Keir Starmer is right to take on inequality, but tax reform is essential to this task | Polly Toynbee

  • Date: 18-Feb-2021
  • Source: The Guardian
  • Sector:Economy
  • Country:Middle East
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Keir Starmer is right to take on inequality, but tax reform is essential to this task | Polly Toynbee

Everything about the UK tax system is upside down - we tax work, while relieving unearned gains. And the public knows itIn a stricken country in a state of suspended animation, everyone says build back better, but no one knows if we have the collective will. Standing on a burning platform with a sky-high debt mountain, public services crippled by austerity, Covid and Brexit, it's not an obvious moment for optimism. But there's a rumbling suggestion that this conservative country could be changing.Keir Starmer's speech reached for that mood, citing William Beveridge's 1942 report beckoning to a better postwar future. He might have looked to John Maynard Keynes in 1940, lifting political horizons in How to Pay for the War. He called for "courage“ and "enough lucidity of mind in leaders “¦ to explain to the public what is required“ and "in a spirit of social justice to draw up a plan which uses a time of general sacrifice to move towards reducing inequalities“. And in 1945 people did find that "lucidity of mind“. In this deepest financial crisis for 300 years, with twice as many dead as those lost from the blitz and flying bombs, Starmer echoes those Kenynesian