It is the tax season, the time of year when solicitous faces (Moira Stuart is my favourite) beseech us from billboards not to put off until tomorrow what we should have started last May. I don’t mind it, having no problem with tax; I merely have a problem with the people who raise it, the people who spend it, and the way it is discussed.

The problem is not that the main parties have the same attitude to tax, but rather that they have all signed up to the consensus – which has become a “wisdom” – over our attitudes to paying it. There is quite a lot of difference between George Osborne – whose long game, with modest income taxes, swingeing sales tax and no public services, is a neo-feudal scenario in which the poor pay most – and Ed Balls, whose preferred option is for the middle to pay most in order to bolster the incomes at the bottom so that they too may pay tax, and nobody has to make any rude incursions into corporate super profits. Whether or not you agree with either of them, you can concede that there is a bus ride between their two positions.



However, they take this as their unquestionable first principle: voters hate to pay tax. The most to hope for is either such profound popularity that voters will do this thing they hate as a favour to you (a distant dream for the current party leaders), or that you can design tax so intelligently that people don’t realise they’re paying it. The minute any politician says the word “taxpayer”, you know the creature they’re conjuring: not an individual with a possible range of beliefs, or a citizen who may take pride in a society built together (with tax), but a person who hates tax in principle. To be someone who pays it is to be someone who resents it.

People tend to blame Neil Kinnock’s 1992 tax-and-spend manifesto, sprung at the last minute on an electorate that had been conditioned by years of Conservatism into thinking of taxation as state-sponsored mugging. In fact, the ideas therein were pretty mild – a 50% higher-rate band combined with the repeal of the poll tax and a rise of the lower threshold to remove low earners from the equation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Photograph: Don McPhee

The vision of tax as a punishment of the rich for the audacity of their wealth, distilled in the phrase “squeeze them until the pips squeak”, was not Kinnock’s but Denis Healey’s. And it was not about the rich – it was about property speculators. His suspicion was that if landlords were left unchecked, Britain would slowly become a rentier economy. Vast and ever increasing numbers of people would be paying unreasonable, verging on impossible, proportions of their wages to a tiny number of landlords. What an old idiot, huh? Thank God nobody listened to him.

Research produced after that election demonstrated that Kinnock actually hadn’t lost the vote through his ideas on taxation. There was no great aversion to high-tax plans. The public had no problem differentiating between property speculators and beleaguered slightly rich people whose sterling efforts might be discouraged. These conclusions were all in by 1994, but the myth had gone round the world before the data had put its bow tie on.

It is impossible to devise good tax policy on the basis that reasonable people don’t want to pay it and have to be either coerced or conned into doing so. Deduction at source turns into the mug’s option while tax avoidance becomes the natural course of the prudent person. It is often said that HMRC doesn’t have the staffing levels to deal with avoidance as it currently stands, and that’s true – but actually the resources don’t exist in the world to police an activity that nobody believes is wrong in the first place.

We have a situation in which world-class tax avoiders have OBEs and honorary knighthoods, and the MPs voting to close tax loopholes are themselves making use of them. There is always room for manoeuvre when tax is seen as a chore not a duty; Bob Geldof often points to the fact that instead of tax he has contributed “ideas”. Andrew Mitchell, one of the highest profile MPs found using a possible avoidance scheme, has since be-skinted himself with a bewilderingly expensive libel case. So that’s all over and there’s nothing to see – the avoidance was cheeky but never wrong.

The only figure in public life making a robust moral case for the honest payment of tax is Margaret Hodge. I love Hodge, but she can’t do this on her own. She’s not the Terminator.

You cannot collect tax unless you believe in tax; likewise you cannot pay tax gladly unless you love it, not for the useful stuff it might buy but in itself. This is seen as a political impossibility. But why? Tax is no more and no less than an investment in the future. It is no more idealistic than buying an Isa, yet its possibilities are endless.

Anybody who has ever salted away 200 quid instead of spending it on a hot-air balloon ride will understand the point of investment. Anybody who has ever joined a round in a pub will see that some activities – drinking is one, building a society is another – are pointless (and quite depressing) unless undertaken collectively. If you consider how proud we are as a nation of the things we have built with tax, it wouldn’t be such a giant leap of the imagination to take pride in the tax itself. But it would be a giant leap of the current political class to put any faith in us to do so.