Labour or Tory: which is the true Home-Owner-Ist Party?

From the BBC:

Central grants to local authorities make up the bulk of councils' income, and have risen to £76.2bn for the coming year. The total take from council tax will be £26.3bn in 2010/11, up from £25.6bn this year.

That probably understates the importance of central funding - schools and hospitals are decidedly 'local services' and the government spends about £150 billion on them (a third of which is probably waste) - but, hey.

Council tax bills in England will rise by an average 1.8% in 2010/11 - the lowest annual rise since the tax was introduced in 1993, new figures show... Local government secretary John Denham said the below-inflation increase had been made possible by a 4% increase in central funding for councils from next month. "The lowest ever increase has been made possible by a 45% real increase in government funding for local services since 1997," he said.

Now, as we well know, there is no such thing as 'central funding', what he means is that local services are largely funded out income tax, National Insurance, VAT and corporation tax, i.e. taxes on economic activity. So, whichever level of total tax and spend you choose (and we are currently way above that level, of course) there's a trade-off here - it's easy to reduce the increasingly meaningless Council Tax if you just hike the other taxes a bit, which is quite clearly what Labour have been doing in order to stoke the house price bubble, get the Home-Owner-ist vote etc.

Shadow local government secretary Caroline Spelman said: "Council tax is Gordon Brown's most painful stealth tax...

No it's not a 'stealth tax', you stupid witch. Council Tax is an 'in-your-face tax'. A stealth tax is something like not indexing up personal allowances, which the Tories reckon will increase income tax and National Insurance receipts by £2.2 billion, that's what I call a stealth tax, and a stealth tax on wages at that. The milk-curdler continues:

"Under [Gordon Brown's] watch, council tax bills have doubled...

Probably true, in cash terms (rather less than that in real terms). But house prices have trebled, so the total average council tax bill is only about fifteen per cent of the total increase in value of an average property since 1997, so the tax more than pays itself and it's mainly taxes on economic activity that pay for local services (see above). Or put it another way, Council Tax has fallen from 1% to 0.6% of average property values - leaving that little bit extra in the first-time buyer's budget to take out that little bit bigger mortgage to push up house prices that little bit more...

... while frontline services like weekly bin collections have halved. You pay more and get less under Labour. This rise compounds the massive hikes of previous years. As Scotland benefits from yet another council tax freeze, hard-working families and pensioners in England now face council tax bills of £120 a month."

Now, maybe I've missed something, but isn't the £2.2 billion stealth tax on wages something that should primarily concern 'hard-working families'? Didn't the Tories deliberately design Council Tax to have a large Poll Tax element, i.e. to be regressive, i.e. to bear unduly on "hard-working families and pensioners"?

And unlike a flat tax on land or property values, there's no escaping the Council Tax/Poll Tax, you can't reduce your bill by trading down or moving somewhere cheaper: if you want to move somewhere with lower Council Tax bills, then all things being equal, you'd end up paying more for a similar house.

To cut a long story, they're as bad as each other.