15:04 Claire Hanna (SDLP)

Tax is a fundamental and necessary tool of the Government and, from my perspective as a social democrat, one that is not being adequately levied by the Government to address the huge and parallel challenges of poverty and wealth inequality. Wealth inequality is one of the most defining issues of our time and, like other seismic challenges, such as climate change, it will only be addressed by concerted, co-ordinated and internationalised action. It is being driven, first, by failures in the tax system to levy tax, and secondly, by evasion and avoidance, which is not just about short-changing the public purse but also has a distorting effect on decent, compliant and locally anchored businesses.

The Government need revenue and they turn to tax—so far, so fair—but who or what they choose to tax reveals a mindset. A state can choose to tax either wealth or income and this Government have chosen to tax income—to tax work, when a wealth tax would garner more resource for the state and, in parallel, help address the issues of income disparity that are driving a lack of cohesion and hampering social solidarity. Taxing income alone will not raise the resource needed to be genuinely transformative in those issues of poverty and climate change or, for example, the challenges within the health service. It will also do nothing to address the widening gap between the richest and the poorest, which, as others have outlined, is part of what is driving populism, fundamentalism and people feeling lost within the political system.

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