Fair taxes? They’re as likely as Osborne joining Take That...
TAX is a necessary nuisance, not a moral duty. It is not, as the Leftists chant, ‘the price we pay for a civilised society’. It is the price we pay for handing over too many of our responsibilities to the State. A huge amount of it is wasted. Tremendous sums are simply squandered on debt interest, in many cases paying for failed or useless schemes of long ago.
It does terrible damage to the economy, shrivelling the rewards for hard work and diverting wealth i nto the wrong hands.
It falls very heavily on the poor, especially in the form of indirect taxes such as VAT.
In my view, our whole attitude to it is wrong, and well summed up by the fact that Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs seldom if ever say ‘please’ when they demand our money and never say ‘thank you’ when they get it.
I am told by people who have paid too much tax that HMRC can even be aggressive about telling them that. And now there is this plan to let them seize money from private bank accounts without a court hearing.
These are the methods and attitudes of a haughty autocracy, not those of a public ser- vice in a free country. The current frenzy against ‘Tax Avoidance’ is churned up by a government that cannot control its spending or its borrowing and so is frantic to grab all the money it can get, without worrying too much about how.
It is sad to see people joining in a campaign that will eventually hurt them too. We should remember that our money belongs to us, not to the State.
I barely know who Gary Barlow is and care less. I cannot imagine that he really deserves to be as rich as he is. Nobody does.
But the people who choose to buy his music intend their hardearned money to go to Gary Barlow, not to George Osborne.
Think about it. If George Osborne went on a national tour and sold copies of his speeches, he would be hard put to make a hundred pounds.
ONLY one thing allows him to seize Gary Barlow’s money. It is the law. And Mr Barlow is quite entitled to use the law to hang on to as much of his money as he can. If the courts decide that his investment scheme isn’t allowed, then the law says he must pay up.
But there is no shame in trying to keep his tax as low as possible (in fact I’ve yet to meet a well-off media Left-winger who wasn’t doing his utmost to keep his own tax bill down).
And the idea that he should be stripped of his OBE, as if he were a criminal, is a grave misunderstanding of what a free country is, and of what the law is for.