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| Ed Miliband’s war on non-doms shows whose side he is on | Ed Miliband’s war on non-doms shows whose side he is on |
| (about 3 hours later) | |
| Totemic policies that announce what a party stands for are the gold dust of elections. Most election offers try to hit that gilded button, crafted for message way above practical effect. | Totemic policies that announce what a party stands for are the gold dust of elections. Most election offers try to hit that gilded button, crafted for message way above practical effect. |
| How much would Labour abolishing non-dom status raise? No one knows – and it’s not the point. We can’t tell how much these 116,000 super-rich have got stashed abroad, so any windfall will be pure bonus. The message, not the money, is what matters. | How much would Labour abolishing non-dom status raise? No one knows – and it’s not the point. We can’t tell how much these 116,000 super-rich have got stashed abroad, so any windfall will be pure bonus. The message, not the money, is what matters. |
| Ed Miliband has taken a stand against outrageous excess in company cartels and top pay. The non-dom status is so anomalous and unjust that promising its abolition creates a useful trap for the Tories: will they oppose this colonial perk that passes only through the male line? Michael Gove – always quick on the draw and often wrong – jumped straight into the pit when he warned of “a flight of talent” yesterday. The FT’s Lombard column gets it right: “Like a truffle wrapped in gold leaf, non-dom status is nice to have, but hard to justify” – adding a sage warning: “Organised capital needs to pick its battles. The non-dom wheeze should not even make the long list.” | Ed Miliband has taken a stand against outrageous excess in company cartels and top pay. The non-dom status is so anomalous and unjust that promising its abolition creates a useful trap for the Tories: will they oppose this colonial perk that passes only through the male line? Michael Gove – always quick on the draw and often wrong – jumped straight into the pit when he warned of “a flight of talent” yesterday. The FT’s Lombard column gets it right: “Like a truffle wrapped in gold leaf, non-dom status is nice to have, but hard to justify” – adding a sage warning: “Organised capital needs to pick its battles. The non-dom wheeze should not even make the long list.” |
| Whose side is a party leader on? That great signifier is not easy to get right. Margaret Thatcher’s sale of council houses was iconic as it summed her up in a single policy: it said she stood with aspiring, hardworking tenants – the C1s she needed; it said she stood for a property-owning democracy – the well off; and it said she was against the state owning anything. | Whose side is a party leader on? That great signifier is not easy to get right. Margaret Thatcher’s sale of council houses was iconic as it summed her up in a single policy: it said she stood with aspiring, hardworking tenants – the C1s she needed; it said she stood for a property-owning democracy – the well off; and it said she was against the state owning anything. |
| Totems can be disastrous, too. Michael Howard got it badly wrong in 2005 with his “patient passport” that would let people take 60% of the cost of treatment out of NHS funds to spend in the private sector. Denuding the NHS to pay for the well-heeled told voters all they needed to know about Tory values. | Totems can be disastrous, too. Michael Howard got it badly wrong in 2005 with his “patient passport” that would let people take 60% of the cost of treatment out of NHS funds to spend in the private sector. Denuding the NHS to pay for the well-heeled told voters all they needed to know about Tory values. |
| George Osborne’s 2007 pledge to lift the inheritance tax threshold to £1m struck Gordon Brown as such a brilliant symbol that it panicked him out of an election he could have won. Expect Osborne to do it again: it works because the Tory press blows up a storm on this, deliberately misleading every homeowner in the south-east to think their children will be stripped of their birthright – when only 6% of estates fall into it, and only on money above a tax-free allowance of £650,000. Inheritance tax was the great historic equaliser that reduced gigantic accumulations of wealth – but it’s a tax hated by even humble homeowners. Has Labour the heft to explain how this only really affects the top few? | George Osborne’s 2007 pledge to lift the inheritance tax threshold to £1m struck Gordon Brown as such a brilliant symbol that it panicked him out of an election he could have won. Expect Osborne to do it again: it works because the Tory press blows up a storm on this, deliberately misleading every homeowner in the south-east to think their children will be stripped of their birthright – when only 6% of estates fall into it, and only on money above a tax-free allowance of £650,000. Inheritance tax was the great historic equaliser that reduced gigantic accumulations of wealth – but it’s a tax hated by even humble homeowners. Has Labour the heft to explain how this only really affects the top few? |
| Miliband’s non-dom gesture follows his mansion tax on homes worth over £2m, and the 50p top tax rate – all highly popular in the polls – and marks another significant break with New Labour’s contamination, infatuation and fear of the super-rich. | Miliband’s non-dom gesture follows his mansion tax on homes worth over £2m, and the 50p top tax rate – all highly popular in the polls – and marks another significant break with New Labour’s contamination, infatuation and fear of the super-rich. |
| Peter Mandelson’s famously laconic remark that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” did include “so long as they pay their taxes” – but Blair and Brown never dared tax them enough. That remark became totemic too – redolent of a glimpsed lifestyle of yachts, Tory Rothschild bankers and Russian oligarchs that warped the party’s identity. | Peter Mandelson’s famously laconic remark that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” did include “so long as they pay their taxes” – but Blair and Brown never dared tax them enough. That remark became totemic too – redolent of a glimpsed lifestyle of yachts, Tory Rothschild bankers and Russian oligarchs that warped the party’s identity. |
| Related: Ed Miliband: Labour will scrap non-dom tax status | |
| Outrageous excess went unchecked in those boom years. But even after the crash, the number of UK billionaires has doubled since 2009, says the High Pay Centre. FTSE 100 directors’ pay is up 40%. Nor is there any connection between top pay and success as FTSE 350 leaders’ pay has risen twice as fast as their companies’ profits and five times faster than average pay. Ever since Thatcher took over, the share of earnings of the bottom 80% has fallen while the top 1% own 55% of everything. The poorest regions in northern Europe are all in the UK. | Outrageous excess went unchecked in those boom years. But even after the crash, the number of UK billionaires has doubled since 2009, says the High Pay Centre. FTSE 100 directors’ pay is up 40%. Nor is there any connection between top pay and success as FTSE 350 leaders’ pay has risen twice as fast as their companies’ profits and five times faster than average pay. Ever since Thatcher took over, the share of earnings of the bottom 80% has fallen while the top 1% own 55% of everything. The poorest regions in northern Europe are all in the UK. |
| By instinct, if not by statistic, voters know all this, furiously feeling nothing will ever be done. Polls show 80% say income distribution is unfair, and pay doesn’t reflect how hard people work. But that may be a trap for Labour too: people also hate the idea of redistribution, fearing it means taking from them to give to wasters. Hitting the rich is popular – but the Tories have been good at turning that into fear that ordinary voters will be “double-whammied” too. | By instinct, if not by statistic, voters know all this, furiously feeling nothing will ever be done. Polls show 80% say income distribution is unfair, and pay doesn’t reflect how hard people work. But that may be a trap for Labour too: people also hate the idea of redistribution, fearing it means taking from them to give to wasters. Hitting the rich is popular – but the Tories have been good at turning that into fear that ordinary voters will be “double-whammied” too. |
| This is the emblematic battleground of the election. Was New Labour right to duck squeezing the rich until their pips squeaked, for fear of frightening the rest? Or is Miliband on to a winner when people know how pay and wealth has been sucked upwards to the undeserving rich? | This is the emblematic battleground of the election. Was New Labour right to duck squeezing the rich until their pips squeaked, for fear of frightening the rest? Or is Miliband on to a winner when people know how pay and wealth has been sucked upwards to the undeserving rich? |