Tory Mansion Tax: Three Words You Didn't Think You'd Ever See Together

Breaking News: Jeremy Corbyn announces Labour policy to cut taxes for high earners. Pledges to abolish Capital Gains Tax. Thinks the Royal Family 'could do with a few more quid'.

Unlikely? Yes, given his political leanings you'd be surprised to hear that a politician of an ideology such as that of Marx and Mao might prove to be benevolent toward those that represent the better off. It's not a press release that you're ever likely to see either from Jeremy or from any of his likely successors.

Yet, at the other end of the political see-saw sits news today that the new Johnson government is considering a tax raid on all UK homes worth seven figures plus - a Mansion Tax.

The term 'Mansion Tax' may be familiar to you. It was a proposed policy floated by the Liberal Democrats in 2012 as a financial penalty levied every year on the owners of properties worth over ￡2m to the tune of 1% of each property's value. Then, the Labour party under Ed Miliband jumped on the bandwagon and pledged to introduce a similar tax if they were elected to power. At the time Conservative Home, the website favoured by Tory MPs to air their views and policy formation, declared the proposal 'a nasty tax'. Greg Hands MP for Chelsea and Fulham, described it as a 'homes tax' on the basis that it would affect so many ordinary homes in London.

And, wait for it... Boris Johnson himself, in a video with the Daily Mail in 2014, described Mansion Tax as a 'tax on homes'; a 'tax on London' and said that people would be 'clobbered by it' - that it would be 'wrong'.

So, how can he now be considering a tax on such homes? And how does this reconcile with Boris's promise in his leadership campaign and in the 2019 election to be a 'low tax administration'? Well, it doesn't and moreover, a Mansion Tax is not a tax on palatial footballers' gaffs and Notting Hill hedge fund mews houses. It's a tax on ordinary people in ordinary London homes and especially upon those that may have lived in their property for decades, having purchased it when prices were a fraction of what they are now. They will be elderly and retired. With limited financial liquidity. And still subjected to a land tax that is akin to something that Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham would conjure up in Robin Hood story.

A Mansion Tax is not born of a Conservative ideology, of a politics that favours the aspirational, the entrepreneur and the financially brave. Indeed, the party that is the so called protector of the employer and the corporation tax payer. The wealth builder. The hustler.

And add this suggested annual payment to the Treasury's existing take from Stamp Duty at the higher end - thanks to George Osborne, 12% above ￡1.5m plus the 3% surcharge on second homes where that applies - and this starts to look more like Corbynomics than Boris's fiscally conservative roots. In fact, if you want to kill a slowly revitalising London property market, such a layered penal approach is exactly the way to do it and at the same time, why not add in a further 3% foreign purchaser tax. Yes, that's still on the cards too and you can expect to see that in the March Budget almost certainly.

Who will administer the paperwork on the thousands of homes that will be subject to the Mansion raid? How much will that cost? How will valuations be decided upon? And what will the appeal process involve (because inevitably anyone with a home 'valued at the lower end of the proposed scale, will appeal). Moreover, how much will this extortion of luxury homes actually raise? I wager that the income net of administration and appeal costs will barely register on the Chancellor's spreadsheet and, therefore, what is the point when the tiny benefit is balanced against an attack on the Conservative party's electoral base and on it's own ideology? Seems a pretty mad thing to even float as an idea, frankly. Perhaps Cummings was just having an off day and thought for one mad moment that his current rebalancing philosophy means that in handing first time buyers a 30% discount on a new home as announced this week, means having to hurt the market at the other end of the scale like some weird governmental karma thing.

The property market and the industries that support it have taken a good kicking over the past three years or so. It's time that politicians now left us alone.