While not pretending to know the specifics of British tax law, how about property taxes, capital gains taxes, inheritance tax is still possible, and any income tax. The goal would really be to break up Voldemort’s gang in a way the magic government is unable to.
You could probably just assassinate them. Consider this. Voldemort’s greatest advantage is the ignorance of his foe, but in truth he barely knows more about them than they know about him.
So the muggle Prime Minister finds out about the situation. What he should do is get some Ministry aurors (wizards who hunt evil wizards) in a room with a team of anthropologists and a team of spec ops, intelligence agency operatives, spies, whatever.
The Aurors are there to tell your elite team what defenses Voldemort has, as well as what Wizarding society is like. In order to hunt Voldemort and his death Eaters, you have to think like them, and the aurors know how they think better than anyone.
The problem is, your elite SAS team or whatever will have no idea what they actually need to ask, and if the wizards we see are any guide the aurors won’t know what to tell them either. That’s where the anthropologists come in - and maybe some muggleborn wizards who are relatively young, not old enough to have married into a Wizarding family and forgotten the mundane world’s assumptions but familiar enough with the Wizarding world.
Then you have all these people spend a month or two getting on the same page. Once that’s done, you have the aurors and SAS team plan a hit using the capabilities of both of them. Maybe the aurors use magic to help the SAS team get into position, for example.
Once all that’s done, Voldemort and his death Eaters lose the only advantage they have over the muggles. Now their own hubris is their downfall. Voldemort thinks muggles are lower then dirt - you think he has bothered to research the capabilities of their firearms? Even if Voldemort can stop a bullet and has supernatural reflexes that let him react the moment he hears a gunshot, you can use a supersonic round. Sure, maybe you could design a spell to protect against that. But is Voldemort the kind of guy who would bother to do so? Definitely not! The idea that a muggle weapon could end him wouldn’t even occur to him.
And even IF Voldemort senses your shot and whirls around to defend against it - his instinct will be to defend against a spell. Will that stop a bullet? That’s the sort of thing the aurors and SAS team will need to figure out, of course, but somehow - I doubt it.
Even if Voldemort’s horcruxes bring him back at this point, imagine for a moment the morale blow it would cause the Death Eaters to see their leader defeated by a MUGGLE. First a baby - now a muggle? That’s gonna cost him ALL his street cred.
Cricket, maybe, but tennis? Pshaw!
You hit a ball back and forth, and the one that misses loses a point. très simple. Now the scoring, sure.15-30-40-win, that’s odd, but it isn’t “score all you want, but whoever catches the snitch wins.” What a dumb game, on the ground or on brooms.
If I may go there…it hasn’t diminshed trump’s street cred with his true believers. And he can’t kill with a thought.
Neither is Quidditch.
That’s retcon. Only after someone that understands games pointed it out did Rowling “clarify” the game.
It’s a dumb game, but the snitch was never a victory, it was always 150 points
The movies got it wrong, but the books made it clear right from the start that catching the Snitch didn’t guarantee victory.
What did the WW do during WW2, specifically The Battle of Britain? [Cue image of a wizard on a broom chasing a Heinkel-111] Was their entire attitude that it didn’t matter to them in the slightest if the Germans conquered the UK? [Which seems a bit unlikely to me] WI the Germans had (as someone said upthread) their own Nazi Wizards? Would there then have been a huge shadow war going on in the WW while the conventional war raged? Why would the Nazi Wizards then stop at conquering the Allied Wizards, and not take over the Muggle Nazi leadership?
[Yeah I know good food for fanfic fodder there-wonder if someone has already done that]
There was a shadow war against Nazi wizards. The last book or two goes into some detail about it.
Except for your point about the PM just giving up I have pretty much the opposite opinion on everything.
It’s not obvious that the muggles will destroy the wizarding world but for sure there will be a lot of bloodshed. The wizards have decided that it’s safer and less violent to hide their existence rather than take on the muggles. Voldemort has no such qualms and is willing to kill as many muggles as necessary to take control. He conquered death so it’s not that crazy to think he could largely make himself immune to muggle weapons. Being able to teleport anywhere and immediately assassinate his (muggle) enemies is a powerful weapon.
