One of us is a millionaire, the other a care worker.

The divide between rich and poor disgusts us both

Julia Davies and Winsome Hill |opinion | the Guardian | December 1, 2022

The two of us are from very different worlds. One of us is a millionaire investor, the other a care worker and trade union member.
We have totally different experiences of the economy, but we share a fundamental belief that it is broken – and the government in
its autumn statement did nothing to fix it.

The argument of the last prime minister – that the only route to economic success is to allow inequality in our country to grow even
greater – is simply wrong. Wealth does not come from the top and trickle down, it comes from all of us. There is no route to
prosperity through increasing inequality. The new chancellor may have accepted this argument in theory, saying in his autumn
statement that he is “asking more from those who have more”, but this is not the reality.

Instead of squeezing low earners, the chancellor should have matched his actions to his rhetoric and taxed wealth at the top. If the
last prime minister’s attempt to give huge tax cuts to rich people is part of what crashed the economy, then the opposite seems like
a good place to start fixing.

Let’s start with taxing the seriously wealthy – people with wealth of more than £10m. A wealth tax of just 1% or 2% on their stocks
of wealth over £10m would give our country the investment it desperately needs to see out the hard winter to come. A 1.1% tax on
wealth above £10m would raise £10bn from the wealthiest 0.04% of the population, according to Arun Advani, assistant professor
of economics at the University of Warwick’s CAGE research centre.

We also need to make sure that people’s incomes are taxed at the same rate, no matter how they are earned. The reality of our
current tax system is that money made from work, such as caring for vulnerable people, is taxed at a higher rate than money made
from investments or the rising value of assets. The unfairness is maddening, and it’s also holding our economy back.

This matters because of the other big part of the chancellor’s plan: the squeeze on public services. The bitter experience of the last
few years shows us that when public services such as social care are cut, it piles pressure on to other areas and we all suffer. We
need to invest in our public services and those who work in them, rather than inflict further cuts that continue a journey of decline.

One of us is seeing the result of this underfunding every day, as staff in the care sector work longer and longer hours for less and
less pay, and feel more overwhelmed than ever before. These staff simply can’t be asked to continue to give everything to keep the
social care sector afloat, when what is desperately needed is the extra resource that only government can provide.

A collection of groups have come together to form the Stop the Squeeze campaign, in order to call for this vital change of direction.
It is a rejection of the failed inequality economics that has held us back, and an endorsement of the simple idea that, as the saying
goes, we’re all better off when we’re all better off.

The two of us have never met, but we both felt the inequality in this country couldn’t continue, so we got involved with Stop the
Squeeze (one through a union, the other as part of the anti-inequality Patriotic Millionaires group), and decided to write this piece
together.

The media also have a role to play here. The narrative about the overall “tax burden” is spin designed to deflect from the real
questions that need to be asked about exactly who is being asked to pay, and whether it makes sense. A country where people who
do essential work in our communities struggle to put food on the table is not a country that is working.