THE BIG CON: VOTE REFORM, VOTE BIG BUSINESS
A vote for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is essentially a vote for big business and the super-rich.
Reform promises to lift 7 million people from paying tax at the lower end of the pay scale to “save every worker almost £1500 per year.” Although I am sure this saving for low earners would be very welcome, it is the rich who benefit most from Reform’s income tax proposals.
At the moment people earning over £50,000 pay a 40% tax rate on earnings above this figure. The Reform Party promise to raise the threshold to £70,000, a saving of £3,588 a year for the 15% richest people in the country.
Reform and the far-right favour business over individual workers. It is therefore no surprise that Corporations are to receive the biggest tax breaks. Corporation tax will be reduced from 25% to 20% for the first 5 years, and then down to 15% after that.
For year ending 2022/23 corporation tax brought in £79.9billion. Under Reform, corporations would be in receipt of tax breaks worth £47.94billion. In November 2022, State of Tax Justice reported that
…”the world was losing over $483 billion a year in tax to multinational corporations and wealthy individuals using tax havens to underpay tax. That’s equivalent to losing a nurse’s yearly salary to a tax haven every second.”
The only reason Reform would want to legitimise corporate tax avoidance is because Reform is essentially a political party for the already wealthy. They might throw a few crumbs to the ordinary worker but the real rewards are to go to the rich and powerful.
Many large corporations are foreign owned so tax breaks for big business are just as likely to go to overseas shareholders as they are to UK owners. Does the British taxpayer really want to be subsidising foreign share ownership by cutting tax revenues?
Richard Tice, leader of Reform until replaced by Nigel Farage a few days ago, is a multi-millionaire who made his money in property development. Both he and Farage have their own TV shows on GB News, which is bankrolled by the hedge-fund billionaire Paul Marshal and the Dubai based investment company Legartum, founded by New Zealand billionaire Christopher Chandler who made his fortune in Russian gas.
Reform's links to the super-rich goes further. Multi-millionaire Jeremy Hosking has given £2.578,000 to Reform coffers. Is it coincidence he is funding a party that campaigns to scrap UK emission targets when he is “the director of a company with tens of millions of pounds invested in oil and gas” ? (Open Democracy: 22/03/22). I think not.
Another major donor to Reform is the ex-Bullingdon Club member George Farmer. (Other members include David Cameron and George Osborne the architects of Tory Austerity and the liar Boris Johnson who brought us Party Gate). An “ardent supporter of Donald Trump”, Farmer was CEO of the far-right platform Parler, and is married to Candice Owens, a woman who “promotes far-right ideologies”, In 2023 he joined the board of GB News.
The biggest single donor to Reform according to Electoral Commission records is Chris Harborne, handing over £10 million to Brexit/Reform. Harborne owes his fortune to the sale of aviation fuel and technology investments. He gained notoriety when his name appeared multiple times in the Panama Papers. These documents revealed:
“…off-shore holdings of world political leaders, links to global scandals, and details of hidden financial dealings of fraudsters, drug traffickers, billionaires, celebrities, sports stars and more”. (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: 03/03/2016)
These wealthy backers of Reform are not spending millions of pounds in order to benefit ordinary workingmen and women. They see these millions as an investment, an investment on which they expect a return for their money.
