Losing Art

Wednesday 29th November

On November 1st 2011, Arts Council England announced that the Government is going to allocate new strategic funding provided by the National Lottery between 2012 - 2015.

The main strategy requires ACE to spend money on improving existing buildings and equipment, (placing a halt on any commissions of new institutions and initiatives), and involves using catalyst money (£50m) to help organisations bring in more private and philanthropic money to the sector.

The financial consequence: 30% cut in the arts budget announced by George Osbourne - which will see the Arts council grant of £445mil drop to £349mil by 2014.

A more social consequence as Dan Jarvis, Shadow culture minister commented:

"The decisions made by this Tory-led government have meant that the Arts Council has to formulate a strategy based on scaling back the budget, and in turn this is leading to a scaling back of the ideas, innovation and creativity which was so prominent under Labour".

So it is quite clear that ACE have been backed into a tight corner. And what is remarkably terrible about this situation is the lack of social significance the government have associated with cultural institutions and initiatives.

During WWII, Churchill was said to have been a believer in the influence of the arts. It is documented that the finance minister at the time said 'Britain should cut arts funding to support the war effort' - to which Churchill replied, 'Then what are we fighting for'?

Even if Churchill didn't actually say this, George Eliot backs it up with her line 80 years previous, 'Art is the nearest thing to life'. And of course it is. Without art we could not begin to understand the human condition. Not to mention that cutting funding for the arts is a regressive step for economic recovery.

Here's a brief outline of how ACE are required to spend £440m 'strategic funding':

• Respond to major opportunities such as London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games; to showcase talent and build audiences for excellent art.

The space for exploitation here is obvious. The Olympic Games: a shop window to the world and more a political stage than 400m relays - we are now to consider Art as selective. Doing the one thing that Labour worked hard at discarding: instead of free admissions to galleries, we can expect an expensive ticket to watch the Triathlon also combining an entry to Turner at the Tate.

• Promote digital platforms and touring of exhibitions.

Perhaps galleries will be known as 'Google Galleries' and in the future, visiting a gallery will be an experience more like this:

Google, the Internet colossus is collaborating with 17 heavyweight international museums, including the Met in New York, the Hermitage in St Petersburg, the Uffizi in Florence, and the National Gallery in London, to provide an online simulacrum of the experience of visiting a world-class gallery. Using Google's "Street View" technology, viewers can take a virtual tour around the museums, and look at high-resolution images of more than 1,060 works of art from their collections.

This is all true and Google's project launched earlier this year. No thanks.

• Help arts organisations diversity their income streams, including private giving.

Well, as we have recently seen with Vodafone's sponsorship of Tate Modern, there is stronger encouragement of private funding for the arts.

Arts and Business: the not-for-profit organisation, which aims to encourage and assist businesses to invest in arts projects, found that:

"In 2006/07 the private sector invested £599 million in culture, in the same year the public sector in the UK spent in the order of £1.6 billion. Together (£2.2billion) they helped the cultural sector produce £7.7 billion in GVA (Gross Value Added) to the economy."

And inevitably it will only ever come through core public funding. And arts and public service unions need to fight to defend and expand this

Just two years ago, private funding only constituted 15% of total Arts funding, unlike public funding which was 53%.

Not to mention that it is usually only after Government funding has been granted and the organisation has had some level of success that additional private funding is found.

And finally

• Building a network of arts leaders, who value sharing their knowledge and skills.

I have a vision of a variety of 'leaders' Saatchi, next to Tracey Emin, next to the owners of the various London auction houses. Their belief in the human condition is sceptical let alone their consideration of art and innovation.

It is clear that ACE will as ever try to make the best out of a bad situation but under this government ACE are essentially required to be 'seen to be doing' work in the Arts - 'maintaining existing galleries but not commissioning new ones'. By doing this Dan Jarvis believes we are 'running the risk of falling behind other nations who are investing in art continuously'.

Moreover, if we look at small theatres - the Arcola in London. Reading groups in Liverpool, Get into Reading Organisation. Galleries such as the Ikon in Birmingham or the Baltic in Gateshead - none of these would have happened under this government.

We need to work hard to make sure the Arts Sector is not a second-rate sector.

Natasha Cox (Art Uncut)

Art Uncut hope to soon collaborate with a new campaign, Lost Arts.

Launched earlier this year, their campaign is dedicated to recording and archiving the losses behind the cuts in the Art and Creative industries. It aims to record all the projects, initiatives and organisations that will be lost due to the cuts. And will log a running total of the money lost to the arts; money lost to the wider economy and the number of jobs at risk. The public are encouraged to send details of the arts cuts to the campaign.

It is a three year project, until the review in 2015. And has been set up by 8 unions, including Bectu, The Writers Guild and UNITE.

The Power of Corporation of London: The reason nothing changes

Friday 28th October

The free market experiment of the last thirty years was catastrophically discredited when finance bought the world to its knees in 2008. Public anger against the banks is huge. Why then do we see no radical change?

The public will is for radical reform, but there are powerful non-democratic forces working in the opposite direction. Perhaps the most important of these is the power of Corporation of London.

What is the Corporation of London?

The Corporation is a weird entity. It is the local council for the Square Mile in the centre of London known as the 'City of London'. But it is largely voted in by corporations rather than people. Ordinary residents living in estates in Portsoken are denied the democratic right to choose their local council, as their votes are outnumbered 4 to 1 by the votes of corporations.

But unlike other local councils, the Corporation has considerable private wealth. In addition to the money it uses to perform its function as a local government, the Corporation has a private account known as 'City Cash', which provides it with a few hundred million a year income from investments. This money is officially held in trust for 'the Citizens of London', but a large part of it is used to lobby for the banks.

However, the main source of the Corporation's power comes from its ancient status. Lead by the Lord Mayor, and going back a thousand years, it is embedded at the heart of our political life. Sat opposite the speaker in the House of Commons is an individual called 'The Remembrancer', whose official role if to protect the interests of the City of London. When the Queen enters the City she must ask the permission of the Lord Mayor. Beyond these symbols, the Corporation wields enormous influence through connections with Westminster which it has built up over hundreds of years.

