Statement from UKUncut
Dave Hartnett – HMRC’s chief tax man – met Goldman Sachs’ top brass in
late 2010 and, with a handshake, agreed that the banking giant would be
let off paying up to £20 million in tax. We believe that £20 million was
money owed to the public purse and could pay for vital public services
and welfare, which is why we are taking legal action to have the deal declared unlawful.
The Story So far
A message to Dave Cameron and Nick Clegg...this comfy little establishment you imagine will cushion you from the allegations of corruption is being shaken now from all directions, you are under attack and you will fail to achieve this dismantling of civilisation in this country. The writing is on the wall and no end of New York bankers are going to save you from the consequences of your actions. A reckoning is coming like a train and I'm not talking about a few UKIP councillors nor any other proto-fascist entrists to the political game. The real opposition is extra-parliamentary... you should fear the ones that did not vote in England's local elections last Thursday, the vast majority of the potential electorate that did not turn up.....not a few disillusioned Tories and utterly confused Lib Dems that voted for a UKIP councillor.
At the same time last week incidentally we also witnessed the total elimination of the far right BNP from English local town hall politics for the first time since 2002, England's local government is completely BNP-free.
UKIP are the soft BNP of course, I have of late characterised their followers as goosestepping hairdressers, an epithet which is undoubtedly both unkind and unfair, but my defense of it is they brought it on themselves with their racism and anti European mindless twaddle.
They are, they say... rebelling against establishment public school toffs like Cameron and Osborne, by voting for an establishment public school toff like Nigel Farage, a former tory bankster and current leader of UKIP.
UKIP is actually a con trick that fortunately the vast majority of English people (by which I mean everyone for whom England is home irrespective of ethnic, religious, or cultural background, so long as they have a stake in its future shape and development... they are English) the overwhelming majority are not taken in by Farage's smoke and mirrors!
UK Numpti-ocracy
To be honest I think most people see Nigel Farage as a bit of a twit, but many people also think the same thing of London Mayor Boris Johnson, unfortunately however that doesn't stop people from voting for them.
Nigel Farage and his U-Kippers
We are creating a Numptiocracy here in the Un-United Queendom (UUQ) by default, where every power broker will eventuially be a caricature of some British stereotype or another from a made for TV movie.
Boris Johnson already plays Bertie Wooster, so sorry Nigel that role has gone already. But in place of conviction politicians we now have a Hollywood pastiche of small part actors, comic butlers and blathering colonels all in the thrall of the gangsters on Wall Street and in the City of London
Boris Johnson already plays Bertie Wooster, so sorry Nigel that role has gone already. But in place of conviction politicians we now have a Hollywood pastiche of small part actors, comic butlers and blathering colonels all in the thrall of the gangsters on Wall Street and in the City of London
The point here is that all the bastions of legitimate authority in the UK (possibly in many other places too) have been subverted by their own corruption, decadence and widespread public disrepute.
Government credibility is almost non-existent in this country today!
The film posted above is about exactly the sort of activities that are going on in neighbourhoods all over this country.... a movement is emerging that does more than just vote, it tangibly changes things. In my own particular case it also does more than just blog too, it is a force active outside the political party structures and unlike parties, groups and cells.... it can never be infiltrated or subverted either.
In my own Tory dominated county for example, Conservative fortunes were down in last week's polling with Labour taking 9 new county council seats thereby quadrupling their number on that body....the first ever four UKIP councillors were elected which is bad news, but then again so were the Greens, who won two seats for the first time. There were also a variety of independents, including independent health concern councillors and one old fashioned Liberal Party candidate who has been repeatedly elected here for the last 30 odd years.
The Tory grip on power in this county is not undone yet, it is a tradition here that goes back as long as voting itself, but their hold on power has significantly weakened probably for the first time in at least 150 years.
The picture is very complex of course and that is not UKIP's strong point, complexity no, not at all.... but we have got an emergent media driven Numptiocracy since all the male celebrities of the 20th century have been dragged from their plinths by sex scandals and rape charges.
England is very sick at the moment, the virus that is causing this sickness is corporate greed and political collusion, corruption in a nutshell and we are not going to put up with it any longer. Goldman Saches owes us £20million in interest on their taxes and we want it, every penny of it.... as well as all the rest of the money these multinational corporations owe the British taxpayer.
The picture is very complex of course and that is not UKIP's strong point, complexity no, not at all.... but we have got an emergent media driven Numptiocracy since all the male celebrities of the 20th century have been dragged from their plinths by sex scandals and rape charges.
England is very sick at the moment, the virus that is causing this sickness is corporate greed and political collusion, corruption in a nutshell and we are not going to put up with it any longer. Goldman Saches owes us £20million in interest on their taxes and we want it, every penny of it.... as well as all the rest of the money these multinational corporations owe the British taxpayer.
No more dodgy handshakes please... you must be having a laugh or something and since the tax gathering representatives of Her Majesty are involved as well, it doesn't look very good for the House of Windsor either does it?
And all because......
Twenty Million dollars in Unpaid Taxes???!!! And they get let off???
ReplyDeleteMy first thoughts are unprintable.
So anyway I have to confess my downunder ignorance of the UKIP (they haven't raised much of a profile down here) and so I googled very successfully and read the Wikipedia version which seems to agree pretty well with your analysis of them as a pretty nasty lot. Apparently they are into reducing corporate taxes, getting rid of inheritance taxes (no prizes for guessing which class they represent) and consider gay people being allowed to adopt children as child abuse?
ReplyDeleteDo rise up, people of England. Between the Labour Party and the Tories and the UKIP, it seems that ordinary people of Britain are being very poorly represented. Or not even represented at all. Sheesh.
