At the risk of infuriating Coffee Housers (and Polly), I rather like Polly Toynbee. She’s good company and we chatted happily before appearing on Marr on Sunday. It’s just that she’s wrong, and particularly wrong about tax. See her article in today’s Guardian, calling on Gordon to open up clear red water between himself and the Tories, and to explain “what tax is for, why it is a public good and not a burden, how it is the agent of social justice.”
Tax is a necessary evil to most people, especially the least affluent. They accept it as the membership fee of society, and the price they pay for common goods such as health, education, welfare, transport infrastructure, law and order and national defence. Most accept the principle of redistribution in the traditional British sense that the have nots deserve a helping hand from the haves – a hand up, rather than a hand out. There is no taste whatsoever in this country for the use of taxation as the clumsy clunky fist of mass redistribution, PAYE as a means of flattening out the peskily unequal wages that the market supplies.
As for inheritance tax, what Polly fails to see is that it is people’s aspiration as well as their anxiety to which the Tory policy appeals. In a property-owning society like ours, voters want to own homes and hold assets at their death that are worth a lot, and to pass them on to their children. What instinct could be more natural? They aspire to accumulate more as they grow older. They do not like the principle of inheritance tax, and, as a result, they are attracted to a party that promises to slash it.
Let’s see which way Alistair Darling turns this afternoon.
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