Fun Time Again!
Yes, it’s that time of year, the time when the Inland Revenue starts nagging that you have until 31st January to complete your tax return online (and pay what you owe) or they’ll send the boys round with baseball bats to squash vital and delicate parts of your anatomy.
(In fact, what they actually say is you’ll have to pay loadsamoney extra but, when you get to my age, that’s almost as painful as having those vital and delicate parts squashed.)
We all hate paying taxes but we all also want government to spend money on what we think is important and, as the old song goes, you can’t have one without the other. So really I ought not to complain but pay up with a cheerful smile on my face and a song in my heart, knowing I’m doing my bit to keep good old Britain rolling along. Who knows? My little contribution might be just the bit that helps fund an earth-shatteringly brilliant piece of new theatre or buys a hundredth of a square inch of a new lane of an already overcrowded motorway. Or perhaps it might pay a tiny fraction of MP Boris Johnson’s salary. (Would that we could stipulate that our money is not used for such wasteful purposes! But I suppose medieval kings used tax money to pay their court jesters, so…)
Actually, what annoys me about taxation is not having to pay taxes (alright, it does annoy me, but I accept they’re necessary) but the condescension of government ministers when they tell us that they are giving an extra £Xm to the NHS or £Ym to education, as if they are putting their hands into their own pockets. They’re not. They’re putting them into ours, deciding what they want to do with our money and then expecting us to be grateful.
Oh well. Rant over. Do I feel better for it? ‘Course not: I still have to fill in all those bloody forms!