Remember the game Buckaroo, in which players take turns trying to place various items onto a plastic mule?
The goal is to add items to the mule’s back – ropes, axes, spades, a frying pan, a bedroll – without making it buck. As you carefully place each item, the spring builds and the mule can suddenly kick, throwing everything off.
I feel it’s not too dissimilar to the game Rachel Reeves is playing with UK citizens at the moment, a kind of fun challenge about which new tax she can load on our backs without us dumbasses kicking her in the shins.
And it’s not as if our animal legs aren’t already quite burdened, trembling slightly with each step, our ears drooping and breath laboured, as we struggle to carry the disproportionate load across the shifting sands.
What a heavy load it is already: council tax, capital gains tax, corporation tax, employment tax, stamp duty, dividend tax, student loan repayments, VAT, excise duty, air passenger duty, insurance premium tax, car tax, fuel tax, landfill tax, climate change levy. Then we have the local taxes: business rates and congestion charges, and some miscellaneous ones such as the plastic packaging tax, the apprenticeship levy and gambling duty, for when you put everything on red to pay your escalating bills.
Let’s be honest here: Labour has always been a party obsessed with redistribution and hoarding. Its psyche doesn’t allow for deep-seated anxieties in the individual who wants to store their cash for self-protection; the party’s desire is for control and security, and removing assets is how it thinks stability amongst the masses should be maintained. Materialism, where objects become extensions of identity and self-worth, is seen as distasteful because it separates the haves from the have-nots.
And the one tax they think can help prevent the excessive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, thereby promoting greater economic equality, is inheritance tax; that’s the one you pay when you finally keel over from the pressure of it all, and the equivalent of a hoover comes to your house to suck up anything left including trinkets and pictures if you’ve done well enough (I won’t go into all the exemptions here or the dodges or the tragically ill-conceived farmer’s tax because this is just a disgruntled overview). In fact, the only tax relief I believe you really get comes when you float around in the ether as a spirit.
The mean thing about inheritance tax, apart from the fact it taxes wealth that has already been taxed, is that it goes entirely against basic human nature: that evolutionary drive to ensure survival and continue the genetic lineage, but also as an expression of self-sacrifice and moral duty. It boils down to the simple question: is it better the state looks after you, or is it better your parents do?
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Read MoreDon’t get me wrong, I know taxes are the price we pay for a civilised society. I don’t want to wait in A&E any longer than the next person, and I want a few weapons in the national gun cupboard if everything goes tits-up geopolitically, and to bob down a pothole-free country lane, and for water companies to clean up our rivers so we don’t have to swim in shit. I know it’s my duty to fund social safety nets for the less fortunate. But there are taxes, and then there is legalised theft.
What gets my goat, and the goat of many others, is when a chippy political party, rife with special interests – that will be for the train drivers – start funnelling my hard-earned cash into the hot furnace of institutions rather than reforming them (see the NHS – I remain to be convinced that Wes Streeting’s demands for reform will come to anything) or into pipe dreams (net zero), or when it starts to distort markets (VAT, fuel duty, stamp duty), or reduces personal responsibilities by managing people’s lifestyles (sugar tax, fags, alcohol).
The mad thing about this country is that it doesn’t encourage you to do well, because if you do well you just get taxed to hell and back to support those who don’t do so well. High taxes blunt aspiration. Sometimes it’s easier, regarding your tax codes, not to get that wage rise or bonus and to just stay home and watch daytime TV.
Carry on like this, and Reeves might soon find she has added the last burden she can to Britain’s back – and that we are ready to kick.
Sasha Swire is the author of Diary of an MP’s Wife
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