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by Brian Peacock » Fri Nov 01, 2019 8:59 pm
Who here has a problem with that concept Scot? The monied classes (formerly the landed classes, now corporate entities, financiers, and a stateless coterie of transient oligarchs and billionaires) have always resented having to pay taxes, just like they've always resented paying their workers enough to live on, or abiding by regulations usually brought in as a response to dangerous practices, and/or to wedge some element of accountability into the system, and/or to out-and-out curb abuse and exploitation.
The EU tax reforms may have been the push the Tory Eurosceptics need to get rise up from their troughs onto their hind quarters and start yapping, but that hardly applies to the disenfranchised voters of the economically stagnant areas of the UK who voted leave. For those predominantly working-class Leavers tax isn't a major concern but employment, housing, public services and costs are, along with the fact that Capitalism has not just failed to improve their situation but that it's systematically thrown them under the but and made their lives measurably worse.
Farage and friends tapped that discontent and built a platform off years of stories about immigrants and foreigners somehow simultaneously getting all the jobs and all the benefits, jumping the housing queue, the school placement, or the hospital waiting list, of being a drain on shrinking public resources during a supposedly necessary period of austerity, and about how the EU had made all this happen rather than the policies of the governments we'd elected ourselves. Brexit offered these people a promise of change and renewal and a way to send a massive 'fuck you' message to Cameron and his ilk and to a middle-class opposition who said they wanted things to Remain as they were.
It's too simple to say that tax caused Brexit or that Brexit is about tax. Brexit is a symptom of liberal economics' failure as it tends towards ever-freer laissez-faire economic and social structures globally, and we're seeing the same kinds of dramas being played out across the Western world..
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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