Vince Cable has accused the Government of walking away from a mansion tax on homes worth over £2m to avoid upsetting the party’s rich donors. He said that the Tories were “very ill advised” to have blocked the tax and insisted that the plan would return.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s World at One, he said: “We’re going to make the case that Conservatives are very ill advised in not going down that mansion tax route.
A lot of thoughtful Conservatives recognise that taxing high levels of property wealth is a successful form of tax. I suspect what happened was some of their donors, very wealthy people, stamped their feet”.
Source: The Daily Telegraph
We say: You can have a legitimate debate about whether a wealth tax would be a good idea. We happen to think it wouldn’t, for all sorts of reasons both of principle and pragmatism. But we simply fail to understand how an apparently intelligent man can be so wedded to the idea of imposing a wealth tax which looks to only one very specific asset and ignores all liabilities. That just isn’t reasonable on any analysis.