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The Miller household resembles a plague pit at the moment as the winter colds go on a full-blown assault on its occupants.

Despite this, at least we can comfort ourselves with the fact that plague victims are more popular than bankers at the moment.

The ditching of the rule of law to sate the baying hounds has been the most depressing aspect of events this past two weeks.

Ed Milliband has no reason to be smug; the decision by Stephen Hester to give up his £1m bonus resulted in a £900m loss for the tax payer as the markets reacted angrily to the implied state interference in RBS.

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And the decision to shred Fred Goodwin of his knighthood was pandering of the highest order and leads to more questions than it solves. After all, if he brought the honours system into disrepute, then surely Lord Archer has done so also, if only because of his crimes against literature?

Why did Goodwin not lose his pension as well? Well it was contractual, said Labour when they were in power. So was Hester’s bonus.

In fact Hester’s bonus was implicitly linked into performance. The bonus was based on shares that would mature in three years time - if RBS didn’t perform, he wouldn’t get a very good bonus. Isn’t this exactly the type of bonus that we always want from company leaders?

Now, of course there is an argument over a state-controlled bank and bonuses. But RBS was explicitly told to run like a commercial bank and has done so until the political machinations of Milliband and the vacuity of David Cameron led to someone, who by all accounts has done a very good job at RBS, being served on a platter to satisfy the pound of flesh crowd.

Politicians always bang on about how they are accountable to the voters but they strut about to the whims of the loudest voices.

And they do so using our money.

The PAYE system allows politicians to spend our money without any real accountability. There has been a fiction that has been created that allows them to hand back part of our money in the form of tax credits, pat us on the head and send us on our way; a fiction that allows a client state to be created; that allows politicians to genuinely argue that £26,000 a year benefit cap is too low; that disconnects the taxpayer from his money and disconnects the voter from the idea that he is the chairman of the board.

We are like frogs in warm water. The tax system slowly bleeds us and we don’t realise until it’s too late.

For those who self-assess, I say it is their duty to avoid tax. If the rules allow it, don’t pay the full amount.

Governments for far too long have got used to spending billions of our money without true accountability. If we scrapped PAYE, we would have our money. Governments would have to justify spending our money as we would finally realise - thanks to the once-a-year hit - the waste in our system. Politicians with their pet schemes would have to argue in public why such spending is justified. It would make them accountable.

It would make them accountable in a way that they never have been for the past 75 years.  It would make them as accountable for performance as Stephen Hester is - or rather was before he had to ditch his bonus - in a way our current system doesn’t allow.

Once we ditched the idea that it is state money and that it is our money, we may even find that politicians would have to think about their actions rather than waste time on political point scoring.

Political point scoring that sends out the wrong signals to businesses worldwide at a time when, thanks to the lunacy of Sarkozy, we couldn’t be better placed to capitalise on the hoped for upturn.

Simon Miller is the Editor of Financial Risks Today. He tweets at @simontm71 

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