Why election candidates shouldn’t have to publish their tax returns

Remember all the stuff Liberal Democrats such as Vince Cable have been saying for years about how our tax system catches too much income and not enough wealth? You know what – I believe that, and I haven’t suddenly forgotten it in the last few days.

So the idea that getting people to publish their tax returns really gives you a sense of how well-off they are is as flawed as the idea that the tax system those returns illustrate manages to catch how well-off you are. For the same reason that the tax system is out of kilter, so too is the information you get from people’s tax returns. Huge wealth can barely figure in them.

But it’s not just Liberal Democrats I agree with. I even, ssssssh!, agree with Ken Livingstone. Well, a little bit. He may have had convenient political reasons for calling for the tax figures from the households of candidates to be published and not just those from the candidates themselves. But he did actually have a fair point that often you cannot really understand one person’s income and wealth, or indeed their attitude towards paying over tax, without also understanding that of the other people in their household.

Is someone aggressively trying to minimise the amount of tax they pay? If you want to know that, you can’t just look at their own tax return. That raises a rather thorny problem. Do you really count a spouse as financially part of the same unit as the candidate? Moving from household to individual taxation was a good move forward for equality, treating people in their own right rather than as someone else’s appendage.

But can you really ignore the household arrangements if you are getting into publishing the tax affairs of a candidate? Think of that aggressively tax minimising politician whose activities you perhaps want to be brought to light. You think they’re suddenly going to soft-pedal on how finances can be arranged within their household and you’ll get a full picture from just their own tax return?

Of course not, so better through in the tax return for their spouse too. To hell with the privacy of spouses it is then. Oh, and hang on… What about the children? Or parents? Remember all those questions about trusts for children and trusts from parents that have come up in the news in the last few years? Transparency needs to catch them too.

But wait: all this is ok in the name of avoiding politicians who are hypocrites? Bit of transparency keeps them nice and honest, hey? Just a shame if a few others have to sacrifice privacy along the way too, but remember the big picture of transparency and honesty?

Well, I’m partial to a bit of transparency and honesty. But a good test of any claimed principle – to see if it really is a decent principle or just shoddy anger dressed up in a fake shroud of respectability – is to try it out in a slightly different scenario.

So let’s take an area where politicians frequently make decisions and express views in public. And where there is something about their private affairs which will reveal if they are being hypocritical or secretly furthering their own interests.

In fact, let’s take “private affairs” literally and have the complete sexual history of each candidate published. How else can we know if they are being a hypocrite or not when talking of marriage? Best insist on details of any and all contraception involved when it’s mixed-sex arrangements too, as you never know when they’ll be voting on a health budget for contraceptive advice or pontificating on the size of other people’s families.

Or perhaps, just possibly, the forced revelation of a politician’s private life should be the rare exception and not the eagerly desired norm?