What are we going to do about the rich? Anti-elitism, neo-liberal common sense and the politics of taxation

This chapter considers the political implications of the new visibility of tax-avoiding elites, and the extent to which this visibility creates opportunities to challenge neoliberal ideas about taxation.

In the first part I review neoliberal ideas about taxation that have become sedimented in common sense over the last four decades. I go on to identify some of the key frames through which ‘the rich’ have been discursively constructed in the crisis years of the 2010s. In the third part, I discuss how the characterisation of elites as tax avoiders has been exploited by political parties on the left, who have sought to use tax issues to enable ‘the people’ to recognise that neoliberal economic policies privilege ‘elites’ and are designed to serve their interests. In the last part of the chapter, I evaluate the new visibility of elites as tax avoiders and their activation as adversaries in left politics, and consider the opportunities that the political salience of tax avoidance in the 2010s presents to left political actors. I argue that while the construction of elites as tax avoiders has helped to foreground the ways in which neoliberal capitalism is designed to favour the economic interests of the few, it has not supported the consolidation of diverse grievances against the current economic system into a general political demand. The chapter contributes to our understanding of the ‘performative dimension’ (Laclau, 2007, p.14) of ideas about taxation in contemporary political debate and popular culture.