Wealth tax proposals: target 'those other guys'

 Gotta laugh at this earnest Grauniad article: 

One of us is a millionaire, the other a care worker. The cruel divide between rich and poor disgusts us both ...  Britain’s cost of living crisis is disastrous for one of us and will barely touch the other. The best answer is a wealth tax

The two ladies in question are Julia Davies and Winsome Hill.  In case you are wondering, it's Julia that is a member of "Patriotic Millionaires" (sic), and Ms Hill who is the care worker.  Entertainingly but somehow inevitably, the article includes the words "the two of us have never met" !   No, really? -  you surprise me.  "... but we both felt the inequality in this country couldn’t continue ... and decided to write this piece together."

So what have they, errr, spontaneously agreed as a solution for inequality?  Even though they've never met. 

Let’s start with taxing the seriously wealthy – people with wealth of more than £10m. A wealth tax of just 1% or 2% on their stocks of wealth over £10m ...    [my emphasis]

I think we know what this means.  It means - I'm just guessing here - that Ms Davies' "stock of wealth" is somewhere in the band £1m to £5m.  Because that's the very definition of people who think that "seriously wealthy" means north of 10.  Left on her own with the pen, Ms Hill might, I suspect, have written "people with wealth over £1m" - or even £500k, given that the average UK house price is £256k and the median personal pension pot is only in the tens of thousands (though the data is hard to summarise simply).  But that wouldn't do, Ms Davies - would it?   No no no!

Yup, it's human nature to reckon that "serious wealthy" is always someone else.  You got a yacht?  Yeah, but he's got his own island.

ND

Wealth Tax on the List of Demands

My crie du jour just now is: "what are the demands?"   The BLM thing was the proximate cause, and "they" still haven't got remotely near Marcus Rashford's stunning, tangible achievement in terms of coming up with something of all-round practicability.  "Defund the Police and dismantle capitalism & the patriarchal system" allow Kier Starmer to snort with dismissive ridicule for the cameras, and counter with his deep and abiding support for the police.  So - not much traction there.  

But it's broader than just BLM's amateurish flounderings.  Starmer's Labour, and in particular the signally unimpressive Anneliese Dodds, are always coming up with silly anodyne lists of things they'll be holding the government to account for, ("Our 4 tests for Covid Economic Recovery") which are always modelled on the Brown/Balls tests for joining the Euro - designed as a cunning trap for their enemies disguised as something constructive and clever.  (Does this clever-clever political stuff ever really work?)

Anyhow: it hasn't taken long for that old Corbynite favourite, the Wealth Tax (- everything can be paid for by smashing the 1%), to hove into view.  Here's nervous little Dodds again; and here's ... Polly!

Cards on the table: though I'm no LVT obsessive, I've always reckoned the Council Tax is a masterpiece and case study in practical politics, and that Little Git Osborne missed a massive political, fiscal and economic trick in 2010 when he failed to take the simple step of extending the bands upwards very significantly, thereby rectifying a grotesque anomaly.

But WT in the way Polly intends it (and she writes of all manner of serious work being done on the subject) we're talking a lot more than recognising the stupidity of a banding scheme that stops at 'H' ('I' in Wales).

What do we reckon?  Open WT thread below.

ND