Collectivising Surrey: A Tragedy in One Act

The mansion tax isn’t a revolution - but judging by the screaming, you’d think Rachel Reeves had just seized the Home Counties and nationalised the Cotswolds.

I am back. Kind of.

South Africa was an absolute whirlwind of activity, crisis management and, yes, lots of sunshine (that last bit being very, very welcome).

I have, however, been woefully out of touch with the political comings and goings since about the budget – which means that while catching up on what I’ve missed since getting back into the country has been… overwhelming.

Not because of the sheer scale of what I’ve missed, but rather the noise – and specifically the noise that’s been generated from the wailing and keening about the mansion tax, because you know you’ve just come home to the UK when you step off of an eleven hour flight only to open your phone and be met with a wall of news, commentary and shouting that the country is on the brink of economic collapse because a couple of people with £2m houses might at some point be mildly inconvenienced.

It is utterly absurd.

On my heavily overused Chrome browser, I currently have a tab with all the information on starvation level food insecurity, crumbling schools and corridor care being completely normalised, while on the other I have a tearful Times headline telling me about a presumably lovely old lady who bought her house in 1970 for £4,000 and now fears the jackboot of Rachel Reeves for daring to notice that it’s worth more than God¹.

The tonal dissonance is… something.

Now, for any of you who may not be aware of what I’m nattering on about, the “Mansion Tax” I’m referring to is not an elaborate² Bolshevik plot meant to wrest wealth from the elite into the hands of the proletariat - it’s a very minor revenue mechanism. It’s officially named the “High Value Council Tax Surcharge” and it applies exclusively to homes in England worth more than £2m³.

“This humble cottage and its twelve reception rooms simply cannot withstand such tyranny.” // Photo by Rafik Wahba on Unsplash

The surcharge itself is banded - £2,500 a year for properties between £2m and £2.5m going up to £7,500 a year for homes that are worth over £5m. It’s due to start from 2028, it’s a surcharge paid by the owner (not the tenant) and there will be deferral schemes and exemptions for people who are asset-rich and cash-poor.

The government itself has stated that it will affect about 100,000 households - around 1% of properties - half of them in London and most of them in the South East of England. In terms of income it generates, the OBR thinks it’ll raise around £400m, which is just about 0.3% of the total tax receipts and roughly 0.012% of GDP.

If we’re talking in macroeconomics, this is coming down to what could be a rounding error.

And yet, if you expose yourself to any sort of right-wing press⁴, you would be forgiven for having the impression that Rachel Reeves had announced the collectivisation of Surrey and the Home Counties.

Richard Tice has boldly and sincerely claimed that this microscopic surcharge would instantly “break the whole economy”, while Nigel Farage has darkly warned of widows in London facing “distress” and being “forced out of their homes”, while in the same sentence insisting that it would not affect very many people at all.

Mel Stride was more thunderous and I imagine bellowed like an injured boar about Labour implementing a tax on aspiration, introducing a “death tax by the back door”, while Kemi Badenoch in her usual pugnacious way wrote that policies like these “kill the forces of aspiration” and that it was another “unjustified raid on pensioners who have done the right thing and worked hard their whole lives.”

The outrage we’ve seen is nothing more than theatre - and not especially good theatre at that.

It’s am-dram Macbeth in a draughty village hall, filled with over-projected vowels and fake blood. It’s the same basic plot we see again and again - any time there is even a hint of a policy that asks the wealthiest in the country to contribute just a bit more, the right-wing outriders assemble on cue to perform a morality play about suffering.

The protagonists are always the exact same archetypes - the widow in the big house, the pensioner that’s “living in a mansion but on a tiny income”, the “salt of the earth ordinary homeowner” whose £2.8m townhouse in Richmond is somehow completely indistinguishable from a semi-detached family home in Stoke.

Numbers, context and nuance? Never get a starring role.

And why is that? Because the moment you add any of those three factors in, the melodrama collapses spectacularly in on itself. A surcharge of a few thousand pounds a year on properties well over £2m - with years of notice as well as the option to defer until sale - is in no way or form the end of civilisation. It will be for the vast, vast majority of the people it will affect, a modest adjustment to what will be a very, very comfortable life.

But of course, that doesn’t matter, because this pantomime is what has become Britain’s national sport. Not football, rugby or cricket, no - it’s the launching of a full scale national crisis the moment that the rich are asked to endure what the rest of us in the cheap seats would instantly recognise as no more than slightly annoying admin.

