Thursday 30 December 2010

the growing movement of the excellent UKuncut

I've been following the progress of a movement known on the internet on twitter and facebook called UKuncut.
They are at this website here : http://www.ukuncut.org.uk/

I was listening to a bbc radio 4 podcast on the growing movement and the excellent work they are doing so far tonight, you can listen back to it here for a limited amount of time only.

http://j.mp/i3ZYhW

Please do listen to this it offers a good arguement from both sides and includes interviews from the founders of Ukuncut and representitives of the tax payers alliance which i will come on to a bit later on.

If you havent heard of them before UKuncut are a new protest movement group set up on the internet using twitter and facebook to communicate to spread the word and highlight the fact that while public sector money is being cut hugely that on the other side to represent that we are not in fact contary to what some tories may say we are not all in this together.

Ukuncut's aim is to bring to the wider publics attention that big business's multinationals in alot of cases areavoiding and dodging huge tax bills. Whilst this is not strictly against the law it is moraley wrong in my opinion.

With Vodafone having been found to have avoided paying a estimated 6 billion pounds to the british HMRC this provoked anger with people and UKuncut took to the streets to make this point heard that there is something very wrong going on out there.

In the podcast it highlights some of the protesters inside Top shop in Oxford street in London before christmas protests of which i followed very closely on twitter live at the time. But to hear actual sound clips from the protests gives me real hope and belief that there are people out there fighting for a fairer future for all.

People such as Phillip Green who i have blogged about in the past were targetted by UKuncut. ALthough Phillip has not committed any tax evasion as far as we know his wife is a non british citizen and it is rumoured he ships a lot of his company Arcadia's profits off to Monaco where she apparently lives to avoid having to pay tax on it while in Britain.

I feel this is a outrage and for innocent hard working people in the public sector having to loose their jobs due to cuts and job loss's when no cuts wouldh ave to be made if cases's like Vodafone and Top shops owners paid their tax properly we would be ok.

What angers Ukuncut protesters even more is the absolute lack of effort being made from our present government which is conservative lead with the vast majority of the current cabinet being millinaires themselves. They feel a lot lot more could be done to plug the loop holes that these rich multinationals are exploiting for their own benifit. To me it smacks of a very unbalanced unequal system when you have hard working honest poor people paying their bit of tax which will be a lot of their weekly earnings to the government when the people who really can afford to pay tax and a hell of a lot more in my opinion do not consistently.

The tax payers alliance which i eluded to earlier in my post rear their ugly head again. They all seem to be a load of daily mail reading look after yourself type person really and feel that we will have to put up with this as it has always been this way in this country. They also feel that taxing big business's too much in the end will drive them away to other countries. To me i'd say good ridence really maybe in their place we would bring in fairer and more honest companies who want to play by the rules. We as a country need to be setting an example i feel as with a lot of things our actions are often reflected and replecated around the world. So i whole hartidly support Ukuncut and their efforts to protest and make their message heard. Also good on radio 4 for highlighting their efforts i think its about time this sort of message is heard loud and clearly and those who are not playing by the rules are named and shamed.

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