The great domestic political question of the 20th century was whether the state's tax rates should be set to benefit the working or middle class. The great domestic political question of the 21st ought to why the working and middle classes should pay taxes when the rich are all but exempt.

For the time being, few defenders of the status quo want to discuss it. When, for instance, you raise the case of Philip Green, who takes hundreds of millions of pounds from taxpaying shoppers in BHS and stashes them in companies held in his wife's name in Monaco, they reply that however ugly and unpatriotic his behaviour looks, it doesn't matter.