And I’ll be honest, after spending a week in a country where poverty and collapse are not theoretical, the sheer emotional energy devoted to this subject completely breaks my head, and leads me to ask where this level of raw feeling was when UC cuts pushed families into food banks? Where was the biblical language of “collapse” and shouts of “war on ordinary people” when social care was completely dismantled or when councils effectively went bankrupt when central funding was removed?

Because if my memory serves me correctly, all of the above had justifications, good reasons and a lovely narrative of scroungers not working, “Benefits Britain” and “hard decisions” that were all carried not by the decision makers, but by the care worker skipping meals to feed her kids or the local hospital’s A&E closing because of a lack of funding.

It is utterly infuriating.

And the genius of this all - and I do mean that in the darkest way you can conjure up in your mind - is how it tries to make the wealthiest people in the country relatable by laundering them through saccharine sentimentality. Because if you had to say “I’m terribly worried about people living in Fulham with £3m houses”, you would be rightly laughed at and called a numpty, but if you switch that around to “we’re terribly concerned about poorly widows with dicky hips on fixed incomes being taxed out of their family homes where all their memories are”, you have a story.

You have what I presume would be a sad piano track⁵, a soft focus photo of a lovely old lady sitting in front of a glass cabinet with all the pictures of her children and grandchildren, and a headline about how said old lady just wants to live out her days in the house she bought in 1970 for less than a price of a used Ford Fiesta. The fact that the house is now worth twenty to thirty times the UK’s median salary will, of course, be completely absent from the story, because who wants to ruin a good tearjerker with context, right?

And it’s not as though there aren’t issues that need to be considered - if you are living in a house that’s ballooned in value over decades while your income hasn’t kept pace, then a new annual bill won’t be nothing. But that’s exactly why there are going to be things in place like the deferral scheme, more accurate valuations and protections for people in social housing or messy divorce situations.

Each of these factors deserves boring, serious technocratic attention, and that’s a conversation that’s worth having - but the right wing response has no interest in that whatsoever, because “Careful mitigation of potential consequences of introduction of policy” doesn’t generate nearly the number of clicks that GB News needs to survive, while “DEATH TAX BY BACK DOOR” most certainly does.

And the contradictions - oh, dear God, the contradictions.

The Telegraph simultaneously paints the policy as a “death tax” and a tax on “ordinary families”, despite the fact that owning a £2m+ home places you in a tiny and rarefied slice of the population.

The Conservatives scream about “politics of envy” while at the same time promising a £9bn stamp duty cut that will overwhelmingly benefit high-end buyers. Reform frames the whole thing as a communist plot of confiscation, while the most senior figures in the party - from Tice to Nick Candy - sit on properties that would be very much in scope of the tax.

If this were a Jonathan Swift satire about venal aristocrats, people would say it was far too on the nose.

In the end, the ultimate goal of this melodrama is two things.

First, it turns what should be a dry and slightly tedious argument about how we tax property into yet another episode in the ongoing culture war we’ve been living through the past ten years - because you’re not just discussing council tax bands anymore, you have to pick a side. You have to either be “on the side of hardworking homeowners” or part of a jealous, pitchfork wielding mob that’s dead set on punishing any sort of success.

Second, it demands emotional labour from us - we’re expected to empathise with people who have been the structural winners from forty years of housing policy as though they are the victims of some sudden historical injustice foisted upon them by those damned socialists.

After fifteen years of watching the suffering that was introduced by Tory austerity up close, I find that demand genuinely offensive. I simply do not have the bandwidth or empathy available to shed tears for someone whose main problem in their life is that their asset has appreciated so much over the past four decades that it now crosses an arbitrary threshold. The entire point of that asset is that you have options - options that the vast majority of people in this country do not have. You can borrow against it, you can sell it and downsize, you can pass it on and still leave your children with more money than most people will ever see in their lives.

Or, as a very last resort you can, put on your big-boy or girl trousers, stop throwing yourself onto a fainting sofa and pay a bill that is literally a fraction of what your paper wealth is worth.

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Thank you, as ever.

1. Which in this case is around four million pounds sterling.

2. And some may say overdue

3. Which despite LBC callers might want you to believe, is, in fact, a very high value.

4. That is to say, most traditional media in the UK.

5. Reminiscent of what would be on an OxFam advertisement at three in the morning