Today on Twitter Juliet McKenna pointed us to this article in The Guardian which claims that a substantial proportion of the UK population would become self-employed were it not for all of the red tape involved. It is odd to see the The Guardian complaining about bureaucracy, but then again it is odd for The Telegraph to have some of the best trans coverage in UK media. We live in interesting times.

Juliet rightly highlights the EU’s disastrous new VAT rules which are driving large numbers of very small companies out of business, and forcing others (like mine) to trade solely through giant multi-nationals like Amazon who constrain what we can do and take a substantial slice of our profits.

However, the UK government is by no means blameless in this area. Their latest wheeze is to require self-employed people to file four tax returns a year instead of one. I can see no logical reason for this. It isn’t going to change the amount of tax we pay in the long run, and any gains that might result from more efficient collection are pretty certain to be wiped out by the cost of processing four times the amount of information.

For self-employed people, it might mean that tax bills yo-yo slightly less dramatically (which they have done ever since the government decided to charge an estimated bill 6 months in advance), but it means a lot more work and, in many cases, a lot more money spent on tax accountants.

It is hard not to come to the conclusion that governments these days view self-employed people as an unnecessary irritation, and they’d like to put a stop to such things if they possibly can.

There’s a petition about the new tax rules on the Parliament website. I see it is already more than half way to the number of signatures required to force a debate on the issue. If you are a UK citizen and are self-employed, or enjoy the artistic output of people who are self-employed (which means pretty much all authors, artists, actors and musicians) then you should sign.