The first and best thing George Osborne could do is start all over again. Of course he won’t and this week’s budget will be another missed opportunity. But each year that passes without real reform is another year wasted.
Britain’s current tax code is the product of a century of bodging. Each year the Chancellor promises to ‘simplify’ the system only to reward chosen groups with allowances for this and relief for that and lord knows what else. Other, less favoured, petitioners are punished to compensate for the trinkets dished out to this year’s chosen interests. The new simplicity turns out to be as much a warren as the old complexity.
So another year of bodging. The system is rickety and contradictory and no longer, as they say, ‘fit for purpose’. Dismantling it and beginning again would not be an act of fiscal barbarism but, on the contrary, an opportunity to write from scratch a tax code that was sensible, equitable and, even, comprehensible.
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