The Left so loathe the rich, they even laud jewel thieves as ‘diamond geezers’

THERE are war heroes. There are sporting heroes. And now, apparently, there are criminal heroes. In sections of the media, there has been a more than sneaking admiration for the gang that spent the Easter weekend emptying the security boxes of individuals and small businesses in London’s diamond district of Hatton Garden.

The Daily Mirror’s front-page headline was ‘The Diamond Geezers’. Underneath, it gave them nick-names such as ‘Mr Ginger,’ ‘Mr Strong’ and ‘The Gent’. Later, it mused how their raid might be immortalised by Hollywood.

A columnist in The Independent gloated that ‘since the financial crisis made the superrich richer, it’s hard to sympathise with victims who are perceived — rightly or wrongly — to belong to this new class’.

The Guardian, with a hint of wistful approbation, described this raid as ‘Return of the old-fashioned heist’ and quoted a former armed robber from East London: ‘Everybody’s happy because everybody’s skint at the moment and they reckon — rightly or wrongly — that whoever’s lost something can afford it.’

Shaking

How about wrongly? Many of those emptied safety boxes contained the entire stock of some local jewellers; others held precious family items.

Gerald Landon, one of those who feared his box was among those emptied, said he was ‘absolutely devastated. It’s a lifetime of work and stock I’ve had for years.’ Michael Miller, another jeweller, said his box had contained a £5,000 watch he had bought for his son’s forthcoming 18th birthday. Norman Bean said he had probably lost £35,000 worth of jewellery, all uninsured: ‘I was shaking. I couldn’t believe it.’

Yes, uninsured; because as one gem industry spokesman told the BBC: ‘If you can’t afford your jewellery insurance, you put it in a safety deposit box which is going to cost you between £300 and £400 a year and you know it is the most secure place you can put it.’

This does not soften the hearts of Guardian readers. ‘There are more pressing and important issues in this country than feckless rich people who are too tight to look after their property . . . Screw them,’ commented one.

Another took the line of that Independent columnist: ‘Good luck to them [the gang], I say. They are only playing into a rather ridiculous game of one- upmanship perpetrated by rich people.’

Well, it’s true that the General Election is a more pressing and important issue. But, in fact, it is exactly the attitudes to the Hatton Garden raid — and the moral issues arising from the estimated £200 million theft — which are being tested by the main parties in the election campaign.

Yesterday, David Cameron revealed that, if they got a majority in the next Parliament, the Conservatives would protect family homes up to a value of £1million from inheritance tax. This has been denounced by Labour as yet a further example of the Tories ‘looking after millionaires’ — and contrasts that with its own policy pledges to restore the 50p-in-the-pound tax rate for the most well-off and to abolish the right of foreigners partially resident here to pay tax only on their British earnings.

The Labour- supporting Guardian and Daily Mirror might resent the accusation, but I believe there is a clear link between taking Labour’s side over those pledges and admiring the actions of the Hatton Garden jewellery thieves.

They will protest that whereas the vault-raiders are simply taking the jewels for their own pleasure, the extra money that comes from increasing the top rate of income tax, or abolishing the privileges of so-called ‘nondoms’, will go towards funding public services: that this is more like Robin Hood, taking from the rich to give more to the poor.

In fact, neither of Labour’s proposals is likely to have such an effect. It has now been shown that following the abolition of the 50 per cent rate in George Osborne’s 2012 Budget, income tax received by the revenue from those in the new, reduced, top-rate bands actually rose over what had previously flowed to the Exchequer.

This bore out the forecast made by the widely respected Institute for Fiscal Studies when Labour introduced a new top rate of tax of 50 per cent just before the 2010 election: ‘The current 40 per cent rate is already generating the maximum revenue; any change in the rate reduces government revenue.’ As economists have long known, there is a point at which putting up tax rates has a negative effect on both the economy and enterprise — at which point the funds available for public expenditure fall.

The same goes for Labour’s ‘non- dom’ pledge. There are good arguments for abandoning that system (although many countries offer similar incentives to rich foreign incomers) — but raising revenues is not one of them. The shadow chancellor Ed Balls knows this, which is why he told the BBC as recently as January that to abolish ‘non-dom status’ would lead to a drop in tax revenues.

Fairness

But it would not in the least bother those on the angry Left if the effect of Labour’s proposals were to lead to a drop in revenues to the Exchequer. The reason is that their real motivation for taxing the rich ‘until the pips squeak’ is to make society ‘more equal’ — and, if they are honest, for the sheer pleasure of it.

Put another way, they would prefer a poorer, ‘fairer’ Britain to a more successful ‘unfair’ Britain. That is why they are so happy about the Hatton Garden safe deposit raid (although it probably doesn’t occur to them that the individual thieves, if they get away with it, will each be multi-millionaires whose unearned gains will never be taxed).

They certainly regard the Tories’ proposed inheritance tax reduction on family property as grossly ‘unfair’. Again, it doesn’t impinge on their consciousness that those who leave assets to their children have paid tax on their earnings over the decades, additional taxes on any savings income they have lived off in retirement, and that what such individuals manage to leave their families is what has been preserved after all those taxes have been paid.

It is a peculiar notion of ‘fairness’ that says the state has a greater right to those properties than the children who were brought up in them.

It is the same infantile notion of fairness that makes Left-wing commentators wet their knickers with excitement at the thought of uninsured family heirlooms being stolen by a gang of thieves. They think they are moral, but they don’t know what the word means.