When Gordon Brown introduced the 50p tax rate he said that “it is right that those that earn more should pay more”. Obviously that is except if they sit around his cabinet table.  If members of the cabinet paid tax on their perks like the rest of us they would be well inside the £150,000 / 50p tax bracket.  In awarding themselves tax-free perks they evade paying the higher tax rate.   A cabinet salary package, with grace and favour residence thrown in, is worth well over £250,000.

Government limousines go untaxed, whereas company cars are heavily taxed.  £400 a month for groceries is a tax-free perk for politicians, whereas anything more than a couple of quid subsistence sandwich is taxed for the ordinary travelling salesman.  The mortgage subsidy alone is worth some £40,000, it is a tax-free perk for cabinet members.  Stamp duty is not a tax that troubles those who tax us, they charge it to us taxpayers.  Against clear HMRC rules they even charge the cost of tax advice to the taxpayer.

Taxpayers have seen their burden go up and up while the governing classes live like Soviet era nomenklatura, above the law with untaxed perks denied to ordinary workers.  This is spitting in the faces of taxpaying voters.