So we have an ancient and wealthy institution at the heart of our political life, which has been completely captured by narrow financial interests and now uses its money, status and resources to pursue deregulation and the interest of finance. It is little wonder that, despite what politicians say, we aren't 'rebalancing our economy' away from an over-reliance on the instabilities of finance capital.

Action for Change - Alternative Lord Mayor's Show 12th November

It's time to do something about it. Reclaim the City is a campaign for Democratic Reform of the Corporation of London. We have three concrete demands:

• We demand that the local council representing the Square Mile be chosen solely by the votes of the Citizens of London.
• We demand that the Corporation of London publishes its secret City Cash account held in trust for the Citizens of London.
• We demand that the Lord Mayor of London once again serve the interests of the Citizens of London rather than the interests of finance.

We will set out these demands at our Alternative Lord Mayor's Parade, 12th November, which will be at the same time and place as the real Lord Mayor's Parade, when the Lord Mayor flaunts his wealth and power through the streets of the City. We would like to invite as many people as possible to get involved. For those who like dressing up this is a great opportunity to mix the pomp and finery with the corporate reality. We will start at Mansion House at 11am, and then process to the Occupation at St. Paul's where we will elect and acclaim an alternative Lord Mayor for the people.

In 1381, the Lord Mayor ended the 50,000 strong peasant revolt over the poll tax by murdering its leader Wat Tyler. Join us on 12th November, and hopefully this time we might have more success!

Cutting the 50p rate is crucial for redistribution

11th September

Cuts to Sure Start - permanent. Cuts to benefits - permanent. Council cuts - permanent. Removal of tax credits - permanent. Cuts to police and defence - permanent. Raising of the top rate of tax - temporary. This says a great deal about the government's priorities.

To be fair to the government, cutting the 50p is exactly the right thing to do - given their priority of redistributing income from poor to rich.

Independent research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (see graph below) shows that, putting aside the top 10%, the richer you get the less you are affected by the government's tax and benefit reforms over this parliament. Because of Labour's 50p rate, the top 10% are hit almost as hard (in proportional terms) as the bottom 10%. This dying act by the Labour government has been the single obstacle stopping Osborne from creating a perfect redistribution from poor to rich.

Of course Osborne can't explicitly state his grand goal of taking from the poor to give to the rich - although it is clear to anyone looking at the evidence - and so we get the old Tory lie that tax cuts for the rich make economic sense. Last week 20 economists wrote to the Financial Times to urge the government to lower the top rate of tax, posing as experts working from hard evidence. In fact, the only "evidence" they could offer was anecdotal. There simply is no evidence that a higher tax rate of anything up to 70% does any harm to the economy.

Moreover, much of the speculative theory that harm is caused by progressive taxation is based on the idea that the rich will avoid tax when the rate is too high. This is simply not something we should be taking into consideration. No one would suggest putting up benefits in order to stop fraud, so why is it reasonable to think we should lower taxes on the rich to stop them avoiding? Reflection on this asymmetry shows the double standards at play here. We should be building a culture where people feel a duty to pay their fair share, not basing policy around the assumption that they won't.

Even if there were some negative effect on the economy from the higher rate of tax - which has not been shown - is it plausible that this effect is more significant than the long term economic damage of the cuts to Sure Start or the abolition of the Future Jobs Fund? Billions will be spent on this tax cut for the rich. I would like to see the research showing that cutting tax for the rich is the most economically sensible way to spend those billions.

This research will never be carried out, because Osborne doesn't really believe in his heart of hearts that lowering the 50p is important for the economy (it is worth noting that his 'review' into the matter is being conducted from within government rather than being carried out by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility). His aim is to accelerate the redistribution from poor to rich that has been going on for the last 30 years. Cutting the top rate of tax is simply the best way to do this.

Without a proper enquiry, the bias towards conservative explanations of criminality will prevail

15th August

For the last week or so many on the left have found themselves exasperated at how difficult it is to persuade people of a simple truism: to explain is not to justify. Just because one tries to explain the riots in terms of the ever growing inequality and ever decreasing social mobility, does not mean one thinks the actions of the rioters were perfectly acceptable. There is no inconsistency in seeking to explain something you condemn.

But there is a more subtle fallacy that has been making mischief here: the conflation of explanation and justification seems not to be present when the explanations are those typically favoured by the right. When the Prime Minister suggested in his address to the commons that the deeper causes of the riots were absent fathers or 'a culture that says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities,' nobody supposed that he was trying to excuse criminality. But in the same debate when Caroline Lucas suggested inequality might have some role to play in understanding recent events, she was shot down by the Prime Minister as being an apologist for the thugs.

No doubt some people try to excuse criminality by pointing to social injustice. But one might equally try to excuse criminality by pointing to bad parenting, or the rights based culture. Alternately, one might offer either as an explanation of criminal behaviour, without supposing that the blameworthiness of the criminal is thereby removed. For some reason, however, people are disposed to hear the kind of explanations Caroline Lucas favours, but not the kind of explanations Cameron prefers, as attempts to excuse what was done.

The result is a firm bias in favour of typically conservative explanations of criminality, because such explanations are not seen as justifying behaviour which people intuitively feel can't be justified. If Cameron can successfully bat off Ed Milliband's calls for a full, public enquiry into the riots, it is likely that this bias, bolstered with relentless dressing downs of 'wet liberals' who dare to offer 'thug-apologist' explanations - the kind we phenomenon we witnessed in the heated Newsnight exchange between Harriet Harman and Michael Gove - will ensure the received explanation of why the riots took place is a distinctively conservative one.

A proper enquiry would have a much better shot at overcoming this bias. Were such an enquiry to find that inequality had even a modest role to play in the lawlessness of recent days, this could potentially provide a powerful evidence based motivation for constructing policies to tackle the terrible social injustice in the UK. It is notoriously difficult to motivate those at the top of society with a concern for inequality. An explanatory link between social injustice and the riots could provide a self-interested motivation for all sectors of society to care about the gap between rich and poor.

