In last weeks Sunday Telegraph Boris Johnson set out a manifesto for envy and privilege, pointing out that society failed to care for and love the uber-wealthy “the type of people who never wear the same shirt twice, even   though they shop in Jermyn Street, and who have other people almost   everywhere to do their bidding: people to drive their cars and people to   pick up their socks and people to rub their temples with eau de cologne” It is hard to read this with any degree of seriousness, surely Boris is just having a bit of fun? Most of the article is a critique of the nature and nurture of the wealthy people that Boris has in mind, and a subtle attempt to promote the value of the Govian educational reforms and to challenge the idea of ‘high levels’ of business rates, which seems a bit odd as he is actually promoting the values of tax payment. He does of course get a comment in about privilege of birth, suggesting that this or luck are the alternative routes to taking advantage of intelligence and risk taking. As a legislator it seems rather despairing that Boris cannot see how limited this perspective is. We need to improve the structure of our support for entrepreneurial endeavour, irrespective of whether this is in order to create economic or social outcomes or even to improve the public sector.

There is however one serious proposal in the article: “In fact, we should stop publishing rich lists in favour of an annual list of the top 100 Tax Heroes, with automatic knighthoods for the top 10.” At present many of the richest donors to our main parties already get rewarded in this way, as long as Boris is suggesting that these knighthoods will replace all of the party based knighthoods, that we change the emphasis from rewards for people who help the parties, for rewards for people help the country, then I think Boris is onto something. I also think that shifting the focus from people who earn a lot, but avoid most of the tax, to those who pay the tax that they should that there is some merit here. Perhaps we could also ask for knighthoods to be removed from people who evade tax and also those who go to extreme measures to avoid paying tax. People like Michael Green!

Assuming that Boris is serious and this is an attempt to really focus on tax heroes, the part of the argument which this wealthy, part time socialite appears to have left unwritten is the part which refers to those who pay large amounts of tax as a proportion of their income. These people are also heroes. There are of course many more of these people than the people Boris has written about. His focus is on people whose tax payments are significant by the absolute sums paid out, sums that the other group might spend a whole lifetime earning, but the test of any policy is its effect on diverse groups. Just as Boris feels that we need to be inspired to create wealth and jobs, we and perhaps most importantly our law makers need to understand how hard it is for people on low incomes to pay a high proportion of their income on tax.