Football Nonsense, Profit before People, Tax

                                          Sport:

“In football as in life, events occur at the juxtaposition of noise and signal, contingency and agency.”

(Matthew Syed, The Times – quoted in Private Eye 1491

                                  What?

Any Wintry Afternoon in England, 

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889-1946)

Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]

*Liverpool and Tottenham fans are being charged sky-high prices to attend the Champions League final next month.

The price of scheduled flights from the UK to Madrid has increased to more than £1,300 return.

…Liverpool Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram expressed his anger at easyJet’s prices, tweeting: “Hiking up prices by 683 per cent for return flights to Madrid is quite simply profiteering from the passion of football fans. This is nothing new but entirely shameful.

EasyJet responded: “We use a live pricing system and when it’s busy many people are booking flights at the same time. This can result in the price of your flight going up while you’re making a booking. You can then choose to accept the price difference before payment.”

Ex-Liverpool player Jim Beglin wrote: “You call it business. The punters call it nothing but pure greed. Profits before people and it’s not just you, your kind are all at it. It’s a disgusting practice.”

…Hardly any Madrid hotel rooms are available for less than £1,000 on 1 June. The cheapest room at the Hilton Madrid Airport hotel is £2,301. One week later a room is available at the same hotel for £124.

(The i, 2019)

Profits before people. Isn’t that the way of the world?

Tax

Abundance Suppressing Avarice,

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) (and studio)

Photo Credit: The Banqueting House - Whitehall Palace, 
Historic Royal Palaces [CC BY-NC-ND]

There may be a popular appetite for increased taxes on the rich but these demands must be resisted, it is said, because the rich, the wealth generators would flee abroad.

Where to? Well Russia has a top income tax rate of 13% whilst Serbia’s is 15%. No? Monaco, Switzerland or the Bahamas, then.

*Tax avoidance is legal. This highlights how the law is rigged in favour of the wealthiest.

          Change the law, just change the law.

*Benefit fraud costing an annual £1.2 billion, or 0.7 per cent of social security spending is treated as a despicable crime, whilst tax avoidance, worth an estimated £25 billion a year is even facilitated by the state, with accountancy firms that promote such tax avoidance seconded to government to draw up tax laws.

(The Establishment, Owen Jones) 

                                                         Surely not?