When I’m in London I stay in a modest flat on the top of a tower block just a few yards from the extremely unglamorous and very noisy Shepherd’s Bush Green. By no stretch of the imagination is it a mansion, but if we get Ed Miliband as prime minister he’ll say that it is and charge me £30,000 every year for the privilege of owning it.
That isn’t completely the end of the world while I have a job, but one day, when my bladder has become leaky and I’ve been sacked, Miliband will still be on the doorstep every April demanding that I hand over 1% of what my flat is worth.
Apparently, if I really can’t afford his stupid new tax, he’ll let me pay after I’ve died and the flat has been sold. So that’s good news. To meet his demands I shall have to commit suicide.
Now I’m not going to get bogged down here in a verbal assault on the Labour leader. Because what worries me is that we are living in a country where he stands a very real chance of winning the election.
The mansion tax is popular. People have been told — by the Daily Mail, oddly enough — that the rich spend their time quaffing champagne, gorging on swan and jetting in and out of Los Angeles international airport with a dead leopard on their heads. And they think that it’s only fair these people should do their fair share to help those who live in Scotland.
Oh, for crying out loud, they already do — apart from Lewis Hamilton, obviously, but don’t worry about him, because to avoid paying his whack he has to live in Monaco, which on the Clarksometer is the second-worst place in the entire world.
No. Most rich people do contribute, and contribute massively. In fact it has been said that Britain’s wealthiest 1% pay almost a third of all the income tax received by the Treasury. But still Miliband wants them to cough up more. And the electorate may well decide he should get it. Which will cause the rich to move elsewhere, which will cause tax receipts to go down, not up (see France for details).
The mansion tax makes absolutely no sense, but it’s popular because in this country there’s a sense that the sun will shine every day and Scarlett Johansson will tuck you in every night if the pigs at the top have less on their table. This, however, is a theory that only really works in a weed-infested sixth-form common room.
Let’s take Warren Buffett as an example. He’s worth £48bn, which means he’s richer than Cambodia and Ghana put together, and there are those who say no single person should have this much money. Fine. So what if we took his fortune away and spread it out evenly among everyone else? You wouldn’t even get a tenner.
Let’s bring it closer to home. Let’s say we confiscated the assets of the Duke of Westminster and gave them all to the NHS. An excellent idea, a firebrand leftie would say. But his £8.5bn would be gone in less than a month.
I spoke the other day with a man who was cruising around the Caribbean on his extremely beautiful yacht. He told me that he would be there for a month more, after which he would switch to his slightly smaller yacht and sail to the Galapagos Islands for a few weeks.
Then he would fly in his private jet to Nice, where he’d rejoin his bigger boat for a summer in the Mediterranean, after which he’d go to his game reserve in South Africa.
Today this sort of thing is seen as revolting, and I cannot see why. Yes, he was born into a wealthy family and that makes him very lucky. But what difference does it make to you that he is spending the next six months on holiday?
It doesn’t matter whether he’s swimming with the turtles in the Pacific or working as a filing clerk in Watford: you will still live in the same house with the same stains on the carpet and the same wonky car.
Let me put it this way. If you hit a supermodel in the face with a tyre iron, would that somehow make the rest of the nation’s women more beautiful? Would your horse be faster if you cut one of Frankel’s legs off?
A couple of weeks ago a buffoon called Chris Bryant said it was iniquitous that the arts in Britain were dominated by people who’d been educated privately. There’s James Blunt, and Chris Martin out of Coldplay, and, er, Florence Welch out of the Machine, and, um . . .
The fact is this. Of the UK artists who had a top 40 album between 2010 and last year 72% went to a state school and 62% did not go to university.
So the shadow culture minister is talking out of his privately educated back bottom. Pop music is dominated by public-school kids in the same way as parliament is dominated by Liberal Democrats.
And anyway, who gives a damn? When I hear a tune I like, I don’t think, “Well, I’m not buying that because it was recorded by a load of smelly, poor people from a council estate”, any more than I think when I hear The Lady in Red, “Ah, this chap went to private school so it must be marvellous.”
Normal souls don’t think like the bitter and the twisted. I look at the people with whom I socialise now and I don’t have a clue where half of them went to school. I don’t care. Nor does anyone I know.
We employ the best candidates, choose friends based on their kindness and sense of wit and go to work to earn as much as we can. It’s not complicated.
But if Miliband wins the election it’ll get extremely complicated because everyone whose home is worth more than £2m will have to become a rent boy — or dead. Happily I’ve come up with a plan. I shall start a business and tour the country, valuing everyone’s house, no matter how big it is, at £1.9m.
