It makes Buckingham Palace look quite utilitarian

It makes Buckingham Palace look quite utilitarian. As I say, I'm in Paris at the moment It's still a bit di erent rom London. Charmingly, the cyclists wearing helmets are outnumbered 10 to one by cyclists without. rench characters in comic books don't go Bang! Bang! They go Sbaw! Sbaw! Our car horns go honk honk! rench dri ers are rude: their horns go wank wank! In the brasseries they call Croque Monsieur, in a rather a ected way, Welsh Rarebit. But in odor's guide the delight ul sentence: "Americans may ind it di icult to ind No Smoking sections in restaurants."Their linguistic skills are ar superior to ours E en tiny children speak ery passable rench. And when adults want to thank you in English, as they so o ten do, they say something that sounds like "St Cloud Paris Match."simoncarr75 hotmail More rom Simon Carr. Stephen Byers called or the end o inheritance tax, pro oking squawks rom the Labour aith ul. Now a policy re iew set up by Da id Cameron is said to call or an unambiguous commitment to increase public spending, pro oking squawks rom the Tory aith ul - or at least rom John Redwood.

What gi es the current debate a certain spice is its unpredictability. Inheritance tax brings in relati ely little money, is expensi e to administer and seems to be particularly unpopular. Howe er or the attack on it to come rom a ormer Labour cabinet minister is undoubtedly interesting. Similarly or a Tory policy group to commit to more state spending on public ser ices not only cuts across pre ious Tory rhetoric but seems to run counter to the downward trend in Europe on tax le els.

Things may become interesting again. Or at least they will i people are prepared to ha e a rational discussion rather than ight rom political stockades built hal a century or more ago. That is why the Byers/Cameron initiati es are encouraging: they should make us dump preconceptions. The trouble is that there is no clear and accepted ramework or thinking about taxation, or more broadly about the role o go ernment, either here in Britain or anywhere else.So go ernments lounder around, launching tax policies that are utterly under-engineered or the tasks in hand. Here we ha e had endless experimentation with new tax incenti es that are subsequently modi ied or abandoned.In Germany they are about to increase AT to try to raise more re enue, when actually re enue has been coming up nicely and a hike in tax may so clobber Germany's modest reco ery that they may end up with less re enue, not more. In the US they ha e had a programme o tax cuts that, on paper, will end a ter a 10-year li e with tax rates going back to where they were at the beginning.