Our Gordian guardian invented quite enough new taxes while he was Chancer - for heaven's sake don't encourage his little Darling to continue in the same vein!...
He should raise the basic rate of income tax (and the higher rates) instead - though I'm sure that wouldn't be acceptable to Alistair's Thatcherite views on taxation.
The problem with taxes under New Labour is not that they are too high, but that they are too low.
OK - allow me just to have a little yawn first - before repeating that my views on taxation are not specifically "Thatcherite" at all. The points that I would make, however, are these. Firstly, there is no point in raising tax rates and/or inventing and implementing new taxes unless there is a very specific and achievable end result therefrom; taxpayers are, after all, shareholders in UK plc and, like any other shareholders, they want their results or else (and in this instance the "or else" means having - and, if necessary, exercising - the wherewithal to vote out the Chairman, CEO, etc. at that shareholders' meeting that is called the national ballot box at General Election time). Secondly, there is quite simply no useful purpose to be served by incresing the general tax burden on the taxpayer, however good and well-meaning the reason and however well-structured and achievable the end result if the taxpayer simply cannot afford to pay and therefore finds him/herself in default, especially since this result ends up costing the taxpayer him/herself.
The problem with taxes under New Labour is not that they are too low and arguably not even necessarily that they are all too high but that they are too diverse, too complex and too expensive to collect; you have only to go into any major accountancy office and observe the vast libraries of tax textbooks and consider the costs or their prepartion and distribution and the immense swathes of advice provided by taxation professionals on the back of it all to recognise this - and someone, somewhere, has to pay for all of that.
You advocate here that income tax rates should be increased. This is an old-fashioned concept even to most Old Labourites, never mind to New Labourites, Demeral Libocrats, New Nice Tories, Traditional Old Tories and Right-wing Redneckwooded Tebbocrats alike, largely, I think, because everyone knows that it's easier to avoid direct taxes such as imcome tax than it is to avoid indirect taxes such as VAT. Yet even here there are anomalies and loopholes aplenty; even without trying to get involved in the more esoteric complexities of VAT avoidance (a massive international industry in its own right), one has only to recognise that our standard rate of 17.5% is less than that which applies in France (19.6%) yet at the same time vastly greater than that which applies in Spain (7.0%), so what do people do? - well, it's obvious, isn't it? - take full advantage of these anomalies wherever and whenever they can, despite the fact that these tax rates all apply in EC member states.
We now have certain Tory, Liberal Democrat and New and Old Labour members all independently considering the possible virtues of the abolition of IHT (inheritance tax). Perhaps you would want such a tax only to remain but to be increased, despite the fact that most of those who find themselves in the IHT bracket do so only because of the recent increases in the values of their homes that have not been reflected in increases in the thresholds beneath which no IHT is payable.
One of the biggest problems with attempts to widen the net of taxation is that the more that any administration does this, the more money gets spent on research and legal avoidance and planning measures and the more complex both the taxation régime and the avoidance processes become. Someone, somewhere, always has to fund all of that, for there's no such thing as a tax-free lunch.
Gordian Brown went on a Radio 4 Today programme some while ago and repeated his then self-chosen mantra about those quaintly-termed National Insurance Contributions (which may be national, but they insure no one against any risk and their compulsory nature negates the entire notion of "contributing" - as if voluntarily - to anything) as "a contribution to the health service". He just wouldn't be argued with over this. We nevertheless know that they are nothing of the sort; they are tax by another name and the revenue derived from them is not invested in any healthcare system or even the state penson system (such as it is) but paid straight out in state benefits; now if this is what it is supposed to be for, I do not object in principle - what I did and do object to was/is the ex-chancer / present prime monster claiming that this revenue source is something quite other than what it is in reality. Had Margaret Thatcher said the same thing, I would have objected to it just as vociferously.
Anyway, please don't worry overmuch about what you believe to be my left-wing (well, "Thatcherite" was the actual term that you used, but let's not fall out over mere semantics) views on taxation, for it is surely of far greater and widespread significance that the much-loved and long-standing socialist Lord Tebbit has now publicly derided someone called David Cameron (who he?) as some kind of political failure and claimed instead for Gordian Brown the mantle of successor to Thatcher...
Best,
Alistair
