Douglas Carswell's Blog

An open state will become a smaller state

Polly Toynbee wants every person’s tax return to be public information, available on-line. 

Daft, leftist nonsense? Maybe. A grotesque intrusion into our private lives? Perhaps.

But hold on a moment. Our tax bill is the amount of money that the state extracts from each of us to pay for all that government each year. Why presume that that bill should be private? 

Although I have yet to make up my mind, for the reasons Daniel Hannan has already outlined, we should not dismiss an idea simply because Polly Toynbee is in favour of it.

And what if one were to take things a step further? What if as well as making all contributions to the state public information, we also made public every single payment made by the state – including every welfare and benefit payment?

It is public money, right? So surely the public has a right to know? 

If it is acceptable to publish what each of us pays to the state each year, it is no more of a violation of our privacy to show what each of us gets back?  Indeed, it would only be fair. 

Big Government lefties are always telling us what good value all that public spending is. Ok. Let’s see it. If you could look on line to see who in your neighbourhood was claiming what public money, perhaps we would learn to properly appreciate how the welfare system actually works in practice, right?  As well as flushing out one or two benefits cheats, it might help us appreciate the social good our tax pounds were doing, eh.  

Letting everyone see how you are spending public money is the best incentive to ensure it is spent wisely and prudently. 

A couple of years ago, my local town hall took the initiative by publishing details of every item of public spending each month, right down to the £3-and-something they spent on pens for the reception desk. And because council officials knew that the public was watching every time they spent public money, they started to spend public money much more wisely. Guess what? Council tax has been cut each year since. 

Polly Toynbee thinks that publishing details of everyone's tax contributions will expose lots of plutocratic tax cheats and make us all yearn for social democracy.  I suspect publishing details of how much each of us pays into the system, and details of who then gets what back, will dramatically shift the centre of political gravity - but may be not quite the way Polly imagines. 

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