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I wrote these thoughts on my Facebook page yesterday, and I have taken a few elements out and added others. Anyway, let me know what you think:
The State’s share of the total economy continues to rise, putting even more pressure on those who are still here, working, building business, etc. There are one or two decent elements in it (stamp duty suspended on new share listings in London) but the general direction is bad. Unfortunately, given the reluctance of backbench Labour MPs to accept any meaningful welfare reforms, the total public spending bill will continue to rise. So next year we could have more of the same. That means more emigration of young, ambitious people to lower-tax places such as Dubai, Australia (relatively), etc. The tax base will contract.
One element in particular – the so-called “mansion tax” levy on high-value properties – bothers me not just because of the specifics (it will gum up the real estate market, and thresholds are bound to be frozen, drawing in more over time), but because of a principle.
If I own something that is valuable, why should I pay tax on it purely for that reason? Does the imposition of such a levy equate to the State acting as a landlord, demanding a rent? I can understand the point that a property that is valuable partly because of state action should therefore bear some tax (this is the argument for land value taxes or even council taxes, although LVT is problematic); there is also some sense in taxing property owners to pay for local services (back in the 19th C, only freeholders could vote in elections, which meant they had a vested interest in frugal government).
But taxing something that is worth X, and purely for that reason, is punitive. It also means that the asset-rich/cash-poor issue arises. Some people will need to sell, or at least downsize earlier than they perhaps wanted. Some folk might rent out a room to a tenant, or take out a second mortgage to find the cash. That could have a cascade impact on property prices, perhaps undermining the point of the tax. But maybe that is the point of this tax: it is designed to push property values down. And ironically, that will mean that on death of the owner (s), the haul in inheritance tax will be lower than otherwise.
If you own your home – you have paid for it fair and square, then it is yours. Period. A tax puts the State in the position of a sort of supreme landlord.
I realise that some people will say that there is a generational wealth injustice issue here, because lots of younger adults cannot afford to buy or even rent a decent place. That’s a genuine issue. The solution, broadly, is to free up the planning system, and control net immigration. Another factor is that we must stop artificially holding down interest rates, which has enriched some people with large homes, particularly if they are leveraged.
In some ways, the situation today is the long-drawn out consequence of the 2008 financial bust and a decade-plus of very low interest rates.
I saw a few people on other social media forums saying that objectors should stop bellyaching and pay up. Apart from the oafishness of this sort of response (“do what you are told!”), it ignores the principle of absolute property ownership. Another objection I’ve seen is that lots of people have to downsize, so those affected can do so. However, this is not that easy. Who’s going to buy, particularly when stamp duties are high and taxes in general are crimping growth? Underlying liquidity in the UK housing market is weak and unlikely to improve fast, although it might pick up a bit. Some owners might rent out part of their home to make a bit of cash to cover the tax, but not all such homes are easily changeable for that purpose, and rental income is now taxed anyway. Even so, I would expect some of this to happen in the years before the measure is hopefully repealed. The new tax will not come in immediately – and might get snarled up as the general election nears (it must be held by July 2029).
Of course, people downsize their property for various reasons: their children flee the nest; people want a smaller place to look after, unlock value and buy a holiday home, travel, invest in a business or hobby, etc. it’s natural and normal. But it’s not the State’s role to force the pace on this, to create a sense of duress.
The levy on high-value homes is a form of wealth tax. Even someone who is generally favourable towards the UK government, Dan Neidle, says they are a really bad idea.
Of course, I don’t need to spell it out to the sensible Samizdata regulars that what is wanted are taxes that are as low, flat and simple as possible.
Final random thought: property taxes could be defended in the past when only freeholders could vote in elections, and they tended to have an incentive to vote for stuff that would protect the value of what they had, such as sewage, water supply, electrification, parks, amenities, law enforcement of various kinds, and so on. I sometimes hope, however, naively, that we could bring such an approach back. Voting ought to involve some beneficial ownership “buy-in” to one’s neighbourhood.
