Labour should not be ashamed of supporting UK Uncut

By Sebastian Michnowicz / @BigRedSeb

Saturday’s TUC march of almost half a million people has succeeded in getting the Government to sit up and listen. It has got them very, very worried. This worry manifests itself in Tories attempting to link Labour to the violent minority. Boris Johnson used his £250,000 a year Telegraph column to claim that Ed Miliband and Ed Balls were ‘quietly satisfied by the disorder’, and over on ConservativeHome is a pathetic attempt by the unfortunately-surnamed Hammersmith and Fulham Tory councillor, Harry Phibbs, to link Labour to UK Uncut, portraying the tax justice protesters as a violent organisation.

UK Uncut were pretty unfortunate last Saturday: they took the decision to occupy tax-avoiding Fortnum and Mason as the police had pre-empted direct action from them and formed lines of officers outside their usual targets such as Vodafone and Topshop. Inside F&M, the demonstration was fairly peaceful and largely without incident but the black bloc, the anarchists wearing masks and waving black and red flags, were outside throwing or destroying everything that wasn’t nailed to the ground.

With so much going on and so quickly, the police response had to be quick and powerful; with no way of knowing who was a UK Uncut protestor without malicious intent and who was a traffic-cone-wielding maniac, it was inevitable everyone would be treated the same way and that media coverage would overshadow the peaceful protest. Without the anarchists, the TUC would have had its peaceful demonstration and UK Uncut would have had its peaceful sit in. A really tiny minority ruined it for everyone else.

Phibbs’ first accusation is aimed at the most immediate high-profile electoral threat to the Conservatives: Ken Livingstone. First the Tories said the mayoralty isn’t a ‘job for life’ in reference to Ken’s age, then they create the fallacy that he uses the same press officer as the RMT and are now keen to point out that a member of UK Uncut spoke at the Progressive London Conference in February. They managed to get irrefutable proof of the last claim as Boris Johnson sent a couple of stooges to the conference who managed to penetrate as far as the registration desk before they were sussed-out.

When attacking Ken, the Tories would do well to take heed of a somewhat unflattering but nonetheless fairly accurate assessment once made by journalist Andrew Rawnsley: ‘Like the coprophagous beetle, the more crap that is thrown in his [Ken’s] direction, the stronger he becomes’. At a time when the extent of cuts is becoming apparent to more and more people and living standards are being squeezed, the electorate does not respond well to negative, personal attacks against others, regardless of their political hue.

The rest of Phibbs’ diatribe concentrates on a number of Labour MPs who signed Early Day Motion 1146, which ‘congratulates UK Uncut for the role it has played in drawing attention by peaceful demonstrations to tax evasion and avoidance and to the need for firm action to secure tax justice’. Phibbs then goes on to list some of Garfield Weston’s charitable donations to organisations in the respective constituencies of those MPs. This exposes a worrying attitude in the Conservative Party, that random acts of philanthropy somehow excuse tax evasion and avoidance. The donations Phibbs’ mentions range from £3,000 to £20,000 which went to various organisations such as hospices, housing advice centres and charities for the blind. Interestingly, Phibbs neglects to mention £900,000 Garfield Weston donated to that famously hard-suffering charity, the Conservative Party; a donation of £100,000 made in 2004 even landed Garfield Weston in hot water with the Charity Commission.

So why should we be supportive of UK Uncut? They have held enough protests and sit-ins to prove they are a peaceful movement, turning shops and banks into crèches, poetry reading sessions or just general gatherings until they are asked to move on. The action highlights the scourge of tax avoidance which costs the exchequer £32 billion every year in lost income. In terms of dealing with the deficit, the cuts versus no cuts debate or the cuts versus higher taxes debate could rage on for days, but UK Uncut make the very valid point that cuts wouldn’t need to be so deep, if only corporations paid what they were legally obliged to pay at present rates.

Businessman Sir Philip Green, whose shops are regularly targeted, usually defends his decision not to pay tax because his companies create enough wealth for the UK with all the jobs they provide – an argument used by many tax-avoiding corporations. This attitude illustrates tax-dodgers lack of understanding of society. Wages are what you pay people in exchange for their work, but taxes are needed to pay for the roads and railways to get those people to work, for the SureStart centres to look after their children when they’re at work and for the hospitals to nurse them back to health when they fall ill. Without a publicly-funded infrastructure, wealth creation could not happen and the likes of Sir Philip would be just as poor as the 20% of young people in the UK who don’t have a job.