Maybe if our MPs stopped pissing away all our money we’d stop paying cash-in-hand

Puffed-up Pillock

It’s really too hot here in London to indulge in an extended rant – I might actually explode. In Cornwall, which we've just left, it's a delightful 71°F: here it's a truly revolting 86° and rising. But hearing Tory Treasury Minister David Gauke accuse tax-payers who pay builders and decorators cash-in-hand because the workmen in question might just possibly go on to avoid paying all the taxes due on their earnings has enabled me to throw off my torpor for a few minutes.

Look, Gauke, when you’ve quite finished brown-nosing your useless bosses -  those twin pillars of morality, Cameron and Osborne - just ask yourself why British tax-payers might not particularly resent Poles and Irishmen dodging a couple of billion quid’s worth of tax. For a start, we don’t see it as our job to collect tax – we already pay the revenue a fortune to do this on our behalf. Second, all that interests us is the bottom line – if the quoted price is right, most of us would happily pay it in 2p pieces in bags marked SWAG, because, as even a Tory MP might have noticed, times are hard (well, for middle-income tax-payers, at least).

Third, tax rates in this country are ridiculously, grotesquely, punitively high, and those of us who pay them get practically fuck-all in return (please excuse the language – heat tends to do that to me). Fourth, at least these people are actually working for a living, unlike a large proportion of the endless millions in receipt of our tax money in the form of lavish welfare payments. Fifth, perhaps we’d be more outraged about tax avoidance if you lot in government showed any inclination to stop waste cosmic quantities of our money  – we’re in debt way past our national eyeballs and, thanks to you ridiculous, cowardly fools, government spending is still increasing.

How is this even possible? Didn't you promise to stop this sort of ruinous socialist profligacy?

You’ve had two and a half years to get spending under control and despite degrading our armed forces to the same level as Luxembourg’s and cutting police numbers, you’ve failed dismally. How moral is it to increase the amount of other people’s money you spend when you’re heavily in debt, and when the people whose money you're spending - and their kids - are the ones who'll eventually have to pay it all back? Your unwillingness to take the heat for tough spending decisions is morally disgusting. 

And before you come bleating to us about the moral motes in our eyes, what about the dirty great beams in your own? I mean, Keith Vaz MP in charge of the Home Affairs Select Committee? Tim Yeo MP – who appears to make a handsome supplementary living as a cheerleader for the Green Energy industry – is the Chairman of Energy and Climate Change Select Committee. And you’re lecturing us about morality and straight-dealing?

Here’s an idea: if you want to stop law-abiding tax-payers from paying cash-in-hand, make it illegal for them to do so. Otherwise, shut up and get on with cleaning up the stinking mess in your own back yard.

And now, a cold bath, I think.