The Flat Rate Tax Rocks

Veritas is positioning itself as anti-EU, anti-immigration and pro-flat-rate-tax. That flat-rate-tax idea rocks, any betting the Tories will probably have it as policy in 2010?

The idea is being pushed by the Adam Smith Institute, maybe it won't be government policy on May 6, but in 2011 it has a good chance of making it to the statute books. The Economist has it as the cover story. So Veritas is on the cutting edge of policy here, if not in other areas.

Progressive taxation is so 20th Century, tax competition is where its at in Europe.

I dunno, I mean I just can't dissociate flat taxes from either Ross Perot or the US Libertarian Party. It's a minority cause among the GOP too. In fact, the only person I've heard advocate it recently in the US was the fat bald loser character on King of The Hill.

With that in mind, are you suggesting that one of Britain's two main parties is only a couple of years away from shattering the '3% either way' consensus around maintaining the tax system in its current form and about to propose something which will be panned as the national equivalent of Margaret Thatcher's much-hated Poll Tax? You might pine for a flat tax yourself but I think you're over-inflating the market for take-up within the self-professed wimpish Tory Party. Even Maurice Saatchi's proposals from a few years back were largely ignored as too radical for the party to countenance (Tax Freedom Day Bank Holiday included, it seems).

The Economist used its front page to call for an end to the British monarchy a few years ago. Sadly, it didn't happen.

Or I could be wrong in my refusal to think out of the box and Kilroy might yet be hailed as a pioneer of something with obvious appeal to the British public. But you're assuming that the Tories will have dragged themselves out of their current disarray by 2011.



Steve Forbes, is the main U.S. advocate for a flat tax. A bald (close) loser in the GOP primaries in 2000, perhaps you have him confused. You Whitehall types need to pay more attention, flat tax is now the system of choice for the New European democracies Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia - with opposition parties in a number of other countries adopting it as policy. Lets not forget Jersey, Hong Kong and Guernsey. The flat tax is simpler, fairer, more efficient, and better for the economy. Flat Tax in Britain is going to happen.

Kilroy is just a trend chaser, he sees which way the wind is blowing... Whatever happened to Tax Freedom Day?

Well, we've adopted New Europe's hatred of romany folk so a flat tax might not be such a big step after all. But the Community Charge factor would still weigh heavily in any public debate so I remain to be convinced. I mean, there was a riot in 1990 only metres away from where I'm sitting over the mere idea that millionaires should pay the same rate of local taxation as the less well off.


I really enjoyed being on that riot.




Unwittingly, you initiated a sequence of events that was to prove a formative political experience for a pre-teen Peter Cuthbertson then (or so he used to state in his biog). Rock on!