You’d like to pay more tax? Well, you can… but nobody seems to want to
We’d like to pay more taxes, the super-rich – and usually super-famous – cry. Yesterday, Brian Cox and Simon Pegg added their names to an open letter which demanded governments just let them hand over more of their income to the public coffers.
The good news for Brian and Simon is that they can. The Debt Management Office, the executive agency of HM Treasury tasked with (you guessed it) managing the country’s national debt, allows the good people of Britain to help out with a little extra cash. An 1823 tweak to the law allows any Tom, Dick or Harry to do their bit to pay down the country’s national debts via the DMO’s donations and bequests account. Technically of course it’s not paying more tax, but by helping pay down the country’s debt and reducing the resulting interest payments, more is available for public services funding than would otherwise be the case.
Unfortunately, it appears there is less of a giving attitude than some might have anticipated. In 2022-23, the Debt Management Office’s donation and bequests account received a grand total of £47,249. The year before, it received less than three grand.
Perhaps the issue is simply that not enough people are aware of the option to write a cheque. Armed with that knowledge, there will no doubt be a queue gathering outside the DMO’s office on Mincing Lane – just by Tower Hill – by mid-morning. Or perhaps not.
The truth is that most people, particularly in Britain, are fed up of seeing their hard-earned swiped by the taxman only for the public services they are paying for to be collectively up the swanny. The tax burden in Britain is as high as it was in the aftermath of World War II. The issue is not how much tax is paid but how it is used: pumped into endless arms-length bodies, botched procurement and ‘investments’ in a system obsessed with inputs rather than outputs.
Perhaps the luvvies could turn their fire on the mismanagement of the system, rather than legitimise the wrong-headed view that only more tax can solve our ills.