Mansion tax: The Telegraph’s meltdown is pure comedy

The Telegraph’s meltdown over the mansion tax is an actual comedy roadshow

In the November budget, chancellor Rachel Reeves announced a mansion tax on properties worth £2m or more. And the Telegraph has been up in arms ever since in a sob story that, judging by Facebook comments, most people find utterly hilarious.

The mansion tax

From 2028, owners of properties valued between £2m and £2.5m will have to pay additional council tax of £2,500 per year. But there are different thresholds. Owners of properties valued at £5m plus will have to pay £7,500.

The policy is projected to rebalance the economy by £400m per year. This isn’t much, but demonstrates that Labour is feeling the pressure from the Greens.

The meltdown

The Telegraph‘s meltdown started two weeks ago, with the claim that the mansion tax had “ruined” a man’s retirement. And people on social media were quick to bring out a microscopic violin:

Has he considered cutting back on his coffees or cancelling his Netflix?

It looks like the patronising frugalness the rich demand of less well off people is being turned on its head. In a similar vein, a further person asked:

Maybe if he just works a little bit harder?

Meanwhile, another social media user pointed out:

Love that he is wearing an Aston Martin vest for his photo

Imagine selling various properties, along with owning a £2.5m home and thinking you’re hard done by. Well enter the subject of the Telegraph article:

I’ve got some money in savings, but I don’t have a big pension – I put all my money into property…. So I’ve been buying houses, working on them over a few years and selling them. Essentially, I’ve used my house as my pension.

My property was worth £3m, but it’s probably around £2.5m now. I think the value of my home has come down by 15pc in the last year and a half – since Labour took power. I already paid a significant amount of stamp duty when I bought it in 2016. And now I’m going to get caught up in the council tax surcharge.

Funny stuff. Another Telegraph piece has the title:

Asset-rich, cash-poor Britons trapped in Rachel Reeves’s mansion tax ‘nightmare’

Obviously it’s not the millions of people on low-paid work that’s the issue. It’s the “asset-rich” who have it hard. Fortunately, the Telegraph is here to save the day with a further piece, titled:

Five ways to avoid the mansion tax without selling up

Real solutions to housing

The actual solution to the housing crisis is to stop treating homes like assets altogether. Instead, housing should be treated as a necessity and delivered at cost price by the state for people to own their own homes. This would pop the housing bubble. The Greens have some policies in this direction, with their move towards banning landlords. But state-issued home ownership is a better approach than the state landlordism of council housing.

Labour’s mansion tax, meanwhile, is a welcome however-piecemeal-concession. And the corporate media reaction is hilarious.

Featured image via the Telegraph

Tags: UK

Comments 2

Airlane1979 says:

6 months ago

“delivered at cost price by the state for people to own their own homes” who would then sell them on at a profit so that private landlords could rent them at high prices to the working class. This policy is Right to Buy, as promoted by Labour and Tory governments since 1979.

David Lewis says:

6 months ago

The Council Tax bands favour the better off, as do the amounts attributed to those bands. The top bands in Westminster is far lower than in less well-off places. Furthermore, the bands themselves are based on 1991 rate bands with any properties built since 1991 fitted into those rate bands. This means that a small bedsit locally built five years ago gets a banding at Level C and pays more than a large mansion in Westminster.

The whole thing needs to be redone but no government will because it will immediately adversely affect the better off, this being borne out by the Telegraph whinging about the mansion tax.

The mansion tax is still profoundly unfair as is the ability of partners in top end law and accountancy firms paying tax at half the rate of those who are not partners who, in turn, will be the lower paid. They also don’t pay National Insurance, saving another tranche of tax.

Large companies such as Amazon also don’t pay their way, by being based outside the UK. This is extremely unfair on UK companies but has a double difference in that Amazon gets grants and tax breaks to expand whilst UK companies don’t.
Most tax evasion is carried out by the better off, whilst more money spent by government recovering benefit fraud than tax evasion and avoidance, again benefiting the better off at the expense of the less well off.