Robin Brookes came up with a clever way to pay his tax and protest it too:
Last year he was visited by bailiffs demanding payment for the earlier tax year who found themselves facing a wall of £10 notes under a sign reading: “Every 10 seconds Britain spends this much occupying Iraq.”
The bailiffs unpinned the £10 notes and left.
The documentary film Contempt of Conscience is now on-line. This movie focuses on the war tax resisters in Britain known as the “Peace Tax Seven,” putting their protest in the historical context of the fight for conscientious objection to military service, the growth of mechanized warfare, and the history of conscientious war tax resistance.
The seven resisters featured in this film are Joe Jenkins, Robin Brookes, Brenda Boughton, Birgit Völlm, Simon Heywood, Siân Cwper, and Roy Prockter, and there are shout-outs as well to some other resisters, like Henry David Thoreau and Arthur Windsor.
The tax resistance movement featured in this film is largely focused on winning a legal right to conscientious objection to military taxation — largely by judicial appeal based on human rights standards in Britain and Europe — that is, on gaining a legal mechanism that would allow conscientious objectors to pay their taxes to some sort of government account that is firewalled from military expenditures.
Hannnelore Morgenstern, of the German “peace tax” group Netzwerk Friedenssteuer, sent me a recap of the Conscience and Peace Tax International conference that was held in London . (I have made some edits for clarity, as English is not Morgenstern’s best language):
Fourteen participants from six countries met to make the necessary decisions. Now the work of the Board has been strengthened and the assignments for our Geneva delegate have been appointed. Board members are Jan Birk, Derek Brett, Robin Brookes, Dietmar Czemy (chairman), and Milena Romero. If necessary, Chris Coverdale and Cathy Deppy want to support the board. And it needs support.
Since the transformation of the association, only a few countries have reregistered themselves. In order for us to continue our work, we must levy a membership fee from now on. The modest balance in our account only allows for three assignments to the CPTI delegate, Christophe Barbey, in Geneva. New ways of funding must be found.
It was agreed that the website should be updated and maybe even redesigned. An expert, and the money, remain to be found.
No announcement was made regarding the next international conference.
For some context, one of the things CPTI members seem to value most about the organization is that it has “special consultative status” at the United Nations. Christophe Barbey is the representative at the UN who carries out whatever privileges this allows CPTI.
CPTI dissolved at its meeting in with the intention of reforming in another host nation under the same name. That, and the deaths of two board members, disrupted the already fraught group, and they’ve been struggling to find their footing ever since.
The group has only a tangential relationship with war tax resistance, though some of its members are war tax resisters. The group is mostly composed of representatives of various national “peace tax”-promoting groups, and it hopes to somehow convince some authority in the United Nations to declare that this form of conscientious objection to military taxation is a universal human right.
Some recent links of note:
The campaign is asking local groups in the U.K. to demand that their local councils declare a climate emergency and suspend projects that are ecologically irresponsible.Our movement has only scratched the surface of what non-violent civil disobedience can achieve. While they deceive and seek to oppress us further, we can take a stand against their ecocidal leadership — by simply withholding council tax then telling the world why we’ve done it.
Catalan separatists have amplified their tax resistance campaign. For some time now the Catalan National Assembly has been promoting a campaign in which individuals, businesses, and (an increasing number of) municipalities would redirect their national taxes from Spain to the Catalan regional government. That government would forward those taxes along to Spain, so the effect of this (and its risk) was minor, but in theory if the Catalan regional government decided to pull the trigger on political independence, this would establish the groundwork for fiscal independence as well.
But now, the separatist “Council for the Republic” is trying to push things further: asking resisters to redirect €300 of their taxes from the government to the Republican Fund for Solidarity Action. That money will not be forwarded to Madrid, and so this is a more confrontational act of civil disobedience.
The group has launched the campaign with the #Proumonarquia site (“Build the Catalan Republic with your taxes”) and two videos: a how-to narrated by actor Toni Albà and an overview of tax resistance by long-time war tax resister Josep Manel Fontdevila.
, honoring those who refuse to participate in their governments’ war-making institutions. It comes a couple of days before in the United States, and so conscientious objectors to military taxation are appropriately in the news:
“I want to live my values, which includes nonviolence,” said Lindsey Britt of Brattleboro. “Paying for destruction at home and abroad doesn’t fit into that, so I live more simply and refuse to pay a portion of my taxes.”
I have been a war tax resister since the 1970s since I do not want my money supporting murder. The money I resist to the military I give to local groups that actually help people and the environment. Now I am also a war tax resister because I don’t want my money supporting the biggest contributor to the burning of our planet: the U.S. military.
In other news:
The Civil Disobedience Movement in Myanmar apparently has a lot of support from within the Ministry of Electricity and Energy, which may make things easier on resisters.“I’ve decided I won’t pay any tax to the dictators, and that includes electricity. If police and soldiers ask me, I’ll just tell them I don’t have any money. I don’t care if they cut off the power to my house,” the resident of Yangon’s North Dagon Township told Frontier. “Most people in my ward who I’ve spoken to say they’re not going to pay either.”
Ko Aung Thu, who lives in the Shwe Lin Ban area of the highly industrialised township, said he had received a bill for but had no intention of paying.
“They killed people right here, in this township,” he said, referring to the security forces’ massacre of more than 50 people on . “Why should I pay money to a bunch of murderers? I won’t pay any taxes. If we pay taxes, we’re just supporting murderers.”
A hotel owner in nearby Bagan said he wouldn’t pay either and he expected many others would also refuse.
“I just heard today about how the state lottery isn’t able to run because so few people bought tickets. I think most people won’t pay their electricity bills, either,” he said. “We won’t support the dictator… the income from electricity charges is huge and they won’t be able to survive without that money.”
During site visits to two processing centers, management estimated that 42 percent of 164 devices used by the submission processing functions are unusable and others are broken but still functioning. “IRS employees stated that the only reason they could not use many of these devices is because they are out of ink or because the waste cartridge container is full,” it said.
The report added: “The lack of working printers and copiers affects many different areas of the IRS but has an especially significant effect on the return and income verification services functions” where employees must make copies of tax returns to fulfill requests for tax documents from taxpayers and other institutions. At one center, though, only three of the 10 devices were working.