Perhaps an enquiry wouldn't deliver this result. But we must try our hardest to gain an objective understanding of these recent events. Without an enquiry, there is little hope of this.

Economies are like stones not corks

1st August

More terrible growth figures: 0.2% for the second quarter of 2011, which means that the economy has been pretty much flatlining for 9 months. The delicate recovery that was brought about by Labour's stimulus has been choked to death by the VAT rise, cuts to public spending, and the affect of Osborne's scaremongering on confidence.

This did not surprise us. The day of the VAT rise back in January coincided with the first Art Uncut blog entry:

Progressive taxation is not only socially just, it is economically sensible. What we need to do to stimulate the economy is to get people spending, and the poor tend to spend a greater percentage of their incomes. Put money in the hands of the poor and they're more likely to spend it, thus getting things moving again. Put money in the hands of the rich and they're more likely to put it in their Swiss bank account for a rainy day.

The government instead decided to get the economy surging forwards by rolling back the state. Free marketists like Osborne believe that economies are like buoyant corks which, once freed from the weighty presence of state spending and regulation, will naturally rise up. The trouble is this is bollocks. Economies are more like heavy stones which naturally tend downwards and can only be kept afloat by a combination of innovative ways of increasing productivity (on the side of business) and spending (on the side of consumers). You need both. If people aren't spending then there's no demand, and so no matter how innovative business is, no matter how cheap borrowing is, that stone is going to sink.

To be fair to them, the government do seem to be genuinely surprised that the stone hasn't floated, and are now grasping round in the dark for a growth strategy consistent with their ideology. Steve Hilton, the genius behind the Big Society concept, had another bright idea, 'Clearly the rolling back of the state hasn't been radical enough. Let's abolish maternity and consumer rights and for sure that cork's gonna float.'

Of course Hilton's little gem is never going to get tried out, but it is obvious what would happen if it were. Get rid of consumer rights, and people are less willing to spend. Less people spending, and that weighty stone which is already on the seabed, is going to start sinking beneath the sand.

Great Fortnight for Democracy. Great Fortnight for the Left

18th July

It's been a great couple of weeks for UK democracy. The power that Murdoch has enjoyed for so long over our politicians - the power he hoped to consolidate by buying all of BSkyB - has suddenly vanished. Fear of Murdoch has for so long been a dominant force in British politics, that it felt like his role was written into the constitution. No-one expected this would all change so quickly.

This should also be seen as a great couple of weeks for the anti-cuts movement. Cameron claims that the information about Andy Coulson which the Guardian gave to his chief of staff never reached him. He owes us an explanation of why this was. If it eventually turns out that Cameron is lying about this, and that in fact he knew that Coulson had hired Jonathan Rees - a private detective then facing charges for conspiracy to murder, and previously jailed for conspiracy to plant cocaine on an innocent woman - this could bring down the government.

But even if Cameron somehow squirms his way out of this one, the end of Murdoch is likely to result in a small but significant shift to the left in the UK. The True Blue Tory core vote has always been a minority. And inequality is now so great, wealth so focused at the top, that it ought not to be possible for the Tories to win elections. Much of the Tories' electoral success is down to the right wing media twisting the facts to serve their political agenda.

Of course the Daily Mail and The Telegraph will continue with their propaganda campaign to persuade the British public that benefit scroungers and Gordon Brown's spending are the source of our current troubles. But we should not underestimate the degree to which Murdoch dragged our country to the right, either by using his dominance in the media to support the Conservative Party at elections - "It was the Sun what won it" - or by wooing Labour away from its traditional policies in return for the gift of electoral support (Of course, News Corporation is not the only powerful organisation that New Labour sold its soul to, but it was a significant one.)

Murdoch wasn't a political animal, but he was a man of power who scared politicians and police into serving his business interests. That power is suddenly gone. A less corrupt country is a more rational country. And Reason favours the left.

Bono Pay Up was all about bringing about a culture shift

4th July

On 24 June Art Uncut erected a 9ft-wide, 24ft-high column at the front of the audience at U2's set at Glastonbury, with the words "U PAY TAX 2?". This expression of our concerns was quickly pulled down by heavy-handed security, breaking a finger of one of our team in the process. But the column was up long enough to be filmed and photographed, and the images appeared on the BBC website, on the Politics Show and in many national newspapers.

There was a narrower and a broader point to our protest. The narrower point was to raise concerns about the irresponsible way U2 arrange their tax affairs. In 2006 U2 Ltd moved most of its tax affairs to Holland, seemingly in response to the Irish government's decision to cap the tax-free exemption on royalties at €225,000 (before this, artists in Ireland were not obliged to pay any tax on royalties). Our concern is that when individuals and corporations "shop around" different countries for the best tax deal, this puts pressure on governments all round the world to lower their tax rates, which results in an ever-dwindling proportion of profits going to governments to spend on schools, hospitals and public services. Given the financial difficulties in the group's native country right now, any tax revenue denied to Ireland hurts badly.

The broader point of the protest was to raise awareness of the connection between tax ethics and development. Christian Aid estimates that $160bn, more than the global aid budget, is lost every year to the developing world from multinational tax dodging. It's clear that if we're serious about making developing countries richer, we need individuals and corporations to take a much more ethical and responsible approach to their tax affairs.

Art Uncut aims to bring about a culture shift, to create a world where people automatically and instinctively think about tax ethically. We're not claiming that individuals have a duty to pay as much tax as possible. Rather each of us has a duty to think about tax in an ethical context, to ask questions such as: what's my fair share? What do I owe to the country that paid for my healthcare and education? What's the spirit as well as the letter of the law? What effect does how I arrange my tax affairs have on the globe?

Let me suggest two ways in which this culture shift might come about. First, we want to empower people to "Just Say No!" to the tax accountant. We have a culture at the moment in which tax is seen as something complicated that is best left to the experts. We want to encourage individuals who have made a bit of money to realise that their tax decisions are shot through with value. It is within their power to tell their tax accountant that they don't want the only consideration to be the minimisation of their tax bill. JK Rowling and Graham Norton have spoken with great eloquence and conviction on this issue.

