We need to tax the grievance monkey unwashed Jocks until they squeak!

SPEECH TO 1922 COMMITTEE:

EXCELLENCIES,

I understand my plans for a series of tax cuts in the event of my becoming your Dear Leader have been rattling the chandeliers.

Some of you have even suggested that I haven’t thought through the implications of such measures. Once my advisers remind me again what the truth is I’m sure you’ll agree that nothing could be further from it. In the land of calumny, infamy and general, all-round disreputableness this is a vile scurrility.

And might I also add at this point that my tax proposals have actually been watered down from what I had originally proposed. I wanted to raise the 40p tax threshold to £150k. The initial cost of this could have been met by applying a series of stealth bombs on working class types seeking to make home improvements, like installing inside bathrooms and those padded cocktail bars they all seem to like in their bought council houses.

Many northerners have previously been accustomed to cramming – 10 of them at a time – inside a room and kitchen. If they want to live in a place with two bedrooms and even three we could have applied my version of the spare bedroom tax. If the hoi-polloi want to climb the social ladder then they should all jolly well realise that this comes at a price: if they want to scale the giddy heights then they need to pay the going rate (unless of course you’re Michael Gove in which case you just need to know the cheapest local dealer). I know of what I speak here as I’ve got the full box set of Shameless and The Royle Family. Indeed at Hallow’een my families all get to dress up as some of these characters.

I digress. Today I’d like to elaborate further on my tax plans. I’ve thought about this long and sometimes hard and I think the answer to stimulating our economy has been sitting underneath our noses all of this time.

It all started with Rees-Mogg and once I’ve rolled out the entirety of my enlightened tax regime this might even come to be known as Jacob’s Ladder. There we were discussing our respective personal tax defeasance plans over brandies at the Carlton Club. Jacob suddenly turned to me and said: “Do you know what, Boris. I’ve often wondered why we use such foreign fiefdoms as Panama, Belize and Liechtenstein to bury our hard-earned poppy.”

“Yes,” I replied, “I’ve often thought here we are preaching patriotism and supporting British industry yet we choose to bury our loot in bloody pirate republics. By jove, I’ve got it. What if we were to create our own pirate republics inside the United Kingdom?”

So this is what I’m proposing. We will turn most of the north into a tax haven. Yes that’s right, places like Sunderpool, Middlesbruff and Uddersfield. They’re always banging on about investment and powering up the North. We cancel all tax north of Birmingham and get the Saudis and the Russians to stick all their money into construction and infrastructure projects.

They get to own all of these new apartment and office blocks absolutely tax-free. What’s more: we also use their money to build those sprawling big pubs that the northerners like to go to with soft-play areas and large outside smoking spaces. We’d also build gazillions of amusement arcades, pigeon lofts and greyhound tracks. In fact, we create massive northern theme parks with all of these going on at the same time from dusk until dawn. And all of it absolutely free.

Who pays for this, I hear you ask. Well the indolent northerners do, of course. We tax them until the Maraschino cherries begin to squeak on top of their lager cocktails. But after we’ve built them their massive 24-hour play areas they won’t mind not having anything left in their pay packets to spend on booze and gambling because we will have provided these free.

Thus the north gets powered up until its sparkling; our Russian and Arab friends invest in it; the pound gets stronger; we all get to bury our profits closer to home and the northerners won’t mind paying for it because we’re providing everything that’s close to their heart for absolutely sod-all.

Bob’s your uncle and Fanny’s your auntie (and probably your mum too, as they say in the best aristocratic circles, what-ho).

Already I hear the usual grievance-monkeys in Scotland moaning that they’re effectively financing my tax cuts. But does anyone care? I mean, really. Has any seat in Scotland ever made the slightest measure of difference to a Tory election win? Margaret Thatcher won three bloody majorities when the Scots were under her heel. It seems the worse you treat them the less difference it makes.

We’ve been siphoning off all of their oil underneath their drink-sodden noses for 30 years without them noticing. And even when they did find out they still voted to stay in the Union. So I’ll have no more of this fear-mongering about my tax proposals threatening the Union. We all know we could turn Loch Lomond into a sewage facility and clear the Highlands again and they’d still want to keep hold of our coat-tails.

Indeed I’ve got further plans for the old sweaties up there in Jockoland. Most of them don’t know they’re living. Here we are in the over-crowded south-east, creating wealth; working our socks off and living on top of one another. Yet in Scotland they have all those mountains and lochs all to themselves. You can go hundreds of miles without seeing another living soul. I never thought I’d say this, but the problem with the jocks isn’t that there’s too many of them but there’s too few.

As such they’re a luxury and get to live in luxury surroundings and should thus be taxed. So, I propose we tax the living sodding daylights out of their wee bit hill and glen. Why should they get these spaces disproportionately to themselves without paying for it? I propose we tax the space that they live in and the very air that they breathe. And we’ll tax all of those wretched Munros they keep insisting on bagging.

That way, we might even keep a lot of the unwashed blighters away from them and prevent them traipsing through some of our precious grice-moors.

We’ll call it the Jock Tax. They keep telling us how their country is the most beautiful in the whole world; well it’s about time they were made to put their money where their mouth is.

Boris Johnson, June, 2019