Everyone should pay their fair share

Gary Barlow may be a national treasure, but this week we all learnt something about him that casts him in a different light. A tribunal ruled that Barlow, Howard Donald, Mark Owen and many others must re-pay millions of pounds of tax. An MP called on Barlow to return his OBE. And then David Cameron went on the telly to say he shouldn't. To be honest, I don't care too much about the honour, but I do care about the money.

I'm fed up with people moaning about tax and talking about our public services as if they're a drain on our wealth. Public services are our wealth. They're the thing that makes us prosper. And paying tax is the social agreement we all have with each other to chip into the pot. When you stash your money away, out of sight of HMRC, you're breaking that agreement.

Next week we have the local and European elections where we decide who gets to have a say over how to spend what's in the pot. What the people we elect believe will determine what they spend our money on. Gary Barlow may be a millionaire, but presumably he went to school, uses our hospitals and police and drives on our roads? Our taxes fund all of these public services. They're the safety net that should ensure everyone in our society, whatever their needs, abilities or luck, has a decent quality of life. Without the rich paying their fair share, it falls to us to pay more than ours.

I'm standing for the Green Party in both the local and European elections. In our campaign we've spent a lot of time talking about the growing inequality in our society. Many people I speak to accept this as inevitable. But it isn't. And a more progressive tax system is one way to make our society more equal.

The Green Party is calling for significant reform of our tax system. It must be fairer and it must also be more transparent - companies must tell us where they do business, the profits they make and what tax they pay. The Lib Dem-Conservative coalition has come under increasing pressure to take action on tax avoidance, but has taken little action. Companies such as Amazon continue to get away with paying just 0.1% tax. Mr Barlow may well be writing a large cheque to the government sometime soon, but it's time we took action to ensure that everyone pays their fair share.