Second, we want to encourage consumers to make tax one consideration in their choice of which artists to support, or which companies to buy from; just as environmental considerations already figure in these decisions. We want to see a world in five years' time when credible musicians just don't do what U2 Ltd did, because they know the public won't support it.

Last week I argued with a financial analyst about our Bono Pay Up campaign on the World Service Newshour. He came out with the tired line that "as long as it's legal it's fine". But more and more people are realising that good citizenship is more than just sticking to the exact letter of the law - that it's fine if you're wealthy enough to get accountants to find clever loopholes around the clear intentions of parliament. It undermines democracy when the rich can avoid what the democratic government has decided is an appropriate amount of tax for them to pay, and it is morally schizophrenic to suppose that we have a duty to obey the letter of the law but not its spirit.

The Bono Pay Up campaign has been a great success and Art Uncut intends to build on this. In the UK you struggle against a rightwing media to get ideas out there. The Uncut movement has stumbled upon a powerful way of raising awareness: direct action. And it works. We're going to continue to complement the work of UK Uncut by raising awareness of political themes that are at one remove from the cuts - tax and development, class discrimination, the power of the City of London - but which ultimately have significance for the anti-cuts movement. We're going to continue working closely with Tax Justice Network to challenge the tax affairs of artists, musicians and public figures. Not because we're self-righteous prigs that love to have a dig, but because we want to change the world for the better.

Glastonbury - A festival for radical politics?

25th June

If they can get away with it, the wealthy establishment tend to hire heavies to crush dissent. We wanted a dialogue with U2, on an issue which is crucial for international development. Instead we got heavy handed security tactics; our highly visible (25ft high) expression of conscience was pulled down after just a few minutes - where are the festival's radical roots now we ask?

In spite of this, the 'Bono Pay Up' has been a great success. The whole point of the campaign was to use the national and international media to raise awareness of the importance of thinking about tax ethically, and the relationship between tax ethics and international development. This we have achieved.

We will build on this. We aim to bring about a culture shift. We want to see a world where people automatically and instinctively think about tax in an ethical context. We want to see a world where credible musicians just don't do what U2 did in 2006 because the public won't tolerate it.

In the meantime join us tonight in Kentish Town for the 'Bono Pay Up' night of music, comedy and talks, to celebrate what we achieved at Glastonbury, and to hear from Christian Aid, Tax Justice Network and Maurice Glasman about the crucial message behind the headlines.

How things could be

12th June

Some on the left want to get rid of capitalism and replace it with something more conducive to human flourishing. I'm agnostic as to whether this is possible. I hope that one day in the far flung future we do find a workable system founded on cooperation rather than competition. But it seems to me reckless to burn what we have and start from scratch in the hope that what sounds nice in theory will work in practice. I'm something of a small 'c' conservative Marxist.

But even without the overthrow of capitalism, things could in principle be pretty good if the nations of the world started to take back the power which big business and wealthy individuals currently have over them. I want to describe a possible capitalist world which is significantly better than the capitalist world we live in today. The utopia I will describe will not be brought about in the foreseeable future, but this is only because of lack of political will. If countries chose to, they could live in the world I will describe.

In the world we live in today, nations compete with each other to undercut one another's tax rates. States allow themselves to be played off against each other by big business and wealthy individuals: 'Please don't leave to go to Switzerland! Here, have more of the money that could be spent on schools, hospitals and public services', says George Osborne as he slashes corporation taxes by 2%. Of course in the short term one country may increase its tax intake by undercutting the tax rates of another country, but this is done only at the expense of that other country, which has lost business by not offering a high enough ransom to persuade it to stay. And globally, over time, this process inevitably results in an ever-dwindling proportion of profits going to governments to spend on the public good.

If the nations of the world decided to cooperate rather than compete, they would have everything to gain. If every country in the world agreed to impose a progressive corporation rate on business with a top rate of, say, 50%, they would secure many, many times more revenue. Big business would have nowhere to run, and so would lose its power to dictate to governments how to set their tax rates. In democracies, the power to choose the tax law would be returned to the people. The painful decisions nations currently face over how to spend their ever dwindling share of global profits would be a thing of the past.

As things stand, such a global transformation is a far off dream. But there are steps nations can take in the direction of mutually beneficial cooperation. The Robin Hood Tax group campaigns for an international tax of 0.05% on transactions like stocks, bonds, foreign currency and derivatives, which it estimates would raise &poound250 billion a year globally. The leaders of France, Germany and Spain have expressed support for something like this, as did Gordon Brown towards the end of his premiership. The prospect of a Robin Hood Tax becomes more and more realistic as nations realise what they have to gain by it.

There is a struggle going on between nations and big business. It is struggle which nations can easily win if they only organise. Nations of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains!

It is crucial we challenge U2 on this issue

3rd June

Before 2006 U2 Ltd, which deals with U2's royalties payments, was registered in Ireland, the band's native country, for tax purposes. At the time, Ireland had an astonishing policy of allowing artists to pay zero tax on royalties. In 2006, quite sensibly one might think, the Irish government decided to cap the income which can be subject to this exemption at 250,000 Euros per annum. Following this change in the law, U2 Ltd decided to move their tax affairs to Holland in order to pay less tax.

What's wrong with this? Why not shop around to get the best deal for yourself? Isn't capitalism driven by customers demanding the best deal for themselves? Well there's competition and there's competition. At its best, competition between companies trying to please the customer leads to better and cheaper products. But what we're dealing with here isn't competition between companies; it's competition between countries, fighting to undercut one another's tax rates. This kind of competition leads to nothing but bad consequences for the citizens of the world. Of course in the short term one country may increase its tax intake by undercutting the tax revenues of other countries, and so attracting businesses greedily wanting to pay as little tax as possible. But globally, and over time, tax competition inevitably leads to an ever dwindling percentage of profits going to governments to spend on health, education and public services. By 'shopping around' for the country with the best tax deal, U2 put pressure on countries to surrender more and more of their tax revenues to share holders.

