A Tax Proposal by Bill Kirton

I’m reasonably intelligent. That’s not a boast. I managed to fool most of the people most of the time when I was a university lecturer. I got a PhD, wrote what were laughingly known as ‘learned’ articles, and talked about Sisyphus, Racine, Flaubert, Sartre and others with students who, probably out of politeness, rarely complained. So when, each year, I find myself reduced to baffled, tearful despair as I stare at my self-assessment tax return on the HM Gov screen, I wonder how those less fortunate than myself in terms of the educational levels they’ve been allowed to access manage to get beyond the bit where they ask for your name.

Some people have obviously worked hard designing the form(s) and their goal was, no doubt, to simplify it/them so that any idiot can dash off the answers in a matter of minutes. Well, this idiot can’t. Even though I can treat many, many sections as ‘Not Applicable’, those that remain mix and mingle incomings and outgoings in bewildering combinations so that I find myself going back to previous sections in order to change ‘No’ to ‘Yes’ (and vice versa). I used to pay an accountant to do it all but, since I was the one producing all the receipts, invoices, expenses, fees and the rest, and my income, after retirement, was significantly lower, I decided I might as well do it myself.

Which is fine when it comes to putting up a shelf or cleaning the car, but not if you’re having to work out the fine distinctions between income and legitimate (reimbursed) expenses, or the difference between class 1 and class 2 NICs. I’m pathetic. I have to send hurry-up emails (and even letters sometimes) to banks and insurance companies who seem unconcerned that morons such as me want to send off their tax returns as soon as possible after April 5th to minimise the possibility of a total mental breakdown.

Since yet another election is upon us. I’ve been looking for a party manifesto that includes a promise to create a branch of the Inland Revenue which caters for scriptophobia (which is apparently the closest psychologists can come to a posh name for ‘a fear of filling in forms’). Unfortunately, no party has been inspired to propose such a change, which demonstrates how unsuitable they all are for government.

It would solve so many problems because its function would be to accept whatever mental currency a taxpayer could offer to avoid scriptophobic tedium. A plumber, for example, would be able to ring them on April 6th and explain how to deal with kettling or pressure variations inside a central heating boiler. And I could give them a breakdown on existentialism, essentialism and the absurd, or maybe just chat about the parallels between Julien Sorel’s fate in Scarlet and Black and the crucifixion. It would take about half an hour and the bloke on the other end would say something like, ‘Right, Bill. This year you owe us £4,577 plus an extra £43.27 for failing to develop the significance of Camus’s affinities with Kierkegaard’.

The NHS and the education system would benefit from the consequent reduction in stress levels and increase in practical and theoretical learning, and everything would be strong and stable, instead of chaotic and coalesced.