Messing with taxes on homes never ends well – politicalbetting.com
Messing with taxes on homes never ends well – politicalbetting.com
As Mrs Thatcher (the Poll Tax) and Mrs May (the dementia tax) would attest messing with the taxation on the homes of the voters leads to unpopularity, I will not be astonished to see Labour polling in the teens after this announcement, this could be potential kite flying but once the perception is out there it can sit in the minds of the voters.
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They pay rates with rage.
SpaceX seeks more cash, calls fiber "wasteful and unnecessary taxpayer spending."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/starlink-keeps-trying-to-block-fiber-deployment-says-us-must-nix-louisiana-plan/
Communism when Jeremy Corbyn's Labour proposed the same thing. In America, it's investment.
She cannot sell an economic vision or plan because she doesn’t have one. It’s rather painful to watch this all unfold in slow motion. At least Kwarteng was gone quickly.
That said, I don't envy her: none of the muppets on her benches will ever vote for any cut.
It's a bit like the triple lock, only worse. Doesn't matter how hard it is to justify, you can't even talk about removing it.
And it is led by someone who cannot sell a vision if they had one.
(I might tentatively suggest that that is the problem: Starmer cannot sell the vision they have. But I see no other ministers trying, either, so I fear they don't have one.)
There's something to be said for a level of CGT on high value homes, in that it targets those who have made the most unearned, untaxed gains. And it targets property as untaxed speculative wealth, which is easy to tax and a cultural idol we need to crack - because we need houses to be HOUSES, not investments, which applies to owner occupiers particularly.
And it has the political merit of addressing a small minority of wealthier people who would at core not be Labour voters.
But I'm not sure that the current Govt are good enough as politicians to pull it off, or the wit to address all of it rather than just nibble at the edges.
Which brings me back to the massively expensive loopholes that still exist around Vehicle and Fuel Excise Duty...
It's a state of denial.
There was some hope when they took office that, when confounded with a poor inheritance (and it was - and I do concede that a lot of the government’s problems stem from that) as the grownups in the room they would actually face into the challenges and make some hard choices. Instead they prevaricated, made some rather illogical “one off” announcements like WFA that just served to concentrate anger, and spent their political capital unwisely.
The problems with the economy and state will not be fixed by tinkering around the edges - it will only make things worse. Labour are showing they can’t rise to the challenge.
After various stupid attempts at slashing costs, politicians and civil servants believe this. Worse, the public believe it.
So everyone believes that any tax rises will see services the same. Or worse.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gmjm8z47jo
The Gazette won't be seeing a half-empty glass of lager on the moon.
We will get Labour's Double Whammy*: higher prices, and higher taxes.
[*Credit to S&S and John Major, GE1992]
As usual with policy, neat slogans to sell helps. And I honestly think the one Labour should adopt is Build Back Better. An awful lot of people wistfully looking to the past. A huge amount of stuff needed. A society - cultural and infrastructure - needing improvements.
Boris the great showman rightly identified this and had the pithy slogan, just without the policies. Starmer lacks the vision but gives the impression of being a technocrat. So come up with the polices to actually do it.
There is a lot of denial in a nation, especially when something disagreeable is in prospect. (And the idea that One Weird Trick will save us is another form of denial.)
And I'm not entirely convinced it would be a good idea to slaughter this particular sacred cow anyway.
And if governments of the last forty years hadn't such a hash of housing policy, it wouldn't have mattered so much.
My worry is that because they haven't planned for this tax rise, they haven't left themselves enough time. So they end up doing something implementable rather than what would be best.
Democracy may be a better system than the alternatives, but it can still be pretty awful. Much the same goes for this government.
There is an argument, when people are pushing back on higher income taxes on the wealthy, that they rely on the eco-system of the country to allow them to earn these huge earnings. This isn’t always true as they could do these jobs or set up these companies elsewhere however if applied similarly to property then it can’t be denied.
