Mansion tax bargain for Sultan is insulting

IN London’s wealthiest borough where 71 died in the Grenfell Tower fire, combative MP Emma Dent Coad quotes a simple comparison that highlights grotesque inequality in Two Nation Britain.

The Labour battler’s example involves the Sultan of Brunei, an obscenely rich multi-billionaire dictator who profits personally from the oil and gas fiefdom he rules with an iron fist, and Mrs Braithwaite, a working class retired mother and grandmother.

The Sultan owns a 16-bedroom mansion with golden chandeliers, worth upwards of perhaps £100m, in Kensington Palace Gardens – known for good reason as Billionaires’ Row.

In the borough’s northern end, in what is practically another world socially and economically, Mrs B rents a three-bedroom terrace in which she lives with her family.

So it’s a 24-carat injustice the zillionaire’s council tax is, according to Dent Coad, only a measly tenner a week more than Mrs B’s – what a flunkey of the Sultan might slip a doorman outside a swanky hotel.

Nothing better illustrates the bankruptcy of a system funding vital local services than an unjust arrangement favouring an affluent elite.

Council tax was fossilised in England 28 years ago by a toxic combination of indifference, scaremongering and political cowardice.

Labour as well as Cons dodged property revaluations and new top charges to leave it stuck in 1991 when houses were much, much cheaper.

The Sultan wins with a top Band H set at £320,000 and over.

The losers are the Mrs Bs in band G and down.

Rejigging the tax so the very wealthiest pay a decent whack isn’t the only main route for cash-strapped councils to raise extra cash for everything from home helps and carers to street sweepers, lollipop patrols, librarians and teachers. Grants scrapped by the austerity Tories require urgent restoration plus a renewed championing of redistribution from affluent to struggling areas.

Yet the “mutual” exit of Left-wing Chris Williamson from Labour’s front bench for daring to suggest bills rise on the most expensive homes, freezing them for 85% of households in his Derby backyard, suggests even Comrade Corbyn’s wary of wrestling with local government finance.

Instead of sitting back complacently as a Government-in-waiting, his party must now recall four-time winner Harold Wilson’s rallying call: Labour is a moral crusade or it is nothing.