I don’t know about a ‘full house’ but own a big house and you’re toast…if the BBC has its way.
Listening to Today (around 07:25) and the BBC journo was interviewing Lord Turner, in charge of not regulating the banks at one time.
Said journo stated that he thought the housing market was creating inequality and that we must surely have a ‘mansion tax’.
Nice, as always, to have a BBC journo’s opinion inserted as ‘fact’ into a news programme along with his solution….nothing to do with Cameron clearly stating in PMQs that he would fight this unjust tax?
Whilst I personally think the mansion tax would be a terrible introduction to the tax regime in this country, it is fair to say (I think) that the BBC are starting to get into campaign mode on this issue.
I think it is also fair to say that it is possible to see that in 20 years time this may have been introduced to the country (if you look at what was mooted back in the 80’s and derided then as loony left, and compare with the current situation).
Having said that, Ed Conway (the Sky bloke) wrote about the unintended consequencies of pension reform in his excellent blog earlier in the week.
http://www.edmundconway.com/2014/03/why-george-osbornes-pensions-reforms-matter-so-much-and-why-ed-miliband-needs-to-confront-them/
Labour seem to be prepared to accept pension reform, although probably not in the same form as that proposed, so there will be plenty for the BBC to get their teeth into over time. It is clear though the way they are moving.
Mansion tax? How about our politicians look at the current house tax, the council tax?
I’ve been paying more than my neighbours for 25 years now because their houses have never been revalued.
Wonder where the Benn Estate will find itself, once the reading of the wills is done?
A Palace for the People?…or yet more money to ensure that the likes of his grandaughter Emily gets that MPs seat in a rotten borough of Labourland.
And how many bedrooms does Adair Turner or Jim Naughtie have..let alone Polly Toynbee?
And how many of those spare rooms actually house a Somali refugee or an amateur ricin chemist…or wannabe boiler house fraudster from the old Communist bloc?
Can we take a guess?
I myself would allow squatting in the likes of Chris Huhne or Dennis MacShanes house-a database for when prisoners houses become empty, and then re-allocate said properties to those outside who are NOT criminals.
They can go to court once they`re let out again-but it would relieve the housing shortage for all of eight weeks anyhoo!
Someone like Chris Huhne is a fantastic example of why the mansion tax is so wrong, and so inequitable.
Owner of 9 properties (at the last count) all of which are apparently independently valued beneath the notional £1m mark, but as a whole exceed that threshold cumulatively, he would obviously escape any mansion tax.
There are other reasons why it is a bad idea of course…
Seems like we’ve crossed the Rubicon of taxing people a proportion of the value of what they already own. There’s not enough taxes from taxing us on a proportion of what we earn and a proportion of what we spend. BBC and politicians could never conceive of maybe spending less of our money.
The idea of confiscating a part of a person’s stuff because they own too much seems immoral and deeply stupid to me.
Why should I work hard to pay off the mortgage I needed to buy a really nice house if the government is going to make me sell it to pay the tax they’ve decided to impose on me for owing the nice house.
At a stroke they’ve removed the incentive that underpins capitalism. I’ll get a better life dossing around in a council house producing a bunch of feral children.
Sometimes I wonder if the political class, in which I include the BBC, are stupid or incompetent – then I generally recognise that this is a false dichotomy – it’s obviously both.
Essentially, HMG has long ago run out of money to spend on all the bells and whistles that politicians like to hand out to deserving causes and make themselves feel good, and therefore need to find new sources of income either from downsizing things (Armed forces etc) or from
confiscatingtaxing things that they’ve never touched before, usually by requiring a licence to be taken out, a training course to be gone on (plus tasty annual renewal fee). When this still doesn’t provide enough (and it never will so long as the state refuses to shrink) then more ‘overt’ methods are employed, e.g. McDoom’s pensions grab (the current lot are apparently looking to add their own wrinkle to this in the near future), moving tax bands around to trap more mugs or this little number here being floated once more. No doubt this one will be spun as something along the lines of the rich being forced to pony up their fair share for the rest or some such Bennite tribute nonsense, rather than the highway robbery that it actually is but then highwaymen at least took the trouble to rob you openly and didn’t expect you to trudge round to Casa Turpin and deposit the readies as a matter of course.“trudge round to Casa Turpin and deposit the readies as a matter of course.”
At least, Dick Turpin had the decency to wear a mask when he was robbing his victims.
talking about full houses,it is going to be a full house down radio 5 lives manchester hq tommorow for the big 20th anniversary bash for the radio 5 live presenters and there hangers on,god knows how much that is going to cost us,but before the party is the big finale,at 4pm tommorow on the drive show the posh sounding peter allen and the plum in her throat jane garvey are going to be reunited for the fist time in 10 years to present the drive show,they have promised a special finale,i cant wait for that,anyway,not to be a sour puss, i wish radio 5 live and there presenters past and present a happy 20th annivesary party tommorow and may the champayne and caviar flow because you well deserve it.umm.
I wonder how many people reading these pages consider themselves unlikely to be paying this tax?
Well think again!
Under the Tories in Margaret Thatchers day they decided that vehicles which were 25 years old would not have to pay car tax.
The legislation went through as per, except that they set the date and then conveniently forgot to move it, so that now your car has to be 40 years old to qualify!
The government knows exactly what it’s doing here as in the 2013 budget it generously moved the date by one year to 1974 when exemption becomes valid.
This is exactly what will happen to the ‘mansion tax’. Eventually we shall live in Mansions because of the way the government allows dates and monetary values to stand still.
Once it begins to affect the apparatchiks however you can expect the howls for it to be modified – which of course it will be!
First lesson of the modern world: once something is in place then it can be adjusted up, ratcheted up or alternatively declared resistant to being changed by the poor sods it actually affects, thus the first priority is never to let the bloody thing across your threshold in the first place. Sad, negative, but true.
(Bizarrely the first time this truism was borne in upon my young(er) self was the (then) TCCB experiment with four-day county cricket, which was initially brought in for three years only with the proviso that there’d be a review at the end of that period. Hands up who’s surprised to find that the review was chucked out of the window as soon as the fix was in ? Anybody ? Ha ! )
Just a thought to add (thinking aloud) – that the largest UK land owner (by far) in this country is the Queen. It does not take much imagination that the Guardian and the BBC itself between them represent a formidable ‘republican’ movement that has already undermined ‘rights of succession’ and will do so again (either through the EU or the next Lib/Lab pact admin under Millipeed and Clegg). The EU is not keen on sharing a power base with a nobility when it (thinks) that ‘right’ to a centralised uniform, harmogenised, sanctified, supreme one party state may be undermined by a populist sentiment from a fringe state called England.