All this furore about the Budget and the tax rises for the top level of tax is a bit silly. After all, to achieve a fairer society, income tax is the most redistributive of all tax systems. All these moaners saying "I earn 400,000 pounds a year and I'm going to have to pay a few extra hundred pounds in tax," is beyond satire or downgrading the annual skiing holiday from the French Alps to Bulgaria. These people deserved to be taxed till the pips squeak!
Watching Will Hutton's conclusion to his superb (if slightly lefty) two-part chronicle of the credit crunch to date, last night, one feels that the bankers should be thrown in prison for five to ten years, rather than milking the taxpayer for bonuses and retirment packages. Their aggression, their arrogance and their inability to understand the financial packages their conjure up (it is utterly appropriate for 'creative accounting' to continue as a perjorative), means the dunderheads who appear in The Apprentice really are the ones who were running the economy when they couldn't run a bath. These tax rises are the least that should be meted out to them.
First of all, the top level of tax burden until the late 1980s (so under an arch-Tory government) was actually higher than it currently is. Secondly, this is payback for ninety per cent of the population who will never earn that much but are still being punished. Thirdly, the argument that you can't have such high tax because it will drive away wealth-creators - well actually these people were the opposite, they were wealth-destroyers and the sooner we drive such pestilence from our shores the better.