TAXES, TOYS AND BOXES

Three things cropped up recently that did little to convince me that we don’t live in a very bizarre and divided country as we sit here on our little island just off the shores of Europe. Oh, I’m still convinced that, for me at least, it’s the only place that I could continue to live with any degree of mental comfort, by which I mean I really, really don’t believe I would “fit in” by choosing to live anywhere else. Not, to be fair, that I fit in much around here, either, but I still believe that this really is the place I’m most likely to, if any is. People may extol the virtues of those faraway places with strange sounding names and I’m sure they’re all quite lovely to visit, but I think I’d always still be eager to head “home” afterwards. It’s just the way I’m made, I guess…

There are still many, many advantages to being a resident of Merrie Olde England, of course. Generally speaking, life here in comparison to lots of other places I might have ended up in, is pretty good. The system of government (if not some of the individuals) seems stable enough to be reasonably sure that the military are unlikely to march in and tear the whole thing down. If I fall off a ladder, I can be reasonably sure that the health service will do the best they can to help me to recover. The supermarket shelves remain reasonably fully stocked unless you happen to be looking for a particular type of loaf on a Sunday afternoon, and there aren’t that many people spending a great deal of time and energy kicking down doors so they can drag people off and shoot them.

Granted, there is a downside, but I’m sure that I’ve rambled on about various aspects of those over these past few months, and I really wouldn’t want to go over any of that old territory once again.

Well, not yet anyway.

Not until whatever it might be really bothers me.

I’m sure you’ll find out soon enough when that happens.

Stay (as they say) tuned…

Meanwhile, it’s the little things that sometimes vex you. Not in the kind of way that is ever likely to persuade the more rational parts of your mind to crate up all of your belongings and get them shipped to the country of whatever embassy is likely to give you house room, but just enough for me to feel the need to remark upon them, make a loud tutting sound, roll my eyes towards the ceiling and wonder once more whether we really are all heading off to hell in a handcart.

For example, our Minister for Transport, or Transport Secretary, or whatever fancy job title they’re calling it nowadays, Mr Philip Hammond announced recently that our train system was now so expensive that it was really only a “rich man’s toy” these days because the only people who can afford to buy tickets are on “above average” incomes. Setting aside the notion that perhaps, just for once, he’d been expected to buy his own ticket and been suitably appalled at the cost that most of the rest of us have just had to learn to suck up, I did wonder whether anyone running this rather wonderful country of ours had any idea as to how the rest of us have to organize our little but incredibly real lives. If you have to get to work, and the only way you can get to work is by using the train, and the train company puts up the prices, you simply do not have any other choice but to pay up, no matter whether your income is above or below the mysterious “average” which always seems to soar far higher than anything anyone I know is getting. All this proves to me is that someone, somewhere must be pocketing a potful to boost that average up so high, and I suspect that that someone is precisely the sort of person who generally doesn’t have to buy his own train tickets.

Other matters fiscal included a retort I saw on television to a suggestion made by another guest that, if he were in power, the first thing they would do was “abolish taxes”. The retort was “But where would my kids go to school?” and it really is, with a few possible tweaks, the best one-line answer I’ve ever seen to that argument, and one I’ve been seeking out for more than two decades. Many years ago, when I had been slaving away in an office for a few years, younger, keener workers would come along and inevitably, their first, relatively tiny pay cheque would be received with howls of anguish along the lines of “What’s this tax thing then? Why do I have to pay that? They’ve taken nearly a third of my money! What do I get for that?” etc., etc.

Usually someone would try and explain whilst I was too busy lamenting the lack of education about such things in the modern schools system, but in the end, like the old joke said: “There are two things in life that are inevitable – Death and Taxes” and our lives without them, being denied access to all those schools, hospitals and protection by the forces of law and order, might look horribly different, so once again we must simply “suck it up” whilst those in the upper echelons spend all their days trying to avoid paying any of it.

Finally the Royal Institute of British Architects took it upon themselves to criticise the minimum size standards that are used when building the little tiny boxes we now call “new” or “starter” homes. They are actually making a fair point, to be honest. I once worked in an industrial estate that was busily being demolished and replaced with new housing and it was astonishing to me quite how many houses could be fitted onto so tiny a building plot. As the foundations were laid you could walk past each house and, in a couple of small paces, be passing the next one along on the row.

These things were tiny.

The argument against the change is that materials cost more, so the houses would cost more if they were any bigger and so nobody on a low income would be able to afford them. Of course, if you actually stacked up the basic materials it takes to put any house together, I don’t imagine that the cost of the actual individual bricks, wood, glass and metal would add up to anything like the hundreds of thousands of pounds being asked for the average small terraced house these days, but that’s another fiscal matter. House prices, it seems, need to be kept high to keep all the people who’ve already paid out for them happy. The laws of supply and demand, or “market forces” are suddenly redundant when it comes to your property keeping its perceived value, which is an abstract concept anyway. Houses really should be for living in, not just be commodities to be bought and sold. After all, we all have to live somewhere. What does it matter what it’s worth as long as you’re warm, and safe and secure? The real problem is that the quality of life you can actually live in a shoebox a couple of paces wide is very limited, and we sometimes start to lose track of what’s important. Granted, all of these houses are infinitely better that existing under a bit of corrugated sheet metal in the slums of some other countries around the world, but we really need to learn the value of the quality of life and living it, instead of bleeding people’s salaries dry so that they can attempt to live up to someone else’s ridiculous idea of aspiration.

It’s hard to put a value on a home, just as it’s hard to put a value on the sense of security, safety and freedom you might feel by living in the country you live in, but I do think we deserve to live in slightly more space as a matter of basic human decency. After all, we would never want to get to a position where we envy the relative luxury that a battery chicken finds itself in, do we?

Unfortunately, it seems, a great many of us actually do.