I am not an accountant.
I am not an economist.
I am not a professional poltician.
The world of national, international and institutional finance is as complex to my mind, and as inaccessible, as an esoteric gnostic myth, written on a much used palimpsest, in an ancient language barely visible let alone legible, to my untutored eyes.
But my uninformed gut feeling is that the impact of an across the board rise in VAT will make life so much harder for lower income people and families.
And my moral instinct is therefore that such a tax adjustment is demonstrably unjust, ruthlessly ideological, lacking in moral commonsense, devoid of political imagination and socially irresponsible.
It isn't the big consumer goods – but the increased cost of fuel, domestic energy, clothes, basic foods, the necessities, that will erode the security of poorer people.
Yet Tuesday morning we were afflicted by the sanctimonious tones of the Chancellor, Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister that this is a tough call, but one that treats everyone the same. When will it dawn on them that to treat everyone the same is unfair, because not everyone is the same – else why a welfare policy at all!?
My elderly friend getting by on her pension will now pay an even greater proportion of her income to the Government, and do so from a margin of financial security with few footholds left.
The refusal to increase income tax we were told is based on the judgement that this would indeed hit the lower paid – well, how about increasing the threshold, or bringing back the 10p band compensated for by extra income tax further up the feeding chain – I use the slang deliberately, because this increase could well come down to choices about food for some people.
As I said – it's all very complex and ordinary folk like me should keep their noses out of such specialist, complicated, technical financiology (new word?) – but noses are not only for sticking in, they are for smelling, and I don't like the smell of a policy that is indiscriminate, declared irreversible, and reeks of social carelessness – by which I mean demonstrates an absence of care.
But I'm no politician or economist. Just a human being insisting that humanity is also an important criterion in socio-economic policy – and this tax adjustment seems to lack that entire dimension.
The photo above betrays the ethical dilemmas facing the LIb Dems – and the runaway ethical deflation reducing their currency and credibility, as promise and principle dissolve into compromise. But once again, that expedient compromise, as with the pledge on student fees, is one which will impact most on those with least.
Or am I wrong?
Haven't done a fibonacci for a while. A poem in which the syllable count of each line is the sum of the two previous lines – it goes thus 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34 and if you feel silly, 55!
DRAT THE VAT! (A FIBONACCI SPAT).
VAT!
DRAT!
Increase!
"Tough but fair."
"In this together."
Chancellor Osborne's perspective.
Single parents, pensioners, unemployed, low earners;
all rightly sceptical about the Chancellor's perspective on what's fair or unfair.
They ask, "Is it fair, a millionaire Chancellor, who has a Two/One in Modern History, from Oxford, should confuse fairness with justice?
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