More taxes, Archbishop? Ask your right-on pals to pay first

IPRAY every day for Archbishop Justin Welby, though with no very great hope of success. Christians are supposed to pray for their enemies, and he seems to be one of those. I will never forget the panicstricken look on his face when I said a friendly hello to him at a Lambeth Palace reception, to which I had obviously been invited by mistake. I suspect – judging by his open dismay – that he would have preferred to have had Satan at his party. I left very soon afterwards.

And later I came to have a really low opinion of his abilities, and of his interest in justice, as I and others battled to get such justice for the truly great Bishop George Bell of Chichester, who died 60 years ago.

Under Archbishop Welby’s leadership, Bishop Bell was publicly denounced by his own Church as a paedophile after a miserable secret kangaroo court. The evidence against him was ancient, thin and uncorroborated, and no defence had even been heard. Yet, now that this process has been exposed as the unfair botch it was, the Archbishop still won’t accept he made a mistake.

And his endorsement of last week’s wild Blairite demand for more taxes and a severe assault on our freedom to pass on our hard-earned life savings to our children, did nothing to improve my opinion.

Christians can be socialists or conservatives, or liberals in politics. Or they can be none of these things. It is their personal actions, not their views, that matter. It is absolutely not the task of a religious leader to take sides on political and economic quarrels of which he plainly knows little and understands less.

But does he understand the Gospels any better? In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ at no point says ‘Blessed are the Tax Collectors’. When he tells us to help the hungry, the sick and the homeless, he does not tell us to hand on the job to the State. He tells us to do it ourselves, not through the cold, impersonal agencies of PAYE and the Universal Credit system.

Governments are often very bad at spending money. I pay quite a bit of tax, and wouldn’t mind at all if it went (for example) on an NHS that was well-run, schools that I thought were good, or on a criminal justice system that I thought was effective. But I get none of these things.

And it’s not because the State has too little money that this rich country now has so many food banks.

It is because the state is so incompetent at helping those in real trouble. Charities, sustained by private donations and private hard work, often do the job much better.

Higher tax will not mean people give more to charity. It will mean they give less. Worse, if you threaten the freedom to inherit, you threaten private property itself. And if you threaten that, you threaten the whole basis of freedom. Without private property we all become slaves of the secular, anti-Christian state. How can that be a Christian desire?

Nobody is against tax as such. Most of us are in favour of other people paying more tax. But almost nobody is in favour of paying more himself, in practice.

Look into many tax avoidance schemes and you will generally find plenty of right-on leftist comedians and media figures, taking full advantage. And, though HM Revenue & Customs is always happy to accept voluntary extra contributions, for some reason these are rare.

THE Archbishop, amusingly, issued his fatwa against inherited wealth and in favour of tax through the Institute for Public Policy Research. This leftist coven was set up to provide a fancy figleaf for New Labour’s wild debauch of spending and borrowing, which destroyed many pension funds and plunged the nation deep in debt.

But, oh, look, the IPPR, so keen on taxing others, has somehow qualified to be a registered charity. This status normally means not having to pay income or corporation tax, or capital gains tax. Gifts to registered charities are also usually free of the inheritance tax that Archbishop Welby wants to be so strictly applied to the rest of us. They are often spared all or most business rates on their premises, and can get special VAT treatment.

Quite why such outfits as the IPPR should escape the punitive taxes which are now putting so many small firms and shops out of business, I have no idea. Couldn’t the money be better spent on the poor? Perhaps the Archbishop could do something about it?