Very odd piece here from Nick Cohen: usually he’s rather more cogent than this.

The great domestic political question of the 21st ought to why the
working and middle classes should pay taxes when the rich are all but
exempt.

It isn’t actually a domestic question. It’s an international one. You can’t tax heavily those things that can up sticks out of your tax jurisdiction.

I’m not sure that this defence of an unjust system can last much longer
when it is becoming very clear that the super-rich’s indemnity from
taxation is unbalancing the public accounts. In its end-of- year
forecasts, the Centre for Economics and Business Research predicts that
tax avoidance will soon lead to the Treasury breaking its rule that
public debt must remain below 40 per cent of gross domestic product.

?!? You mean that the spending side of the ledger has no influence upon this at all? Further, Brown has indeed raised taxes on the rich…and the fact that it’s not bringing in the money he thought it would simply emphasises our point above, that you can’t tax heavily those  who can leave.

Since 1993, the British super-rich have been able to land in London in
their private jets on Monday morning and fly back to Monaco,
Switzerland or the Channel Islands on Thursday night. Despite enjoying
the protection of Britain’s laws and the joys of its culture, a
remarkably generous Treasury allowed them to pretend that they were
really the residents of tax havens. A recent court case has begun the
belated process of reducing the scope of the scam,

It’s not a scam….it was the public advice of the Inland Revenue, that day of arrival and day of departure did not count for the number of days of residence. It was up on their website for example, I checked it the day after that case was reported. Obeying the law is not a scam. Changing the law retrospectively is though.

In public, the City paints a terrifying picture of foreign bankers
fleeing Britain if the government requires them to pay the same tax
rates as everyone else, but in private, no financier I know believes
it.

City types saying that tax rates don’t influence behaviour? Jeez Nick, try talking to them about how the eurobond and eurodollar markets started, about why they’re based in London…about why they didn’t stay in New York? You might also want to think about why so many reinsurers are based in Bermuda. Sure, a rise in taxation won’t have that much effect this year or next, but over decades it will, as it has in the past.

Two centuries on and a Labour Chancellor is telling the bulk of the
electorate that he will tax them because they suffer from the twin
misfortunes of not being foreigners and not being rich, while giving
the plutocracy the exemptions of the old French aristocracy.

No, two centuries on a Labour Chancellor is facing a simple real world problem. You cannot tax the rich until the pips squeak (we’ve tried it, remember?) because you actually get less money that way (Yes, the Laffer Curve is indeed correct, at certain tax rates) because those with the pips can bugger off. As indeed they already are at the current tax rates.

It is therefore necessary to tax the poor (those working part time on minimum wage for God’s Sake!) to pay for all the wonderful splurging of money on a large State apparatus.

The solution is to stop the spending, to cut the State back to what can indeed be financed by taxing the rich (let’s say, those above median income…a very wide description of rich perhaps) and to stop taking the money from the poor to pay for the pleasures of the rich.

When the Royal Opera House is subsidized out of general tax revenues, when every household in the nation must pay a flat fee so that the middle classes can get their ‘wonderul documentaries’ , then you’re not being serious about the iniquities of the British tax system.