Sir Simon Jenkins comes over to The Dark Side

Writing in the Guardian, the chairman of the National Trust on the topic of the 50p tax rate:

Let's find progressive ways to tax the winners in our trickle-up economy... there are other ways of taxing the rich that have specific social benefits. The obvious candidate is the one tax that has been in steady decline over the past quarter century, and that is on property. This fiscal Cinderella, once called rates and now council tax, has been hated by chancellors down the ages, largely because it is not collected and controlled by them.

The decline of local property taxes from 12% of total revenue in the 1980s to under 5% today – largely replaced by VAT – has been so stark that some councils, such as Westminster, now get more revenue from the owners of cars (in parking and in fines) than they get from buildings.

The banded council tax has degenerated to being almost the poll tax that it replaced, since there is only a one-to-three ratio between band A and band H. The top band is all houses that were valued at above £320,000 in 1991. Sheer political cowardice has prevented either revaluation or the introduction of higher bands (other than in gutsy Wales).

The Liberal Democrat Vince Cable made a stab at reinvigorating property as a revenue source two years ago, with his ham-fisted "mansion tax" of 1% on houses worth over £2m. He was shot down on all sides. It would have been far simpler, and more honest, just to revive the old rates, perhaps by increasing the number of council tax bands to reflect a wider spread of house values, and with automatic revaluation. Every year council tax gets more regressive, and the rich get away with fiscal murder.

Throughout Europe and America property and local business taxes form part of the revenue mix. In smart New England they can be as high as $20,000 a year. They tax wealth modestly and they tax the nation's scarcest resource, living space. As such they are an incentive to the fairer allocation of housing in both public and private sectors.

Property taxes cannot be evaded, and properly imposed are a fair generator of government revenue. Better, they are traditionally paid in anger. Any tax paid in anger is a good tax – the opposite of a stealth tax, because the payer demands to know how it is spent. Property taxes are thus a spur to democratic interest and activity. That, of course, is why politicians detest them.