And there is a broader issue here. Bono is publically known for being concerned with development. But tax issues are crucial to development. Christian Aid estimates that developing countries lose $160bn annually, more than the global aid budget, thanks to unscrupulous multinational companies dodging tax. If we want poor countries to become richer, we need to adopt an ethical approach to taxation. On the face of it, it doesn't seem that U2 are taking an ethical approach to taxation. They are not thinking: 'What's our fair share? What do we owe the country that funded our health and education growing up?' Rather, they're thinking: 'How can we pay as little tax as possible?' The poor will always be with us whilst such attitudes persist.

This is why Art Uncut have decided to make weekend June 24/25 'Bono Pay Up!' weekend. On Saturday 25 June, there will be a 'Bono Pay Up' night of music, comedy and short talks at the Bull and Gate in Kentish town, with talks by Christian Aid, Tax Justice Network, and Maurice Glasman, leading proponent of the 'Blue Labour' movement. On Friday 24 June we hope to organise a demonstration at U2's headline gig at Glastonbury, to send a message to U2 that their approach to tax is not acceptable. If you're going to Glastonbury, and are up for being a part of this, join the Bono Pay Up facebook group.

This is not just about having a dig at Bono. It is crucial to get people thinking about the ethics of taxation, and the relationship between tax and development. So far, UK Uncut actions have been incredibly successful at getting tax dodging into the public consciousness as a moral issue. This action will spread awareness of the suffering tax dodging causes to the developing world.

Do we have the right to spend public money on the arts?

10th May

Some arguments between left and right are pragmatic. In these cases there is agreement about the desired goal, but a disagreement about how to achieve it. It might be that both left and right agree that we want developing countries to become richer, but disagree over whether deregulating markets is the way to achieve that goal.

But some arguments between left and right concern principle. The day that the government's austerity measures hit arts, there was a debate on Channel 4 news. The participant in that debate who was in support of the cuts to arts had a simple argument, grounded not in evidence but in principle: it's not right to take people's money off them against their volition (i.e. through taxation) in order to spend it on the arts.

Expressions of this kind of attitude are not uncommon at the moment: 'It's our money, so it's wrong for the state to take it off us.' Implicit in this attitude is a belief in sacred, inviolable property rights that any decision about how to shape society ought to respect. This view was taken to its logical conclusion by the 20th century American philosopher Robert Nozick, who held that the state ought to let the poor die rather than fund a welfare state, as this would require infringing 'consenting acts of capitalism.'

This belief in sacred, inviolable property rights is superstitious and primitive. It is founded in a moral conviction - akin to the belief in vengeance or honour - which humans naturally tend towards, but which is grounded in sentiment rather than reason. This is not to say that people don't have property rights. But whatever rights people have to 'their property' are grounded in legal choices which reflect the kind of society we choose to have. Property rights should be shaped by, rather than shape, the kind of society we want to live in.

Putting things this way round changes everything. If there are no sacrosanct rights of property which we are duty bound to respect in our law, then what we should really be focusing on is what kind of society we want. Is it better to have a society in which our cultural diet is entirely determined by market forces, in which only art which has commercial value, or which happens to be favoured by the whims of the wealthy, survives? Or is it preferable to have a society in which a fractional reduction in individuals' spending power protects the arts we collectively value and enjoy? When the choice is put so starkly, it is difficult to deny that publicly funding the arts leads to a net gain in human flourishing.

Art Uncut is founded on this principle, on a belief about the kind of society that we believe to be better for its citizens: a society with well-funded arts, with well-funded public services, and where there is a certain amount of redistribution so that the gap between rich and poor does not get too wide. We began as a small group of artists and musicians involved in UK Uncut actions, but hope now to open up the anti-cuts movement to a broader audience: to those who are not temperamentally inclined to protest, or perhaps haven't made their minds up yet. If we are serious about building a broad sustained coalition of opposition with the potential for political influence, we need to reach out.

A week before the March for the Alternative on March 26th, Art Uncut staged a sell out creative preliminary for the march: a night of music, comedy and short talks, headlined by UK Uncut, Josie Long and The Agitator. On March 26th itself, Art Uncut and UK Uncut jointly occupied BHS on Oxford Street, turning it into an artistic space with musicians, half a dozen poets and a performance from the actors Sam and Timothy West. Moving forward, we have planned a series of events in London, and we hope to encourage others around the country to set up their own Art Uncut events of creative opposition, just as people throughout the UK (and beyond!) have set up their UK Uncut actions.

As the cuts start to bite, the anti-cuts movement is evolving. It has not been easy so far. We have received hostility from most of the media and some of the police. But we're very determined, and have a conviction grounded in firm principles and sound economics. Let's hope that's enough.

It is crucial that the anti-cuts movement reaches out

18th March

It's inspiring how much protest and creative direct action is going on at the moment, from UK Uncut bank bail-ins to student occupations. From March 26th onwards the anti-cuts protest movement is certain to grow in strength. However, if we are serious about building a broad sustained coalition of opposition with the potential for political influence, the anti-cuts movement needs to reach out to a wider audience: to those who are not temperamentally inclined to protest, or perhaps haven't made their minds up yet. The government has done a pretty good PR job persuading the UK public that the austerity measures are the inevitable consequence of Gordon Brown spending too much. It is only by counterbalancing this propaganda, by winning the economic argument, by persuading the majority of the population that there are alternatives to these harsh and unfairly distributed cuts, that there is the possibility of actually having an impact on government policy, which is surely our ultimate aim. No one knows what this powerful movement can achieve, but one thing we can know is that if we remain insular we will achieve very little.

