There is a scene in The Simpsons in which Ned Flanders enthuses about the joys of tax. Asked by his son what taxes pay for, he exclaims: “Everything!” – from policemen and trees to sunshine. I have always been a Ned in this regard and have argued that tax is one of the great social goods. But, as I filed my self-assessment return last week, I found myself grumbling. It isn’t so much that the bill was relatively high, but that I could no longer work out what exactly it was paying for. NHS waiting times are soaring. The social security system is leaving families destitute. It is a feeling surely familiar to many in Britain now: the tax burden has never felt heavier, yet the public services they are meant to fund have rarely been worse.
At its heart, the tax system relies on public consent for a social contract: each of us pools our resources in exchange for the benefit of collective goods, from roads to hospitals, with those who have the most contributing more. It is not hard to see why that contract has come unstuck in recent years. Ministers waste millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on doomed asylum schemes and unusable PPE, while public services and the poorest communities are starved of cash.
