I think it was in his adverts for the Inland Revenue's taxation self-assasment forms that Adam Hart-Davies that said "Tax doesn't have to be taxing". Well bollocks. He only said it becasue they'd locked him in a giant egg timer and wouldn't let him out unless he said nice things about an SA100 form before he was sucked through the pinch and crushed under eight cubic kilometres of sand.
He'd be singing a different tune if he'd had to deal with Leicester City Council's Revenues and Benefits service. Such a shower of monkeys I have seldom known. I can't say never as I am a BT Internet customer and as such I am in the ninth circle of customer service hell already. I also regularly use our nation's railways, famous across the world for their inability to tell their arse from a hole in the ground. But at least they haven't seen fit to send me three mutually contradictory letters in less than a week.
Now let me start by saying that I am not one of these libertarian types who thinks all tax is theft and the whole world would be one blissfully contented giant version of Switzerland if we abolished all government and let the free market sort it all out. People like that are not neccessarily known for their well-thought-out opinions and often tend to be members of organisations like News International or the Ku Klux Klan as well. This is not, I want to make clear, to imply in any way that Rupert Murdoch is in some way intolerant of difference in others or those less fortunate than he so clearly is. I do not make that claim here at all. You might want to, but remember that his lawyers are doubtless well-paid, very reliable and ever-vigilant.
In fact, to return to the very long-winded run up to my eventual point, we in Britain are happily largely free from the Pat Buchanan/ Steve Forbes types in our political discourse. Yes there is the UK Independence Party who advocate a flat tax rate of ten percent to be levelled on everyone and everything regardless of individual wealth, but they also campaign for repatriation of war refugees and leaving the European Union. Again, these are not aims which I can share, having as I do an IQ of more than fifty.
I will grant that Adam Smith, the spiritual founder of modern capitalist economics, was British but then so is Simon Cowell and I don't think he's neccessarily right about everything either. Smith's idea was that taxation was extortion, levelled on the poor to keep them nicely oppressed and supply the idle rich with all the venison and wig pomade they could eat. This may have been true at the time, but the time was the 1700s, when the idle rich were all inbred aristocrats who thought they were rich because God liked them more than their serfs and villeins. Things have moved on since then. We now have the NHS to pay for, along with schools, roads, defence, pensions and all the other stuff we need to keep us alive. Smith unaccountably failed to take account of the cost of government IT systems when he first wrote The Wealth of Nations, possibly because they didn't exist at the time. Also, he decided that if any inequalites should by chance arise, God would sort it out for us. Excellent work, there Adam. Right up there with mesmerism and Boswellox.
So in order to escape the shackles of a modern liberal democracy that Adam Smith, and later Milton "Bonkers" Friedmann and Friedrich "Hallucinations" Hayek so disapproved of (like pensions you could live on and trains that actually work) we have, over the last thirty years, voted for a series of governments that smashed up and sold off basically everything that wasn't nailed down, and much that was. All that is left now is the Royal Family, nuclear weapons and, bizarrely, the Tote. Nuclear power stations and air traffic control were the last to go, after steel, coal, electricity, water, gas, British Leyland, hospital cleaning, school dinners, ports, airports, the railways, the buses, North Sea oil, bin men, the Royal Ordonance, universities, the Post Office, care of the elderly, mental health provision, most of the NHS and Caledonian MacBrayne ferries. There may be more, but that's quite a lot as it is.
As we can see, all of these institutions in Britain are now very obviously the envy of the world and not at all a hollow bastardised shell of the dedicated public service institutions they once were. But this still leaves us with a question - why do we still moan about paying our taxes when we don't have that much left to pay for, can fairly easily see what it is we do pay for, and we don't really pay that much compared to the rest of Europe anyway?
Well. Perhaps I'm missing something. Perhaps the British are just very, very stupid. Who knows? Either way, the people of the world's fifth largest economy deem it too expensive to pay for university education, a non-commercial public service broadcaster or decent public transport. You know, all the things the rest of Europe wonder how we do without. We compare ourselves with the Americans, but I think that this is not really a valid model. For a start, whereas the US is 4000 miles away, France is twenty. Secondly, Canada. This is a cause of endless anger to me, and if I start I won't stop.
But, when it comes to the crunch, I am beginning to see their point. Not as to the need to pay for public services, as unlike some I don't believe that fires will somehow magically put themselves out, nor do I think that having a mechanism to keep me from starving to death in the streeet is somehow an unacceptable burden on the middle classes. No. But I wish that the Council could sort out their fucking letters.
Afetr I moved house, I go to the Council Tax office at the beginning of May, sort out a direct debit for the first of the month and feel happy that my bills are all taken care of, leaving me more free time to write these endless blogs and eat pizza. Then I get a threatening letter on Wednesday telling me that if I don't pay up the full 714 quid within seven days they'll break my legs and bailiffs will take my pancreas (and did you know that if bailiffs come to repossess your possessions you have to pay for their services? No, I didn't either until Wednesday). So on Thursday I go to see them with the copy of the direct debit form that they gave me telling me that they would take 90 notes on the first of June, a copy of my bank statement showing that at no point did they even try, and finally the aforesaid threatening letter with its predicitons of a court-ordered doom.
I know Council Tax well. I work for the council so in effect I am paying at least some of my own wages, but I am not too worried about that. As long as I can afford broadband and houmous I am happy. I know what else it pays for as well - social services, parks, bus stops, and all sorts of contracts from things like bin collection to things like traffic wardens. And really, it isn't too onerous. Me and Blake pay ninety pounds a month for our Band A house. The price you pay depends on where you live. Our mate Hardip pays a thousand a year but he lives in a nice new flat (it's lovely, like something from an expensive lifestyle magazine - wood floors, recessed lighting, the works) in a nice bit of town, hence he's Band B, hence he pays more. We live in a two-up two-down in what was until very recently a slum where the local pub was so rough the police closed it down. It's lovely now, and is flying the flags of all the nations so far knocked out of the World Cup. But back to my story.
Turned out they'd mixed up the last two digits of my bank account number when some clerk typed it in. Now, I am a tolerant man, and used to be a data-entry clerk myself, but I am unhappy to receive a blood-curdling official letter telling me to look forward to my new career as prison bitch to a GBH convict called Psycho because some sausage-fingered idiot can't type an eight digit number properly. And when this morning saw the delivery of yet another letter from the Revenues and Benefits Department (hereafter to be known as The Leicester City Council Gilbert and Sullivan Society, because they sure as hell can't cope with administering local taxation) dated the day before yesterday telling me that they'd made an admin error and I should ignore their previous correspondance I am even less inclined to be as forgiving as I'd like.
And they still haven't emptied my recycling bin either. Next chance I get, I'm moving to Switzerland.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal
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