Guest Post: How Can They Say That The Cuts Are Fair? by Martin O'Neill Lecturer in Political Philosophy, University of York

17th March

George Osborne's Comprehensive Spending Review, and the plethora of swingeing cuts to which it will lead, will hit many of the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society hardest. Cuts to housing benefit and incapacity benefit will make life more difficult for those whose health or housing is insecure, piling extra disadvantage at those who already facing difficult circumstances. Cuts to public services will impact disproportionately on those who rely most on help from the state. Yet, strikingly, the Tories (and their Lib Dem allies) tell us again and again that these cuts are "fair". Is there any way of making sense of this jarring claim that policies so harsh could possibly be expressions of a commitment to fairness?

The first thing to say about the idea of "fairness" is that people disagree about how to make sense of the idea. Everyone is in favour of fairness, just as everyone is, in general, in favour of motherhood and apple pie. With fairness, the devil is in the detail. Everything depends on how one gives content to the general claim that some particular policy is fair.

The idea of fairness that the Coalition seems to favour has to do with the idea that the contribution that each person makes to the reduction of the deficit should be proportional to their starting point. The wealthy should contribute more than the poorest. As George Osborne said again and again while presenting his Comprehensive Spending Review to parliament, "the broadest shoulders should carry the heaviest burden". So far as it goes, this sort of elaboration of the idea of fairness may seem at least to some degree plausible. But do the changes to the tax and benefit system stand up to Osborne's own measure of what counts as fair?

The simple answer is that, even by his own standard of fairness, Osborne fails, and fails in a way that is as abject as it is shocking. The Treasury's own "distributional annex" to the CSR shows that the cuts are "progressive" in that, with regard to tax and benefit changes, the wealthiest pay proportionately more than the poorest. But the Treasury results depend on factoring in changes to the top rate of income tax made by the last Labour government, for which the Coalition can claim no credit. Moreover, the Treasury presentation of the figures is selective and misleading. Independent analysis conducted by Howard Reed and Tim Horton for the TUC and the Fabian Society shows that, when you factor in the effects of reductions in public services (on which the poor rely more than the rich) it is those on below average incomes who will lose the greatest proportions of their household budgets. (See: http://bit.ly/cutstuc )

So the Spending Revew is unfair, even on this rather weak standard of fairness. On other, more plausible, views of fairness, they do even worse. Much worse. Perhaps the most powerful and influential account of fairness comes from the Harvard philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002). On Rawls's view, what counts as fair is what people would have agreed to behind a "veil of ignorance", if they did not know particular facts about their economic, social and genetic circumstances. What fairness is, Rawls powerfully argued, is what free and rational people would agree to under background conditions of equality. On Rawls's view, the principles that people would agree to behind the veil of ignorance, and which would give expression to our deep commitment to fairness, would be very demanding. Rawls's principles of "justice as fairness" require that people should have equal chances of succeeding in life, whatever their social background, and require that public policies should always aim to benefit the worst-off in society as much as possible.

By this more significant standard of fairness, the Tory spending cuts are nothing less than a depressing failure. Cuts to grants to sixth formers from the poorest families (the Educational Maintenance Allowance, or EMA), although seemingly small beans at £30 per week, are likely to hobble the life-chances of some of the least advantaged. Rises in student fees will doubtless do likewise. A genuinely fair CSR would demand that the poorest members of society be protected during the most difficult economic times, while all of the burden of lowering the deficit was borne by those who had the economic means to do so. A fair government would be much quicker to raise taxes on the affluent before it considered cutting benefits and public services. The Coalition's policies, then, are anything but fair.

It is commonplace to say that the British have a deep commitment to fairness. We can only hope that this is true. By speaking the language of fairness, the Coalition government are playing a dangerous game, opening themselves up to charges of the most cynical hypocrisy. When the effects of their ideologically-drive, anti-poor cuts become apparent, their claims to fairness will seen be to be as hollow as they are disingenuous. We should not forget the case of the Poll Tax, and nor should we forget that governments that force such patent forms of unfairness on the British people ultimately pay the political price for doing so.

Why is the phrase 'politics of envy' deemed acceptable?

14th March

Quick blog to register hatred of the regressive phrase 'politics of envy'. If an individual realises that those in the socio-economic group they were born into die a decade younger on average, or that their children's life chances are significantly less than the children of those who can afford private education, or that the wages of those in 'higher' socio-economic groups have risen many, many times faster in the last thirty years than the wages of those in their own, and as a result of this realisation gets a bit angry, I think that we should call this 'legitimate grievance' rather than 'petty jealousy'. The phrase 'politics of envy' is very ugly indeed. I hope in the future this phrase is deemed unacceptable in the way that racist or homophobic terms are now deemed unacceptable.

Guest post: short review of Inside Job by Professor Robert Goff

9th March

Watching certain documentary films, especially on a large screen in a movie theater, can be as pleasurable as being entertained by fictional films. I was reminded of this recently when an audience at a Sunday matinee at the Avon Cinema, Providence, Rhode Island, burst into spontaneous applause at the end of a documentary called Inside Job. The film is about the origins of our current financial crisis, a subject with no obvious entertainment appeal. Yet Inside Job clearly succeeded in providing this American audience with considerable satisfaction. Their engagement with the subject of economic meltdown was not due to the narration by a Hollywood star, Matt Damon, nor the better-than-average cinematography but, I think, more about their collective realization that deceitful human agency was behind the mind-boggling financial losses on a global scale and actually seeing several of those agents being confronted on-camera. There was also the satisfaction that came from following the film's clear explanation of previously bewildering economic complexity.

Beginning with an exposition of how the stable and prosperous country of Iceland got into so much debt, the film dynamically moved on to explore the interconnected world of Wall Street financial services, the Treasury Departments of successive U.S. government, the Federal Reserve Board under the long tenure of Alan Greenspan and his successor Ben Bernanke, as well as a host of academic economists. The film was nearly as dramatic as Oliver Stone's recent sequel to Wall Street, and much more informative. By the end of the film, the concept of the global economy was no longer an abstraction and I actually had some inkling about the meaning of the term "derivatives." Moreover, the concept of "unimaginable greed" I could now associate with a few more faces than Bernie Madoff. I felt strangely confident that I could watch news bulletins on the recession with some expertise--and that perhaps I was even up to arguing with right-wing colleagues teaching in the Economics Department.

