The Hourglass Society

"You don't make the poor rich by making the rich poor." A Lincoln



You may have noticed that talk of income redistribution is showing like a shark`s fin above the sea level for the first time in a long time. We will hear little of it for now but pips will be sqeaking if Brown gets in . His plan for tax on property values to replace Local tax is one horrifying threat for those just about able to keep up with the mortgage. I have been discussing it on Compass …this was in reply to some Guardian Journalist


“The problem is that as Brown has discovered the tax take from high earners increases as you reduce the amount they are taxed because more of them live here and they are at less pains to reorganise internationally . The effect is doubly true of corporate taxation now aid almost exclusively by small to middling companies. That is why even an old socialist like Brown is wary of doing this especially as the revenue to the exchequer becoming quite dependent on this stream. (Additionally because many if them are funding the Labour Party !!!

This why we are becoming what has been called the hourglasss society is which those in the middle get vastly less return for their sacrifices than either end. An ideologically driven desire to misrepresent society as composed of the very rich and the poor ignores the majority who are at shades above the poverty trap and whose lives are rendered worthless by means tested benefits and housing policy . You have to answer where we make up the tax shortfall increasing tax would lead to

Large scale capitalists love the regulation and immigration policies of Brown but SME`s are driven out of existence and all involved detest all redistribution because they know this . The fig leaf of the super rich is always placed upon a naked assault on the middling who are the only source of real income . This would be the view of most suffering our already historically high taxes. It has not gone unnoticed that income redistribution is back on the Labour agenda . It cropped up in the deputy leadership contest and has nosed its way into the pages of the Brownite propaganda rag the new Statesman .Working people like me know exactly who they will come for once they have made the notion respectable again.

You say the markets in the City are rigged ,,..which ones ? The City is not one place or one industry I know something about a part of it and enough to know I know little about the rest of it. Markets are never very perfect but they are vastly preferable to the states waste and inefficiency . You are propagating , albeit slightly recast , another old left Protocols of Zion myth . That of an inter-connected Capitalist conspiracy in which a thing called the City is an entity which it is not its “rigged “ you say ….. This is a fantasy and I do not believe for one second to be frank , you are in any position to make a judgement .

The housing crisis is caused by immigration old age family break-up and social holding being held of the market thereby inflating everyone else’s mortgage. The London effect dos not travel East where there are plenty of affordable properties if you care to browse through Right move …there they sit. Many would prefer a more salubrious area but then the areas they like were not salubrious until wealth made them that way. Its an odd self deluding world we live in on housing and concreting over the SE will not help. There are already lost of places in which noone wants to live . The governments keen understanding of markets to the fore as ever . Incidentally according to the governments own figures 1,000,000 of the supposed 3,000,000 slums due to pave the South will be inhabited by immigrants not yet arrived .

we talk about social incoherence it is not an attempt to cohere the microscopically small super rich group , (like Robinson) with the average .It is to address the social immobility caused by welfare housing and poor education …location location ..location ..as Blair should have said . Education is the key here and one of Labour’s greatest failures .( See Cameron`s excelent initiative this weekend )

Redistribution will eventually target the Private sector middle earning family and that money will be transferred to Public sector Pension funds , Scotland and the £190 billion we currently waste on quangos …lets not even mention the EU £5000 pas per family for what ??!!!!. If you tax the City it will move it already does without any need to physically depart. We would be far better off reducing our taxes to Irish levels thereby increasing the revenue allowing freedom self respect and purpose in our lives which are more vitally effected by the waste of a life spent working that the cash earned by David Beckham


The fact that people whose lives are made to feel worthless as their efforts cannot effect them is a problem we know . Hence the crime wave in the benefits wastelands of London especially crime based around alternative ways of self definition and family grouping …gun crime and gangs . Thankyou Brown and Blair for that and exactly as Frank Field predicted before he was killed off by guess who …….Gordon Brown !