Britain’s Hard Left Trustafarians
Posted on September 9, 2012Funding is always a sticky issue for the main parties – but it seems it poses a bit of an ideological challenge for some of that small parties, too.
Looking through the Electoral Commission returns, the results filed by The Socialist Party of Great Britain jumped out.
If, like everyone else, you’ve never heard of the SPGB, they’re exactly what you’d expect. Fulminating against profit, slamming “tax dodges”, and advocating revolution from a garret on Clapham High Street.
They claim on their website that:
The Socialist Party has been unique in Britain throughout the twentieth century for:
- Consistently advocating world socialism – a fully democratic society based upon co-operation and production for use.
- Opposing every single war
- Opposing every single government
- Being a democratic and leaderless organization
- which is, if nothing else, admirably consistent. Consistent, that is, until you see that their main donation this year was apparently:
£26,757.56 from the May Keyte Will Trust
Err, the what?
A Trust? Surely not a tax-reducing Trust? A Will Trust? Surely not an inheritance-based tax-reducing Trust?
Oh, comrades.
Tags: Clapham, Comrades, Donors, Electoral Commission, Hypocrisy, May Keyte Will Trust, Party Finance, Socialism, Socialist Party of Great Britain, Socialists, SPGB
Categories: Opinion, Politics, Westminster
Let it not be forgotten that The Guardian owes its existence to the Scott Trust, which was created solely to bypass death duties.
04.09.2012 09:34
SPGB, which people always said stood for ‘Small Party of Good Boys’. A lot of their members years ago were often small businessmen who treated their employees badly because it would encourage them to be anti-capitalist.
04.09.2012 10:52
Also they do not consider themselves on the left
04.09.2012 10:55
Ah yes my memory does serve – they take the view that the working class can’t actually pay tax
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/depth-articles/state/taxation-myth
Thus the point of article fails
Not lefties and not hard
Also tax class issue
04.09.2012 13:16
Brian, they certainly consider themselves as Marxist socialists – which is on the Left whether you like it or not! Similarly, the abolition of all property rights is quite a “hard” version of the Left.
The article you point to simply says that they believe all taxes should fall on the profits extracted from capitalism. That doesn’t really affect the “point of article” at all.
04.09.2012 15:36
Well not really
Hard Left refers to in the UK the old Bennist left as well as perhaps people like Bert Ramelston (sp) of the then CPGB
The more far out reaches of the of the marxist movement who are close to anarchist would reject such uses for themselves as they can only apply to supporters of capitalism. In the SPGB’s terms this would include say the SWP.
05.09.2012 11:52
I don’t think you know what a Will Trust is. So, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testamentary_trust .Nothing to do with avoiding tax but normally a way of providing an income to a relative till they die (when the capital passes to someone else) or come of age (when it passes to them).
05.09.2012 06:42
Interesting – though as I’ve already stated, it has the added effect of not incurring inheritance tax as an inheritance is not occurring due to the Trust coming between the donor and the recipient, doesn’t it?
Out of interest, can a political party be the beneficiary of a Trust like this – given that it never dies or comes of age?
05.09.2012 10:30
I imagine the money this party has inherited is the capital not an income. I don’t know if an organisation can be the beneficiary of one of these trusts but any organisation (whether individual, charity or party) can be a beneficiary of a will. Anyway, inheritance tax wouldn’t be payable on a legacy of £26,000, would it? Isn’t the lervel more like £350,000?
05.09.2012 12:27
‘Left-wing is a term which comes from the old French legislature, referring to that section of the membership sitting on the left side of the chamber (as viewed from the president’s chair) holding progressive liberal opinions.
The SPGB rejects the conventional method of political analysis that seeks to understand politics in terms of ‘left’ or ‘right’. The left and right are different only to the extent that they provide a different political and organisational apparatus for administering the same capitalist system. This includes those on the left who aim for socialism some time in the distant future but in the meantime demand some form of transitional capitalism.
The view that taxes are a burden on the capitalists and not the workers was also put by Marx:
If all taxes which bear on the working class were abolished root and branch, the necessary consequence would be the reduction of wages by the whole amount of taxes which goes into them. Either the employers’ profit would rise as a direct consequence by the same quantity, or else no more than an alteration in the form of tax-collecting would have Our argument is that although some taxes are paid by the working class, the burden of taxation rests on the capitalists and has to be paid out of the profit accruing to them in the form of rent, interest and profit, the basis of which is the unpaid labour Criticism and Critical Morality (Marx and Engels Collected Works—Volume 6.)
05.09.2012 08:55
They and you can obfuscate and redefine all they like but a revolutionary party pledging ownership of the means of production and implementation of Marxist economic structures is of the Left whether you like it or not!
05.09.2012 10:31