Pity the ripped-off footballers? I’m afraid I don’t at all

We need to challenge the idea championed by the right that tax is a form of oppression, and make sure everyone is paying their fair share

Kevin Campbell of West Bromwich Albion during the Barclays Premiership match between Aston Villa and West Bromwich Albion at Villa Park on April 10, 2005 (Jamie McDonald/Getty Images)

I have tried, really tried, to feel for the top footballers who, between them, seem to have lost £100m of their fast-earned cash. Craig Short, the former Blackburn captain, shared his pain: “These investments were for my kids’ education, for my children’s future.” Will his beloved progeny have to be plucked out of private schools? Let’s hope and pray Daddy will still be making enough to keep them there. Other loaded footballers are reportedly angry, bitter, appalled, shocked, devastated, etc, etc. They believe they have been mis-sold investment products by an asset management firm. Sorry guys. I think of your losses and shrug. Cold, hard bitch? No, just a conscientious citizen.

The truth is that high-level asset management is a risky game and some products help clients to minimise their taxes. Kevin Campbell, for example, who apparently invested in five film schemes and faces losses of up to £7m, is reportedly involved in bankruptcy proceedings. Other sports and entertainment stars have similarly put cash into new movies, seemingly in pursuit of tax breaks. Private banks such as Coutts – used by the Royal Family – lend money for these top-end “gamblers”. HMRC is, at long last, aggressively investigating some high-value, low-tax investments. What the rich do is not illegal, but immoral.

Companies, politicians and tax experts zealously try to find clever ways to reduce the payments of those who have it all. Some are powerful lobbyists, too. Take this example: Leave.UK, the organisation that ostensibly campaigns to get us out of the European Union, is wholly funded by a Gibraltar finance firm which describes what it does as “international wealth protection”. Maybe we shouldn’t blame them too much. Since Margaret Thatcher turned the UK into an individualistic society, and since the most recent genus of capitalism spread around the globe, middle- and upper-class people have become selfish and antisocial. The privileged are disconnected from the environment, public institutions and society. This ideological shift has led to the taxophobia now afflicting nations. Successive governments have encouraged anti-tax populism. The state even offers “tax free” bonds and the like to small investors. This phobia has altered the DNA of our nation and its proud social democratic character. Everyone is now supposed to loathe taxation and those politicians who would dare defend public expenditure.

Of course, workers on PAYE cannot opt out. They can only feel perpetually aggrieved that money is taken from their pay every month. The poor are taxed mercilessly through VAT when they buy essentials such as tampons and shoes. George Osborne was only prevented by the Lords from hitting them even harder with his Bill to cut tax credits. These people have no voice, no tax advisers.

If you are a property owner, a relatively high earner or a person of inherited wealth, you are meant to look after yourself and your own, and to agree that the state has no business poking its nose into our lives. Those who reject this credo are seen either as soft-headed cretins or Commie class traitors. A year ago, on Question Time, I said we needed schools to teach kids that taxes were good and necessary because they made life better for all citizens. A spokeswoman from the Taxpayers’ Alliance, also on the panel, looked as if she had been shot, and came back with some ferocity. Such a pro-tax view is blasphemous in our times.

Tax is seen as an imposition, a form of oppression. The Taxpayers’ Alliance and its right-wing agenda have, for too long, dominated public discourse.

Adele, the songstress lauded left and right today, gave her views in 2011: “I’m mortified to have to pay 50 per cent tax,” she said, criticising the state of public services. “When I got my tax bill in, I was ready to go and buy a gun and randomly open fire.” Go girl! Stand up for your human rights and kill to keep those millions which even your great-great-great-grandchildren will not be able to spend in a lifetime. (Incidentally, Adele went to a state-funded school for the performing arts.)

Meanwhile, silk-tongued money managers who come bearing legal loopholes and tricks to beat the taxman are the new priestly class.

It wasn’t always thus. Gladstone, admired orator and one of our greatest prime ministers, asserted that income tax was an “engine of gigantic power for great national purposes”. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jnr, the early-20th-century US Supreme Court judge, famously said: “I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilisation.”

A few economists and activists, even a few stars, are taking up this cause afresh – a vital development that could bring us back from the brink of economic anarchy and social disintegration. In 2006, the respected US economist Diane Lim wrote a compelling online essay in praise of taxes. Pro-tax US websites are becoming more influential. In this country, Charlotte Church and the comedian Russell Howard have come out against austerity and for higher taxes. And intellectuals are starting to provide sustained counter-arguments to small-state fanatics.

Without enough money in state coffers, there would be no criminal justice system, no roads, no British Museum or public art galleries, no scientific research, no universities, no funds to fight terrorism, no food, school or social work inspections (and no social work, either), no academies and schools, no road or bridge repairs, no BBC, no English Heritage or Historic Scotland, no public transport, no war commemorations, no palaces, no National Health Service. “Tax-saving” ruses weaken and betray the nation. How to send that message to narcissistic celebs? Maybe M&S could make that their Christmas advert next year.