(moved from another thread)
If I get "worked up" about "raising taxes" (regardless of who is doing it), has it not occurred to you that I may be concerned that there's precious little point in raising tax rates and inventing new taxes if the majority of people simply cannot afford to pay them; taxes are already very high in UK and, if they get much higher, some people will increase their efforts to evade them but many more may well find themselves unable to avoid defaulting on them.
By "European levels" you refer, of course, to mainland Europe. I would be the first to agree that a substantial part of the French rail network and the national health services of France and Spain put ours rather to shame, yet do the French and the Spanish pay vastly higher taxes than we do in UK? I don't think so - at least not on average. Furthermore, many French and some Spanish people do not believe that the success of such flagship state services can be expected to last much longer, because there is simply not the money there to pay for it. As I mentioned before, it's no more use expecting the average taxpayer to go on forking out more and more if he/she simply doesn't have the wherewithal to meet such commitments than it is to sue someone who has no money.
If you want to know why I describe your politics as being of the right, the above should suffice. It seems that the Thatcherite/post-Thatcherite consensus, opposing higher taxation and higher public spending (to European levels - I don't have the figures to hand, but do know that in general both are significantly higher) has become the dominant ideology. One doesn't have to be a Marxist to believe in the value of progressive taxation, just to take a position that was reasonably common in pre-Thatcher times.
Taxes are not 'very high' in Britain - they are considerably lower than they were pre-1979 (or, in particular, pre the 1988 budget). Public spending is not high either.
(a fact that certain environmentalists conveniently choose to overlook when on their "public transport good, private transport bad" soapboxes).
Seems that environmentalists can now be added to your list of
bête noires, together with feminists, advocates of higher taxation than was brought about via Thatcher, modernists, postmodernists, and so on. Surely, in light of the only groups that you attack regularly and without reservation, you must see why that communicates a certain message?
