You can read it in full here, but there were two sentences in the press release and his statement I wanted to look at:
We have to review the amount of taxes that flow from London to other parts of the UK including Scotland , so that London ’s taxes are spent on London , not just Edinburgh or Cardiff . Londoners pay £13.1 billion in taxes that are exported out of the capital - that’s £2,500 for every adult living in the capital.
And:
To stop the disproportionate flow of taxes from London to other parts of the UK including Scotland and Wales , so that London ’s taxes are spent on the needs of London , not automatically the needs of Edinburgh or Northern Ireland . Five of the ten most deprived local authorities in the UK are in London and they urgently need economic support.
To be honest, when I saw that figure, I thought it was one he’d pulled out of thin air, but no, apart from that £1700, he's got the economics and maths side of it pretty much spot on. Last year's report from Oxford Economics, an independent think-tank, showed that the average person living or working in the capital pays about £1,740 a year more in tax than he or she gets back in public services.
Except, of course, it’s not just Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, that such funding is directed towards; deprived regions of England, in particular the North-East were also mentioned as the big "winners", a rather pertinent fact that Mr O’Connor omitted to mention.
Going on his figures, there are five and a quarter million adults living in London, obviously the amount of taxpayers is a fair bit less than that. Its income-tax paying population is very much a transient one, much of London’s workforce is made up of immigrants, both external from outside the Uk and internal from the other three countries and also other regions of England. Without this imported labour, London would simply not function, never mind remain as one of the top tourist and financial centres in the world and also the administrative, bureaucratic and political capital of the United Kingdom.
As I said, that population is a transient one; I worked in London myself for several years, having moved there straight from school, via a short interlude in West Cumbria. The job in the financial sector I did could have been done anywhere in the United Kingdom, cheaper and better, by a lot more capable people than me. If I'd had the choice, or more bluntly the work possibilities at the age of 18, I probably would have stayed in Belfast. In the office where I worked, out of approximately 50 people, six were "native-born" Londoners- of that six, two were British Asians, two second-generation Irish. The rest of us came from all over the UK, the Republic, South Africa, Australia, Canada and various parts of the EU.
We were all working in London, paying for our rent, food, public services, entertainment etc in London, paying it to London businesses, supermarkets, councils and (too much to) London pubs.
Granted our taxes were being paid back to the general UK Exchequer and granted the vast majority of us did very well financially and in terms of experience from working there...but still, I really believe that London itself was and is the winner from that enormous temporary working population being based there.
And the countries or areas where those workers come from are the losers; there is no reason at all, in the modern communication age, why state bureaucracies couldn't be based in Carlisle or Wrexham, the financial multinationals couldn't do their buying low, selling high just as well in Belfast or Glasgow as The City.
So, that's the deal really, whilst London remains a city powered and run by outsiders, we help to deliver its wealth and prestige, you *native* Londoners (and those of us who come from elsewhere anyway) pay a bit of compensation back to those places that you pull us from. Seems fair enough to me.
Note
I know it's not the really the done thing to post up music videos at the end of political posts, but you'll just have to lump it, it's my blog!
"train heaves onto Euston..."
"London" by the Smiths, Johnny Marr at his very best:
3 comments:
And there's more than that too. Corporation tax is paid by a company's HQ, while Income taz and VAT are paid by wherever a company does its financial work.
So a large national company, with stores all over the country, would pay its taxes to wherever its HQ is (usually London). That's why the tax income figures for London is so high.
Everyone always think London is rich and paying for the rest of the UK. Unemployment in London is 7.6%, the UK average is 5.3%. There are more unemployed people in london than in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland combined!
There are more unemployed people in london than in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland combined!
Which surely is an argument for more money to be diverted to/kept in London??!!
That's a totally different argument. The argument is whether London subsideses the rest of the UK or the other way round.
Everyone assumes the former but it probably is the latter.
(surely it's not more money London needs, but money spent on the right things and in the right areas, not crap like the Olympics!)
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