I strongly believe that documentaries are an important medium for connecting to the issues of our society, whether from the past or in the present. The website of Inside Job is useful too: http://www.sonyclassics.com/insidejob/

We knew at the time that Thatcher's plans were not socially just. With the benefit of hindsight we can see that they were not economically sensible either.

1st March

The government was hoping that the growth figures for the last three months of 2010 would be revised up. In fact, the revised figures tell a slightly worse story: even if we set aside the effect of the snow, growth in the economy at the end of 2010 was either flat-lining or falling slightly.

This should surprise no one. The outgoing head of the CBI , Richard Lambert, attacked the government for not having a 'strategy for growth'. He's wrong. The government has a plan, and it's wonderfully simple: pull back the public sector and the private sector will rush in to fill the gap.

The problem is that their plan is inspired by ideology rather than evidence. There is no sound economic principle which suggests that, in a time of austerity, all we need to do is to roll back the state and the private sector will rush in to fill the vacuum. Indeed the sheer scale of job losses caused by the cuts (freedom of information requests by False Economy have revealed that the government estimates that 50,000 jobs will be lost in the NHS alone) make it unlikely.

We have now had 30 years of the Thatcher/Reagan free market experiment. No one doubted that their plans would lead to great inequality, but there was a widespread belief that this would be balanced out by the productivity that would be unleashed by deregulation of the economy 'setting companies free.' It was argued that the enormous wealth generated by liberalising the market would 'trickle down' to the poor eventually.

We can now see that this experiment has failed. The growth rate of per capita income in both the UK and the US was actually lower between 1990 and 2009 than prior to the Thatcher-Reagan revolution in the 60s and 70s. Moreover, it was precisely the tearing down of regulation which allowed the bad practices which lead to the Great Recession of 2008. Wealth has become more and more focused at the top, with no obvious economic benefit to justify it. We knew at the time that Thatcher's plans were not socially just. With the benefit of hindsight we can see that they were not economically sensible either.

By clinging to free market ideology against all the evidence the current government is failing to learn the lesson of history, and we are paying the price of their failure. Growth is slowing. Inflation is growing. Unemployment is growing. And the cuts have not even begun to bite yet.

There is no democratic mandate for the extent and unfair distribution of these cuts: the Tories did not win enough votes to run a government without support, and their manifesto grossly underplayed the extent of their current actions. It is our patriotic duty to do everything we can to stop the relentless, ideologically driven social and economic damage this Tory-led government is causing to our country, before it's too late.

What Exactly is Wrong with Dodging Tax?

1st February

In 2005 Philip Green managed to avoid paying a single penny of tax on a record breaking 1.2 billion dividend paid out by Arcadia, the retailer that owns Topshop, Miss Selfridge and Dorothy Perkins amongst others. He did this by putting Acardia in his wife's name: Mrs. Green is a resident of Monaco, which allows her to pay zero income tax. Many have the intuition that this kind of tax dodging is morally reprehensible. But what exactly is wrong with what Green did?

Bad suggestion 1:He broke the law

This hypothesis is uncontroversially false. Green's action was perfectly legal.

Bad suggestion 2: He paid less tax than he might have

Individuals pay money into ISAs and pensions in order to pay less tax. If Green's action is wrong simply because he has arranged things in order to pay less tax, then paying into an ISA is wrong too. But it is implausible to think it is wrong to pay money into an ISA. Therefore, the wrongness of Green's action cannot lie simply in the fact that it allowed him to pay less tax than he would otherwise have had to.

Bad suggestion 3: He didn't pay his fair share of tax.

Suppose my moral reflections tell me that that higher rate of tax ought to be 45% rather than 40%. Suppose further I happen to earn £50,000. Ought I then, given my moral conviction, to voluntarily pay 5% more tax (after 40,000) than the law demands? Intuitively, this is above and beyond the call of duty. It is not a citizen's duty to sit down and work out what his or her individual conscience dictates is an appropriate amount of tax, and pay accordingly. It is the job of the legitimate government, rather than each individual, to decide what is the appropriate amount of tax for an individual to pay relative to his or her circumstances.

The real reason Green's action was wrong: He broke the spirit of the law

Laws are not just arbitrary dictates. They are instituted for socially understood reasons, in order to achieve certain goals of fairness, and the economic and social good of society. The democratically elected government of our country has decided that British owners of British companies ought to pay a certain amount of tax on dividends paid out to them. Now of course strictly speaking Green is not the owner of the company. But this is only because he has arranged things in arbitrary ways with the sole purpose of avoiding the obligations he would otherwise be subject to. There is a clear sense in which Green, although he has respected the letter of the law, has flouted its spirit. He has deliberately arranged matters in such a way as to avoid the social end the law was intended to achieve.

We surely have a duty to obey not just the letter but the spirit of the law. It is not a healthy society in which the legislature institute laws, whilst those who can afford to are busy hiring clever people to work out sneaky ways of getting around what the government are trying to achieve with those laws. Tax dodging is a profoundly anti-social form of activity. The estimated 25 billion that is dodged each year causes an enormous amount of harm to society, and we should morally condemn it accordingly.

Huge bonuses at a time of austerity is bad enough, but the worst thing is that not enough is being done to stop the bankers from poisoning our economy again

24th January

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there was a little country called Mugland. In Mugland all the medicine was provided by a few huge pharmaceutical companies. Now the problem was that these companies were so driven by short term profit that, instead of aiming to produce medicines that would improve the health of the citizens of Mugland, they created poisons that made people seem healthy in the short term, but in the long term caused great harm. As a result of these toxins being put on the market, a great sickness took hold in Mugland, the like of which had not been seen for a long, long time. Because of the effect the sickness had on their business, the huge pharmaceutical companies of Mugland started to have severe financial difficulties, and were on the verge of collapse. Unfortunately, the stupid rulers of Mugland had allowed the pharmaceutical companies to get so huge that they couldn't possibly let them fail, as everyone is Mugland was reliant on them for their medicine. And so they were forced to bail them out with billions of tax payers' money.

