CARDIGAN RIGHTWINGER STRIKES AGAIN
Thus Stephen Glover of the Daily Mail for 3rd August
2017: ‘I’ve not got a socialist bone in my body, but I’d tax the rich’s empty
homes’, says his headline. So, surprises from the Mail’s resident cardigan reactionary. But more surprises to come:
‘I’m not shocked because of what
happened at Grenfell…’ Wot? Not at the deaths of at least 80 people and the
maiming and personal distress and loss of hundreds? This seems not just
anti-socialist but anti-human. I believe even Mrs May was shocked. Perhaps it
should be placed in context:
I’m not
shocked because of what happened at Grenfell, whose recently refurbished flats
were seemingly much sought after. That appalling inferno seems to have been the
result of flawed building regulations and huge incompetence on the part of the
council and its agencies.
Poor
Stephen still doesn’t tell us if he was shocked about what actually happened to
these people: perhaps by the end of the passage he forgot what he’d written at
the beginning. What he does is surmise the how of the tragedy while
conveniently ignoring the why: the rooted, probably criminal indifference at
the base of the ‘incompetence.’ We have
just seen reports of fires in Dubai tower blocks from which there was little
human loss of life or limb because of more than one functioning staircase, a
top-grade lift system and an army of flunkies on tap. The safety of the rich is
well provided for on high; Grenfell shows that no one in authority had bothered
much about the safety of the poor at great heights. But for Glover all that is ‘a
separate issue’.
Yet the predominance of super-rich
homes that are empty because they are being held as assets in a city with a
severe housing shortage ‘will stoke understandable resentment and envy among
moderate people – feelings that will be cleverly exploited by zealots like
Corbyn and McDonnell.’ I doubt if it
takes a lot of cleverness to ‘exploit’ what Glover already refers to as ‘understandable
resentment’; I doubt if it takes any at all.
Meanwhile, ‘ordinary middle-class
people, who may own a modest second home, [will be] penalised because of the
excesses of the super-rich’. Notice that the actual victims at Grenfell were
and are not exactly ‘ordinary middle-class people’ and few are likely to have
owned ‘a modest second home’, perhaps a key reason for those who do to be ‘moderate’.
Glover leaves all the victims behind as ‘a separate issue’. (Ask the Welsh or
the Cornish what they think of ‘modest’ second homes displacing the needs of
their own young.) We see here that
Glover is appealing to his own middle-and upper-middle-class readership. That
is, to the core of the Conservative vote. No point in wasting one’s polemical time
on the hoi polloi who are unlikely to
vote Tory whatever happens.
The zealotry of Corbyn and McDonnell
does, however, lead to a fear that even some ‘moderates’ in the middle-classes
might be drawn to Labour: that is the real danger.
Hence we turn populist and demand that
the super-rich be taxed more on their empty homes. Not, of course, that they be
dispossessed of them, for they have the same right to property as anyone else.
But: ‘Can it be right that, in Kensington and Chelsea, the owner of a property
worth £325,000 pays the same rate of council tax as a billionaire living in a
house worth £50 million?’ (Or not living in it, as the case may be?) That leads
me to w9onder how much council tax should be paid by someone who owns a £50
million house as compared to that paid by someone owning a £325,000 house. What
should an equitable ‘top rate’ of council tax be in this instance? Surely £1
million would be more than just, but to impose this as council tax would surely
distort the council tax system out of all recognition. So that is what Glover’s
radical tax-the-rich amounts to: an increase in their council tax of some
unspecified amount, and surely not that onerous a one for a billionaire to
pay. As Glover himself admits:
A little
legitimate squeezing (sic) of the absent super-rich might not make much
practical difference. But it would at least show that Theresa May’s Tory Party
has the right moral priorities, and that its heart is in the right place.
In other
words, don’t do anything much but show that you have the right moral
priorities. To be a bit blunter: bring in a fig-leaf policy to keep the Tories
in power and able to continue pursuing the politics of inequality, in including
that of housing. Earlier on Glover gave the game away when he wrote:
Surely one
lesson of the last election is that housing is a toxic issue. If the Tories are planning to be elected next
time round, they had better build a lot more homes than the Coalition ever
achieved.
Thus, not
a social policy but an election strategy. People may, however, find this a
rather unsatisfactory – not to say hypocritical - stance to take as opposed to ‘zealots’
who seek to implement basic social justice (i.e. in housing): build houses in order to get elected. And how many of
those, when push comes to shove?
We see
the same sort of rather obvious realpolitik
in an Observer interview (6
August 2017) with Will Tanner, ‘formerly deputy head of the Downing Street
policy unit’, who says at one point that ‘If Conservatives want to win the next
election, they to need to build a radical new prospectus’. (Note: not that ‘a
radical new prospectus’ is the right thing to do.) When then follows from
Tanner’s position is a Goldilocks list of things Tories should promise – indeed
whether they were to carry them out or not – and this involves various ‘shoulds’
about what needs to be done. ‘These things are easy to say, hard to translate
into policy and more difficult still to deliver,’ says Tanner with admirable
frankness. Though who said anything about actually delivering on election
promises? It will certainly be ‘difficult’ for a party consisting of Theresa
May, Philip Hammond, Boris Johnson, Chris Grayling, Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt,
David Davis and Liam Fox. Unfortunately Pitt the Younger, Robert Peel,
Disraeli, Butler and Macmillan do not appear to be available to help out.
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