“It [taxes on property values] is tantamount to a quasi-authoritarian reopening of settled property rights and fundamentally reorders the relationship between the individual and the state. Her scheme begins to abolish freehold property, turning yeoman-owners into leaseholders, with politicians as the ultimate landlords. Her `high value council tax surcharge’ is best understood as a rent, to be paid to [Rachel] Reeves for the right to stay in one’s home. Labour hates ordinary landlords, but is desperate to turn the state into the most exploitative of rent collectors. It’s sub-Marxist nonsense, a form of legalised theft.”
– Allister Heath, Daily Telegraph, 27 November, on yesterday’s Autumn Budget from Rachel Reeves, UK finance minister. He’s right that things such as “mansion taxes” – which in reality raise relatively paltry sums – are about forcing owners of properties deemed to be above £X or whatever into a situation where they own them at the sufferance of the State, rather than outright. And the temptation to lower the threshold on such a tax, along with everything else, will be irresistable.
On a related point, now seems a good time to introduce readers again to an essay in defence of absolute property right ownership – rather than the idea of owning it at the sufferance of the State. The essay, “Your Dog Owns Your House”, by the late French writer and classical liberal, Anthony de Jasay, is a masterpiece.
My computer is evil, so this will be brief.
“Justice secretary wants jury trials scrapped except in most serious cases”, the BBC reports:
Justice Secretary David Lammy is proposing to massively restrict the ancient right to a jury trial by only guaranteeing it for defendants facing rape, murder, manslaughter or other cases passing a public interest test.
An internal government briefing, produced by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) for all other Whitehall departments, confirms plans to create a new tier of jury-less courts in England and Wales.
The new courts would deal with most crimes currently considered by juries in Crown Court.
But the MoJ said no final decision had been taken by the government.
The plans, obtained by BBC News, show that Lammy, who is also deputy prime minister, wants to ask Parliament to end jury trials for defendants who would be jailed for up to five years.
The proposals are an attempt to end unprecedented delays and backlogs in courts, and do not apply to Scotland or Northern Ireland.
Here is what David Lammy said about juries in 2020:
David Lammy
@DavidLammy
Jury trials are a fundamental part of our democratic settlement. Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea.
The Government need to pull their finger out and acquire empty public buildings across the country to make sure these can happen in a way that is safe.
12:20 pm · 20 Jun 2020
I strongly recommend this article by Gawain Towler about the unedifying case of traitor Nathan Gill.
In May 2020, I wrote a piece called ‘Britain’s Covid Reich’. I commented:
One of the most remarkable aspects of the creation of Britain’s Covid Reich was that even in the middle of the Government’s witless, confused and ambivalent approach to the crisis it was able to rustle up overnight many of the key ingredients of totalitarianism. The ideology and the slogans, and the continual repetition of the message with the supine assistance of broadcast media all fell into place with frightening speed. The speed with which the Great British Public acquiesced was even more alarming.
One possibility I anticipated was:
In one direction lies the complete end of everything we have ever held dear and a life literally not worth living, a mere spectral existence in a paralysed and terrified surveillance state of agoraphobics queuing up like mendicant friars for government handouts.
I thought I was going over the top when I wrote that. But that’s exactly what’s happened – hasn’t it? Back then I thought there was a more optimistic possible alternative, but I was wrong.
Few politicians, few scientists and even worse few in the so-called free press seemed to be able to understand that the measures the Government was imposing were going to leave a legacy that would, and has, set Britain back by half a century and perhaps change it permanently. Anyone who dared to stray from the state propaganda line was shot down in flames.
So it is almost beyond belief to see that the confused and contradictory Covid Inquiry has continued to ignore the impact of lockdown…
– Guy de la Bédoyère
We’re told that students perform better when exposed to “different formats”. This is fair enough in principle, though the guidelines decline to specify what these formats might be, beyond implying there will be an impressive number of them. One can already picture the future: a single course requiring essays, posters, podcasts, puppet shows and a short stop-motion film made from Play-Doh – each designed to develop the student’s confidence, creativity and capacity to perform self-expression in increasingly unhinged ways.
