Turning Rhetoric into Reality: What is Holding the UK Wealth Tax Movement Back?

If we were to ask whether the UK Wealth Tax Movement was successful last year, an instructive litmus test might be the frequency with which the topic appeared in BBC headlines. This is undoubtedly a major feat, but only half the battle. 

Commentators everywhere, like coiled springs, raised their concerns about how effective and feasible the tax would be, rattling off the list of unintended consequences. The media asserted – the Wealth Tax cannot be introduced until all concerns are assuaged. 

There is a sleight of hand at play here – by drawing the discussion of wealth tax into the realm of policy technicalities, it can be swotted away by serious economists. Yet this ignores the purpose of the Wealth Tax, which is not about reducing deficits or public debt. 

The Wealth Tax is a response to current societal power relations. The true aim is to lessen the ability of wealth holders to influence parliamentary democracy in their own interests and thereby rebalance democratic control to ordinary British communities. 

The aim is timely and necessary when one considers the current domestic and global Polycrisis. Yet the methods – engaging social media content, activism and protest, and policy change via the Green Party – are humble when considered against the impregnable and translucent defence mechanisms available to wealth holders. 

The primary mechanism is the offshoring industry and associated shadow banking industry, which keeps wealth untouchable and the holder hidden from account. The Bamfords, the owners of the company JCB Excavators which draws annual profit close to £1 billion, became the subject of a recent HMRC tax enquiry involving ties to Bermuda, for example.  

Another key mechanism is the revolving door, which allows wealth interests to capture and control critical areas of the state, influencing their aims and outcomes. Edward Troup, former head of HMRC and head of its Panama Papers inquiry, and currently an advisor to the Chancellor on tax avoidance, worked for many years advising clients on offshoring methods, for example.  

Recently the mechanism of emotional manipulation has been leveraged by capital’s lieutenants. Methods of disinformation, distraction, and beguilement seek to block straight thinking amongst the populace and foster division. Reform UK,  primarily funded by offshore interests, spread sensationalist false claims about migrants in the wake of the Southport Attacks, for example. 

Another mechanism is the abuse of merit as a societal value. The abuse of merit creates a perception that wealth holders have rightfully earned their power, and therefore any challenge to their behaviour or power is a challenge to the principle of merit. Paraphrasing the Head of King’s College London, the connection between merit and the acquisition of wealth is now practically non-existent. 

Birth pangs of the concerning mechanisms of threat, repression, or violence are showing in the UK. Those who engage in acts of sabotage harming the interests of firms in the military and defence industry can be branded as terrorists in the UK; the latest addition in a slide towards “anticipatory repression” measures introduced by the government. 

This vast array of powerful defences available to wealth holders easily drives members of the Wealth Tax Movement into despair and inaction. Yet, when we remind ourselves of the current global context of Polycrisis, inaction leaves ordinary communities with few meaningful ways to handle threats to their ways of life. 

Having accepted the need to act, the Wealth Tax Movement must then recognise their current tactics are for ideas accepted in the authorised ‘marketplace of ideas’ in liberal democracies. Gay marriage or assisted dying campaigns can successfully appeal to morality or rational explanation to achieve their goals – wealth taxes, de facto, cannot. 

Wealth taxes offend the psyches of numerous wealth holders. Wealth holders believe wealth arises from personal cunning, superior lineage, or superior character. They believe that wealth measures their superiority in their world, which is all about competition and control. 

The weakness of wealth holders is that they seek only to stop the world from changing. They are brittle, where the Wealth Tax Movement has an adaptive, long-term and progressive goal with moral underpinnings. 

The Wealth Tax Movement can and should exploit the weakness of their opponents, but to do so they must recognise a need to ‘be fire with fire’, to eschew their adherence to nice morals, which make them predictable, and therefore easy to control. 

The Wealth Tax Movement must acknowledge their relative lack of resources in this situation – Morton Deutsch provides a variety of methods “low resource” movements can utilise. His first piece of advice is to develop self-discipline, and to refuse to feel humiliation. 

This must be followed by building allies abroad and at home, whether by appealing to the self-interest or the virtues of their partners, within or without secretive channels. Coordinating actions with wider anti-offshoring efforts, other political tendencies, or rights groups must be considered.

The Movement must trick or goad wealth holders into making significant mistakes in political and legal contexts, using the fallout to power their gains. Physical violence must be avoided, so as not to give the powerful an easy excuse to repress further action against them.

If successful, the Wealth Tax Movement must ensure their gains cannot be reversed. Wealth holders must either be converted to the aim, brought to accommodate the aim, or made entirely powerless to challenge the aim. 

On a final note, it is vital to reaffirm that the primary purpose of the Movement is to guarantee that diverse everyday British communities gain real means to handle unprecedented crises affecting them. When the Movement acknowledges this, overcoming the fear of reprisal or defeat becomes a duty. 

It is often said that the best method to overcoming fear is to forget all else, to focus on our feet, and to take the first step. When we look back up from our feet, we can be pleasantly surprised where we find ourselves. The Wealth Tax Movement needn’t hold back but step forward.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Chris Downer

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