There seems to be a weird attitude in the UK that property gain is sacred. Of all gains a person can make however, property is completely dependent on a stable country, law and order, education etc etc. if the country, local area etc is terribly crime ridden or badly served with schools and crap roads then your house won’t go up in value so a huge amount of the lift in price is because the area or country is doing well. It’s even down to your neighbours keeping the area clean, smart, pleasant rather than dumping fridges in the front garden or jacked up cars to repair in the front drive.
I think CGT on primary residence makes sense and it should be split so that half goes to the local authority and half to central government.
This is of course easy for me to propose as I don’t have to pay it.
What we really need is a PM with Boris' vision and ability to sell things to the electorate; Starmer's technocracy, and someone else's (May's ?) morality.
I agree with most of the rest of your post.
A blanket "the British Empire was great" fairy story does not work. We cannot use the horrible to try and whitewash the somewhat-less-horrible. "Look, look, look at the rubies" is a squirrel if we ignore the dust. We can learn lessons and point to good and bad, however.
One of the interesting artefacts of the current far right resurgence is a plastic patriotism. It relies on crass, simplistic narratives about ourselves and other people.
They adopt Christian symbols and a cartoon theology, which they take from the worst time of our history for religion driving politics - the crusades. They do that because they don't want Christianity or any moral values - they want a distracting cultural skin to wear over their xenophobic nihilism.
The same applies with naive tales of Empire - there is no desire for reflection or self-examination, just a need for slogans and political marketing to generate a mob.
And from the right fringe of the Tory Party (Jenrick, Philp) and outwards it's a movement that cannot bear to look at itself in the mirror. That can be observed in the glass jaw exhibited when they (whether Jenrick last week, or Trump and Vance last year) are subjected to even the mildest humanistic - whether Christian humanistic or atheist humanistic - challenge; they just come across as frightened little mice shouting at the tops of the voices and waving sticks.
No, I don't fancy that idea.
Good morning, everyone.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZvD1_BkeYsM
TL/DR; Sally Rooney has pledged UK royalties to Palestine Action so it is arguably illegal (with a 14-year prison sentence) to buy Normal People since you are funding a proscribed terrorist organisation.
Taxes rising??
Inflation out of control???
Quelle surprise!!!!
Its genesis was central government destroying local government housing. So there's been this weird two step of centralisation and local nimbyism (or, if you prefer, leaving it to the market, at the same time as gumming up the market) exacerbated by long term policy which tended to create housing shortage.
More, rather than less local control might be a solution, but it would be a long rather than short term one.
Or in the short term, central government forcing through unpopular decisions.
No government of the last couple if decades has really had the courage (or even awareness) to grasp the nettle.
He was fairly anonymous, but there may be one or two who knew more.
Never going to happen, but guaranteed to make things several orders of magnitude worse if it did.
Just rowing back the two last minute NI cuts of the dying days of the Hunt chancellorship (but converting them into income tax to avoid reinstating the distortions of NI) would largely plug the man made hole in the finances. Reintroducing Rishi’s HSC levy would do the rest. Gilt yields would tumble. But those are untouchable so we get multitudes of little reforms that will all be unpopular.
Family in fear after Tommy Robinson shares video of black man with white granddaughters
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/20/family-in-fear-after-tommy-robinson-shares-video-of-black-man-with-white-granddaughters
..Ayeni and his wife have been scared to leave their house because of threats. “We haven’t gone outside at home, we just can’t,” Natalie said. “Just after it started to go viral, someone in the local pub recognised Olajuwon immediately; we couldn’t believe how quick it had spread. We were walking home from shops just streets from our house, and two lads passed us, spun round and said ‘I hope you’re not them off that video or we’re coming back to slash you up’. It’s just horrendous.
“Someone was shouting ‘paedophile’ outside the house the other night, so I rang the police again but they say there’s little they can do. It feels a matter of time before something bad happens. We tried to go out yesterday and had to come home.”
