CITY AND SUBURBAN
Poll tax: my modest proposal for curing fiscal myxomatosis
CHRISTOPHER FILD ES
What we need now, and what I now propose, is a cure for the poll tax. The Heseltine laboratories are, of course, working overtime on this, and white- coated figures pore long over test-tubes until other white-coated figures come up and lead them away. More research is needed, the chief scientist said this week, and no doubt more government funding. (Chief scientists do say that.) His trouble is that the poll tax is a fiscal variety of myxomatosis — a plague introduced to cope with the previous plague, when the rates were the rabbits. Fiscal biotechnolog- ists are trying to devise a designer bug which will feed on the virus — but all their designs have such unpleasant side effects! Thus the laboratories' Mark 1 bug was meant to eat up quite a lot of the poll tax, by making the Government pay for educa- tion directly. Treasury scientists scorned this, as they always scorn alternative medi- cine. It would just lead, they said, to a nasty outbreak of income tax, without curing the town halls' propensity to spend money and ask for more. They secretly preferred the previous plague: rabbits were easier to shoot. The laboratories' later designs, now in favour, are hybrids, half- virus, half-rabbit, and not obviously more attractive than either. They cannot be expected to overcome the abnormal pathology of tax — in which new strains meet more resistance than old ones, and patients experiencing remission do not react as strongly as patients who are feeling worse. We may sympathise with the Hesel- tine, but it has yet to realise that it is asking the wrong question. It is looking for a successor to the poll tax. It should be looking for a cure. The diagnosis must begin by observing that town halls have no power of their own to raise taxes. Such taxing powers as they have are theirs by delegation. It is time to revoke them. The cure for local taxes is to stop local author- ities taxing.
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