While a few leftwing dinosaurs here busy themselves with the issues of taxation of the low-waged, 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

(ugly people).

“Countless studies have shown 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 employment 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, be pustuled youth in Buenos Aires, where he stood out like a sore, myopic thumb amid his buff compatriots and — reading entre los versos — found it extremely difficult to find someone to have sex with him as often as he would have liked to.

Some men would simply have retired, defeated — or moved to the United Kingdom — but Otalora used his bitter personal experiences to formulate his radical policy of redistributive justice for the greater good of humanity, at large.

Feo! is already a bestseller in Argentina, but despite Otalora’s urging to change the law so as to make it more fair and just, president Cristina Kirchner has as yet given no sign of acquiescence — possibly because it could hit the famously glamorous ruler in her own pocket.

Here in the United Kingdom, 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 Scottish manse rather than insinuating himself round the luscious forms of sultry tango dancers.

And it would find ready acceptance among the people here in the United Kingdom , 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.