Joan Bakewell: Some things are worth paying taxes for

In a café in Kirkwall, on the mainland of Orkney, I met a couple who were planning to change their lives: he had recently retired and she had been a teacher. They were hoping to come and live on Stronsay, an island in the archipelago, a place of some five hundred souls, wide horizons of sea and sky ... but not much more.

I caught briefly a glimpse of what it is like to see the humdrum world and way of life to which we are all now returning as not meeting the deep human needs we all have. And of having the courage to do something about it.

In the few days I had spent on one of the remotest islands in Scotland, I began to appreciate how modern city ways are overloading the human system almost to breaking point. My return journey to London opened my eyes to many things of which, in the course of busy city life, I am scarcely aware.

For a start, where are the stars? It had been a full moon in Orkney, shining through clouds across a sparkling sea. For me this was an actual event, a glorious and inspiring moment. In a city I might have looked up and made casual note. Much as I love city life, I feel the deep visceral need to experience my place in the order of things, to marvel at the smallness of man against the immensities and time and space. It reads oddly in a newspaper column, but then newspapers, too, are part of the frenzied world. I, an addict to newsprint, have been trying to live without them, too.

More immediately, coming from the place of sea and sky, the whole commercial and social set-up that we have managed to devise seems suddenly cock-eyed and out of kilter. On the one hand, there are the grotesquely large bonuses being handout to directors of vast companies in whose success they can only have a short-term and contributory part. Then I find that prison officers are on strike to try and win a pay settlement that would bring their annual earnings somewhere near what the super-rich might spend on a single painting or a glamorous party.

Their lightning strike – brought off with such neat aplomb – hints at the smouldering unease within the public sector that they are not getting their fare share of a world that worships money. There's bound to be trouble ahead. Any sense of natural justice revolts at a world that celebrates excess, headlining the antics of those blessed with gold while deploring the "irresponsible" actions of those who'd like a little more of it. There is even news that a wealthy New Yorker has left $12m to her beloved dog. Has the world has gone mad?

The current political scene is merely making things worse. Russian oligarchs, flaunting the riches leached from their homeland, are given asylum amid pious hopes that they won't attract assassins to track them, leaving poisoned traces through a trail of hotels and bars. The Tory leader proposes to abolish the one tax that redresses some of this disparity of wealth, ending inheritance tax so that the very wealthy will be even wealthier.

In the meantime, those who can't get rich legally take to crime. Drug dealing, people-trafficking, gang-mastering are making money out of wretched lives at the bottom of the social ladder. The prisons are full, while glittering pop stars display their sad addictions as emblems of fallen youth. Young men are shot in a culture that flaunts guns as the latest symbol of macho identity, while Britain boasts one of the world's leading armaments industry. The Army will soon deploy a weapon of enhanced power in Afghanistan, a country in which it is trying to woo hearts and minds.

What a strange, confused and intractable world we have created. I can no more unpick this cat's cradle of contradictions than anyone else. But at its heart lie the eternal problems of power and money: the same is as true of places like Darfur and Ethiopia as of the pillars of consumer capitalism in the West.

But in Britain, I perceive a conundrum at the heart of the commercial exchange. Its nexus is money. It is the agreement of the market economy that profit is the ultimate virtue. It follows that everything – not only products and services, however worthy – must be produced at minimum cost. Effort and money is actually expended to reduce those costs still further, until the viability of the exchange itself is called into question.

It happens everywhere –in hospitals, in schools, at the BBC. The paying out of money is to be avoided. Taxes have become the bogey man of our politic. It is a general assumption that taxes are bad. Any social initiative is reckoned in the damage it will do to our taxes. Any cub journalist can score an easy point by asking, "what is it all costingthe taxpayer?"

But taxes are the most civilised way of organising our wellbeing. The ideal is that each pays their fair share towards the public good, determined on our behalf by an elected democracy. For how far we have departed from this ideal, see above. But as long as those in politics feel compelled always to offer lower taxes, to make reducing costs the ultimate imperative, we will not get our priorities right. Some things are worth paying taxes for. A civilised society is one of them.

joan.bakewell@virgin.net