The narrative around the prospective budget is that tax is necessarily bad or negative. And I’ve read plenty of posts on LinkedIn about wasteful spending on the NHS, nonsense about growth and daft takes on the M4 relief road.
Firstly, tax is a great thing. For business it enables them, for example, to have roads and rail and buses and trains to transport their workers and their goods. For people it means they get educated, they have access to health care, they can go places to do things via the roads and rail and buses that make them happy. As a developed country, with many post-industrial problems to grapple with, fair tax should be championed and celebrated. We’ve had 40 years where tax has been demonised, where the moral imperative of fairly raising funds to support the services and systems which mean business can function has been ignored or forgotten.
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Secondly, I’ve seen entrepreneurs chatting about NHS inefficiency. Well, like it or not a free at the point of delivery system of healthcare is what we have. It’s one of the best ways of treating a population, for all its faults, and remains a cherished institution. The alternatives do not bear thinking about. Treating everyone who needs healthcare whatever their income is a wonderful system, founded not just on principles of socialism but on human value and a moral purpose of what the state should do. Starving it of money would be catastrophic for the economy of growth so craved and so idealised. Entrepreneurs might know how to grow a business but they don’t know how to run a national healthcare system.
Thirdly, growth. What does it mean apart from profits for business. The growth obsession has delivered enormous inequalities, urban and spatial decline in places beyond the sprawl of English south east. The idea that diminished spending and taxation can set business free has surely been disproved by 14 years of austerity and political consensus that government should approach spending like a household does within its means.
It would be refreshing to have a chancellor champion tax, speak freely about the pivotal place of the NHS in our economy, and to advocate a state which not only invests but innovates and redistributes. There’s plenty wrong with the way government does things, the tax system is one part of that. A need to reform it should not deviate from the notion that it is a powerful tool to improve people’s lives and make the places they live and work better and happier.
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