Next, the document warns that “Standard Academic English” (once known as “English”) is an oppressive tool that advantages “already privileged students”. The implication, apparently, is that requiring coherent writing is a form of violence.
This is the educational equivalent of a gym announcing that push-ups are discriminatory because they favour those with upper-body strength.
– Michael Rainsborough
I remember him announcing this on YouTube. It was, frankly, appalling. Classic police overreach and the school complaining was typical of the thin skinned using lawfare to shut down critical voices. Yet it all came to nothing as the case was dropped. As any reasonable person would expect it to be. The correct approach to the initial complaint would have been to warn the complainant of the penalties for wasting police time.
Bryn Harris, chief legal counsel at the Free Speech Union, said the force, as well as others across the country, should “never repeat this mistake.”
But they will, because it wasn’t a mistake. Until there are personal consequences, this will continue to happen.
– Longrider
“Parents ‘vindicated’ after police admit unlawful arrest over WhatsApp row”, the Guardian reports. The subheading is “Hertfordshire police agree to pay £20,000 to Rosalind Levine and Maxie Allen, who were held for 11 hours after complaining about daughter’s school”.
I posted about this couple’s experience last April: Boiling frogs in Salem and Hertfordshire.
One aspect of the story that the Free Speech Union’s Frederick Attenborough highlighted at the time was that Hertfordshire Police didn’t just put the frighteners on Rosalind Levine and Maxie Allen, they also threatened – in writing – their local county councillor, Michelle Vince, that if she continued to advocate on their behalf she too might find herself “liable to being recorded as a suspect in a harassment investigation”. And they told Michelle Vince to pass on that warning to the local MP, Sir Oliver Dowden.
As Sir Oliver said in the Times, “Police risk ‘curtailing democracy’ by stopping MPs doing their job”.
Today’s Guardian article continues,
Allen claimed he and Levine were not abusive and were never told which communications were criminal, saying it was “completely Kafkaesque”.
A Hertfordshire police spokesperson said: “Whilst there are no issues of misconduct involving any officer in relation to this matter, Hertfordshire Constabulary has accepted liability solely on the basis that the legal test around necessity of arrest was not met in this instance.
“Therefore Mr Haddow-Allen and Ms Levine were wrongfully arrested and detained in January 2025. It would be inappropriate to make further comment at this stage.”
You wish. Further comment is both appropriate and necessary. There bloody well are issues of misconduct involving at least one officer in relation to this matter: whichever officer tried to frighten off both a local councillor and an MP from representing their constituents.
The sudden resignations this week of BBC director-general Tim Davie and CEO of news Deborah Turness has focussed minds on the role of the media. It has been startling – and grimly predictable – to watch senior figures at the BBC scrambling to defend their failures by muttering darkly about ‘right-wing conspiracies’ and ‘inside jobs’. Few, if any, have paused to consider whether the real problem might be their own cowardice.
The same rot runs through mainstream media across the world. In Ireland, I’ve met too many well-paid figures at RTÉ, the Irish Times and the Irish Independent who seem serenely proud of their refusal to touch anything remotely controversial. I call it Hugh Linehan syndrome, since, as duty editor of the Irish Times and host of the popular Inside Politics podcast, he appears to be particularly self-satisfied, even self-righteous, about his ability to avoid difficult issues.
– Stella O’Malley
This tweet from “GnasherJew” includes a video clip from a lecture on “The Birth of Zionism” given by Dr Samar Maqusi for the group “UCL Students for Justice in Palestine” on 11th November 2025. Dr Marqusi is currently Research Associate at University College London’s Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory (PEARL). (“Her work looks into the politics of space-making inside the Palestine refugee camps. More recently, she has been investigating modes of sociality and vitality in refugee camps inside a burdened Lebanon. Previously, Samar worked with UNRWA (UN Agency for Palestine refugees) as an Architect/Physical Planner, focusing on programmes of shelter rehabilitation and camp improvement.”)
