Perhaps a raid on pensions? You guessed it, the Chancellor has already dragged them into the purview of inheritance tax.
Even Reeves understood there was no money to be earned from a wealth tax, and Burnham may well prove willing to stand up to backbenchers demanding one.
Which leaves … your home, the final pilferable asset, and Burnham knows it.
With no mandate for anything else and both essential (defence) and ideological black holes to fill, Burnham has been backed into a corner, and the only way out without cutting spending is through your living room.
The truth is that, just like Reeves before her two Budgets, Burnham is letting rumours run wild and the media is poring over snippets from his past to guess at what might be coming down the track. The whispers around Westminster are that Burnham is weighing three destructive raids: a harsher “mansion tax”, a double death tax and a land value tax.
The double death tax – the removal of the capital gains “uplift” on death as well as inheritance tax – would be the most pernicious raid.
Now, I have written supportively of both inheritance tax and land value tax in the past, and I stand by what I’ve said. But what Burnham proposes is destructive.
By removing the capital gains tax uplift on death, thereby forcing grieving families to find the money to pay for another levy on top of inheritance tax, Burnham could end up imposing a 62pc effective tax rate on one’s childhood home.
And in charging a 0.48pc annual tax on the value of one’s home, or 0.96pc on a second home, Burnham is not proposing a land value tax; this is a property tax. A land value tax is a proposal to force landowners to do something productive with their land, or relinquish it to market forces. A property tax discourages landowners from doing anything productive with their land, as to do so would only increase their tax bill.
