Trukey, Syria and Truss

The appalling tragedy of the earthquake(s) in Turkey and Syria, in which close to 5 000 people have died, serves as a sharp remainder of how lucky we are to live in our cosy and comfortable island. True some of us are occasionally upset by floods (which our lifestyles are helping to create) and strong winds, but otherwise, by and large and in the main, and except for unavoidable illness, the only obstacle to our all living a cosy and comfortable life is our inability to organise ourselves sensibly. The re-emergence of Liz Truss and the seriousness which some of our media are treating her fantasy economic policies illustrates how the only real difficulties we face are of our own creation. M/s Truss’s policies are based on two ideas: one is false and the other is foolish. The false idea is that high taxation is holding back our prosperity. The evidence for this is glaringly absent: we are not a highly taxed country. Here are the latest figures I can find for the percentage of GDP taken by governments in tax in some comparable countries. France (46.2%) Italy (42.4%) Greece (39.4%) Germany (37.5%) UK (33.3%) US (27.1%) A full list can be seen here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_tax_revenue_to_GDP_ratio Whatever it is that is holding back our prosperity, it is not high taxation. In fact there is ample scope for increasing the tax take so as to properly fund the NHS, social services, care services, education, local government and all the other public services which, as the present crises show, are currently stripped to the bone and beyond. To claim that “there isn’t the money,” and the attempt at the “grown up” disguise that “difficult decisions have to be made” is pure mendacity. Yet the media will repeat it, against all the evidence. And too many people will be taken in. We bring our inadequacy on ourselves. M/s Truss’s second tenet, that we, as a nation, are held back by too much regulation, is foolishness (or blindness) beyond belief. After the misery to the nation as a whole caused by the banking crash of 2008/9, the Grenfell Tower fire, the pollution of our rivers with untreated sewage, to give but three examples, the message is that we need not just regulation, but adequately resourced supervision and enforcement of regulation, to protect our lifestyles. So, as we as individuals and as a society do what we can the alleviate the misery of those suffering acute distress through unavoidable natural causes in Turkey and Syria, for goodness sake let us “count our blessing” and distriute our ample resources equitably to provide a cosy and comfortable life for us all.