The impact on Ayeni has been particularly severe. “I feel I have to sleep with one eye open,” he said. “I feel unsafe, scared and sad, as mine and my brother’s lives have been threatened. Someone said they will seek revenge and I’ll never walk again, all for just being in the park with the kids I love on a family day out...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy7yj0gkl3zo
Gi's a job
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aObZJN9zDtA
Significant reforms can be done - for example the abolition over time of Mortgage Interest Tax Relief at Source (MIRAS) 1989 and 2000 if I have the dates right, and under both Tories and Labour. The previous Con Govt was more timid than Nigel Lawson, even though he f*cked up the politics.
IMO it's "we're starting from a bad place so FFS get on with it, even if it is a start with baby steps".
I'm not sure what the new setup would look like, but the whole setup of property tax is a gangrenous wound at present.
This area of plucking the goose generates disproportionate hissing. Which I suppose shows how clever the rest of the system is at evading it.
The politics of fear and loathing.
"Can't do much" is the attitude of certain police forces to dangerous close passes, yet others do much. They can deal with it if the choice to do so is made.
Three quarters of our national debt pile is fixed rate, not inflation linked.
1% real growth and 4% inflation means nominal GDP growth of 5% per annum. That means our debt to GDP remains broadly static with our current deficit, rather than growing.
Similarly, it means static house prices are falling in real terms.
Politically it's definitely bad but there are upsides.
More seriously, without going all Rory Sutherland about life, this shows the power of framing. An innocent, perhaps even charming, family video rendered sinister by TR's caption: “Wtf is even going on here? Where are the parents?!”
BTW for a 7 minute useful catch up on 30 year gilts trends and the coming storm beginners and even the better informed, might start with Ed Conway (Sky) here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bpsukhaV2s
Fantasy world: speculating if a writer in Ireland will be extradited to the UK due to financially supporting a bunch of pensioners holding placards
It's an incredibly difficult time, but they can't afford to lose sight of their goals in the fog and the Opposition shrieking.
Coming up with a banding system to cover this vast disparity is probably a non starter so you need simply to go with the value of the property (or the land it's sitting on) and put a tax on that. 0.5% on a £400k property would be £2,000 which in my case isn't far off what we pay Newham in Council Tax. In Bromley, Band H properties pay over £4k in Council Tax - if you assume 0.5% on an £800k property (pretty average for Bromley) you get £4k so again not much change. For your £2 milion property in Cheam Village you would be looking at £10k.
Such a move wouldn't violently impact the housing market and while I've no clue on how much it would raise, I would guess more than the current Council Tax and Stamp Duty combined so both could be removed.
.
There will be winners and losers - aren't there always - and the losers will scream and vent on social media and elsewhere but I think it's the way forward.
CGT on sales above a certain value sounds more like a wealth tax than a property tax - I'm not convinced and you'll see people desperately selling under the limit or a rush of sales of high value properties before such a tax is introduced.
It really is time they started taking money off those whose wealth is continually growing without apparently doing much if to earn it. Property is a great place to start
We discussed yesterday the area of care and the role of carers and I mentioned the role of unpaid carers. If you remove or reduce pensions, that simply means more people in the care system with little or nothing so the State ends up supporting them.
Olajuwon Ayeni, a musician from Redcar, North Yorkshire, has been racially abused and falsely labelled a paedophile in the week since the family video was stolen from the TikTok account of his wife, Natalie, who he married five years ago, and shared by extremists online.
On Tuesday, the couple’s local MP, Anna Turley, was forced to write a letter providing a reference of good character for Ayeni when he was suspended by his management after the online disinformation.
We are back to the late 1990s "target your local alleged paedophile" campaigns, wound up by tabloids. I won't mention names, but the editors responsible do not seem to have suffered.
I wonder if they will move on to gays and other minorities, as Trump and Co have in the USA with their obsessions around whites, traditional marriage, race-based policing, and purging the state?
