Transparency just makes clear our money hang-ups
SO, ONE by one, our politicians are whipping off their fiscal trousers and streaking down the corridors of power for our delectation. George Osborne has a bigger income than David Cameron! Look at Jeremy Corbyn’s minuscule expenses! Now where were we, legislating against systemic tax avoidance…? Ah, never mind, cop a load of Sajid Javid’s P60s! What a time to be alive.
Of course, this is all a humongous distraction. The Panama Papers present a golden opportunity, perhaps the last opportunity, to close the loopholes that allow the wealthy to practise their arcane forms of extortion. It shouldn’t be beyond legislators to re-engineer the tax system so that capital can flow around the real economy rather than accumulating in foetid pools in the tropics, as the EU’s efforts to force Facebook, Google and Amazon to be more open demonstrate.
But the move towards greater individual transparency does mark an interesting — perhaps inevitable — shift. Politicians first: us next? The young have less to fear from a culture of “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours”. We share our passing thoughts, innermost feeling, intimate photographs online. What difference do a few pounds and pence make?
Well, provided you’re not an actual criminal, there are two obvious reasons you wouldn’t want people to see your tax returns. Either you have more money than you feel you deserve; or you have less. Context is all. A millionaire landowner might be defiant in front of a select committee but insecure in front of a petro-billionaire. A Labour MP may be sanctimonious in front of a Tory but ashamed in front of a steelworker. Plot these squirming emotions across a fourdimensional graph and you have something approaching the British class system.
The most revealing intervention came from the Conservative MP, Alan Duncan. For him, the calls for transparency are “politics of envy” pure and simple. “We’ll see a House of Commons which is stuffed full of low achievers... who know absolutely nothing about the outside world,” he thundered. And goodness: that would be awful, wouldn’t it?
Only, in Norway, everyone’ s tax records have been freely available since the 18th century and they’re doing fine. The concept of transparency runs deep over there — they once literally banned curtains — and some Norwegians do complain that this creates a conformist society, a sort of race to the middle. However, that’s equality by another name. And as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrated in The Spirit Level, equal societies like Norway are less susceptible to violent crime, depression, drug abuse, teenage pregnancies and numerous other things we’d presumably like to avoid.
I’d argue that it’s Duncan who promotes a politics of envy. Right-wingers accept a greater degree of inequality than Leftwingers as they believe it’s people aspiring to a better life — envying their neighbours—that gives society its dynamism. His hypocrisy lies in his suggestion that having money is the same thing as knowing how the world works. That comes close to saying that we should simply allow the rich to govern, which is less aspirational and more know-your-place.
Of course, the most desirable state is not to have lots of money like Duncan, but simply to be liberated from money, so that it crosses your mind as little as possible. The worst thing about being poor is that you have to think about it all the time. But it’s also a curse of the rich. It’s not enviable. It’s pitiable.