It’s not often you find a full-blown leftie on the pages of The Times (or any British newspaper come to that). But Janice Turner’s attack o the undeserving rich today is magnificent. Get Thee To a Miserable Swiss Tax Haven is a wonderful, joyous broadside against the whingers who believe that the new 50 pence tax rate will kill enterprise.
She’s not really a socialist, she’s an old-fashioned liberal with a social conscious (which puts you pretty much on the left after the shift in the consensus that took place in the mid-1990s). But this paragraph is particularly good:
“The disturbing thing about Alistair Darling’s Budget was not that it extracted a few extra thou from the few, the fortunate 350,000 or so who already enjoy six times the average British salary. It was the implication that taxation for the rich is a punishment, some vindictive redress for the misdeeds of the bankrupting bankers called for by a torches-and- pitchfork-wielding posse, rather than what it should be, what it is for the rest of us: an enduring social obligation, a mark of citizenship, a duty.
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