Flaggin' mansions!

My defence of Ed Miliband last week got a storming response on Facebook, not all of it polite, but it certainly raised quite a few issues.

Since then, I have discovered two things: 

• Someone has started a petition to remove Myleene Klass as the face of Littlewoods

• Some Labour MPs (and ex MPs) will fall into the Mansion Tax bracket.

Let's deal with Littlewoods first. Personally, I like Myleene Klass. She was very sweet to my mother at a party we went to (her family are friends of our family) and she spent 20 minutes trying to explain how to use a digital camera to her. Anyone who has enough patience to teach my tech-illiterate mother how to use a camera has to be a good person, in my book. 

However, since her tirade against Ed, which I think was a thoroughly misguided and ill-informed topic for her to tackle, more than 8000 people have signed this petition on Change.org. There has also been a counter-petition for her to not be dropped, which has so far generated 590 supporters. 

I don't think Littlewoods should drop her, but a media-savvy PR at the firm should sit down with their face of the brand and explain to her that the target audience for Littlewoods is not likely to sympathise with people who have to shell out £1.8m for a garage.

Next, Emily Thornberry, a thorn in the side of Ed Miliband. There must be something about the man that means every week, a woman will publicly berate him or cause him embarrassment. Last week it was the turn of this woman in her £2m+ mansion, who tweeted a picture of a house in Rochester, swathed in England flags. In case you have been living in a bubble/not in the UK, here's the tweet:

That Thornberry Tweet Rochester

I can't help feeling a slight twinge of guilt when I read about Emily Thornberry's tweet. Sure, the people living in this house are unlikely to have felt any sympathy for those wealthy people complaining about the mansion tax, so they'd agree with Miliband on that. But they should not have to stomach the upper-classes sneering down their noses at them, publicly, on twitter.

People who have bought Thornberry's lame excuse: "I have never seen so many flags on a house, this is what I meant" are obviously living in cloud Kitten Land, where everything is beautiful and people tell the truth.

The truth is, she was taking the proverbial and - do not deny it - she said what many of us were thinking, especially when we saw TV footage of the man emerge from his house, cap on head, less than 100% fit and covered in tattoos. To be honest, I believe people should be allowed to fly their flags without being branded as anything by anybody, but when I saw him, my first thought was 'this is exactly the person I thought would live there'. Then I realised, guiltily, that someone else lives in a yellow house and flies the flag daily, without censure: 

Buckingham Palace

Who was I to criticise? I was no better than Thornberry. But I am just a person, not someone in public office, let alone a Labour personage living in a lofty house in North London. Her comment and the motive behind it smacked of upper-class snobbery. It smacked of Toryism of the Old School kind, not the kind that is pandering to UKIP. It reeked of Middle England putting the educational boot into the rest of us. And therefore Miliband was right to give her the boot, too. Oh, wait, sorry, yes, "accept her resignation". 

If Labour wants to prove it is for the people, for the masses, then its party members better start looking at their own lifestyle rather than criticise that of others, especially the voting public. Because it won't be too long before someone sets up a Change.org petition against the entire Labour shadow cabinet - and their £2m houses - and then we are left with nothing credible that can stand against the grinding, terrible machine that a Con-UKIP truce would bring.

Post-script

However while I may not be able to pay a tax on something like this BIG WHACKING HOUSE unless I become a former prime minister, I am still convinced that if I did own a £21m house in a prime central London location, I would have more than enough equity and/or free cashflow to be able to pay a tax for the privilege.

In defence of Ed Miliband

Ed Miliband, Labour Leader

I can hardly believe I am doing this but I agree with Ed Miliband.

In a week where he has been lambasted by celebrities, the media and politicians of all flavours, it is harder to praise the man than to bury him.

My old debating coach used to tell me it is harder to stand up for an unpopular cause than to decry one, and as I have always relished a challenge, I am unafraid by what might follow.

Ed Miliband is right.

While Myleene Klass may claim that £2m will just about get you a garage in London, and the media may agree, I would like to ask the normal, working people of London and the South East whether they live in a £2m garage.

It is my experience - 15 years as a financial services journalist, not as a celebrity commentator who reads the papers occasionally and listens to BBC Radio 4 - that the majority of people live in homes worth far less.

The average house price in the South East, according to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics and the Halifax House Price index, is somewhere between the figures these bodies have provided of £485,000 and £355,630 respectively.

That's a far cry for £2m - a figure skewed by the media and celebrity-rich areas of Kensington, Kingston, Chelsea, Putney, the City, Canary Wharf penthouses, Wimbledon Village, Dulwich Village, some parts of Clapham and Islington, and some parts of Golders Green and Finchley.

