BY the time you read this, you will know how much Prudence has pinched for his purse. Everyone knew Gordon Brown was putting up taxes in today's Budget, what we didn't know was how, and by how much.

This tax hike was very necessary, of course, to pay for essential services. And what could be more essential than keeping MPs in the fine style to which they have become accustomed?

Their total remuneration package, with allowances and expenses, is now worth £150,000, plus a hefty pension. And no one would begrudge top civil servants their 50 per cent pay increase, as recommended by the Senior Salaries Review Body: these guys will then have to scrape by on £200,000 a year.

Add in all the extra salaries we pay to Tony's army of special advisers, and you start to wonder if, even after the Budget, we are making enough of a contribution. I shall be writing out a cheque this evening to Alastair Campbell, to supplement the PM press secretary's meagre £125,000 wage.

Mind you, if the Chancellor hadn't recklessly doled out 10p an hour more to workers on the minimum wage, perhaps this country could afford to pay its spin doctors a decent whack.

The rest of today's tax rises will go towards health, education and life's other little luxuries. Under instruction from his boss not to touch income tax, the fairest way to raise revenue, our Gordon has always come up with some pretty ingenious ways to sting us for the readies - like raiding pension funds.

Then there are the traditional targets: fags, booze, cars. Successive Chancellors use "punitive" taxation to stop us smoking, driving and drinking. And what a success that has proved.

If the Treasury is willing to make judgements on moral, rather than purely fiscal, grounds, then why stop at these items? There are plenty of things I should love to see taxed out of existence.

The filthy rich, for one. The wealthiest man in Britain is Hans Rausing, whose fortune is worth £4.5 billion but who, an investigation in the Guardian discovered, uses legal loopholes to pay a tiny amount to the Inland Revenue.

And while we're there, let's make the Royal Family pay inheritance tax.

Next, let's tax bad television. Any show that involves a makeover - hair, clothes, house or garden - should be forced to pay so much money to the Chancellor that it would be cheaper leaving everything alone. And there should be a 100 per cent tax on the public appearance of Alan Titchmarsh.

And why not an "Okay!" tax on showbiz parties? Using a sliding scale, the greater the cleavage revealed, the more tax the organisers pay, plus a special surcharge if a contestant from reality TV shows up. That should spare us endless pictures of sparkling frocks - and make the taxman's job far more interesting.

GRUMPIER columnists than me have long advocated a zero tolerance approach to crime. And York is blazing just such a trail. Library users who return their books late are now instantly labelled "delinquent" by censorious computers. Staff say this is a software problem which will be fixed. As a stickler for law and order, I say: nonsense!

If anything, we should make more of a show of these miscreants. As soon as the bar code scanner detects an overdue volume, it should set off buzzers and flashing lights, summoning the head librarian to deliver a public ticking off to the errant bookworm.

That would certainly teach my three-year-old, who routinely fails to return his library books on time.

Next week: how the death penalty would stop cycling on the pavement.

Updated: 11:08 Wednesday, April 17, 2002