While a few leftwing dinosaurs here busy themselves with the plight of the low-waged whose tax bills are about to rocket under the new 20% starting rate, an Argentine writer has been applying himself to wider questions of social injustice. Gonzalo Otalora has written a book entitled ¡Feo! (Ugly!), which calls for the taxation of good-looking people to counteract the natural advantages they have over munters. "Countless studies show that ... it's easier for them to find jobs; they're paid more and find partners more easily," he says. The "manifiesto del feosexual" also calls for the levy to be donated to the ugly, and for photo requirements on job applications and airbrushing in magazines to be outlawed.
As you may possibly have already suspected, the genesis of Mr Otalora's tome lies in his years as a pallid, bespectacled, bepustuled youth in Buenos Aires, where he stood out like a sore, myopic thumb amid his buff compatriots and - reading entre los versos - found it very difficult to find someone to have sex with him as often as he would have liked. Some men would simply have retired, defeated - or moved to Britain - but Otalora used his experiences to formulate his radical policy of redistributive justice for the greater good.
¡Feo! is already a bestseller in Argentina, but despite Otalora's urging to change the law, president Cristina Kirchner has as yet given no sign of acquiescence - possibly because it could hit the famously glamorous ruler in her own pocket.
In Britain, of course, we would have less of a political hurdle to overcome, as our sturdy leader has been bred for stomping around the grounds of a manse in Kirkcaldy rather than insinuating himself round the luscious forms of sultry tango dancers. And it would find ready acceptance amongst the populace at large, though it might need to be adapted to our own cultural specifics. We could either tax all celebrities or have a 24-hour-a-day reality show in which every member of society is assessed as taxably hot or not by a panel of vituperative judges. Rebates, in fairness, to be made available to late bloomers.
