Does Theresa May really think higher taxes would be the worst thing about communist Britain?

In the hundred years since the Bolsheviks stormed the St Petersburg Winter Palace, attempts to replace capitalism with communism are estimated to have led directly to the deaths of between 84 million and 95 million people worldwide.

But the real tragedy is that, on each of these attempts, Theresa May was not on hand to warn of the dangers of overthrowing capitalism and avert the crisis.

On Sunday, in an interview live on the BBC, lifelong socialist and shadow chancellor John McDonnell answered very clearly that “yes” he does want to overthrow capitalism.

It meant that May had a full 72 hours to work on precisely how she would shoehorn this remarkable admission into her answers at Prime Minister’s Questions.

“And what did we learn this week?” she said, in reply to a question about something else entirely. “That the Labour Party and the shadow chancellor want to do? They want to overthrow capitalism. What would that mean?”

Hyperinflation? Mass executions? Manmade famine? No. May had reached into the dark heart of the Tory soul and found something all together more horrifying. What would the overthrow of the capitalist system mean?

“It would mean families paying higher taxes!” she boomed.

It is at this point you have to feel sad that May just wasn’t around with her stark warning about the dangers of overthrowing capitalism at various places around the world at various moments of the last century.

If only May had been there, staring out of the palace gates on that cold St Petersburg night in 1917, meeting the encroaching red army with her dead-eyed stare.

“You know what this will mean don’t you? Families paying higher taxes, that’s what.”

Had this happened, of course, Leon Trotsky and the rest would have immediately apologised for getting carried away and shuffled off home.

Years later, when Joseph Stalin was encouraging children to “inform” on their own parents to the secret police and thus hasten their demise, the real crime, of course was that these families were paying higher taxes just for the privilege of being executed. How tragic to think all this could have been avoided, if only May’s stark warning had been delivered on time

Likewise, historians continue to argue about precisely how many tens of millions of people died of starvation during Mao Zedong's entirely manmade famine of 1958 to 1962 in China. Indeed the scholarly work on the subject if anything brushes over the more important aspect, which Theresa May should have been on hand to point out. “You know what this will mean, don’t you? This great leap forward? Families paying higher taxes.”

When reports emerged from North Korea last year, of public executions carried out by strapping so-called traitors to tank guns then firing them skyward, the real horrors were if anything glossed over. Who even mentioned that these dead people’s families would be paying higher taxes for all this larking about? Absolutely no one.

It is not commonly remembered that it took the armies of Khmer Rouge, hiding in the eastern jungles of Cambodia, almost a decade to amass the required numbers to overthrow the Khmer Republic, a course of action that would lead directly to more than a million executions in the country’s notorious killing fields in the late 1970s. That, frankly, should have been time enough for someone to warn what all this would lead to. “Familes paying higher taxes,” that’s what.

So anyway, when McDonnell and the rest do end up overthrowing capitalism and your own kids have shopped you to the secret police – a frankly shocking display of gratitude for all the rats you’ve barbecued them over a grate made from a discarded shopping trolley – don’t pretend you weren’t warned about the penny on income tax you’re paying to properly fund the NHS.