The public is way ahead of politicians when it comes to paying more tax

The NHS is broken, the army is out of bullets and there’s sewage in the Thames, writes Alan Rusbridger. So how are we supposed to raise funds to fix these crucial public services? As it turns out, the man on the street may have a better idea than your local MP...

Britain Budget (Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

Very few of us think the NHS is working. The army can’t afford enough ammunition to protect Britain. There were 4 million hours of sewage spills in England in 2023. The backlog in our courts is so serious our top judge is thinking of scrapping jury trials in some cases. There are “shocking” gaps in national security at airports. The BBC is desperately looking for new ways to fund existing services.

A single edition of The Times last week contained all these troubling stories. They made for sober reading.

Some pages later in the same issue we learned that a man called Alex Beard, the former head of oil at Glencore, the giant mining fuel and extraction company, had lost his battle to pay less tax on payments of £150m that he had been fortune enough to receive over five years – on top of his salary. That case hinged on whether the payments were subject to UK income tax or capital gains tax. Mr Beard, the FT has told us, had been running a 5-million-barrels-a-day operation from London’s Mayfair district rather than Zug, a sleepy Swiss town where the company is actually headquartered.