Fiscal Subversion

British values are under attack in Austria, the rump of that unfortunate European empire which produced Mr Churchill's great contemporary. Like Adolf Hitler, who took the British Empire's moderate and sensible racism and violence to an unpalatable extreme by inflicting them on white people, an Austro-German heiress has disastrously misunderstood a fundamental tenet of liberal democracy: in this case, the moral imperative of donating to good causes as a tax dodge. She started badly by co-founding a pressure group campaigning for higher taxes, and has now taken the precipitately un-British action of putting most of her inherited wealth where her mouth is, relinquishing its control to a council of citizens. As a result, the money will be spent on non-profit issues such as homelessness, health and the environment, rather than on wealth creation as in the civilised world. Whether a Team Starmer government would be inclined to send a gunboat remains as yet unclear, but presumably the prospect has not been altogether ruled out.