To make tax simple, low and compulsory, get at it with the heavy roller

It is all the fault of the fairy who came, uninvited, to Gordon Brown’s christening. Beside the scowling infant’s Moses basket, his godparents’ gifts of industry and ambition were assembled when this glittering creature approached him with a parcel of her own. ‘See, little man,’ she told him, ‘I’ve brought you the great gift of simplification.’ Then she curtsied, and presented it to him, upside down. After that, he grew up to be Chancellor and opened the parcel. Once in a generation, he announced, came the moment for a fundamental reform of the tax system. He set about it in his own way or, rather, in the fairy’s way. His Finance Bills grew longer and longer, like Pinocchio’s nose. He discovered that the system could be made to work in both directions, extruding money as well as sucking it in. If the result was rather less than clean and tidy, further refinements might be needed, but he could never accept that complexity was a fault in itself, or that what looked straightforward from his seat at the control panel could look different from the other end.