Gove’s war on second-home owners is pure socialist envy
It’s not as if we weren’t warned. During the 2019 general election campaign, many predicted that a victory by the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party would see an unprecedented war on wealth. The innate hostility with which Labour members viewed high earners would manifest itself in various spiteful policies. So thank goodness the Conservatives prevailed, no? Well, not quite.
When any party is beaten as decisively as Labour was, the victors have a right to believe that the philosophical mindset that has just been defeated can be ignored for the duration of the next parliament. It is certainly not to be expected that, having won a massive majority – having banished Corbyn’s style of red-blooded socialism to the political margins where it belongs – the Government should spend the next few years echoing exactly the same kind of narrow-minded politics of envy.
Yet that’s exactly what has happened. The latest example of this blue-rinse socialism is Michael Gove’s decision to give local authorities the power to double council-tax rates on second homes. That’ll show those rich people! That’ll teach them not to do what they like with their own money; to earn enough to make life more comfortable for them and their families!
The aim of this policy appears to be twofold.
The first is to force second-home owners to sell up or rent out their property and allow local families to live there instead. The problem with this notion is that, if those who have invested in a second home really are as filthy rich as claimed, this will simply not happen; millionaires can afford a modest rise in their annual outgoings. But many second-home owners are not among the superwealthy. They are stretched middle-class workers seeking to make an investment for the longterm for their families, and penalising them is not only ethically questionable – it is politically self-harming.
The second aim of the policy, of course, is to seek to gain some credit for this Government’s born-again conversion to wealth distribution. It goes hand in hand with those other great Tory policies of raising personal taxation and hiking up corporation tax.
The war on second homes will not impact in any meaningful way the dire shortage of homes in this country, but it will satisfy the desire of a certain political elite to treat with disdain the wealth of some of our citizens. Only a massive house-building programme will sort out the housing shortage – even to write those words is to cringe at the obvious truth of that statement, as if it ever needed to be written down for it to be true.
But having failed to reform planning guidance and processes to allow such a building programme to get underway, the Government is settling for a deflection strategy, hoping that tinkering with council tax rates and making scapegoats of the middle class will give beleaguered ministers something to say when challenged about the housing crisis.
Meanwhile, the Left is rubbing its hands, watching as this Government follows some of Labour’s worst instincts. But as tribute acts go, the Conservatives are doing a pretty dismal job of imitating the real thing.
After all, Labour actually believes wholeheartedly in punishing the rich for the sin of being rich. When Michael Gove does it, he looks like one of those chimpanzees that used to advertise teabags: amusing but unconvincing.