Payback time for the tax zealot
DAVID CAMERON has only himself to blame for the fix he is in. He and his Chancellor have ceaselessly blurred the huge difference between criminal tax evasion and legal tax avoidance.
They have repeatedly referred to them as if they were the same. They have absurdly suggested that they can put an end to avoidance, which will continue to exist in any country which has tax laws and skilled lawyers paid lots of money to find ways around them.
They have also started warbling in the Left-wing choir which caterwauls that paying taxes is somehow a moral duty, rather than a legal obligation.
It’s not true. Taxes are in many cases squandered on servicing foolish debts incurred by bungling Ministers who knew the taxpayer would bail them out. Or they are thrown away on the most appalling school system, or the most useless police force in the advanced world.
I will pay what I owe, because I believe in the rule of law. But if I’m offered a legal way of paying less tax I will take it – and so will anyone, including quite a lot of prominent Leftists, especially in the media. Indeed, I believe a prominent Left-wing newspaper (you know who you are) recently managed to avoid a thumping great tax bill by using a taxexempt shell company in the Cayman Islands.
The Left-wing tax zealots aren’t free to do this because they have publicly embraced this idea that tax is a type of goodness. If Mr Cameron disappears up his own anatomy thanks to his offshore fund, I shall laugh quite a lot.
But this has really happened because he is past the peak of his power. Seven years ago, when I tried to work up some interest about his record as one of Parliament’s greediest claimers of expenses (£1,700 a month on a £350,000 mortgage, close to the maximum possible, later dropping to £1,000 a month, plus – of course – council tax, gas, oil and insurance), nobody cared a bit.
Most people still aren’t aware of how their taxes helped a very rich man and his even richer wife buy a rather nice country
I’M SURE Justin Welby thought there was ‘no reason to doubt’ that his mother’s husband was his father. But he wasn’t. I hope this revelation also helps the Archbishop realise there is ‘reason to doubt’ his unfair condemnation of Bishop George Bell.
home, now worth at least a million pounds. What’s moral about forcing a dinner lady or a hospital cleaner to contribute to Mr Cameron’s mortgage?
But that’s the sort of thing tax does in modern Britain. I wouldn’t blame any normal person for keeping what they can.
But Mr Cameron himself, a self-righteous taxation zealot who has personally done very well out of the public purse, deserves everything he now gets. I did try to tell you.