Britain’s left-wing Labour government is considering intensifying its forthcoming tax raid on high-value homes, potentially hitting its own voters in the pocket.
A plan to hit the owners of high-value homes with a ‘Mansion Tax’ launched by the previous Labour government of Sir Keir Starmer and his hapless Chancellor Rachel Reeves may be intensified further, and could cost Labour politically in one of its most important heartlands. The Times of London notes it is understood that cutting the threshold for this property megatax from houses worth £2 million or more ($2.6 million) to £1.5 million ($2mn), as the government desperately seeks new sources of revenue to fund its spending priorities is being actively considered in Downing Street, and this could mean over a quarter of a million households nationwide will be liable to pay.
Under the plan, depending how valuable the government decides any given home is, the households would have to pay an additional tax of between £2,500 to £7,500 ($3.3k-£10k) a year, every year. This would be on top of all other taxes, including the hefty property taxes already paid in the United Kingdom, which in some London areas is to double.
While Britain’s left-wing government making a cash grab against some of the wealthier households in society may once have played as a class war move to benefit its core voters, the Labour Party has long-ago moved away from its working class roots and has long more obviously represented a university-educated, urban, middle-class liberal demographic on one hand, and migrant communities on the other. And it is the wealthy leftists group that seems likely to be hardest hit, with analysis reported by The Times stating that nine-in-ten of the electoral areas hardest-hit by the tax are Labour-voting.
Indeed, the data shows the impact is disproportionately London-based, and on the left. There is not a single right-wing-voting constituency in the top-20 hardest-hit areas, all of which are London’s wealthiest postcodes, including the former seat of the previous Labour Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and the seat of his predecessor as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
There isn’t a single Reform UK constituency in even the top-200 areas that will see the highest numbers of households hit with the Mansion Tax.
It has been the norm in Britain for decades for house price inflation to soar well beyond all other measures, including income and GDP, and for taxes set to specific cash values not to change with inflation, through a process of fiscal drag. There is no indication this tax would be any different, and while at a £1.5 million threshold many essentially ordinary middle-class families would be drawn into the punishment band from day one, over time many more families from less wealthy backgrounds will inevitably be entangled, too.
While the policy could be charitably seen as a principled stand on taxing the rich even when they’re your own voters, it is stated several London Labour lawmakers have already broken ranks to tell the Prime Minister to reconsider the property tax raid, as it could imperil their chances of being re-elected.
However it isn’t the only policy of the present Labour government that very clearly impacts its own voters and the lives of the broader left-voting, wealthier England. As earlier reported, Prime Minister Andy Burnham is determined to undo the policy of previous government to maximise value-for-money for taxpayers when putting up newly arrived migrants in government-funded housing by renting the cheapest properties available, and will instead now spread migrant settlements into wealthier areas in the cause of social solidarity.
This is a “point of principle”, Burnham has said. While the government plays politics with where to put migrants, the vast majority of Britons, meanwhile, think the government simply isn’t doing enough to enforce border controls in the first place.