I want prosperous businesses located and trading in the UK: high tech, manufacturing, R&D and design, but also services of all sorts – including health and personal services. I want the first group to use machines, IT, skills and innovation to be highly profitable. But I want them to pay their employees decent wages.
Let’s reduce the benefits bill by reducing the need to make claims. I want these high profit companies to pay their suppliers on time and without onerous conditions – and enough for them to prosper too. And most of all I want them to pay fair taxes on their economic activity in the countries where they physically do business and generate profits.
And Fair Taxes mean big companies paying a fair share of the costs of the expensive social infrastructures that make possible the well organised and well ordered societies that they themselves need within which to trade and prosper. So Fair Taxes for these businesses do not mean low taxes nor avoided taxes – and they certainly do not mean evaded taxes.
Whether from the higher incomes of better paid employees or from the higher profits those employees bring to the business through their skill and innovation, a greater tax revenue to the government and local authorities will enable our social needs to be adequately provided for.
Greater resources to help mitigate the misfortunes of life that can hit any one of us at any time will make life better for all of us. A fair provision of personal care to help those who are ill can only be provided through the state. It is not often that a sick person can cure themselves from their own resources – and who can avoid the deterioration of old age? And shouldn’t we now be making serious efforts to reduce the misery of mental illness that blights so many lives in addition to those of the sufferers themselves.
Personal care, the treatment of illness, safety nets for accident or unemployment – none of these things can paid for by the people that need them. Nor can any form of insurance scheme, whether public or private, do any real good at any reasonable cost.
In a modern democratic state that still aspires to the principles of fairness and compassion the only way of maintaining our social infrastructure and of delivering the care and support that people expect in times of need, is through the recycling of suplus resources from the top of society to places lower down where they are needed. And only the state can achieve this through a fair, rational and morally neutral tax system that is supported by general consent.
We need the glacier to melt so that the people in the valley can drink.
And I say to the hedge fund managers, the directors of private equity firms, the directors of the great multinationals, .