New campaign: A shoppers guide to tax dodgers in Truro - A4 Map with interactive online version
Happy New Year to you all! Just before Christmas we met up to discuss a new campaign that brings together different campaign themes.
We all suffer from campaign overload, so many petitions and letters on so many issues. It is hard to keep up! What we decided was to create a single campaign that brings together several issues, rather than trying to campaign on several things at once.
At the heart of so many issues, whether it is the future of the NHS, inequality or climate change, lies a world view that insists on trying to apply a Free Market model to every area of human life; one that enriches the few, exploits the planet, and impoverishes the rest of us. We need to tackle this head on and at the heart of this dangerous ideology is the 'T' word, the word that Labour or any sensible party dare not say. Tax should be a badge of citizenship; instead it is spat from the pages of the Telegraph and derided by a wider public whenever any political party seeks to include this issue as a central plank of its policy.
Underpinning all this is a determined Tax avoidance strategy practised on an industrial scale by the big corporations which displaces the tax burden onto wage earners and small businesses. They in turn bemoan the taxes they pay, allowing the government of the day to promote a clever, PR package of tax cuts that appeases the corporations (and the super-rich) while winning support from the the public with tax giveaways and pension boosts, all the while insisting that "we must balance the books". This dangerous pied piper politics, aided and abetted by a right wing press that teaches us to hate the poor, is luring us all into supporting - and even voting for - the destruction of everything we hold dear. Top of that list is the NHS. It plays neatly into the governments agenda of privatisation, even as they talk of the unaffordability of the NHS and the pressures of an ageing population as a cover for their own destructive free market fundamentalism.
There are many fundamentalisms in the world today, but this one is the most dangerous - and to repeat, it must be tackled head on.
We all suffer from campaign overload, so many petitions and letters on so many issues. It is hard to keep up! What we decided was to create a single campaign that brings together several issues, rather than trying to campaign on several things at once.
At the heart of so many issues, whether it is the future of the NHS, inequality or climate change, lies a world view that insists on trying to apply a Free Market model to every area of human life; one that enriches the few, exploits the planet, and impoverishes the rest of us. We need to tackle this head on and at the heart of this dangerous ideology is the 'T' word, the word that Labour or any sensible party dare not say. Tax should be a badge of citizenship; instead it is spat from the pages of the Telegraph and derided by a wider public whenever any political party seeks to include this issue as a central plank of its policy.
Underpinning all this is a determined Tax avoidance strategy practised on an industrial scale by the big corporations which displaces the tax burden onto wage earners and small businesses. They in turn bemoan the taxes they pay, allowing the government of the day to promote a clever, PR package of tax cuts that appeases the corporations (and the super-rich) while winning support from the the public with tax giveaways and pension boosts, all the while insisting that "we must balance the books". This dangerous pied piper politics, aided and abetted by a right wing press that teaches us to hate the poor, is luring us all into supporting - and even voting for - the destruction of everything we hold dear. Top of that list is the NHS. It plays neatly into the governments agenda of privatisation, even as they talk of the unaffordability of the NHS and the pressures of an ageing population as a cover for their own destructive free market fundamentalism.
There are many fundamentalisms in the world today, but this one is the most dangerous - and to repeat, it must be tackled head on.
Starts on
Saturday, 23 January 2016 at 10:00 AM GMT
