No taxation without representation!!!

So rang the chorus of the Americans when they decided, stupidly as it turned out, to oust their British masters and become a ‘republic’, rather than just remain a suburb of London, 5000 miles away and 974 times bigger than its governing nation. The Amerians regret it now, of course, and rue how life could have been so much better if they’d stayed under sovreign rule. But it was all about tax. Its always about tax. No matter how many tea-bags you throw into Boston Harbour.

And we stand on our high horses, in the moral high ground; us and all the press and media, and we slag off Amazon and we slag off Starbucks and Google and Jimmy Carr and Gary Barlow. Not for the quality of their appalling coffee, rotten singing or whatever google do that sucks, but because they don’t pay enough tax. And that’s unforgivable. And so we nod and congratulate the powers that be when such nasty, selfish, un-public-spirited companies/people get shafted for past evasion/avoidance and get lumbered with an eye-watering tax bill. Hah! we say, fucker(s) deserved it. Good job.

Then we pay the window cleaner in cash so we don’t have to pay the vat and moan like Jose Morinho after every Chelsea game when our tax bills come in telling us how much of the meagre monies we’ve worked so hard for are demanded, not requested, but demanded, by the government so they can squander it in handouts to India to feed their starving millions so they can use their own billions to fund their useless space programme. The Romanians get the rest of ours.

No-one wants to pay tax. No-one volunteers (other than Her Majessty, but she’s different), you can appeal taxation but you’ll never win, you can avoid it but it’ll come back and bite you on the bum (Gary Barlow’s bum has teeth-marks all over it, nothing to do with Luis Suaraz) and only misguided socialist billionaires offer to pay more.

Oddly, the most maligned and misunderstood company in the whole country, if not the whole world, the infamous Wonga, pay lots of tax. 50 million last year alone, but because they lend money to people who can’t borrow from the banks, who have no ‘line of credit’, who are desperate, Wonga’s profits are so frowned upon that no-one mentions the money they put back into the national pot.

But mainly, we hate tax avoidance schemes because a. you have to have sufficient millions to get onto them (unlike job creation schemes, homeless shelter schemes), and b. we don’t like people getting away with things we can’t. Rich people who pay tax are just about acceptable and forgivable. Rich people who don’t must be lambasted and crucified in the court of public opinion. Bastards. And companies who make big profits are total bastards. They must be to make such big profits in the first place.

So Wonga are bastards because they make a big profit. Even though they pay all their taxes. And Gary Barlow is a bastard because he’s richer than me. And Starbucks are bastards because they don’t pay tax.

I better think about this whilst sipping my skinny, soya, no-foam, flat-brown caramel mochiato with extra calve,s liver.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx