How to save our precious public services? A windfall tax on those who got rich from Covid
Windfall-tax the rich, Rowan Williams, former archbishop of Canterbury proclaims. Start with a one-off seizure from the top 1% and then bring in a 1% wealth tax that could yield at least £70bn a year. Time at last for the poor to inherit the Earth – or at least a little sliver of it.
The last two Covid years have seen tidal waves of wealth wash into the pockets of those already possessing it, just as the cost-of-living disaster drains funds from low- and middle-income households. The pandemic should open our eyes to an already grossly unequal country suddenly engulfed in extra unearned excess.
Williams’s forceful words are actually moderate in the context of what’s happening right now: property prices are rising at the fastest rate on record and the stock market is rocketing, while low earners fall into debt. “Spiralling inequality,” he says, is “deeply damaging to our collective morale and trust”. The super-rich with “vastly disproportionate rewards” should welcome a windfall tax not as a burden but as an “opportunity to build a sustainable economy that works for everyone”. That’s optimistic. But if the rich don’t see his commendable plea in that light, surely the top 1% can be ignored electorally? There are only 250,000 households in this bracket, owning a minimum of £3.6m (although many are worth vastly more). And squeezing the very rich is electorally popular: Denis Healey denied saying he’d squeeze them “until the pips squeak”, though he did it.
Yet the electoral power of plutocrats is not in their puny voter numbers but in the command they hold of the ears of Tory ministers – especially those hyper-donors who allegedly buy their way into Boris Johnson’s secret “advisory board”. Keir Starmer, in the Observer, asks why
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