Are we possibly going to need end-of-segregation-era style political activism to resist this?
Stop pension credits
Stop wfa
Reform public sector pensions
Increase retirement age
All need to be done.
➡️ REF: 30% (=)
🌹 LAB: 21% (-1)
🌳 CON: 20% (-2)
🔶 LDEM: 13% (=)
🟢 GRN: 8% (+2)
🗳 Other: 5% (+1)
As we thought, last week's Conservative number at the top end of their range so back in the comfort zone. Labour continue to srift downward while Reform hold at around 30%. Greens back in their normal range too.
I think its even more fundamental that that.
Labour need a new mythos.
Labour's current mythos of this century is that the economy was going well before foreigners trashed the financial system, 'it started in America', and Gordon Brown then saved the world.
That increased spending, 'investment', on public services was a complete success, that 'austerity' was a voluntary choice by cruel Tories which turned the golden age of the 2000s into some Dickensian workhouse.
Beat me to it, it will stay in my copy and paste, lol.
Luke Tryl notes in his tweets that others are creeping up and 'many' of those prompted to elaborate are saying 'Your Party', so it gives us an idea of their current support - a few %. They certainly arent polling (even if unprompted in the initial screens) like a party with a million ready to join per the more enthusiastic ramping of its founders. I could see them maybe polling 10% after the bells and whistles of a founding conference and settling into 'Greens leading into GE 24' territory taking a % or two off each of the left leaning parties and some NOTA from Reform and WNV
Everyone can point to general decay and rot. On local streets, in their communities, in town centres. In the tatty schools and hospitals and public buildings. Maintenance budgets cut because "we can't afford it" which creates more mess and a bigger bill than the cut. Water and electricity infrastructure not invested in for foreign owner profits hence running out of water and Heathrow's substation burning down.
We need to spend money to save money. Every pound we save fixing things up saves more than a pound fixing the mess caused by not fixing them. Of making commercial centres buzz again. Of making people proud of their community again. Will have to spend more in the short term to save in the medium to long term. Better to do that than to keep throwing more money onto the bonfire to only get ashes.
THAT is the vision thing.
0.5% roughly covers council tax only - you'd need to pop it up to 0.7% for stamp duty too.
What bemuses me most is that on X its perfectly OK for someone to call me a "faggot". No censor. But if I question them as to why "faggots" threaten their manhood I am censored for hate speech. A bizarre platform.
Nick Tyrone
@NicholasTyrone
50m
I think the main reason Labour’s first year government has gone so badly is that they thought twiddling lightly with a few things would solve everything, instead of making some big plays. Ironically enough, they are failing for the same reason Sunak did.
https://x.com/NicholasTyrone/status/1958067373375684776
Then there's their relations with the Greens and what will happen if Polanski becomes party leader? Could we see a single anti-Labour candidate on the "Left" for the Mayoral election and a single slate of candidates for the Council elections (Green in some Wards, Newham Independents in the more strongly Muslim Wards)?
How much is the government and people of this country willing to reduce their current spending for long term benefit.
The excuse was roughly "but nobody told me it was cancer, so my actions were OK":
Carol Hyatt has non-Hodgkin lymphoma and due to her illness City of Wolverhampton Council has given her a dispensation to carry out her duties from home.
At the meeting on Wednesday, councillor Anita Stanley said she did not feel Hyatt's arrangement was "very fair on the residents".
"I'm immunocompromised, I can do everything, but I can't go out because then I'll get sepsis and could die, but I've done my very best still represent my ward," Hyatt told the BBC.
During a full council discussion about a proposed extension of Hyatt's dispensation to work from home, Stanley stood up and said: "I do not feel it is very fair on the residents not to have a political representative being able to speak up for them for the period of effectively one whole year.
"It's not fair on taxpayers."
