Mike Freer is at it again

There are lots of Tory voters in Finchley who are thoroughly sick of Gordon Brown. The thing they hate most about him is the way he's mastered the art of Stealth taxes. In the good old days, Labour chancellors like Dennis Healey and James Callaghan would bump up income tax to pay for social programs. Tory's would shriek with anger as they received their paychecks with ever greater chunks of tax deducted.

Maggie Thatcher realised that your average Joe doesn't like paying tax, no matter how good it is for him, so she came in and slashed income tax. Sadly for us poor saps, this didn't really mean we were paying less tax as she just shifted the burden on to VAT which shot up to 17.5% from 8%, but hey our paycheck looked better. As well as the VAT rise, petrol, tobacco, alcohol would go up every year without fail.

Good old Gordon watched this with fascination and informed Lord Blackadder Tony Blair that he had a cunning plan. He knew that income tax rises were a loser, so he came up with a whole raft of "stealth taxes", many of which we only noticed when we got things such as our pension statements. Now good old Baldrick Gordon Brown decided that he didn't want to be Baldrick anymore. He wanted to be Lord Blackadder himself. Sadly, it all went wrong and he ended up as Rowan Atkinson's other great comic creation - "Mr Bean".

Now all our friendly local Tories see this as an open goal. How can they possibly fail to get back all those lovely seats they lost in 1997 to Labour? Well rather strangely, they've selected "Son of Mr Bean" to fight the Finchley seat. Our very own Council Leader Mike Freer. He's studied Gordon Brown intently for many a year. He's realised that good old Gordon is onto something. Mike and his friends at the council need to raise lots of money to pay for ever increasing councillor allowances, mushrooming pay for senior council officers and holes in the budget left by incompetently managed crackpot schemes such as the Icelandic investments debacle. Now Mike and his Tax Taskforce scoured the borough for "soft targets". Having squeezed the obvious targets (parking, traffic fines), they looked for far more sneaky targets. The most crass of these was the "dead baby tax hike" where parents of deceased infants faced huge rises in costs, way above the cost of inflation. In today's Guardian, we learn of a whole swathe of new stealth taxes. The one which most alarms me in this article is the proposal for a "fast track planning service".

The idea is that if you pay more, your plans get passed more quickly. I ask you this. If you are a big local property developer, who is paying lots of money for lots of "fast track" schemes, will your proposal be treated in the same way as a normal resident, who is struggling to make ends meet. This seems so open to abuse of process. It is a well known ploy for developers to submit plans at holiday times when potential objectors are away. If they are guaranteed a quick hearing, how will this benefit the regular citizens of Barnet who prop up the Council with thier council tax. They will come home from their summer hols to find that God knows what is going to be erected next to them, and they've missed the deadline to object.

Another proposal is to give everyone smaller bins. If you need extra rubbish removed, then you pay more cash. Now I'm all for reducing wastefulness, but this is a recipe for disaster. Have you ever ordered a skip? What happens? Well every time I've ordered one, I wake up to find it filled up with waste from my neighbours. I've even caught the shameless sods red handed. I'm sorry to say that if my experience there is anything to go by, then we are in for a lot more neighbourly disputes.

I don't go for any of these stealth taxes. Every new type of tax needs an army of bereaucrats to administer. There's a department to collect Income tax, a department to collect NI, a department to collect VAT, a department to collect Petrol Tax, a department to collect Road Tax, a department to collect dead baby tax, a department to collect booze tax, a department to collect cigarette tax,etc, etc.

I'd abolish most of them. Just have a different VAT rate for Ciggies & booze. Abolish road tax and put that on petrol (that way you pay as you go) abolish NI & put it on income tax, abolish dead baby tax and take it off councillors allowances. I'm not a flat tax advocate, but I am all for cutting out needless red tape. With most of these taxes, they bring them in, then they bring in a whole system of rebates & allowances. It's bonkers and it costs us a fortune to run. Personally, I'd rather see the money spent on something useful.

That's why I'd not let Mike Freer within a million miles of Parliament, if it was my choice.