Cllr. Gavin Ayling

A colleague has posted the following video to YouTube:

That video calls for the return of Britain’s troops from Afghanistan. I cannot condone this.

Whether we think the Iraq war was right or wrong, we’re there now and we must stay and finish the job. But almost no-one thought then, or thinks now, that the Afghanistan war was wrong. The explosion of two ancient Hindu Buddhist statues touched me in a way that I cannot quite get over to you. That was the most widely advertised example of the Taliban’s absolutely, completely inhumane regime. It is not only right that we are in Afghanistan — it is morally necessary that we stay and that we stop this country from being a failed state.

Somalia, sadly, is on its way to a similar fate (after anarchy-cum-libertarianism nearly brought an ideal state into being). If we do not save Afghanistan now, then we must recognise that Somalia will be just as condemned by that failure.

This post was not written for the blog.

It is criminal that the arguments of the high-tax left have been allowed to gain credence. Taxation should be about funding services that must be provided by the state. Most people in the UK agree upon the minimum that should be provided by the state and agree that it should be funded through taxation.

But what proportion of a UK citizen’s salary is spent on tax? If you’re a shop worker, office administrator or security guard your wages are taxed and then the Chancellor hands some back. The very act of taxing and refunding wastes money that could better be spent on services or tax relief.

Another argument that surrounds taxation — though perhaps not enough — is the use of tax as an incentive for citizens to behave in a certain way. A government adviser recently suggested to me that the Conservatives should support congestion charging as a use of the market to resolve demand on a limited resource. This sounds, on the face of it, like a reasonable suggestion, but what about those people who have no choice but to use a road for a particular purpose? Not only has the tax incentive failed but that person now has less money to spend on their business or on goods and services: The economy has been shrunk by a tax intended to affect someone’s behaviour.

It would be infinitely preferable if taxation were used solely as a method of funding government actions. The simplest way to do that is quite clearly with one tax that everyone pays. Should those more successful in society pay more than those who are struggling to get by? Absolutely. Should they pay less if they’re rich enough to afford the best financial advisers? No.

The simplest and fairest way of raising revenue to provide services to all in society is to take money from all those who contribute to the country’s economy. If you remove VAT, alcohol duty and fuel duty you have instantly provided significant and beneficial tax relief to those on the lowest wages. If you then levy a flat tax at 25% you provide an up-front tax cut to the vast majority of tax payers. Without wasting money on levying VAT, death tax, congestion charges, road tax and National Insurance and with the added income available from those who would normally avoid almost all these taxes, the UK would have a fairer, more flexible and more robust taxation system that absolutely everyone in the country could understand and judge.