When you have a proper job, you never have to think about your attitude to taxation until you’re in a pub trying to bore people. When you’re self-employed, your views, as well as memories, associations and random bits of subconscious apparatus around money and mortality, all rush towards you like a tide at tax-return time, which is either October, sometime in late November before the pre-Christmas rush, or towards the very end of the deadline on 31 January.
If you’re broadly in favour of tax, and recognise its centrality to civilisation and the social state, you’ll file your return in a timely fashion, because deep down you enjoy it. It gives you a fillip, that secure sense of yourself as an upstanding, competent citizen. If you hate tax, particularly a progressive taxation system, believing it to be theft a priori and particularly insulting at the higher rate, you’ll be constantly trying to shave bits off here and there, so you need plenty of time. But you don’t want to do it too early, because that feels like giving in. I bet Nadhim Zahawi is a November person, not an October or a January person, put it that way.
If you don’t recognise yourself in either of those descriptions, don’t worry: there is a third type, the person who believes staunchly, even fervently, in the principle of tax, but blankly cannot believe anyone would put something so important in the hands of an idiot like themselves. These people can’t get along with any accountant, because how do you get along with someone whose calls you won’t answer and whose emails make your heart rate weird? So they end up without an accountant, and now they’re an unsupported idiot, undertaking a task so vital the right pay grade for it might not even exist, and is certainly light years above this idiot’s. The only thing powering them on is the thought of the 100 quid fine if they’re late, but they know they’ll be fined anyway because they’re fined every year. Something always happens.
Anyway, spare a thought for them – I mean us. We’re having a terrible day.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
