The Chancellor cannot - well, does not - do her own taxes
This is, of course, most amusing:
Rachel Reeves has claimed £1,225 on expenses to pay someone else to help file her tax return, it can be revealed.
One of the several amusements here is that hiring an accountant to do the taxes for someone on PAYE - as MPs and Ministers are - is not an allowable expense against those taxes that must be paid. But is, apparently, an allowable expense when claiming, umm, expenses as an MP. It’s possible to think that this is not the right way around.
An appropriate little story is, given that yesterday was her 99th, about St Maggie. The decennial census was coming up and she retreated into the office with a test form. After a certain number of “Tchah!”s, “How intrusive!”s and “An impertinence!”s she emerged to insist that this was all much too complex and must be simplified before everyone in the country must be forced, by law, to fill it out. So, it was simplified.
We think that this principle could be extended. Enshrined even, in law. All those who design such forms and then insist upon their use, all those who create complexity, must be forced to follow such rules unaided. In the case of MPs and Ministers we’d go further - they must be made to fill out the forms to gain the permissions to do things that they do not actually do. All should - for example - have to file a planning permission. Pretend that their now registerable ducks have been eating the Great Crested Newts in the pond. Ask permission for a grant. As well as, obviously, their own census and tax forms. With, as we insist, no aid.
Once we have a set of forms and permissions - whether we think of them as vital necessities or indignities - that can be done by a Richard Burgon, William Wragg or, if we are to be vicious about this, a Foreign Secretary, only then do we have something ready to be unleashed upon the public.
There is more merit to this than is at first obvious. For clearly such will require a significant amount of work in simplifying the system. Which does mean that for the next decade or so we’ll be free of any further indignities being heaped upon us - they’ll not have the time.
We recommend this to the House. Assuming there’re any Members capable of grasping an idea as complex as this.
Tim Worstall