Tuesday 18 March 2014

Let's hope the Electoral Commission has a closer look at this...

From The Daily Mail:

A powerful new lobbying group containing dozens of the country’s super-rich – and backed by a Tory MP – has been set up to thwart moves to introduce a mansion tax.

The secretive outfit hopes to overturn public support for the proposed levy on multi-million-pound homes by arguing that it is ‘economically illiterate’ and would trigger a devastating crash in property prices…


Not many Poor Widows In Mansions were present, of course, but Boris Johnson has invented a new human shield:

"Labour and the Lib Dems would have you believe that the people they want to hit are oligarchs and international bankers.

"But the overwhelming majority of victims would be Britons who find themselves living in a house that has nudged over the threshold…

‘It is hard to think of a tax that is more viciously unfair. It hits families who have worked hard and traded up the property ladder only to find themselves walloped for their success."


Not many of those present either:

The new lobbying group, organised by a property mogul who operates in some of the capital’s most exclusive areas, was discreetly launched last November at a meeting in a West End restaurant attended by 65 of the richest people in the UK – including Russian oligarchs and multi-millionaires from the Middle East.

They were addressed by Tory MP Richard Harrington, who urged them to ‘donate to the Conservatives’ if they wanted to stop the levy.


Of course, as we well know from when UKIP got turned over by the Electoral Commission a few years ago (quite unreasonably and unfairly as it happens) political parties are only allowed to accept donations from people who are on the UK electoral register, which is British citizens and EU citizens resident in this country (plus a handful of Commonwealth citizens).*

So let's hope these kleptocrats donate generously and then El Comm claws all the money back again.

* The Lib Dems circumvented this by accepting donations from the UK front company of an overseas resident, who happened to be a convicted fraudster, but El Comm turned a blind eye for some strange reason.

4 comments:

Kj said...

I love it when proper rentiers suddenly get political.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Kj, these kleptocrats have just given UK voters the best reason not to vote Conservative ever again.

DBC Reed said...

NB
The extreme right wing instincts of this paper manifest themselves yet again: they try to keep in with the little people ( an electoral majority) by attacking a minority of super-rich (whom they usually pander to but are here dropped callously ).
You've filed this under Conspiracy.Should n't you be investigating the Banking Conspiracy? The BoE in a moment of reckless abandon (or arrogant consciousness of being untouchable) has fessed up to creating money ex nihilo. See Quarterly Bulletin "Money Creation in the Modern Economy.As you know I subscribe to the LVT to stop further house price inflation school of thought and look to public ownership of the banks to provide the taxation base via interest rates as a kind of single tax on money creation or
a rent on new money.

Kj said...

MW: it's also a good example of why what we're up against is not a conspiracy, but just a general thrust of homeownerist policies and incentives working against us. When someone do try to "conspire", they have the PR-sense of idiots to gather a whole bunch of kleptocrats in a west-end restaurant, with a Tory speaker and report in the DM afterwards...