We need to make the case for taxation. It’s not a glamorous topic, but its importance is too regularly undervalued. Too often the irrational fear of government leads to the belief that the state is wasting your money – and it is this assumption which compels Ben Gummer’s Ten Minute Rule Motion, today.

The argument is that the way our tax is spent should be more transparent, that taxpayers should receive a statement of how their money is spent, outlining the proportion spent on, say, welfare compared to defence.

Conservative Party deputy chairman Michael Fallon, quoted in this month’s issue of Total Politics, has said: ‘It’s about making tax more transparent. And once tax is transparent, it’s possible for people to encourage their politicians to get it down’. Likewise Tim Montgomerie at ConservativeHome writes: ‘These tax statements could be a powerful way of increasing awareness of the tax burden and therefore they could create further downward pressure on the tax burden’.

It’s true that many people are automatically wary of the virtue of tax and don’t feel they should have to pay as much as they do, but this is because no one is making the case for it as a good thing in and of itself. And if your motivation for introducing a motion to make tax more transparent rests on the belief that we pay too much or that the government is reckless in how they spend it, then you’re pandering to this attitude.

Our attitude to tax should not be ‘how do I benefit from what I pay in’, nor should we get to decide whether the government spends more on my child’s education than it does on welfare. Often even strong defenders of tax fall into this trap, justifying its existence by reference to the infrastructure it funds, rather than making a more fundamental case for its value.

Tax is about a civic duty, borne out of recognition that, when we succeed, we owe much of that success to the society which allowed us the opportunity. Our attitude to the NHS loosely fits into this mould; most consider they have an obligation, if they can afford it, to help provide healthcare for those who can’t. But our approach to tax could go even further – all it takes is for us to admit that no matter how gifted and talented an individual is and regardless of how hard they work, they wouldn’t have been able to achieve that success had they been born in the slums of Delhi rather than the relative privilege of the UK. We should therefore feel obligated, not reluctant, to pay tax. This motion has support because too many assume that tax is a bad thing and that fewer people would wish to contribute if they knew better how it was spent. These attitudes need to be challenged.

With the obvious radical exceptions, it still remains that countries where a more statist approach to taxation takes place tend to have a smaller gap between rich and poor. The US, as Obama last night reminded us in his state of the union address, has one of the most unequal distributions of wealth of developed nations. High tax and spend economies in northern Europe are characterised by their egalitarian societies. A more transparent tax system may not be a bad thing, as long as we remember that success is rarely just the product of our own endeavour.

Tags: Ben Gummer, State of the Union, Tax