Reporting on the 'Tax the Rich' Protest in London (with audio)

On Saturday 7th June, Henry North travelled to London to report on a national anti-austerity march organised by The People's Assembly.

Jun 10, 2025

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Following up from our podcast episode with Dr. John Mulligan, ‘A National Scandal - Neglecting Our Most Vulnerable’ and discussing the devastating effects austerity is having on the welfare state, I went to London to report on the national demonstration, ‘Welfare Not Warfare! Stop The Cuts! Tax The Rich!’

Protest began outside The BBC at noon and the general sentiment was as expected, frustration at the Labour government for the continuation of austerity.

Carol, protesting against austerity in her local village, Didcot, said, “Wasn’t it [the economy] always supposed to be trickle down? You know these rich people and big companies and all the rest of it are making lots of money, and that would trickle down to people. Well, it’s not. What’s happened is they’ve sucked the money out of the working class and it’s now gone up to the billionaire class.”

Emily, an ex-teacher, from ‘emily explains’ Instagram blog outlined one impact of austerity, “one thing I’ll never forget is that there was a car park next to the school, and one day they started putting those kind of containers that you have for a building site. So I thought, oh, okay, they must be building some new accommodation, new housing, but it was actually the containers were the housing. And so there were children who were living in literal shipping containers as temporary accommodation.”

With the slogan of the protest being ‘Tax the Rich’ I asked Magnus, 18, from Brighton what taxing the rich meant to them, “treating people fairly and how they deserve to be. I mean, no one, no one should earn that much money at any level, especially when it means that there are so many people who have nothing or like, so much less, so many less opportunities, so much less power. I just don’t think it’s fair or right.”

I also asked what ‘Tax the Rich’; meant to David Cross, “in the aftermath of the Second World War, having defeated fascism, the welfare state was built on the principle of redistributive justice, that the people who create the wealth in our society should benefit from it in proportion to their needs, and what we’ve had since Thatcherism has been a progressive dismantling of that and a restructuring of the value created by working people and its direction towards corporate billionaires.”

But there was little mention or awareness of a wealth tax, which has been suggested by The Northern Rose as practical and simple solution to start tackling Britain’s current state of crisis.

The 'Tax the Rich' protest continues through London — The protest moves through London

I asked people watching the protest for their thoughts and they were confused as to what the message of the protest was. For an average person who doesn’t pay attention to politics, this would have been an easy position to fall into as there were many different left-wing groups involved but maybe that’s a symptom of austerity itself as it cuts through so many people’s lives.