It was refreshing to hear it being said so loud and clear: tax is good. Hooray for tax. Speaker after speaker made the same basic point. Taxation is not something imposed by some external alien “them” on some hard-done-by “us”. Taxation is all about the us: it is the way we organise ourselves as a society, it is the support we owe to each other – a tick in the box for the common good. So we ought to be proud of paying tax rather than being proud of the clever ways we invent of getting round it. But what political party had the guts to say such things? Has the Labour party finally found its bottle? Of course not. It wasn’t politicians at all. It was collection of vicars, NGO-types and an ex-archbishop at the launch of Christian Aid’s new report on taxation and morality. I know: Central Casting do-gooders, you might think. Easy for them to say.
But why can’t politicians say similar things? The NHS, for instance, is loved by the vast majority of people in this country. And it’s obvious to anyone who has looked into the numbers that it requires a significant injection of money if it is not to collapse – the sort of money that is not to be found down the back of the sofa (or, as politicians like to call it, via “efficiency savings”).
But most of those who offer themselves up for election refuse to take the obvious step and just say it straight: we need more public revenue from taxation. And this is presumably because politicians believe (via the opinion polls) that increasing taxation is so unpopular, so toxic, that they will not be voted for if they tell the truth. So they lie to the public that a better NHS is possible without higher taxes. And the public, in turn, lie to themselves in believing the magic numbers of something-for-nothing. As the great Dr Gregory House puts it: “Everybody lies.”
One explanation of this is the simple fact of human selfishness – we all want other people to pay for things. But another tributary for our lack of willingness to pay tax cheerfully is the way in which we have come to be overly suspicious of the political centre (just as, arguably, I have been in the previous paragraph). It is, for instance, commonplace for politicians in the US to denigrate Washington as the epicentre of all that is bad with their country. And when the political centre is rubbished, it follows that it cannot be trusted to distribute our hard-earned money fairly – so we are less and less willing to pay tax with good grace.
And we in the UK are now following this unfortunate trend. Think of the Scottish yes campaign and their denigration of Westminster. From Russell Brand to Ukip, think of the current amplification of disaffection towards mainstream democratic politics via so-called anti-politics politics. This is a problem, because if we come to suspect that there is something fundamentally dodgy about the person who is divvying up the bill, then we are going to be less willing to pay our share. This is precisely why Brand’s anti-political politics damages the cause of economic justice. And for just the same reason, why tax-dodging is sometimes regarded as less morally shameful that it ought to be. Because we think of it as sticking it to the man, of getting one over on the authorities.
Who cares about the faceless HMRC, right? Going right back to the Bible, tax collectors have long been seen as villains. But this was because tax collectors were seen as Roman stooges, collecting for Caesar (the original “man”, as it were). To think the same way now is twaddle – not least because, these days, the situation is entirely flipped and it is “the man” that is doing the tax avoidance.
This week it is Facebook that has been outed as paying no corporation tax for a second successive year. But it feels invidious to pick on any one company as so many of them are at it. And by squirrelling away all their gold in the Cayman Islands, the only people they are sticking it to is you and me and the very idea of a fair society. So forget the Bible. Tax collectors are now heroes: they keep us faithful to democratic promises we have made to each other.