March Them To The Cashline

Listening to an alleged tax avoider claiming that the motorway speed limit should be raised from 70 mph to 80 mph in order to bring people inside the law almost had me kicking the TV in fury.

This proposal is absolutely Thatcherite, red meat for Del Boys and rich ferals who regard compliance with the law not as a civic duty but as a lifestyle choice. Lives will be lost so that 'business' can be done even more quickly in the country with the most worker-unfriendly employment laws and longest working hours in the European Union (and the visceral hatred of the Conservative Party for people who work for a living is proved by its stated intention to revisit one of the Blair government's very few progressive measures, the reduction in the qualifying period for bringing a claim of unfair dismissal from two years to one; for people who claim their ideology requires the removal of restrictions on business, they show not the slightest hesitation in regulating those who have only their labour to sell).

A suitable response to such specious claims about speed limits would be to demand stricter enforcement of existing laws and tougher penaties on speeders, such as the confiscation of vehicles driven in excess of the speed limit on the motorway network and mandatory life bans for those found guilty of a third offence. To bring people into the law when the law in unclear is one thing, but to bring people who won't obey the law into the law, even when the law is flashed in front of their eyes in orange lights as the speed limit is on British motorways, is quite another. At that point, such people have won whatever game they think they're playing, because the law will always be changed to suit them and the rule of law has ceased to have any meaning.

However, it was doubly sickening to hear another alleged tax avoider mouthfart today from the Conservative Party Conference about the financial mess the country's in. Their brain may have been addled by the small talk of cravatted manacle salesmen and wannabe sanctions-busters, but the irony that the country's finances may be as bad as they apparently are - a myth I do not buy into - on account of our authorities' ludicrously lax approach to the payment of personal tax by the wealthy might have been lost on them.

No person who's used as a tax avoidance vehicle, either personal or corporate, should be permitted to even become a Member of Parliament for a period of five years after their use of such vehicles has ceased. Any Member of Parliament found to have used such a vehicle should be barred from the House until they have paid all sums that would have been or may be owing at the correct rate of tax, in other words of personal income tax, on sums which they have either paid themself or been paid as rather smelly dividends. As they are both income, salary and dividends should be taxed at the same rate and under the same rules. If this means marching ministers to the cashline to pay up so that they can continue in government, so be it. Similarly, no minister found to have ever used a tax avoidance vehicle should be able to claim their full pension, instead being able to receive one calculated to reflect their calculated failure to contribute; and let's face it, they probably don't need the money anyway.

Fish rots from the head down, says that rotting old Russian proverb; and I for one am damn tired of knocking my pan in at the bottom of the heap while the guys who make the rules also seem to be able to slide around them with no or few questions asked.