This is a two-parter, albeit linked. If you’re interested in the duplicitousness of British journalists, then keep reading. If you’re only interested in self-destructive British tax policy, skip to the middle.
Burnt repeatedly by hacks who pretend to be enraptured by my latest novel while snooping through my cupboards, I long ago learned the hard way not to let British journalists into my home. Thus for years I only conducted interviews in the safely impersonal lobby of a West End hotel. But lessons learned are too often lessons lost. That may be an overly kind formulation of: I am an idiot. In my new hang in Portugal, I reverted to gormless naivety last month and let a British journalist into my house.
As ever, the Daily Telegraph feature writer doing the first interview for my new novel, A Better Life, was pleasant, courteous and friendly. This is a controversial book about a fiercely divisive subject, immigration. My unexamined expectation that, of the broadsheets, the Telegraph would be the most likely to send an open-minded interviewer betrayed more naivety. Journalists take jobs where they find them, and the staff of conservative newspapers are all too often raving wokesters.
Well, punish work, get less of it. Punish my work, get less of me
Sure enough, the resultant profile seems to confirm that this woman hates my politics, hates me personally and hates my book. She appears to have arrived already planning to skewer all three. I might have noticed. But while many people assume that novelists are especially observant, apparently we’re just as thick and credulous as everybody else.
We spoke for two hours, but the profile includes little of that conversation’s meat – the book’s themes and characters, the complexities of the immigration debate. Typically for British journalism, the text relies heavily on inference, while taking no responsibility for the conclusions readers are meant to draw.
For example, there’s a weird alcohol thread. Apropos of nothing, she describes a half-empty bottle of wine corked on the dining table (meaning I didn’t finish it, my dear). Granted, I’d remarked that the perk of inheriting a massive, magnificent corner piece in the sitting room – a curved dark wood and grey marble alcove writhing with carved grape vines – helped sell us on the house. Yet this mention reduced to: the only reason we bought the house was that it had a bar. Not this uniquely entrancing bar. A bar. Then she has me saying moronically: ‘We mostly use it to store liquor.’ Why would I ever have said that? It’s self-evident. What else do you use a bar for? I wouldn’t have used that word ‘liquor’. How does any of this booze blather relate to my new novel or my career? These otherwise pointless inclusions are meant to insinuate that Shriver has A Problem.
I’m quoted as wanting to be a writer since I was nine – whereas I’ve repeated numbingly for decades that I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was seven. The tiny inaccuracy is a tell. The quotes don’t sound like me because the journalist wasn’t likely working from a word-for-word transcript. Yet apps will now effortlessly transcribe audio for you.
Although I did observe that the London I left is no longer an ethnically English city – factually true – the biggest inaccuracy in that profile is slanderous. Apparently the sole reason I left the UK was to get away from the country’s immigrants. More inference: Shriver is a nut and a bigot.
Setting the record straight, let’s segue to part two. My reluctant departure from Britain was motivated by a crowded basket of push and pull factors. Yet one prospect tipped the balance, amounting to the straw that broke the camel’s British residency: the upcoming HMRC policy to require the self-employed to file tax returns five times a year. When I first encountered these plans – which mandate that freelancers upload to government-approved software (hence to government) every single receipt – I thought: that’s the limit. I refuse. You cannot make me, and if you’re intent on imposing this death-by-bureaucracy, I will leave. So, note to HMRC: please mark me down as one of the loads of self-employed workers ensuring your unreasonable new obligations will backfire for the Exchequer.
Articles and comment sections are chocka with older entrepreneurs announcing that, thanks to this onerous, complex and laborious regime, they are retiring early and closing shop. Many younger self-starters will think twice about being their own boss. An HMRC spokesman assures us, inanely, ‘“Making Tax Digital” will make it easier for sole traders and landlords to get their tax right by providing a more real-time overview of their finances, freeing up their time to focus on growing their business’. Really? Why not file ten times a year, then, or every day? In truth, vastly increased electronic paperwork is apt to generate more errors, not to mention more fury. There’s nothing ‘easy’ about a thicket of new reporting requirements. The claim that the regime will ‘free up time’ is an insult to our intelligence.
This innovation is surely about control. HMRC may suspect that the self-employed are big cheats. They mightn’t fancy taxpayers whose wages they can’t garnish at source. So maybe they’re happy to discourage being a sole trader. There’s a reason that ‘the process is the punishment’ has become a cliché. This extraordinary administrative demand – on top of quarterly VAT reporting for many – seems deliberately punitive. Well, punish work, get less of it. Punish my work, get less of me. For this former British taxpayer, the only alternative to fleeing the UK before this torturous regimen comes into force in April would have been organising widespread civil disobedience. File five times per year, upload every receipt? We simply won’t. Alas, in battles with tax authorities, guess who usually wins.
A kicker on that interview, by the way. The journalist objected in the profile that I never offered her a glass of water. That’ll teach me! Now every time my HarperCollins publicist rocks up, I exclaim the moment she crosses the threshold: ‘Do you want some WATER?’ So I got one thing out of that hatchet job: a great running joke.
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