But even if Voldemort did miscalculate is that much different from the Japanese decision to bomb Pearl Harbor? The Japanese military were ignorant of the US culture and they paid the same price as Voldemort.
Guarantee…no.
Pretty much always won the game? Yep. If the score is 140-0, and the team with zero catches the snitch they win. So, as I noted, all that scoring for the losing team meant nothing.
Yes, it’s a dumb sport that only makes sense if the goal is to let the protagonist shine every single game. To add tension to the quidditch cup external forces have to keep messing with Harry.
Quidditch without the snitch is a perfectly fine goal scoring game, except for its lack of a defined end point. But that’s easily fixed with a clock, a total score number, or any other number of ways a game can be ended. I’m not expecting a full rulebook for a physically impossible fictional game. The snitch, even without points, is too variable an end point to make it a good way to end a game and also makes for a bad spectator sport. It makes perfect sense if your narrative goal is to write a magical boarding school book and need another way to make your protagonist special.
And as I’ve said, that’s the problem with the series. Rowling is not a good enough writer to expand her scope beyond “Chosen One and friends at school” to a well realized world where the ideas she used early on are now causing issues with the greater world building.
Voldermort, at the height of his power and a full army, was unable to conquer a civilian boarding school for children. The idea that he could take over the human world is…questionable.
And if it’s 840 to 590, what then?
In short games, where the Snitch is caught quickly, it will usually decide the game. And Harry is unusually skilled, as school-level Seekers go, which tends to lead to short games. But short games are not the norm: We’re told that it’s not uncommon for them to last multiple days.
Now, granted, this does require the reader to extrapolate a few things that aren’t stated explicitly in the books: For instance, the pros use a different snitch, that’s much harder to catch than the ones used by schoolchildren. But that’s really not much of a stretch.
Really, the only problem with quidditch is that the Snitch score is an exact multiple of the Quaffle score, which makes tie games possible. It really ought to be worth either 155 or 145. The fact that we see some anticlimactic outcomes isn’t a result of the game itself, but of the fact that one player happens to be much better than the others.
They say games can last days, but could you even imagine what that would look like? It would be so boring. It’s a sport designed by someone who completely misunderstands sports and why people play them. But to her credit, it’s also accepted by readers who also don’t understand sports so it works for her books.
It’s a sport designed by the same person who came up with the Triwizard Cup, where an entire school gathers to stare at a lake and a hedge for hours until someone declares a winner.
As with any fantasy setting, at some point you just have to suspend disbelief and accept that there is only so much minutia the author is going to go into in order to build her world. It’s a fantasy book for and about children. In the context of the story, Harry Potter and his friends are a bunch of 11-18 year olds who have a gift that allows them to participate in this secret world of wizards and magic that most people don’t know or care about.
That said, it’s still not clear to me the relationship between the muggle and wizard world. For the most part, we only see such interactions through Harry’s relationship with the Dursleys. And for the most part, they behave as if your sister in law having magic powers and getting murdered by a wizard and your ward heading off to wizard school every fall is just sort of an unusual, but not out of the ordinary annoyance.
Suppose Voldy can stop a single bullet; can he stop two? Two hundred? Can he defend himself against a squad of SAS armed with semiautomatic carbines and a SAW? RPGs? An armored car?
I enjoyed Rowling’s stories, and I don’t demand a fully-realized, coherent world. But Jim Butcher has done a better job of thinking about the way magic works in the Dresdenverse, and when it doesn’t. There’s a scene in one of his short stories when a vanload of wizard-wannabes shows up at Harry Dresden’s house to take revenge on him for messing up their black magic. The leader declares, “Prepare to defend yourself!” Harry shrugs and pulls out his .44 revolver. “Ummm…what are you doing?” “I’m fixing to defend myself.”
I do need to cut some slack, it is very hard to invent a new sport, and many many writers fail at doing so. The best case is you usually get an existing sport with a strange name like “wizard ball” which is just like basketball except the ball glows or something.