Dear Daily Telegraph,
I am writing to you to complain about your article published on 27th April 2009, “Boris Johnson says the new tax rate is an attack on London.” I regret to tell you that this article was lukewarm and did not defend the Tory point of view with enough conviction.
Firstly, Boris Johnson’s words are reported to describe the increase of top income tax rate from 40% to 50% for people earning more than £150,000 a year, as “an attack on London,” but nowhere is it mentioned that this expression is too weak to characterise the situation. In fact, a new Blitz is hitting London, worst than the preceding one, to some extent, because this assault on our glorious city does not come from a failed Austrian painter but from a treacherous Scot.
Secondly, the article reports the worries of the Mayor of London and his councillors, “It [the new tax rate] runs the risk of driving highly skilled workers away and deterring others from coming to our great city.” However ordinary Londoners also are very worried, it should have been reported that hundreds of thousands of football supporters cried out in terror when they realised that this iniquitous tax policy could deprive Arsenal and Chelsea of their best players. By the way Sir Arsene Wenger himself, this unrecognised political thinker and incidentally Arsenal’s coach, warned us: “A new tax on high-earners will drive foreign stars away.” A wave of protest is swelling not only on the Square Mile but also on the Emirates Stadium, and Gordon Brown should be rather careful with this widespread anger.
Thirdly, it would have been highly judicious to interview a true foreign worker to confirm the English experts’ warnings, so I took the liberty of describing for you my own experience. I am a French gentleman, I arrived in the United Kingdom in January 2009, and it is true that I have chosen London only after comparing very carefully the income tax policies of every country all over the world. Why would I have come in England otherwise? Certainly not to admire Hogarth’s paintings at the National Gallery, I leave this kind of entertainment to spotty art students. I have not decided yet if I am to start a career as a trader at the Royal Bank of Scotland or be a banker at Northern Rock, at first I have to finish my course in English. I am a hard-working employee, very competitive in praising the virtues of the free market and the dangers of government intervention (except of course for RBS and Northern Rock), I nourish a personal hostility toward unions, so there is no doubt that I will soon be offered a comfortable job at £150,000 a year. However, thinking that I will pay £2,590 in extra tax and that my income after tax will be only £92,921 this year (according to the figures from The Daily Mail) has taken all my motivation away. I will have to make great sacrifices and give up my dinners at Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s. I do not understand why England does not want to reward my uncommon merits anymore (especially the merit of being me), and why this country is turning into the USSR. So now I am very seriously considering moving to Dubai, maybe the last free country of the world, at least a country where taxpayers are treated humanely.
Actually, the UK needs a brand new fiscal policy. Above all, the jejune ability-to-pay principle, according to which everyone pays in proportion to one’s income, has to be abolished. We need to be realistic and practical, and give up the old-fashioned utopian ideas. From now on only people who can not leave the country to go to Zurich, or who can not hire a financial adviser to set up a tax avoidance scheme, will pay a high income tax. I propose four new tax brackets: 40% up to £2,230 income, 22% between £2,231 and £34,600, 10% between £34,601 and £150,000, and 1% beyond £150,000. Only such an energetic policy could save England from communism, retain worthwhile people in the country and restore London’s credibility as the most attractive financial centre in the world.
Naturally, I am aware that the British people at first need to be enlightened about the necessity for this fiscal reform. Nevertheless, it is the duty of the press and the responsibility of the elite to educate the ordinary people whose intellectual capacities are insufficient to form relevant opinions, especially on economic and financial matters. For instance, I suggest that The Daily Telegraph should publish more explanatory articles on the public sector pensions, which cost the public purse £21.4 billion per year (according to the figures from The Times). Therefore, every average reader could see that this sum is exorbitant when compared to the £700,000 of Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension. The contrast between the two figures is striking: RBS’s former CEO pension is only 0.0032% of the total of public sector pensions. Anybody sensible could conclude from this comparison that the public sector has become an unbearable burden for British taxpayers and that the whole row over Sir Fred’s pension was quite exaggerated.
I am not suggesting that The Daily Telegraph should turn into a tabloid. I am only sharing my personal feeling that conservative beliefs could be expressed with more manly confidence and that the responsible right-wing press ought to back Tory candidates without useless scruples. After all, that is how Sarkozy and Berlusconi, these two Latin touts whose IQs added together equal half that of Queen’s favourite mare’s, were each triumphantly elected in their respective countries. To be honest, I am a bit suspicious about David Cameron and his good manners, and I am afraid that his education at Eton has slightly enervated him. In these troubled times, we need a leader who could be a bull in a china shop – exactly like Margaret Thatcher thirty years ago. It brings tears to my eyes just mentioning her name; I wish we had today such a Churchill in skirt! She had all the qualities to be a perfect PM in social-wartime: rather thrifty, reasonably germanophobic, pig-headed just as was needed to be. Above all, she was instinctively in line with the aspirations of the great bulk of English people, because she had never ceased to be the daughter’s grocer that she had always been at Downing Street. Her roots went straight down in the very heart of eternal Albion. Well, a Tory grandee such as Cameron is better than nothing, however, much better anyway than Angela Merkel, this big Teutonic spud, or Barack Osama, the weird gollywog (as would say Carol Thatcher) who was elected President overseas.
In conclusion, I am beseeching you not to allow yourself to be intimidated any more by the BBC, the left-wing intelligentsia, the state pensioners’ nomenclatura, the diabolical trade unionists and other terrorists in overalls, the Brussels bootlickers, the Orwell’s last readers, the professional do-gooders of IFWA, the red-faced members of the Guinness Drinkers Society and the criminal fellows of the Royal Jamaican Spliff Smokers Club of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. As it is said nowadays, “Be yourself!”
I am looking forward to reading an article of your own stuffed with some good strong Tory nourishment soon,
Yours faithfully,
Emmanuel Quilgars
Oh, to blog in London ! 