My Dutch friends and colleagues, however, coughed up willingly. Tax rates were very high – 52 per cent on earnings higher than about €55,000 a year – but I never heard the kind of bloody-thieving-taxman grumbling that echoed around offices in Britain on payday. One well-paid friend’s cheerful comment that ‘the government takes a lot out of my bank account in taxes, but they put a lot back in there as well’ was typical.