Hyatt said: "The situation is not a party political thing so why would you treat any human being like that when they're fighting cancer and going through treatment?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c24v1010p90o
Accounting rules in local government do stupid things. Maintaining drains costs money, so the budget is cut and the money is saved. Huzzah!
But a blocked drain creates a flood which means the council need to spend money in year to clean up - including clearing the drain.
The current spending they need to save to pay to maintain the drains is the money spent clearing up the mess not maintaining the drains. But as the budget needs to balance - and crisis spending isn't firmly costed as its by exception - we end up paying more and getting less.
Don't you get it? We can't afford not to maintain drains and roads and other things. Today the schools have gone back, and Fraserburgh North primary school has the heating jammed on full 24/7. We can't afford to repair the heating because the school is due to be replaced, but we can't afford to replace the school either.
But in-year heating? If it runs over budget then what can you do. So the heating stays on. And students and teachers get sick. Which means high cost supply teachers.
You think cuts save money? No, they cost money.
But I'll give a you couple of examples.
Firstly, you missed the point I was attempting to indicate: Some of the arguments for why the British Empire was a good thing sound very similar to arguments other people make for why their empires were/are a good thing. For example, have a look at Chinese arguments for why their occupation of Tibet is a good thing. Or read the fascinating texts written by German historians and academics in the 1920s arguing that the former German colonies in Africa were run much better than all other European colonies in Africa, and they should be given back to Germany.
Of course, some of the arguments people make for why their own empire was/is good can have some truth in them. But I always think it's a bit of a coincidence when people think own empires undoubtedly a great blessing for humanity, while finding all the other empires abhorrent. Of course I can understand people feeling this way - I didn't argue with my 10-year-old son the other day when he told me that I am 'the best dad in the world'.
Then you've got things like people saying 'you can't judge the British Empire by the standards of today', and in literally the next sentence inviting us to compare the British Empire favourably with the Mongol Empire. Just to spell this out for you:
Time between today and the heyday of the British Empire - about a century or so
Time between the heyday of the British Empire and the heyday of the Mongol Empire - about 7 centuries
Or there are claims like this: "The Empire invariably improved the constitutional and economic conditions wherever it settled"
As for the argument that the British Empire was definitely a good thing because the Belgian Empire was terrible - I'm hoping this was posted as a joke.
Balance the books, tax the rich, under cover of this tax the middle too, reform property and pensioner taxation, explain the direction of travel and the dire outlook, cut expenditure, create some hope with a long term narrative outlook.
In a few months, 2026 arrives and we start saying 'Might be an election the year after next'. She needs to sort it in 2025.
As well as the mayoralty there is of course then the London Assembly. Perhaps the price of a deal will be the unincorperated indies throwing support behind New for the Assembly list vote. I can see New picking up 1 or 2 Assembly seats
A number of right wingers clearly see an opportunity from the judgement yesterday. A summer wouldn't be a summer without some race riots.
That requires a government big enough to tell people that they need to make some sacrifices in living standards for medium term gains in quality of life.
And a people big enough to accept it.
If though you want to increase spending on maintenance and capital improvements without cutting welfare spending then you need to convince the bond markets not me.
I'd agree with whoever said it that this is the last chance - imo for perhaps a decade.
We get that. Why do you think the Tories got demolished in the election?
We don't need to cut welfare, we need to cut waste. The poorest in our society not only spend that money quickly, they do so locally. Cut their money, they spend less, local businesses go bust and more people are out of work.
Cut the waste. Welfare is an absurd mess with endless bureaucracy and petty assessments contracted out. Simplify to save. Same with Education or Health - stop tipping money onto the admin bonfire and buy a hosepipe.
Lower spending on the old and poor.
Increased productivity in the public sector
People retiring later.
All together, no exceptions, everyone must feel some pain.
Time for honesty, no more denial.
Should make Chelsea, Hendon, Uxbridge, Barnet, Kensington, Cities, Finchley, Brent West etc that much more targettable