Governments are formed of elected politicians whose role is to legislate on our behalf, enforce the law and demonstrate morality through their own actions; which, incidentally, they often singularly fail to do. It is then up to individuals to decide what is and isn’t moral, within the law, not government.
Through its misjudgement of public opinion, the government has crossed a line over Jimmy Carr’s use of a tax avoidance scheme. Firstly, a public official, in the form of the prime minister, discussed the tax affairs of a private individual with the global media.
And then David Cameron, and his government, have jumped on the ‘immorality’ bandwagon. They are demonising a perfectly legitimate activity, not through any genuine desire to ‘clean up’, but because they are under attack on many fronts and think it will be crowd pleasing. What they fail to understand is that that the public’s anger is not at tax avoidance as such, but at Carr’s hypocrisy in publicly attacking tax avoidance whilst enthusiastically embracing it.
Perhaps our politicians ought to put their own house in order first and tackle its own hypocrisy and morality before accusing others of the same. Is this the same house of elected representatives who brought us the MP’s expenses scandal? Is this the same David Cameron whose own father is alleged by the Guardian to have run “a network of offshore investment funds to help build the family fortune that paid for the prime minister's inheritance”?
Well, prime minister, alongside Jimmy Carr I also have a confession to make. I failed to exceed the speed limit on my drive into work today. And I apologise for paying for my Americano before leaving the coffee shop. It seems that there are a whole raft of laws I won’t be breaking today – can you find it in your heart to forgive me? After all, you appear to have forgiven others close to you for participating in perfectly legitimate K2-like schemes.
In addition to the government’s hypocrisy in lecturing on morality, it is a adopting a totally inappropriate black and white approach to tax avoidance, which is sending out some highly damaging signals. The real world is not a child’s cartoon – or ‘Carr-toon’ – where life is straightforward and the lessons are simple; it is much more complex.
Should every worker in the country with a private pension be demonised as an immoral tax avoider? After all, if you pay a percentage of your gross earnings into a private pension pot, you are potentially reducing your income tax bill. Or is saving for retirement no longer moral in the government’s eyes because it perfectly legitimately involves tax avoidance?
If the government views a particular tax avoidance activity as unacceptable, then its job is to legislate the scheme out of existence, not to lecture on the morals of its use. Until it takes those legal steps, then users of such schemes, including Jimmy Carr, should not have to apologise for acting within the law to pay only the tax that the legislation requires.
It seems the lesson the government wishes us to learn from this affair is that the point where tax avoidance becomes morally wrong is when the government is not gathering enough tax.