Our union is asking all members to stop working at 1.00pm on 5 April and take strike action for the rest of that afternoon. This is part of the ongoing national campaign and our defence sector Fair Deal campaign to safeguard our pay, pensions, jobs, terms and conditions.
5 April marks the end of the 2012/13 tax year – and the walkout is the culmination of a week of tax justice campaigning highlighting the £120 billion tax gap. From 1 April, PCS members will have extra pension contributions imposed on them, while from the same date millionaires are being given a tax cut by the Cabinet of millionaires.
Let’s look at the numbers
Our union has done a bit of further research and we have started by making the assumption that we live in a world where a talented, expensive accountant cannot create a dozen shell companies in exotic places to hide income. We have even made the assumption that the top earners in the UK declare every penny they make and pay full tax on it.
We have used the 2009-2010 confirmed HMRC figures to avoid charges of manipulation or error. The total number of taxpayers in the UK is just shy of 30 million. The top 1 per cent is, therefore, 300,000 people. Total income declared across the UK was £870bn. Of that, £121bn was made by the top 1 per cent. The total income tax received was £145bn, of which £40.5bn was contributed by this top-earning 300,000 people. This yields an effective average personal tax rate of 33.5 per cent. This leaves the top 1 per cent with an average annual personal income, after tax, of £268,000.
Let’s look at a smaller slice, still – the six thousand people in the UK who have a personal income of a million or more. After all personal tax deductions, they are left with over £600,000 a year. It would take an E1 on the max in the Ministry of Defence approximately 25 years to make what the lowliest of these six thousand people make in a year.
Why do we pay tax?
This should be a simple enough question but at last autumn’s Tory party conference, prime minister, David Cameron said that by choosing to tax this top slice less he was not gifting them a tax-break, because “when people earn money, it’s their money”.
The implication being that this money was not made using the work of low-paid people forced to claim benefits to supplement their income; not made using the roads, airports and ports we all pay for; not made by all of us buying their goods and service; not made under the protection of the same police, fire and health services we all paid for.
In the MoD, every PCS member is also a taxpayer, yet we see our department being torn apart from a lack of investment across the board, whether that be in personnel, pay, our pension provision, the buildings we work in or probably most importantly the support we give to the front line.
Shirker v Striver
Across the UK now there is a very deliberate, orchestrated right wing campaign that sees those with mortgaes pitched agaisnt those in social housing; public sector worker pitted against those in the private sector and the new favourite despicable catchphrase of the right wing - skiver v striver.
In the MoD, if we are not successul in our campaigning, we will see relative assessment come into our department and each year the bottom 5% will be deemed ‘skivers’ and be thrown out the door.
In the wider community, the bedroom tax, the personal independence payment and many more such schemes still to come are all part of the ideology that brands anyone in the unfortunate position of needing welfare help and support as ‘benefit scroungers’
Conclusion
Our union has been at the forefront of the tax justice campaign and whilst we welcome any support to close the £120 billion annual tax gap, it must be done via action and not rhetoric.
During our action on budget day, chancellor George Osborne announced a £4.6bn government crackdown on tax avoidance and evasion. Whilst our union welcomes any action to support our tax justice campaign, looking for 3.8% of the money owed shows the government are only paying tax avoidance and evasion lip service.
If any PCS member in the Ministry of Defence only hits 3.8% of their targets in the next year, they will very quickly be deemed one of the ‘skivers’ and face being sacked by the department. As always, another example of how we are not ‘all in this together’.
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