Perhaps I will start by making a defence of taxation. Taxation exists to pay for public services. Too many people seem to believe that we can have the same quality of public services as Scandinavia but have a taxation system that is more like that of the USA. When you look at the cost of private education and private healthcare, it puts into perspective the value for money we get from our taxation system. It is not by random chance or serendipity that those countries with the highest tax levels have the best public services and those with the lowest tax levels the poorest. It is because taxation is necessary to raise the money to pay for the public services we all need—things like roads, the safety of food and the health service, which we talk about a lot here.

Quality public services, be they health, education or infrastructure, come at a substantial cost to the public purse and the only way of paying for them is via taxation. Taxation can be on income, profit, consumption, expenditure, or value of land and property, or a combination of all of them. But, you need the taxation to get the money in.