I look forward to the Budget like I look forward to rammed Tube carriages, A&E waits and Eighties synth hold music. I detest, yet I must persevere.
With the cost of living crisis now biting so hard that last week I saw a curry – one singular chicken madras – that cost £26 on Deliveroo, Rachel Reeves’s recent request that “each of us must do our bit” makes me shudder. Because so many British taxpayers have no bit left to give, her own “bit”, in fact, has been to come within a 1p coin’s width of raising income tax off the backs of working people, a bad idea only worsened by her U-turn, which gives the distinct impression she’s not got a clue what she’s doing.
To help out, I thought I’d offer up a different bit. How about the government putting the tax burden on the people and things that really cost us all?
I’m talking about so-called vice taxes, which have been around since 1643, when excise duties were slapped on beer and tobacco, and could effectively raise revenue from even more of society’s worst irritants. Or, as I like to call it, a hate-based tax system.
I’d start with all the flashy cars that herald their own arrival with a bang. From Belgravia to Tower Hamlets, it’d be nice if London’s streets sounded less like an F1 circuit or a rally meet-up. We already have cameras to punish speeding drivers, so why not take it further, chancellor? Fix them up with a whizzy little microphone and fine all the boy racers driving cars that rat-a-tat like a battalion of blasting AK-47s.
What about the ultra-processed foods (UPFs) I keep gobbling up? Can the taxman save me from my additive-charmed self?
As a scientist explained to Dr Chris van Tulleken for his recent book on the subject, a UPF is “not food. It’s an industrially produced edible substance”. The so-called “noodle tax” – named by the kind of clever doctors who want to see my wholesome and delicious post-party snack of packet noodles (never pot!) taxed just like tobacco products – is already happening in Colombia, pulling in a reported $4bn per year, and proving that taxing everyday vices is hardly unheard of elsewhere.
I have other clever ideas, particularly for social media.
Sure, the Online Safety Act threatens to hold Big Tech to account for allowing harmful content to be published, but what about the day-to-day ills caused by overconsumption of pulpy trash and needless conflict?
I would apply a levy for every video of a violent incident on a UK street that isn’t prefaced with a 30-second clip of an average day in the life on that same street. There are no no-go zones in the UK, just no-go moments, and every effort to portray the UK as a uniquely collapsed cesspit of horrors is deeply unpatriotic.
Oh, and Ofcom should fine any Big Tech company allowing us to access video content between midnight and 6am; I’d quote you a study here about the universally dismal effects of brainrot, but everyone’s too brainrotted to actually run that study, which rather proves the point.
We live in a divided society, of course. Yet most reasonable, decent people agree that some detestable evils are completely optional activities deserving of, crying out for, draconian punishment.
By taxing these evils, the government would give the public the chance to laugh about the General State of Things without laughing at you, chancellor.
You might not be able to give us exactly what we want, but couldn’t you maybe just take away some of the things we hate? By my calculation, the Great British public’s enemy’s enemy is our friend, after all, and that might be the easiest win the chancellor gets this year.