Now wouldn't you think that, as soon as possible, the rulers of Mugland would introduce legislation to stop these companies creating new toxins to unleash on the public until they were proven to be beneficial, and break them up into smaller companies so that they were no longer too big to fail? You would think so, but unfortunately the rulers were in the grip of some strange ideology which told them that, contrary to the evidence, pharmaceutical companies always do the right thing if left to their own devices. And so the rulers just let things drift on like before, waiting gullibly for the next disaster.

This is exactly analogous to the current situation in the real world with respect to the banks. The creation of toxic financial products by the banks in the pursuit of short term profits unleashed huge damage on the economic health of the world, which has resulted in hardship and misery for its citizens. We had to bail them out because they were so big that they would have brought down the economy if we hadn't. But little is being done to stop this happening again, as we are still in the grip of the free market ideology which says that we only need to leave companies to it, with the barest regulation, and everything will be fine. It is reprehensible that the Tories continue to try to press on the British public the idea that the size of the deficit is a result of Gordon Brown spending too much, because it distracts us from the urgent task of reflecting on the monumental economic events of 2008, and formulating radical action to stopping such a crisis from ever happening again.

The banks should be broken up, so that there is no risk of the tax payer having to bail them out again, and they should be banned from introducing financial innovations until they have been proven to be socially beneficial. Sound extreme? Drug companies have to show that their products are not poisonous before they release them on the market. So should banks!

(For good, clear explanations of these toxic financial products see 'Whoops! Why everyone owes and no one can pay' by John Lanchester, or 'Freefall: Free Markets and the sinking of the global economy' by Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz)

Bankers bonuses: The power that bankers seem to hold over our country is perhaps the most frightening thing

11th January

The Great Recession of 2008 caused considerable pain in the UK. The Great Recession was stopped from becoming a depression as big as the Great Depression of the 1930's by a huge government bailout, the paying off of which is currently causing joblessness and financial difficulties for the majority of the British public, with plenty more pain to come. This terrible chain of events was caused by toxic financial products created by bankers in the pursuit of short term profits. Those very same bankers are about to receive annual bonuses in their millions, whilst their fellow citizens continue to suffer from their mistakes.

Head of Barclays Bob Diamond, whilst being grilled by a committee of MPs today, said that the time for 'remorse and apology' from bankers is over. We genuinely hope there will be such a time, but when millions of innocent people are paying for the mistakes of bankers through jobs losses and cuts to public services, whilst the bankers themselves receive astronomical rewards, this is not that time.

Before the election Cameron, Clegg and Osborne promised in strong words that this wouldn't happen, with Clegg even declaring a 'fatwa on bonuses'. Now he has power, Cameron is warning of the dangers of 'scapegoating' bankers. But you can't 'scapegoat' the people who uncontroversially committed the crime. Of course previous Tory governments are at fault for undoing the regulation which would have stopped the bankers doing it, and the New Labour government is at fault for not creating new regulation. But it was bankers' reckless actions in the pursuit of short terms profits that brought economy down, and it is right and appropriate to blame them for our situation, as well as according blame to the lack of regulation which made these irresponsible actions possible.

Bob Diamond also revealed during his interrogation that Cameron and Osborne have not once been to see him to request restraint on his bonus. Of course Cameron and Osborne will warn of the economic dangers of not giving the bankers everything they want, but are bankers really so powerful that the Prime Minister and the Chancellor are too scared to even politely ask for what justice and the great majority of the country demands, for fear of their wrath? Either Cameron and Osborne are quite happy with this injustice, or bankers hold a frightening degree of power over our democratically elected representatives. It's difficult to say which of these alternatives causes more concern.

Why the Tea Party should vote Democrat

Thursday 6th January

If you're a US citizen and you don't like government spending, you really ought to vote democrat (see graph below). One glance at this graph shows how little the Tea Party care about facts.

VAT rise: The pain starts here.

Tuesday 4th January

Today the Tory led government put VAT up to 20%. Putting up VAT hits the poor hardest for two reasons: (i) VAT is a tax on spending and the poor tend to spend a greater percentage of their incomes than the rich, (ii) with VAT you can't make the rich bear more of the burden, in the way that you can with income tax.

Why choose this way of taxing? Why not put up income tax, so that the rich pay more than the poor? The government will say that putting up VAT is more economically sensible than putting up income tax, as George Osborne tried to convince us on the Today programme this morning. In fact, progressive taxation is not only socially just, it is economically sensible. What we need to do to stimulate the economy is to get people spending, and the poor tend to spend a greater percentage of their incomes. Put money in the hands of the poor and they're more likely to spend it, thus getting things moving again. Put money in the hands of the rich and they're more likely to put it in their Swiss bank account for a rainy day.

The real reason the Tories are choosing to put up VAT (as opposed to income tax) is that the wealthy are their core vote and the part of society they identify with. Why shape your policies to the poor when they're never going to vote Tory anyway?

Osborne tried to defend the rise as best he could, giving the old lie that it's good for the economy and so good for poor (he even dared to claim that for these reasons it was a progressive tax!). Evan Davis had an excellent point in response (I paraphrase the conversation):

Davis: So given the logic of your argument, we ought to lower income tax, and put up VAT by a lot more.
Osborne: (trying to fill the absence of a good response with a smarmy guffaw) Well Evan, you can always take these arguments to their absurd logical conclusion...

What an admission!

In philosophy, there is an ancient and revered argument strategy called 'Reductio ad absurdum', which is Latin for 'reduction to absurdity'. The idea is that you show that your opponents' argument leads to logically absurd conclusions, and therefore demonstrate that there must be something wrong with the argument. In accepting that his argument had absurd conclusions, Osborne was in effect admitting that his argument was flawed. I wish more politicians were so frank in admitting their mistakes.

It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. This tax rise is certainly going to cause a great deal of pain, especially for the poor, and there is a good chance it will stall our delicate economic recovery. The pain starts here.