We Will Strongly Oppose The Liberal Democrats’ Unworkable And Impractical Mansion Tax

As recently announced at their 2009 Party Conference, the Lib Dems want to impose a tax on those who have a property worth over a £1 million pounds. This is an utterly preposterous idea and has no place at a time when serious and thoughtful economic policies are needed to deal with the UK’s eye-watering budget deficit. To quote one senior Lib Dem MP, it is “complete codswallop”. The Lib Dems have to ask themselves the following important and serious questions:

1) Why should someone in Hazel Grove be penalised for owning a home that happens to be valued over a certain figure?

2) Property prices fluctuate, so why should houses worth around the £999,999 mark be exempt and those worth £1 million be penalised? Do they not think that the owners of houses worth £1 million or more may not look to devalue their property by a few thousand Pounds – like take out a spare bathroom – so as to game the system and come in under this arbitrary threshold?

3) A large number of people inherit properties of this value from their friends and family, and often do not have the income to pay such a tax. Do the Lib Dems really want to penalise these people – individuals who are often not very wealthy at all? Allied to their obsession with inheritance tax, why are the Lib Dems so enthusiastically favour of taxing the perfectly understandable and human bequest motives of people when they die? Aren’t people taxed enough under this Labour government when they live never mind when they die?

4) Someone who has lived in such a property all their life, or bought it at a time when house prices were low, would potentially fall prey to this ridiculous policy with no concomitant increase in their personal income whatsoever. Should such honest and hard-working people be penalised too? Some of these people include elderly pensioners who a limited source of income.

5) How on earth would this crazy idea be administered, monitored and operationalised? Who would determine and adjudicate the value of a given property? Would there be an appeals system? How many estate agents would have to value the property? How would the policy work?
At a time when the country needs credible economic policies to get us out of the financial mess that Gordon Brown has created, the last thing the people of Hazel Grove need are whacky ideas from the Liberal Democrats. Labour has shown itself to be economically incompetent in government. With policies like this, the Lib Dems have shown they would be equally bad if not worse. I believe that only under a Conservative government and with a Conservative MP can the people of Hazel Grove be protected from such deeply harmful and ill-thought out economic policies.