Speech delivered at Sands Films Studio event for THE MAN WITH THE PLAN on 12th and 13th April 2025
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00:00So here's a man who can tell you more about that. Please welcome up here, a man from Tax Justice UK. Please welcome Jake Atkinson.
00:18Hello. You okay? Further back? Can everyone hear me? Amazing.
00:26One of the guiding principles of Beveridge's report was that a revolutionary moment requires a revolution, not patching.
00:36And we find ourselves today in a revolutionary moment.
00:40Around the world, we see genocide in Palestine. We see the war in Ukraine.
00:48We see pandemics, epidemics, famine. Millions without healthcare. Millions without education. Millions without clean water.
00:58Here at home, we see attacks on human dignity in the form of cuts to disability welfare benefits.
01:06We see cuts to winter fuel allowance. And we see tax rises on working people rather than on the super rich.
01:17And at the same time, at the same time, our NHS is underfunded. Our hospitals, our schools, crumbling.
01:26Teachers, key workers, nurses, all underpaid and undervalued.
01:30The truth is, this is one crisis, a crisis of inequality, driven by greed.
01:44The top 10 richest people in the world have more wealth than the bottom 3 billion people.
01:53The richest 1% hold more wealth than the bottom 50% of all humanity.
01:58In the UK, you would have to get £3,600 an hour, every hour of every day, for over 665 years,
02:09to reach the average wealth of the top 10 richest individuals.
02:15I don't know how many of you have looked at your last paycheck,
02:18but over the course of the month, I assume it would be less than £3,600.
02:23So, at the same time, we have a billion people around the world living in extreme poverty.
02:34That's less than $2 a day.
02:38And so, much like the poverty line concept, people are now starting to talk about an extreme wealth line.
02:44The New Economics Foundation, along with Patriotic Millionaires, are finally talking about what is the line.
02:51Where do we draw the line to say, enough is enough, and you have enough wealth?
02:56And there should be a limit to the extreme wealth that one person can hold.
03:06So, I apologise to any billionaires in the audience.
03:11This is a trigger warning.
03:12I will be talking a bit about tax.
03:14So, you leave now, if you need to.
03:20So, wealth breeds more wealth, and it carries and concentrates power.
03:27We see this not only in the underinvestment in our public services,
03:30but how politics plays out at home and on the global stage.
03:34The very rich, along with their army of accountants, lawyers, and spin doctors,
03:41work every day in the media and in politics to muddy the waters around inequality and around tax policy.
03:50Following the budget, the CEO of Blackstone, a wealth management company,
03:55personally lobbied the Chancellor,
03:58and months later, the government watered down their commitment to abolish the non-dom tax loophole.
04:05Shameful.
04:08At the same time, we see the government now looking to give a huge tax cut in the digital services tax.
04:15This is a tax on big tech that goes to only the very, very richest tech companies like Meta and Amazon.
04:22I do not believe that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg deserve another tax cut.
04:30No way.
04:31No way.
04:32They deserve something else.
04:34We're going to get to it.
04:35We're going to get to it.
04:37And this is happening, this is a precondition for entering into trade negotiations with the Trump administration.
04:45It's pointless.
04:46You get screwed anyway.
04:47They are giving money away to the very richest people before a deal is even on the table.
04:53Shameful.
04:54So, how do we fight back?
04:58And the question, obviously, has to come from us and building our collective power,
05:02but some of the policy tools at our disposal are very clear.
05:05We need to tax the super-rich, we need to tax the big corporations, we need to tax the big polluters,
05:12and we need to crack down on tax abuse and tax evasion in tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions around the world.
05:19The good news is that we are winning.
05:33It might not feel like it, but there is loads and loads of support for our agenda.
05:38Recent polls showed 78% of people in the UK support a 2% wealth tax on net wealth over £10 million,
05:44and this would raise £24 billion a year.
05:49That's money to stop cuts, to welfare, to winter fuel,
05:56and it's enough to invest in our communities, in our hospitals, our schools, our social care, our childcare, our housing, everything.
06:05That's how we start to wrestle power back from the very rich.
06:08It's also about ensuring that wealth is taxed the same as work.
06:14It is not right that multi-millionaire Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has the same marginal tax rate as a teacher.
06:22So we need to equalise capital gains tax with income tax.
06:25And then we need to crack down on tax abuse.
06:35Globally, half a trillion dollars is lost every year to tax abuse.
06:42A quarter of that is enabled by the UK, primarily through Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories.
06:49So, the good news on this is that we are also, again, winning.
06:57There are deadlines on the books agreed by government for the Overseas Territories to implement transparency registers,
07:04public registers of beneficial ownership that show who owns an asset, who owns a company.
07:09So we can tear down these firewalls, these secrecy smoke screens, and we can get watchdogs, civil society, journalists to expose where people are hiding their money and where they are avoiding their tax.
07:19So we need to hold the government accountable to these deadlines and ensure that these registers are fully transparent, fully accessible to everyone.
07:26And it's worth pointing out that whilst high-income nations like the UK do lose more in terms of revenue,
07:44it is low-income countries who lose five times as much to tax abuse as a percentage of their health budgets than high-income nations.
07:52So this disproportionately harms communities in the global south, many of whom do not have any access to health care or any basic provision of education, sanitation, or water, or anything like that.
08:03So this is a movement of global solidarity to tackle global tax abuse, and the very richest who continue to shift their profits wherever they can.
08:14So we need to make progress in every corner of the world.
08:17And guess what? Again, we are winning!
08:23We are winning!
08:24At this very moment, there is a United Nations Tax Convention being negotiated at the UN by governments around the world,
08:33which will finally wrestle the rules-making status quo away from the richest nations in the OECD to all countries in a UN forum.
08:42There will be finally democratic manufacturing of tax rules and to create an inclusive, just, sustainable financial and taxation system.
08:53And together, using that system, we can crack down on tax abuse, we can tax the super-rich, and we can ensure that no one is exploited.
09:02So, we must build our collective power, conversation by conversation, in rooms like this and beyond, action by action, in the streets, in the town halls with your MP, and in the streets and in the halls of Parliament.
09:25This is the sixth richest country in the world.
09:32It doesn't feel like it, does it? Not to anyone here.
09:36And that is because the super-rich continue to concentrate their wealth in fewer and fewer hands.
09:42Only by taxing the super-rich can we invest in our public services, create an economy and a society that benefits everyone, not just the 1%.
09:51And only by doing this can we wrestle our democratic power back into the hands of you and all of us, the people of this country.