Liz had dreams of living in a Tax Free World! Part 1 By Alfred N.Muggins

14/10/22 / 17/10/22

     Liz had dreams of living in a tax free world where Public Services were just there and didn’t have to be paid for! Most things that you needed could be bought online over the internet (as long as your cards were working and they hadn’t asked complicated security questions that you couldn’t remember the answers to!) It would be like the Garden Of Eden all over again. Youthful people eating apples and free fruit, and not afraid of some work, and everything growing naturally, at a dramatic rate (if there weren’t enough employees you could always quickly alter the manifesto, without asking anybody, and suck a few more million low paid workers in from foreign countries, and even the old European Onion, to make up the shortfall! Easy peasy, what could possibly go wrong?)

    She would taste the ultimate power trip of actually being Prime Minister, which she had secretly liked the idea of for many years (ever since she was a little girl!) She would be able to test those plodding civil servants, and make their stuck in the mud lives far more exciting (She would run rings around them, delivering Growth and spend policies , on the hoof, so to speak, without being constrained by the need for taxation (or calculations!). It could all be put on the never never Public Borrowing Credit Card! Get the future taxpayers to pay for it all in the distant future, or when the SuperGrowth to come made it really easy to pay off!)

    Oh Yes, she would have fun in Whitehall, she had always liked stirring things up! Of course she was a bit of a nineties chick herself, and it was time to shake things up a bit at last! She was convinced, or had convinced herself that it was time to ‘Go For Growth! Say that word again and repeat! Growth! Growth! Growth!

    (Alfred wondered what that really meant? Could it possibly mean that everyone would grow an extra pair of legs, with which to stand at their chairless Bank Counters for longer, or an extra pair of arms, so they could put double the amounts of words and numbers on their computers and phones in the same amount of time? Or maybe they could grow an extra brain, with which to make even more money? Or so they could continue working even when their other brain was asleep?)

    Liz’s new plans to get most of the population back to work, doing 18 hour shifts looked very promising to Liz, but Alfred knew it was doomed to failure. He only had to look at himself. Despite him being given insufficient work at the moment by his employer of the last 20 years, he had got used to shorter and shorter work runs, (and hardly any work at all this week!) He had filled the gap with evermore unprofitable writing ventures and the aimless scrolling of facebook posts, in an attempt to impart his own wisdom to friends and the masses generally. But no one was really listening – the number of likes were going down, more than ever these days, just like the declining hours on his jobsheets. There was not much evidence that many people were reading his literary creations, or paying much attention to his shared posts.

    How could he ever get back to doing 8 or 12, let alone 18 hour shifts? He would be needing to sit down so frequently, and would be gasping for endless cups of tea (and coffee!) to keep himself going. And then there was the need for sleep, and the need for more time spent in call queues, and working out where to find his insurance documents on Emails in this Brave New Paperless World in which they all purportedly lived today in this Digital Universe! And don’t forget food! Surely they must all have time to eat as well!

    It seemed that many professions or work descriptions were short of labour these days – particularly since the Coronavirus Crisis, which had made nearly everyone lazy, or lazier than before. He knew that Liz wanted to get everybody back to work, but he wondered how she might achieve that if people didn’t want to?