For the rest of us oiks, who slum it out in Brixton, Streatham, Peckham, Lewisham, Mitcham, Morden, Hackney, Newham, Hammersmith, Walthamstow, Balham, Norwood, Norbury, Thornton Heath, Hackbridge, Camberwell, Elephant & Castle, New Cross Gate, Lewisham, etc etc etc, well house prices just ain't anywhere near £2m.

We'd be grateful for a £2m garage, sure, but we are normal people who like normal houses that we can afford to maintain. If we were so desperate to live in an area that only had £2m garages, then we'd need to be paid seven-figure sums to advertise clothing catalogues.

But we don't. We are nurses, teachers, shop workers, journalists, pencil-pushers, council workers, administrators, bus drivers and the self-employed.

According to data from the Council of Mortgage Lenders, these normal people here in London and the South East have an average loan size of less than £250,000. Here's some statistical data to stick it to the whinging rich who have actually NO idea what real people earn or experience.

"First-time buyers typically borrowed 3.90 times their gross income, more than the 3.83 in the previous quarter and the UK average of 3.46. The typical loan size for first-time buyers was £212,000 in the second quarter, up from £200,000 in the previous quarter. The typical gross income of a first-time buyer household was £55,000 compared to £52,500 in the first quarter.

"Due to higher house prices within London compared to the UK overall, there was a continued shift in the mix of properties bought by first-time buyers in London towards more expensive properties. In the second quarter, 63% of first-time buyers bought properties priced at more than £250k, up from 57% in the first quarter and 51% in the same period last year. This was significantly higher than the UK overall level of 17%."

Yes it is true that house prices are higher in London - but as with all data, this is skewed by the super-rich areas where a dog kennel costs £70,000. This is not the experience of the vast majority of the population, for whom a £2m mansion is far above what any length of inflation and upward pressure on house prices could hope to achieve. 

Even if my own five-bedroomed house were to show house price rises of 600 per cent in the next 50 years, it could not match the £2m mansion tax proposed by Labour.

Now I am not agreeing that it is a good policy. But it may be a way to show that Labour is getting back to its roots - tax the rich and give to the NHS (and yes, if you have a £2m house you are going to be more wealthy than the majority of the UK population. Get out of your cars and go have a look at some of the poorer neighbourhoods around you).

It may also be a way of raising some much-needed revenue to shore up our ever-flagging deficit. 

I've sat through Budgets and Autumn Statements which each year tell me how great the government has been in cutting the deficit and getting us out of a recession, how austerity has helped us get back on our feet. 

And each time the figures get smaller, the achievement gets narrower, the prospect of being a country with no debt gets further away. This is called clever accounting by some, or wishful thinking by others. 

A proposed £2m tax on property - a theory by the way - might be a very convenient political football for a party that is already taxing people in council houses and on the lowest earnings ladder.

These people fall below the £10,000 a year limit for auto-enrolment into a pension. They have no savings. 

They literally live in garages - prefabs and tiny homes run by councils. And if they should dare to have one extra bedroom - maybe a spare room, maybe a room that their family uses, or maybe a grandmother looks after her grandchildren at weekends - they get taxed.

Let's repeat this slowly so that people understand: 

Labour has proposed to explore a £2m mansion tax on the wealthiest sectors of society (sorry upper middle class, yes you are more privileged than you believe you are).

The Conservatives are forcing the poorest people in society, the financially vulnerable, the people relying on food banks, and often the least educated, out of their homes into smaller properties or taxing them for daring to have one more room than they need.

Instead of jumping on a fashionable bandwagon and slating the Labour leader, why not sit back and actually think about these things: 

Fairness
Justice
Social equality
Raising people out of poverty
Helping the excluded.

If you advocate any of these things, you cannot take anything the Tory party says to ridicule Ed Miliband seriously.

This is the Tory party that doesn't know whether or not, or how much, it will have to pay the EU. First it doesn't owe them, then it does, then it managed to halve it, then it managed to not halve it but in fact will repay it "at its own convenience".

So basically it worked out a debt repayment plan, just like many of the poorest people in the UK have to do daily just to get by.

Ed Miliband is right. The Labour Party have their party members' interests at heart. Their policies are getting back to the real everyday struggles of normal people, the people that the Coalition has forgotten. 

Think before you leap and end up alienating we people, the normal people, the average people. 

Because we are the voters, the majority of voters in the UK and we want someone who actually will represent us.