Lower top tax rate for more gain and less pain
The only point of increasing taxes on the rich is to raise more revenue. Everything else is sadism or class war. “Those with the broadest shoulders should bear the heaviest burden.” That is why the rich pay much higher income tax rates than normal earners, with the top rate being more than double the standard rate. There is no point in increasing that burden, however, if it then yields less.
Because of its Covid-related spending splurge, the Treasury is hinting at tax rises for the better off – on corporation tax, on income tax and by cutting pension tax relief. Behind these moves lies the assumption that if the rates rise the amount of money taxed stays the same or grows, so a higher rate brings in more.
What if that is false? In the era of lower top rates of income tax which Margaret Thatcher inaugurated in 1979, whenever the top rate fell, the revenue rose. When Labour put up the top rate to 50 pence in 2010, the share of the income tax take coming from the top one per cent got stuck at just over 25 per cent. The total soon ceased to rise.
When George Osborne cut the rate to 45 per cent in 2013, that share climbed steadily, reaching 29.6 per cent in the latest financial year. The total revenue also rose sharply. Less pain, more gain.
The chief librarian of the British
Library, Liz Jolly, has told colleagues that “racism is the creation of white people”, so they must help purge it. Two hundred staff reportedly signed a letter declaring a racial “state of emergency” in the library. An internal report has complained of “Eurocentric” maps in the collections and demanded the founders’ statues be removed.
In the House of Commons, senior white staff have put out abject confessions of their feebleness about racism. One seeks a “reverse mentor” and hopes, she says, to learn from the BAME friends of her teenage children and “bring their learning” about “discussing Black Lives Matter … in to the workplace”. “I am guilty of expecting that black colleagues will explain everything … I am sorry,” says another.
At Worcester College, Oxford, the interim provost, Prof Kate Tunstall, writes in her annual report: “The racist murder of George Floyd in late May and the global movement of Black Lives Matter shed a glaring light on the intolerable fact that being safe and well is all too often a privilege. In Oxford, many of us joined the socially distanced protests in support of Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall … and the governing body, expressing its support for the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes, also recognised that though it might not have a statue it could agree to take down, it was not outside the legacies of colonialism.”
That body, Prof Tunstall continued, has “now established an Equity and Inclusion Action Group. It is tasked with putting in place anti-racist training for all members of the college community”.
Now, the new provost of Worcester has been announced. He is David Isaac, the chair of the equality and human rights commission. The college informs us: “In his capacity as chair of Stonewall, he advocated for and successfully brought about significant legal and social change in the UK, including the right to civil partnerships and marriage for gay and lesbian couples.
“As chair of the equality and human rights commission, David promoted the rights of people with disabilities, advised the Lammy Review, and set up the inquiry into the effects on black and minority ethnic communities of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
The above furnish three current examples of institutions with public duties – the care and study of rare books and documents; the expediting of the work of elected MPS; and the higher education of students. Could one suggest that the staff of these institutions are not entitled to neglect these duties because of their obsession with racism? That is not what they are paid for.
If they are white, and if they feel that white people are the cause of racism, they should follow their own logic, and step down.
I was amused by Lord Hall’s
interview with this newspaper on Saturday to mark his retirement from the BBC. The soon-to-be ex-directorgeneral said the idea of the BBC as “the woke corporation” was “not a description I recognise at all”. His tone was characteristic: whenever he spots troubled waters, he pours oil on them.
Tony Hall is always attentive to his audience. Since he was addressing Telegraph readers, he emphasised how much he enjoyed joining in the singing of the traditional Last Night of the Proms.
I noticed, however, his artistic – and artful – choice of pose for the accompanying photograph. He was standing beside a painting of St Catherine of Siena by Artemisia Gentileschi, a picture which is also the artist’s self-portrait. In doing so, he achieved two things. The first was silently to advertise the National Gallery’s forthcoming Artemisia exhibition – he has just become the gallery’s chairman. The second was to choose the picture with the maximum jiggery-wokery opportunities, since the artist, having been a feisty woman in the overwhelmingly man’s world of 17th-century Italy, is now a poster girl for feminism.
No one should object to this: Artemisia is a front-rank artist and the National Gallery has a show to sell. It is just typical Tony.