I don’t know about you, but everything I read about Sweden makes it seem like a hoot. Admittedly this averages about one and a half news stories a year — fewer if there’s nothing on a former member of Abba wrestling with her father’s Nazi past — but the impression is still one of a country with such terrible television that they have to make their legislative life entertainingly nuts, just for some fun.
Last time I checked out the Swedes, they were wondering whether it might be time to dispense with the official list of names from which Swedish babies must be named. This time around, a popular radical feminist party is proposing, among other policy ideas, a “man tax”. The idea is that most crimes are committed by men, ergo, men should pay more towards police funding.
Of course, if the radical feminists had thought about it for more than 30 seconds, they would have proposed the eminently fairer and more logical “bad man tax” instead. After all, there’s no point in getting librarian drag queens to pay the same moral tax penalty as “Mad” Frankie Fraser. Indeed, I’m sure that women who wear nylon knickers and drink Dooley’s Toffee Liqueur commit just as many crimes as men.
Besides, I think there is a danger that the man tax could do more harm than good to the male rate of offending. Personally, if I were a pleasant Swedish chap being shafted for an extra 10 per cent a year on the automatic premise that I was running around in a loincloth, clubbing all and sundry, I’d want to get a bit more value for my money. At the very least I’d stop saying “thank you ” when I was given my change. At worst, in a bad mood, I might feel that I was entitled to one free murder a year, and perhaps randomly kill someone in the local planning department, on the rationale that statistically they were quite likely to deserve it.
But if “because you’re all wife-beating beasts” wasn’t the reason behind the man tax, the Swedish feminists would have a fairly logical policy idea. After all, men still earn, on average, 10 per cent more than women, while still resolutely not shouldering half the domestic burden. We’re not allowed to feel that this could be a taxable perk because, despite their advantage, modern men apparently feel “impotent” and “useless” — frankly, exactly how someone should feel when they’ve reached the age of 42 and don’t know how to reshape a woollen garment when wet.
But if you suspect that it might be a little unfair to penalise men just because they’re wily enough to get one over on the ladies, then there are plenty of other taxes that one could consider levying, on equally justifiable moral and economic criteria. Polluters; smokers; repeat offenders; the obese; 4x4 drivers; non-recyclers; the owners of small boutiques that sell only candles and diaries ; local poets; parents who make their children learn the tuba; anyone with the nickname “Maverick”; people who are “a bit Buddhist” (have a pair of Maharishi combat trousers); Nazis; bores; drips; weeds; people who are “a bit asthmatic” (coughed once in 1982); those who describe themselves as either “perfectly normal” or “a bit mad”; and the unrepentantly vile.
I could wholeheartedly back any putative Lydia tax, under which everyone called Lydia paid 109 per cent. Personally, I’ve yet to meet a Lydia whose shimmering blonde good looks weren’t the perfect cover for being a devious, backstabbing, two-faced creature of the night. Lydias cost the NHS millions in post-traumatic workplace therapy.
It’s not as if such taxes are without international precedent. Monaco, for instance, levies no taxes on its own citizens — sending tax returns only to businesses and resident Americans. Whenever I recall this detail, it makes me yearn to read more about the apparently productive time when Europe’s second smallest principality had an economic think-tank run by John Pilger and Rik from The Young Ones.
The only problem with all this random imposition of semi-amusing taxes is that it reinforces the notion that tax is a punishment for being either bad or too stupid to move to Switzerland. Really, the opposite is true. One has only to think about living in some corrupt Stone Age country run by a freak to realise that tax is a privilege; something that should be paid joyously. One should bound to the postbox with one’s tax return and accompanying cheque, shouting “Yes! Here is my contribution to the country! Today I am going to buy the people of Britain one defibrillator, 46 small chairs for a primary school, half a gun, 6,000 ring-binders and an ‘unspecified item’ for Dr Liam Fox’s lunch! Tax me!”.
No suet
So the coldest winter since 1962-63 is approaching. No sweat — or perhaps more appropriately “yes, lots of lovely hot-body sweat” — for anyone who has already placed an order for thermal underwear and a couple of cases of Scotch. Of course, it makes sense to have a second line of defence. On hearing of the incipient blizzards, the mother of a friend who lived through 1962-63 forwarded me her recipe for dumplings: “Boil up half the mixture and serve with beef stew,” she wrote, helpfully. “Use the other half to seal up the front door.”
Rich list
Coutts Bank announced last week that the price of happiness is £2.6 million. That is what you need to win, earn or steal before you can tell your boss to go jump off a log, and take early retirement.
Coutts calculates that the necessities for early retirement include: a five-bedroom house with two staff; two luxury cars; an apartment and a yacht in the South of France, and two top-end holidays a year. Obviously it does not include the cost of a leather-bound year planner in its list — it generously gives you one of those when you open an account with an initial deposit of more than £1 million. Really, if Tesco hadn’t claimed the catchphrase, Coutts’s ethos could be summed up with a jaunty “Every little helps”.
But anyone scanning the above list of necessities will be left with a few questions — the main one being “Jeez Louise, when did I become such a cheap date?” Personally, I reckon I could easily scum by with a mere £500,000 — no cars, no Barbados, no yacht. Just £2,000 a year on black cabs, a mad half-hour in John Lewis’s upholstery department, curry every Friday and the remaining £489,000 on two standard open return tickets, recklessly bought on the day of travel, to Wolverhampton, not changing at Rugby or Crewe.
