Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government →
the danger of “feel-good” protests →
“symbolic” tax protests? →
the “Peace Tax Fund,” legal conscientious objection to military taxation →
Peace Tax Seven →
Simon Heywood
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.
Here are a few things of interest to flash by my screen in recent days:
Here’s a short film on the Dublin anti-water charge movement of , being used to inspire the household tax resisters today (and, it appears, to boost the public image of Joe Higgins, a Dublin politician who has hitched his wagon to the tax resistance star):
NWTRCC held its earlier this month in New York City.
Word about what took place at the gathering is still trickling out, but meanwhile here are some photos.
A new project — Your Faith, Your Finance — has been launched as a joint project of the Ecumenical Council for Corporate Responsibility and Quaker Peace & Social Witness.
It aims to help Christians in the United Kingdom “explore ethical and spiritual issues around the use of money.”
Their website has a section on taxes that gives a half-hearted nod in the direction of conscientious tax resistance:
A small number of self-employed people have chosen to withhold part of their tax in protest over how it is spent.
This is usually based on an objection to expenditure on war and preparations for war.
Some of these individuals have had their goods seized or been imprisoned, although others have paid up after withholding payment for a while to make a point.
This action is not of course open to people whose income tax is taken directly from their wages.
and quotes English Quaker war tax resister Simon Heywood:
“I withheld the military proportion of my income tax for two years during the Iraq War.
I felt I had no choice: if others were going to risk their lives on my behalf, for this nonsense, I had to risk some of my own personal convenience to protest against the waste and folly.
I was summonsed before the magistrate and told I had thirty days to pay.
I paid up on day twenty-nine, having discovered some foe making arrangements to pay up behind my back.
It was all spectacularly unheroic.
I’m glad I did it though.
It was very slightly less unheroic than paying up on time.”