Thanks for your comments Iri, you are right of course the people of England at least are being very badly served by political parties including UKIP. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have their own political assemblies or in the case of Scotland a national parliament, but not so in England where more than 83 per cent of the population of the British Isles reside.In this context United Kingdom independence is meaningless. UKIP supporters are by and large not committed fascists but people who have been persuaded that what Rupert Murdoch tells them means they are more in touch than the parliamentarians cloistered away in Westminster. Their leader Nigel Farage is a strange 'Man of the People' ....an ex-tory son of a stockbroker and of course a one time stockbroker himself. Farage is a self publicist who has risen to his current dizzy heights by mouthing all the simplistic claptrap the tabloid press purvey across the land as a substitute to 'news'.
DeleteIt is also interesting I think that the anti-intellectual elements of the working and middle classes who crave easy answers to complex questions respond well to slogans but now will have to actually have policies which may prove rather challenging for people who just mouth cliche's about immigrants and Europe. UKIP are the British version of the Tea Party.
I shall be putting the UKIP councillors in this neck of the woods under increasing pressure in the near future to see how they cope with the strains of local politics in Austerity Britain. Should be interesting.
A very interesting documentary, AA. Good to see the little fry of the banksters put to the camera and made to squirm.
ReplyDeleteHow ironic (and sickening)to see the deadheads of the U.S. Tea Party reconstituting themselves somehow in England. It's Lend-Lease for the Banking Elite and it stinks.
Handicapped people and others are being pushed to the wall so fat cat banks can get off. Tax them, there's your answer!
USA or UK or NZ or whatever, it's clear: those who can't keep the politicians in clover with money get it in the neck when times get tough! And yet we can vote the lot out if enough people can wake up from their delusion that all will be well if everybody just leaves them alone and lets "the market" sort things out.
I don't mind some people being rich, to coin a phrase, but I do mind it when they want to run city hall, the statehouse and Washington DC.
The Austerity crowd is never sated: not satisfied with further adventures in Reagan/Thatcher style attacks on the disenfranchised, now they are going whole hog to take down pre-schools and public libraries???? This is beyond what even that corporate troll Reagan could have imagined.
This is the kind of "sacrifice all to the cash nexus" bilge that got my Oregon county's local public libraries shut down here in Oregon for nine months, something that may happen again next year thanks to cuts in public services. Needless to say, the longer libraries and schools are shut, the more power to the corporations and the greater the ignorance of the "low-information" voter.
Those who cling to the notion that only "big government" needs to be cut while big banking is left with sweetheart deals that even Al Capone could never have dreamed of are truly living as useful dupes for the corporate state!
This is the ugly part of a political system where one or more political parties kowtow to the finance industry. The only solution is to get the big money out of politics. You cannot have a pluralistic society if there are great disparities of income. This is not a radical idea. Aristotle wrote about this 2,400 year ago and that so did Plutarch, among others. JM Kenyes knew it was a dead end and he knew a thing or three about macroeconomics. . Austerity is not the answer!
Thanks Doug, the 'little fry you mention is Justine Greening Tory MP the right honourable member for Putney.... which is a historical irony since it was the Putney Debates (1647) that first set a course for the universal franchise in England, which like in the rest of Britain did not finally achieve full adult universal suffrage until 1928, indeed the concept of one-person-one-vote was not enshrined in British law until 1948.
ReplyDeleteBut I digress. Justine Greening is strictly 'new money' an accountant by trade and a high flyer in the Coalition where she is International Development Secretary. It was nice to see her scurry away like a little mouse under the weight of public scrutiny and accountability. You'd think an accountant would understand the concept of accountability wouldn't you?..... but not Justine, she doesn't think it applies to her, a northern lass "made good" by cooking the books for Big Pharma.
The observations you make about austerity and its ultimate self defeating pointlessness is an ideological obsession of people like Justine Greening and her ilk. The current attack on what is left of Britain's welfare state is driven by corporate greed and political corruption on an industrial scale and that is what UKIP supporters believe they are fighting against.
A large part of the UKIP success in last week local elections is that they have replaced the Lib Dems as the beneficiaries of the protest vote, but the disatisfaction they represent goes far deeper than that. UKIP members are simply the plaything of the anti-Europe Tory rightwing. They represent the schism in the Conservative Party over Europe tearing it apart, but they also represent a rejection of the manistream in British politics.
That rejection is very widespread and spans the entire political spectrum from the far right to the far left and all the undecided, uninformed, tabloid reading voting fodder in between.
The thing is though, although austerity is certainly not the answer, neither is growth in the traditional meaning of the word, that is why the transition movement in my view has to be the shape of the future in Britain and actually all over the world.
Sustainable economics is I believe the 21st century revolution and the 'new' paradigm arising from the wreckage of collapsing capitalism.
I think if the Putney Debates happened again today then this transition agenda would be the discourse that would again change the course of history in many different ways, both here and abroad.
Thanks again for posting your thoughts on this Doug, Al Capone would be leader of the Tea Party if he were alive today and eventually he would probably run the Fed or perhaps more likely - Goldman Sachs. We are now at the point where we are fighting the austerity programme and the confronting the Justine Greenings of this world from street to street, the sandbags are around the library and the resistance movement is coalescing around certain issues then dispersing to regroup again elsewhere. We are now in a national liberation struggle here in England and the 'enemy' is 'international finance' and the banksterism that is robbing us and destroying our assets, will not go and is not going unchallenged above and below the radar.
I agree AA that there is no sense in trying to do something on a national level if corporate lobbyists are busy sheep-dipping politicians to continue along with old paradigms. If "growth" means just postponing cuts until the next recession then something more local and sustainable (and less vulnerable to The City and Wall Street) is the better alternative.
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