Taxing Us Dry

In which I let off steam after completing my tax return.

That’s it. I’ve lost patience with being treated like a stupid, naughty child who can't be trusted to cross the road alone. I pay my taxes. I drive carefully (mostly). I follow the rules, even when they're idiotic. And for my trouble, I’m hounded, fined, monitored, censored, and squeezed harder with every passing year.

Take ‘Making Tax Digital’. Apparently, submitting an annual tax return isn’t enough anymore. Now I must pay for commercial software and submit quarterly summaries to HMRC, as though I’m some slow-witted delinquent at a school for underachievers. It’s a punishment designed for the good boys and girls who already play by the rules, while the cash-in-hand economy continues laughing all the way to the literal mattress.

I have to accept quarterly floggings while the real tax dodgers — the money launderers, the barber shops running a hundred £10 haircuts a day without a single receipt — are out there, untouched. I'm the problem, I’m the easy mark.

And it's not just tax. Try driving through London. Crawl along at 18 miles an hour, dutifully pay your congestion charge, make the mistake of hesitating in a box junction for a few seconds and boom, another fine. It’s hard to see our punitive road rules and fines as anything more than another tax.

Meanwhile, half the drivers around you seem to have bought their licences on Etsy. You have to assume from the standards of driving — here in London at least — that a good percentage of road users have no license, no insurance, because they certainly have no regard for the Highway Code. Thank goodness for all the cameras, laser-focused on the mainly law-abiding.

And you can't even open your mouth anymore. Say something mildly unorthodox on social media — one slightly misjudged tweet — and, like Lucy Connolly, you might find yourself in court. Meanwhile, open antisemitism is screamed from megaphones on 'pro-Palestine' marches, and trans activists wave placards threatening violence against women who are guilty of nothing more than believing in biological reality. Certain sorts of 'progressive' bile get you a free pass, but slip up once and the machinery of the state grinds into motion to crush you.

We all know we are being taxed at the highest level seen outside wartime but I was galled when I completed my tax return this week to see what tax is due on the paltry interest earned on my savings — savings I scraped together over the years precisely so that if I ever hit hard times, I wouldn’t be a burden on the state. Savings that haven’t even kept up with inflation. Savings that were already taxed when I earned them the first time. And if I dare to spend them, I’ll be taxed again through VAT, fuel duty or some other weasly wealth extraction scheme.

How many times can the same meagre earnings be taxed, I ask you? Is there a department at HMRC dedicated to calculating the infinite recycling rate of my money? Of course there is. And guess what — we’re paying their salaries too.

And what am I paying for? A bloated, inefficient NHS. Housing illegal migrants no one wants here. Layabouts cheating the system to avoid work. And apparently there are now plans to spray the skies to dim the sun — no, no, no, I really don’t want to pay for that. Of course millionaires are fleeing the country!

And through it all, we are treated to an endless drip feed of propaganda from government departments, their behavioural scientists and communication spinners. A whole industry is dedicated to manipulating the law-abiding citizens into smiling sweetly as they are robbed blind.

Clearly, the problem is that I haven’t been nudged hard enough. Maybe what I need is more behavioural science. Maybe I need more glossy ads, more hectoring slogans, more gaslighting press releases telling me that everything is fine. More threats if I don’t follow each oppressive rule. Maybe if I truly understood how much the government loves me, I’d kneel down, thank the government for taxing me so thoroughly and ask to it to take what little I have left.

Are you tired of it too? Tell me in the comments. Or don't. Maybe that's taxable now as well.