Update: It looks like I pressed “publish” too soon. Never mind, you can enjoy seeing this post made in real time. Watch the video clip. It shows an academic in University College, London (UCL) spreading the blood libel. For anyone new to the term, a blood libel is a specific sort of anti-Jewish propaganda in which Jews are said to have murdered Christians for ritual purposes, often including baking their blood into bread. The genre goes back to the thirteenth century cult of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln. The spreading of such tales is usually the precursor to a pogrom, as it was in Lincoln in 1255.
Dr Samar Maqusi said this to her students the day before yesterday:
Now 40 years later, in about 1838, there was something called the “Damascus Affair”. Uh, what happened is, there is, um, a priest, a Christian priest called Thomas. He disappears, um, in Damascus during what is called the feast of Tabernacles. So, this is a Jewish feast, and the story goes – and, you know, again, these are things that you read again and again. As I said, do investigate, draw your own narrative. But the story is that during this feast they make this, um, special pancakes, or, um, bread. And part of the holy ceremony is that drops of blood from someone who’s not Jewish, which the term is “gentile”, has to be mixed in that bread. So, the story is that, um, a certain investigation was undergoing to try and find where Father Thomas is. He was found murdered and a group of, of Jews who lived in Syria said that, you know, admitted to kidnapping and murdering him to get the drops of blood for making, uh, the holy bread.
This one is known as “the Damascus Affair” or “the Damascus Blood Libel”. It’s famous enough to appear in lists of historical blood libels. I wasn’t expecting to see it related as fact in 2025 in one of the top ten universities in the world. Like every conspiracy theorist ever born, Dr Maqusi peppers her speech with literal and metaphorical “uptalk”, little get-out clauses such as “the story goes” and “draw your own narrative”, so that if challenged she can claim to be “just asking questions”. But she felt safe enough to speak as she did, and, with the delayed exception of whoever recorded her, her student audience did not challenge her.
As ever, I do not seek to use the law to silence Dr Maqusi. I want it made clear to all how common and accepted her views are among the pro-Palestinian movement, and among Palestinians. I do think that unless UCL takes action their Equality, Diversity and Inclusion policy will be revealed as an empty sham, but if that is the case I would rather know about it.
Update: Dan Souter points out in the comments that UCL has apologised and Dr Maqusi’s profile has been removed from the UCL website. The link is to an article by David Rose in Unherd. I commend the Provost’s decisive action to protect his university’s reputation, but I do find it disquieting that in just five years universities across the English-speaking world went from beating their breasts in penitence for the most minuscule and indirect manifestations of racism – here is UCL’s 2020 statement on Black Lives Matter and here is an account from its website of how it “denamed” buildings named after a couple of Victorian eugenicists because seeing the old names has “a profound impact on the sense of belonging that we want all of our staff and students to have” – to this.
That is certainly one way of putting it. Another is that, first, the Trump stuff is much less important than the BBC’s issues in other areas and that it seems modestly significant that Goodall devotes almost no space at all in his lengthy Substack piece to any of those issues. Secondly, at no point does Goodall bother considering whether some or any of the criticisms made by Prescott and Grossman have any validity at all.
That, however, seems a necessary starting point.
News judgement is often a nuanced and complex business. News “values”, on the other hand, should be comparatively straightforward. This is where it is entirely reasonable to convict the BBC’s coverage of the sex & gender wars. For here the corporation largely – though with notable exceptions, especially Hannah Barnes on Newsnight – picked a side and chose the one that required BBC journalists to sacrifice their judgement. Ideology trumped basic news values. They said it was dry when in fact it wasn’t obviously dry at all.
For once again, among the most important of those values is this eternal question: Is This True?
– Alex Massie
There is blood in the water and the sharks are circling. This story is going to run and run and run 😀
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