How many people reading this have shares in companies?
How many people reading this have enough shares in companies to mean that they don't have to work or maybe earn enough from dividends to pay hefty amounts of tax on?
My guess is not that many, if any.
I have shares in what was known as Standard Life but is now known as Abrdn (don't ask, I don't know) and that gives me dividends of upwards of £30 a year. I know, barely enough money to pay for half a week's shopping for two people. If I cashed those shares in I'd get something in the region of between £200 and £300 depending on share prices and how much commission I get fleeced for selling them.
I'd also guess that most people with shares aren't that much different from me, yet have you noticed how everything is profit driven now? It used to be that companies floated on the stock exchange to make enough money to invest back into their companies to ensure they grow and develop and continue to progress. Now it's all about how much money the owners can make and how much money people investing in it can make in the future.
With the exception of railways in Scotland, all of the UK's rail system is private and last year, like every year since privatisation, the shareholders - big or small - made money from dividends. Did you know that there isn't one railway network in the UK that actually makes a profit? Yet because of government subsidies - the kind we all hear about but probably don't take a lot of notice of - instead of that money being invested in the rail network and the people who keep it running, it goes to shareholders.
That means essentially that as a tax payer you're subsidising the rail network and allowing shareholders to walk away with dividends paid for by you. That isn't some left wing conspiracy theory floated by a known leftie; that's economics and easily verified by doing something as simple as Googling it.
The same goes for a lot of privately owned businesses that were once owned by the 'public' - the water boards, some of the power companies (although most of them are owned by European countries, not people but actual countries and their governments, who use the profits to subsidise their own energy bills - in other words all you people who voted Brexit are still paying EU countries to subsidise their own - European - peoples energy bills, at your expense; that's what 'taking back control' really means.
But this isn't about politics, or governments or even partisan party politics. Labour were just as bad as the Tories and I suspect the LibDems and the SNP wouldn't be any different, whether they could change it or not. The point here is everything from supermarkets to fuel suppliers to transport to small companies that have grown out of the privatisation of councils, parts of the NHS and other formerly publicly owned services are in it to make as much profit for little investment and that profit doesn't go to the workers, it goes to the shareholders and while you could argue that these 'investors' deserve their dividends because they invested in buying shares to start with; do they deserve to make vast profits while watching their businesses invest less and less money in the actual services they supply?
A perfect example is water, which has more problems than you can imagine from pollution into our rivers to leaks, and yet all the private water companies registered profits. It isn't just things that were once owned by us via our governments; we see supermarket chains offering schemes to help the poor people, giving waste food to food banks or suggesting ways where you can help those worse off than you enjoy certain things, yet all of them record obscene amounts of profit that usually gets funnelled out of the country so the shareholders don't have to pay tax on them. They also screw suppliers, with farmers earning a fraction and facing ruin so they can offer you a bag of carrots for 19p.
Yet a lot of people - probably those who would never read one of my blogs - are more concerned about a poor person defrauding benefits for about £20 a week than they are at massive corporations financially raping us, repeatedly, every time we step into their establishments; if that concerns these people at all. 'That's life, get used to it and get over it,' said one of my former friends not so long ago, while simultaneously condemning dole scroungers...
We live in the sixth richest country in the world yet we have more poor people than you could possibly imagine. People struggling to pay bills or feed their children and these people aren't benefits scroungers, these people are nurses, teachers, labourers, warehouse workers, shop assistants and many, many others who get tax credits and benefit handouts to subsidise their wages while others who don't need it are hoarding money off shore and yet we can still demonise strikers, single mothers or people who have mobile phones or flat screen TVs because they once could afford these 'luxuries' that businesses encouraged them to have and they can't any longer.
Surely instead of putting caps on wages and energy prices, if it was possible to put caps on shareholder dividends, or closing the loopholes that allow rich people to avoid paying taxes, we might live in a better place where everyone has enough to survive and prosper. However, while we have a media that tries to make those with a little more hate those with less, rather than actually look at the general unfairness of how profits are distributed, we're going to have prejudice and discrimination all the time and surely nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st century that shouldn't be happening - whoever is in charge of the country?
If Tesco makes £2.4billion profit in 2022, surely they could slash prices on everything, or pay suppliers more money and still make money? It's not like they invest that profit into the future of the country or the people who live here. No, that money goes into the pockets of executives, managers and shareholders who then tell you how you can help those less fortunate. Isn't that simply despicable and vile? If it isn't, why not?
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