When the head of tax doesn’t pay tax

I noted to a friend the other day that, when I was young, I was quite left wing. Back then, my belief was everyone should be included; everyone was equal; no-one should be treated as lesser than me; society should ensure everyone had a minimum wage and support them.

Then I grew up. I became a capitalist. A lot of that was to do with getting a mortgage, getting married, loading myself with debts, being independent. At that point, my politics pivoted to the right wing. I needed to be successful and earning. I needed my career to make me successful so that I could pay my bills and taxes.

Now, I’m older. Now, I’m kind of middling. I believe everyone should be included, whilst I also believe we need to be successful and earning.

What this makes you realise is there is no right or wrong. There is no right or left, tbh. There is just a middle ground of outright success versus everyone’s inclusion. The right pushes for the successful to be more successful at the expense of the rest; the left wing argues for everyone’s inclusion, supported by the rest. Who is right and who is wrong?

You pay taxes to support those who struggle; you pay taxes to give people access to health services and to pay for a police force; you pay taxes to have your streets cleaned and bins collected; you pay taxes to enable a bettter society.

But then we have tax dodger Donald Trump, a former American President; we have Rishi Sunak, married to non-dom Akshata Murthy, a multi-millionaire Prime Minister basing tax offshore; we have Nadim Zahawi who carelessly forgot to pay his tax; and so on.

Conservative Party Chairman and former Chancellor of the Exchequer pays £5 million in taxes that were avoided by mistake

It reminds me of the presentation made by photographer Platon a few years ago, who made the point that most powerful people are corrupt. His specific point was that he photographed  the most powerful leaders in the world at the United Nations Assembly. Of those people, most were jailed for corruption, in some for other.

With great power comes great responsibility.

As we view the world and its machinations, we see people working for the greater good but also many, both those in power and those in crime, working to corrupt the world. I guess my disappointment is that there appears to be more of those in power who are corrupting the world as much as those in the underworld.

That’s why I’m now in the middle-ground between right and left. I just want to make this a better world, don’t you?