UK Taxation and Public Services, Davos and Tax

                                 Public Services

Spending on public services in Britain would be higher by £2,500 per person each year if the government matched comparable European levels of funding, an analysis shows today.

The Institute for Public Policy Research found that Britain spends about 40 per cent of GDP on public services, down from 47 per cent in 2010. European spending has also fallen, but comparable EU countries still spend an average of 48 per cent of their GDP on areas such as health, education and welfare, the think tank said.

Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain and Sweden were classed as the comparable countries.

Britain’s tax burden is also lower than the European average. Employee taxes amount to about 11.6 per cent of average income in the UK, compared with 15.4 per cent in the EU.

The total burden of taxation in Britain is 33.3 per cent compared with 41.8 per cent. The figures, from the left-wing think tank, are likely to be seized on by Labour as evidence that its plan to increase taxes to support greater public spending is not as radical as Conservative critics would claim.

Harry Quilter-Pinner, senior research fellow at the institute, said that its report showed that after years of austerity there was now a need to increase public spending.

La Route, Effet de Neige, Camille Pissarro (1830-1903)

Photo Credit: Leicester Arts & Museum Services [CC BY-NC-SA]

“Our neighbours have consistently invested more in welfare and public services and consistently deliver better social outcomes than us,” he said. “We need a fundamental shift in our approach to investment in this country to deliver high-quality social and childcare, a life-long education system, 21^st-century healthcare and a properly funded benefits system. Ending austerity must be more than a political soundbite.”

(The Times, 2019)

 Lower taxes, lower spending on welfare and public services than our European counterparts. What does common sense tell us about the effect that will have on our Health, Education and Police sectors?

                                                             
Davos

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Rutger Bregman, author of the best seller Utopia for Realists and How We Can Get There, asked why his hosts didn’t pay more taxes.

Sir Thomas More ( copy after an original of 1527)

Hans Holbein the younger (c.1497-1543) (copy after)

Photo Credit: National Portrait Gallery, London. [CC BY-NC-ND]

“It feels like I’m at a firefighters’ conference and no one is allowed to speak about water…We’ve got to be talking about taxes.

This Yahoo CFO on the Davos panel got really angry with me off-camera. These people find when I cry ‘bullshit’ more offensive than tax avoidance. I couldn’t live with myself and not point out the elephant in the room.

What frustrates me so much with the contemporary left is that it’s just moaning all the time.”

The book’s original title was Why We Should Give Free Money to Everyone.

Who would pay for it? Bregman explores this area in convincing detail, pointing, for instance, to a UK study that asserted child poverty costs the country £29 billion a year, and the conclusion that a policy to eliminate it would pay for itself. How? State funded stipends, keeping those who need it above the floor of the poverty line.

(The i, 2019)