There’s a surprisingly simple way to destroy the cult of Corbyn: scrap PAYE

seeing that you pay £1,000 in tax each month is low. You have never held the money, and the way it is displayed on a pay cheque makes it appear comparable to a health insurance payment or a pension contribution. The sum is presented as if it is merely a cost of you doing your job, rather than money that is forcibly withheld and spent on things that you have zero control over.

If, instead, you were required to make a single payment for the year, the impact would be rather different. That £1,000 would become £12,000 – enough to send a child to private school. You would have had to steward that money all year, making sacrifices in your spending to make sure you had saved enough. The full horror of what we require even people of modest means to pay each year would be plain, as would be the missed opportunities that surrendering so much money to the government entails.

Fine, a new system would take some time to introduce, but practically this would increase pressure not only to lower taxes (perhaps middle-class Corbynites would be less glib about calling for higher rates) but to simplify them, too. And it would also have an intellectual purpose. Labour is successfully selling socialism to one of the most pro-consumerist, entrepreneurial countries in the world because they’ve spun a yarn that Britain is some sort of freewheeling, hyper-capitalist state. It’s not: it’s tightly regulated and highly taxed; but when the scale of that tax and regulation is hidden from public eyes, it is no surprise that people have bought Labour’s lies. Let’s expose them for all to see.