At the risk of infuriating Coffee Housers (and Polly), I rather like Polly Toynbee. She’s good company and we chatted happily before appearing on Marr on Sunday. It’s just that she’s wrong, and particularly wrong about tax. See her article in today’s Guardian, calling on Gordon to open up clear red water between himself and the Tories, and to explain “what tax is for, why it is a public good and not a burden, how it is the agent of social justice.”
Tax is a necessary evil to most people, especially the least affluent. They accept it as the membership fee of society, and the price they pay for common goods such as health, education, welfare, transport infrastructure, law and order and national defence. Most accept the principle of redistribution in the traditional British sense that the have nots deserve a helping hand from the haves – a hand up, rather than a hand out.
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