Let’s be clear about what this would mean.
If you’re very rich, you can pay this out of pocket, and if you’re a social tenant in a million-pound home, you almost certainly don’t pay property taxes anyway.
But ordinary families who have taken out gigantic mortgages to live in London could be forced to move out, potentially selling at a loss. And retired couples on modest pensions who bought before the boom will have to move away from the places they built their lives.
If you have the temerity to build a new shopping centre or apartment block in London, you’re accused of gentrification, social cleansing and pricing out residents. But for some reason, it’s acceptable to talk with appalling casualness, and even glee, about squeezing the put-upon middle classes out of their neighbourhoods.
Even if you do think of all owners as feudal aristocrats, a poll tax on living in London will also be passed on to private renters, adding a further impossible burden on top of an already crippling cost of living.
Many things in life are unfair. Residents of London and the South East may pay a smaller share of their property value in council tax, but they are also the only net fiscal contributors to British public finances. In other words, if you’re a taxpayer in the South East, you’re already subsidising other regions to the tune of hundreds of billions.
