The cat is out of the bag. Just as smoking, drinking and having fun have been made illegal because they affect your ability to cost the State nothing whilst it takes half your wages every week, the beady eyes of our masters have found a new bogeyman to scare the good citizens with – the tax avoider. Now regular readers will know that I detest the concept of involuntary taxes just as robustly as I detest masked hoodies with knives emptying the handbag of old ladies (remarkably similar in my opinion) and frankly, if this is the road we are set to travel, our masters can expect a very bumpy ride indeed.
Firstly, I’d like to remind the Stasi bean counters as they threaten to batter down our doors at 3am that tax avoidance IS LEGAL. Jimmy Carr may be spouting apologies on twitter for paying 1% income tax but why should he have to pay more if it is not legally required? How many of us have willingly signed out a cheque to HMRC to help alleviate the problems of decades of overspending by over promising politicians? It’s all very well chasing him around with burning stakes because the NHS can’t afford to make us better (after they stopped us smoking, drinking and eating anything other than lentils) but logic says to me that we shouldn’t NEED an NHS the size of an Indian army if we are no longer unhealthy. Don’t ban me from smoking and then send me an enormous State medical bill “just in case”, it won’t work, I’m not a mug and my money belongs to me, remember?
Except of course, it doesn’t. It belongs to them and the merest rumour that you might just be trying to keep their grasping mitts off the stuff will now see you with a burning tyre around your neck as quickly as if you’d looked at a girl with lustful intent or suggested to your wife that she might like to wash up occasionally. So now we can expect a HUGE flurry of claims and counter claims as we race to the inevitable conclusion that NONE of us is paying enough tax to become a saint and it is our DUTY to be taxed at 70% like the compliant drones we are supposed to be.
Well, tough. I’m not falling for that one. Anyone looking down their nose at me for wilfully tacking advantage of a two for one offer (and therefore cheating the VAT man out of 20% of the second item) or looking for discounted stuff on the internet (not to pay FULL price is THEFT, d’you hear?!! THEFT!!) may find their nose put well and truly out of joint. I wasn’t put on this planet for a Politician to use as his personal piggy bank, to grease the wheels of power and corruption and buy the influence of the well healed – no matter how much they prattle on that if we want a new ethnically diverse motorway or more gay unicorn research then all of us are going to have to pay more tax. Greece has found out exactly what happens when you spend money on stuff nobody actually wanted or asked for or was willing to actually pay for - just like any other business where the CEO is addicted to spending, you go bust. The UK is not the only country in the world and as the French are finding out, porous borders work both ways and capital AND labour can flee like nothing else on Earth when a grey suited Government official has it within his crosshairs. If Osborne and Miliband decide that they can’t get by on HALF of OUR income a week, it’s THEIR problem, not mine and I refuse to wear the mantel of pariah for preferring not to fund anymore of this Ponzi madness inflicted on us by 650 crooks who couldn’t get a proper job if they tried. Most of them should be sitting in prison themselves for flipping their second homes to avoid capital gains tax or shoving their fat fingers in the expenses till until it finally burst.
So before you allow anyone to covert the contents of your wallet with a view to “we’re all in this together, so cough up more tax” remind yourselves of the little scrap of paper left by Liam Byrne as he and the last Government were booted out – “There’s no money left”. Sauce for the goose indeed.
