The Tories are always harping on about the evils of regulations and "red tape".
Whenever they need an excuse for their latest attack on workers' rights they churn out the same old rhetoric about how the rules that protect us from unsafe working environments and unscrupulous bosses are burdensome "red tape" that needs to be cut back in order to increase "prosperity".
Just think about the way the Tories have abjectly failed to reform the financial sector after their appalling spree of reckless gambling and outright fraud crashed the economy. "We couldn't possibly burden the banks with regulations to stop them from paying themselves vast salaries as they resume exactly the same kind of unsustainable bubble inflation schemes that crashed the economy the last time around" say the Tories, because "regulations are bad for business".
Bearing in mind how much the Tories claim to hate regulations, it seems more than a bit strange that they're pushing ahead with plans to force all small businesses and self-employed people to start filling out their tax returns four times a year instead of once.
Lumbering millions of small businesses with so much additional bureaucracy seems to be completely at odds with the Tory rhetoric about their hatred of "red tape", so what is it actually all about?
One possible explanation is that the Tory party see small businesses and self-employed people as a threat to the large corporations and corporate fat cats who provide the vast bulk of donations to the Tory party. If the objective of the Tory party is to favour the interests of their large corporate donors, then tying up their small competitors with even more "red tape" would be a brilliant way of achieving it.
The more time small businesses and independent traders are forced to spend filling out tax returns, the less competitive they'll be against the giant corporations favoured by the Tory party (many of which use elaborate tax-dodging schemes instead of paying their fair share anyway).
In my view this whole ridiculous debacle is a huge gift for the opposition parties. An awful lot of small business owners and self-employed people have suffered under the absurd delusion that the Tory party looks after their interests, rather than the interests of the gigantic tax-dodging corporations who can afford to stuff vast sums of cash into the Tory party coffers.
This absurd Tory policy is an ideal opportunity for opposition parties to stand up for small businesses and the self-employed by vigorously opposing it. Whether the opposition parties are competent enough to choose to shoot at the open goal the Tories have presented them with is another matter entirely.
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