4bn was pocketed by the rich. Get real. David J Crawford, Glasgow.