Jolyon Maugham is a tax barrister. Despite all rumours to the contrary I know a number of themand get on with most. Jolyon and I have yet to meet but I look forward to doing so and it is scheduled soon.
Jolyon is relatively rare in his profession. He is a member of the Labour Party and has had the courage to say so.
In relatively recent times he has begun an active engagement with Twitter and a blog.
As a result of a recent twitter exchange he has written a blog on the nature of the current tax debate called 'give peace a chance'. In it he characterises that debate as being between moralists (of whom he says I am the grandfather of them all, which might come as news to Margaret Hodge, Polly Toynbee and Alex Andreou, who are the others he named) and technocrats, with many of whom I, to be candid, now refuse to engage, but in whose numbers he appears to rank the likes of Mike Truman at Taxation magazine and some deeply libertarian members of the tax profession.
It's an interesting idea. For now I say no more. I am reflecting on it. And I will respond, but I am not expecting to embrace the idea.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
That would confine the debate to just two schools of thought which is just not true. And moralists can be highly technically knowledgeable (like yourself) and even technocrats can have a conscience.
The technocrats in question don’t have a conscience
I respect those that do, of course