Well, unbelievably the headline in today's Telegraph online is that Dave Hartnett, head of HMRC wants us to understand that paying tradesmen in cash is 'diddling the country'. Firstly, to be true it requires every tradesman to be a liar, inasmuch that he is saying they all don't pay their taxes, which I don't doubt is largely true but still potentially libellous.
Secondly and much more importantly, I think the head of the tax office letting large companies off billions of pounds of tax (and interest) owed is a far more serious situation, perhaps requiring a slightly more serious word than diddling to describe. There has been some talk recently about the decline in moral standards in Britain (with some correctly understanding this is directly connected to the overt corruption of Tony Blair's gang) and I think this clearly fits into it.
Economically literate types (e.g. not Labour) understand the Laffler curve effect on taxation. If you tax highly, people look for ways to avoid paying it. At a lower level everyone pretty much agrees it is something they should pay and also low enough that they can't be bothered to see if they can avoid any of it. So you get more by lowering the rate of tax (as long as you don't have someone lunching with big company bosses from the tax office).
The kind of deceit Hartnett refers to has always been tacitly accepted, but much of the moral decline is due to more unsavoury behaviour by New Labour than just their incessant raising of taxes. The lying (and obvious lying) by the PM and his MP's sent a message that it was OK for everyone to do it. And with binge drinking, which is also part of the NL culture a little lying fits in pretty well. No personal responsibility, you see.
There was a comedian (I believe) on QT last night who was quite brilliant with his left liberal deceit. He started off by saying that the top 1 percent of Footsie 100 executives had increased their pay recently (during a recession) by 49%. He then contrived to link this to the £26,000 benefit cap, proposed by the coalition government and then had a stab at Melanie Phillips for being concerned about the 'working poor'. He was applauded well for this diatribe by the audience.
I wonder though, if they listened to the words and not the delivery they would have thought 'hang on, that doesn't make sense'. The working poor do get a bad deal. If you can't afford another child on your wages you don't have one. The state doesn't find you a nice, larger house, because you have decided you need ten child benefit payments, to meet your needs. More should be done for those that help themselves. Similarly, the well paid executives wouldn't offend me if they earned it, but too often they are paid highly 'by arrangement'.
One set of executives sit on a remuneration committee for another set and award generous salaries and bonuses for success or failure. The favour of course, is returned. This is what we must stop.
It is rich however (no pun intended) to watch politicians spout on about nasty bankers when a) the bankers did what they did following the leadership of Blair and the financial pushing from Brown -two particular idiots, a perfect storm of politicians. And b) the MP's were finding ever more openly criminal ways to enhance their salaries, but how many of them paid a price for their behaviour? The message over MP's expenses was writ large and clear; we are corrupt, we acknowledge that we have been caught, but we don't really care what you think, we will carry on doing whatever we want and only the small will go to jail, if anyone must.
There should have been serious police intervention, with large scale arrests and, from what we know quite a lot of imprisonments. However, when one force cannot decide what happened when the Deputy PM was filmed assaulting a member of the public and when another force agonises over what to do, when presented with clear testimony supporting a charge of perverting the course of justice against a Cabinet Minister, then I guess we couldn't expect much from the Constabularies, who are clearly corrupted themselves.
If we think a political party of any colour will offer a fair system of taxation and do substantive good to support the working poor, when senior members of their ranks are not prosecuted for lying in their declarations to the tax office and parliamentary officials, then we are deluding ourselves.
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