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. 

The Taxman Cometh

Now here's a fun topic we haven't covered much before, partly because it's not fun at all: Tax.

Specifically, what measures some governments are going to in order to scoop more revenue in these austere times.

You probably read about this man.

CREDIT: REUTERS/LASZLO BALOGH

What a handsome chappy! I hear you say. What is this troubled, "je ne sais pas" expression doing on such a silver fox of a man? Well this is not just a man, this is an M&S man. Actually, it's Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary, who has just earned the ire of 40 per cent of his electorate. I suspect a few more wrinkles will grace his brow now, than the few that were photographed by Reuters in 2010.

This week, Mr Orban had to backtrack furiously because he had proposed to introduce a tax on using the internet.

Yes, that's right, people would have had to pay tax on how many times they looked at pictures of cats! OUTRAGEOUS. Everyone knows, the internet is made of tubes, and the tubes are filled with cats.

Protestors took to the streets against the threat that they would have to pay the equivalent of 40p per gigabyte. Questions about freedom of information, freedom of expression, the right to browse, etc were lobbied inside and outside of the Hungarian parliament.

But as one of my favourite tax analysts, Andrew Hubbard of Baker Tilly, has said, although this internet tax may be "consigned to the dustbin of history", there is another tax row brewing, this time on the other side of the pond.

There is a tax vote going through San Francisco and Berkley, California, to impose a tax on sugary drinks. It has been mooted in other US cities and it has also been debated in the UK. Can we stop people from being fat by taxing the fun out of sugary drinks and fatty food?

Mr Hubbard said: "There have been other attempts to introduce such as tax but none have been successful because of public opposition to additional taxes and the clout of the powerful soft drinks lobby."

(Side-note: a Soft Drinks Lobby sounds really nice. It sounds like a seated area in a hotel or an office, where gorgeous waiting staff serve you ice-cold cola on a silver platter on a warm day, and hot squash and a blanket on a cool day. I'd like to spend time in that sort of a Soft Drinks Lobby.)

Mr Hubbard adds: "But the tide may be turning".

Yes, the healthcare lobby is desperate to get people to cut their sugar intake. If you've ever seen those Secret Eaters or Super Skinny vs Super Size shows on your tellybox, you will know how bad sugary drinks can be. I like watching those programmes, it really opens your eyes to what we are putting into our bodies. I make a point of watching a few episodes in a row on iPlayer, so that I can get through a whole tub of Ben 'n' Jerries while judging fatter people, silently.

So it may not be too long before this bizarre tax is levvied not just across the US but also in the UK. Teachers will rejoice.

It's not the most bizzare tax, however, in the UK. And certainly it is not the weirdest one in the world.

Here's my list of top five weird and wonderful taxes

1) The window tax. It sounds like a Tory Party policy to hit out at council house people who have not just a spare bedroom (The SIN!) but also have more than one window (coming over here, stealing our natural light). However, this was a real tax just over 350 years ago in the UK - which is why you will see many old buildings with some window cavities that have been bricked up.

2) Soap. Yes, that expensive commodity endured a tax for centuries across Europe, from the late middle ages onwards. It wasn't repealed until 1835, when, coincidentally, people started to realise that hygiene helped them not to get diseases. Some parts of the UK, teenage boys' bedrooms included, may think a tax on soap still exists. It is time to put them straight!

3) Urine the money. Yes, those lovely Romans didn't like people wasting their precious pee, especially as tanners (people who treated the skins of animals) and launderers (not money launderers) used the chemicals in urine to keep themselves in business. So by taxing other people's "business" back in the 1st Century, Vespasian managed to raise a lot of money from people buying urine. But then he had also managed to pee away the majority of his predecessor's large fortune...

4) Bearded Russians? You've heard of bearded Russians? Well, you wouldn't have if you visted in the early 1700s. That doyen of Czars, the Emperor Peter the Great - a man often pictured with a beard - placed a tax on beards so that men would look like the French, who were clean-shaven. For about 100 years, the Russian elite attempted to look, feel and sound French. Until that bald-faced Napoleon tried to invade Russia.

5) Hat Tax. For some weird reason unknown to anyone but the political establishment in 1784, England tried to impose a tax on hats. No man could wear one unless he paid a tax; in desperation at loss of customers, milliners invented new names for things you wear on your heads. The English government decided that wasn't cricket, and they were not about to start playing a Regency game of Taboo with hatmakers, so put a blanket ban on all headgear. This was repealed just before the Battle of Waterloo - so maybe Napoleon did English gentlemen and Russian noblemen a big favour. Hats and beards ahoy!

In fact, I am so happy that people have the right to be hatted and fuzzy-faced that I've decided to come out in favour of them. I don't have a hat in the office, so I hope my tache and beard will suffice.