Tyranny of the Month: Taxation Without Representation

Some two hundred and fifty years after the American Revolution, it's clear His Majesty's Government has forgotten the difficulties of taxation without representation.

Our satirical series, Tyranny of the Month, continues...

A. J. P. Taylor’s English History, 1914 - 1945, famously opens:

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport of any sort. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. … Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

How far we have fallen! Imagine, for a moment, if a person were to fall asleep in 1914 and wake up today in 2026. What might the man from 1914 say?

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Some two hundred and fifty years ago, an aggravated band of colonists picked up their firelocks and fowling-pieces, threw the equivalent of 18.5 million bags of tea into Boston harbour and gave the Crown a good kicking.

Their arms and methods had seemed quaint amid the modernity of 1914 but their actions were of great and not solitary effect. For those colonists were together joined in the righteous proclamation of a sentiment that all right-thinking people were forevermore bound to revere: that there shall be no taxation without representation.

Some two hundred and fifty years later, however, it seems His Majesty’s Government has forgotten the bother of scrubbing the tea stains off Boston harbour.

Thirty or so councils in England were told they would be allowed to delay their local elections in May 2026. For a number, this would have been a second year’s postponement. The afflicted councils were those local governments undergoing a scheme imaginatively christened in Whitehall “Local Government Reorganisation” (LGR).

Worse yet, a clear majority of the councils who flocked to this poisoned chalice were Labour-run, leaving even the most sensible of people to suspect that the delay was less about local government reorganisation and more about rearranging local Labour politicians’ employment affairs.

It is, of course, perfectly intelligible not to incur the great expense of reappointing councillors whose seats are soon to be abolished. But the delay calls to mind painful memories of when the British government attempted such exercises before. The further delay meant that some councillors could end up serving terms lasting six or seven years without fresh mandates.

All the while, those very councils pushing for delays have driven council tax bills sharply higher, hundreds of pounds more for the average household and roughly £280 million extra in total, according to research by the Taxpayers’ Alliance. In other words, much more taxation with less representation.

Is this not the same folly that sent those aggrieved Americans at Lexington and Concord into their fits of righteous indignation?

More or less every politician, civil-society figure and constitutional commentator not in the employ of the Labour government seemed to think so. Our democracy, fluid as it is under our uncodified constitution, is all the more susceptible to covert attack. Few examples are clearer than this colossal breach of the basic principle of representative government: there shall be elections.

Unlike most of our Tyranny of the Month articles, however, this one has a hopeful ending. After a legal challenge by Reform UK, the great scholars of the law in Whitehall thought twice and advised ministers that the whole sorry affair was on shaky ground. The government accordingly reversed course, and once again managed to send the ball directly backwards to score another spectacular own goal.

Yet we must not let this victory blind us to the totalitarian creep of ministers and civil servants in the name of “efficiency”. This is the second time these tactics have been attempted and only the first they have been checked. Meanwhile, the government still intends to limit jury trials to trim the court backlog, to rifle through our bank accounts in pursuit of welfare waste and to introduce digital IDs, the specific purposes of which they haven’t quite worked out.

As the technocratic statists’ tentacles attempt to throttle every aspect of social life, we must stand ready to bear the flame of liberty fiercely carried, so many years ago, by our transatlantic cousins. The dignity of the individual must be defended under that old rallying cry: no taxation without representation.