VAT: a back door money spinner that generates billions for the government

If conspiracy theorists turned their attention to the economy rather than, I don’t know, aliens or Hillary Clinton, surely it would not take long for them to notice the peculiar rise in the tax take from VAT.

VAT sounds innocuous enough, perhaps because no one really knows why it is there or what ‘Value Added’ actually means.

But it’s not really innocuous. To a government that makes much of its supposed generosity on income tax through, for example, increasing personal allowances, VAT is becoming the back door money spinner du jour.

VAT has all the hallmarks of a brilliantly unfair tax. Unlike income tax, it is often invisible or well hidden. It is complicated, with so many different rates for different things that only accountancy geniuses stand a chance of remembering them. And it is levied on an activity that, in a consumer-led society, is impossible to avoid; an activity that we are constantly being encouraged and manipulated to pursue through clever marketing and government policy, an activity that is basically our primary function in modern society – spending.