Proposer: Paul Brett
Congress to adopt as policy the following:
Only allow accountants/accountancy firms who are members of the
Chartered Bodies of Accountants and are regulated by them to act for
taxpayers.
Only allow a new business to be started once the proprietors have attended
a course and passed an assessment on basic bookkeeping and record
keeping being allowed to start to trade, along with attendance on a course
relating to tax rules and responsibilities.
To allow on the self-assessment tax returns of individuals a summary
section of the percentages they would wish their tax to fund each type of
service.
This is excessively prescriptive and alienating to many working class people intending to set up micro-businesses. The entire focus of the Party to date has been to reduce the stranglehold of middle class professionals on society rather than embed it as managerialist Labour has tended to do.
Forceable attendance at courses is precisely the sort of thing that leads to the Buro-Fascism and is only a shift from forcible attendance to diversity courses towards new demands that suit the minor professional class of managers and accountants. It may stifle working class entrepreneurialism, even strangle it at birth in some cases and lose us votes in the small business and aspirational working class community. I would have preferred a Motion supporting financial literacy in schools and making microbusiness knowledge support more easily available on a voluntary basis and online.
Similarly, the decision-making on tax is a matter for the democratic process through representative democracy and through party policy more generally, based on the macro-evidence available. The ‘wishes’ of individuals are not relevant in this collective context.
It will be up to Congress on the day to decide whether to carry this Motion and I regret that I will not be present to speak against it. I hope the Party has the wisdom to reject it.
Thank you for your comments Tim which have made very interesting reading.
Due to personal circumstances I am unable to provide a full response.
I will endeavour to respond by close of business on Monday coming.
Thanks for your response Tim.
Knowledge of business owners
This motion is to consider the ways in which business owners can improve their business skills to ensure that, businesses have a better chance of success with owners understanding the financial position of their business and to help them pay the right amount
of tax. Tax which is needed to ensure that our important public services can still be provided.
There are rules and regulations for many jobs e.g., electrician, plumber, nursery, charity and so on but nothing for a person starting a business. Having some knowledge the business owner will have better opportunity and will have a better chance of having
a successful business and protecting the interests of all the businesses interested parties.
I do like your suggestion of bringing this skill to be taught earlier and in schools.
If you look online at various forums for accountants, you will see some of the horrendous beliefs that some business owners have, here are a few quotes taken from one:
This month alone some of these have been heard from my clients:
I don???t have any paperwork
My bank account links to the software, I did not??? think I had to tell you what the costs were for too!
???I have got 9 months worth of bank transactions, can we just guess the last 3 based on averages?
HMRC say I have to complete a tax return, but I do not???want to pay for one ??? can you tell me how to do it?
HMRC significant ties test show I am??? UK Tax Resident, but I don???t want to pay tax in the UK
Decision making on tax spending
This element of the motion is for consideration and discussion and its aim is to give taxpayers some say were their hard earned money goes. Without being allowed to do this that is more like Buro Fascism, in my opinion.
I agree that there is a need for the governments to ensure they earmark funds for certain essential services and costs, but letting the individual have a say will show the government where taxpayers want their money to go and could help in the government policy.
We could even have a percentage of tax that the taxpayers pay, and they could vote to use this for what they decide.
Even the associations of accountants are recognising and studying this constantly the ACCA has recently sent an email to its members regarding this:
With taxpayers questioning how taxes are spent ??? and almost half asking whether tax is spent for the public good ??? ACCA joined with IFAC and OECD in groundbreaking research. The collaboration promotes constructive conversations
about trust in global taxation with a focus on Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Join ACCA, IFAC and the OECD on 28 January 2025 for the
launch
event.
What we must remember with political motions is that it is a starting point for a policy, it needs work and adding and taking away and even when used in practise may need to be changed if it does not achieve the required results.
It then policy reaches the manifesto then it will have gone through many hurdles and dismissing a suggestion is not, in my opinion, the way to go especially when it is an important topic and is also being considered globally.
This motion deserves further debate, but Tim Pendry and his analysis are spot on.
Yes, I certainly do not mean to discourage debate. I will add to it here albeit tentatively. What we need to consider is how we are moving into a complex new age where working class interests are sometimes bound up with the ‘liberating’ effects of radical capital working against the administrative state and sometimes in profound and direct opposition to capital along traditional lines. This needs discussion from within that core socialist, anti-imperialist working class perspective.
Historically the working class and petit-bourgeoisie had interests absolutely opposed to each other in the most fundamental way. Over the last century, liberal capitalism has exploited that ‘divide and conquer’ approach to the point where it has created its own nemesis with the emergence of the populist Right which exploits legitimate grievances for reactionary purposes. Determined on crushing the Left, the Centre forgot that grievances do not just disappear when they ignored … they mutate.
The response of the liberal left is to demand our loyalty because the populist Right is allegedly so much worse but that claim no longer stands up in the age of Gaza and welfare cuts. In 1933, the working class vote actually stayed solid for social democracy and communism and it was the petit-bourgeoisie who, despite its claims to ‘national’ socialist radicalism shifted to the Nazis. A century on, things have changed in three respects:-
1. The petit-bourgeoisie and working class are now both victims increasingly of neo-liberalism rather than the victimisation being much more targeted at the latter to the benefit of the former. The Thatcherite model has gone horribly wrong for the former and they know it now.
2. Working people much more fluidly move between ‘classes’ under conditions where their economic security may sometimes be better as workers than in petit-bourgeois micro- and small businesses but then find that they are pushed into the latter category. Over a working life time a household may be in the gig economy, be employed or be in an independent status as a small business and under pressure in all three states of subordination to the market.
3. There is (for technological reasons) a growing disconnect between both a) international [Davos] capital and national capital and b) between old hierarchical managerial capital and the super-hyped up accelerationist capitalism of the new libertarian mega-capitalists. The liberal-left have allied with managerialists to try and repress free speech and ensure social control in favour of their own intellectual class whereas the mega-capitalists simultaneously liberate and exploit but, in liberating, create the means to fight their exploitation and organise resistance.
There is a debate to be had about all this, about exactly which sort of capitalism is the lesser or greater evil and how one organises to overcome both and reintroduce a socialist perspective (which the liberal left have abandoned except performatively and rhetorically). Encouraging working class entrepreneurialism and freedoms alongside a revived public service ethos and a socialist (not frightened middle class liberal) understanding of new technologies like AI strike this observer (me) as a decent starting point.
AI is coming and it threatens more than any other technology the ruling caste. Few truly understand the import of this revolution which will change everything – think of the arrival of printing in the sixteenth century. A ‘socialism of the late middle ages’ could never have managed its way into relevance if it had tried to deny the power of the printed text. The Church’s undoubted welfare role collapsed quickly on its lack of a more fundamental moral compass.
Politically an alliance of working households in all three capacities – vulnerable gig worker/low paid, employed worker and micro-business/small artisanal business – is one way to build something that can counter the fundamental threat which is an oppressive bureaucracy where the administrative State does the bidding of finance and managerial capital using ‘growth’ as an excuse (as the current Government is doing). Observe the panic of Labour faced with a world it no longer understands.
Anyway, that is one theory of politics but let a thousand flowers bloom at Congress because the right approach will only come through vigorous evidence-based debate that results in an eventual unified position that may require intelligent compromises to build the right alliance but never moves outside those core principles that drive us forward.