My last missive on speculation about a possible wealth tax raised a few eyebrows, even though I think it is safe to say, it is unlikely to get the go ahead in the upcoming Budget. It did remind me however, of a piece written by Giles Coren, published in the Times, on 1st September 2012, when we were under the Conservative/Lib-Dem coalition government. It took me a while to find it, buried as it was in an old archive but find it, I did. Enjoy!
Soak the rich. Start with the mustard cords – Giles Coren
Nick Clegg’s useless tax wheeze will never work. You have to use stealth – and that means using your imagination.
If Nick Clegg wants to “hardwire fairness” into the Government’s austerity measures then he is going to have to do a lot better than implement a French-style wealth tax of 0.5 per cent on rich people’s assets because, as Denis Healey explained to Harold Wilson 350 years ago this week, rich people are too clever for that. That’s how they got rich in the first place. They’ll see a thing like that coming from a mile away and just hold all their expensive stuff behind their backs and go “tra-la-la” until the tax man walks past, or they’ll go, “Oh look, is that a cormorant?” and then stuff it all down their trousers when he looks up.
The only way to tax the rich is by stealth. Not with a “stealth tax” so unstealthy that even bone-thick Labour backbenchers can spot it without their NHS specs on, but one that is actually stealthy. Stealthy as a mink with a diamond-studded cane and a sex worker on his arm at a cocktail party on an oligarch’s yacht. A tax nobody could notice because it is just too, too clever.
If the coalition wants to save the economy without picking the pockets of the poor it need only tax the following items, then sit back and enjoy the inevitable upturn of the curve.
Red trousers
Slap a tenner on every pair of these and you’ll be half way out of the doldrums already. Just take a glance around Kensington and Chelsea on a Saturday afternoon if you don’t believe me. Nobody with a ten million quid town house in that part of the world appears to own any other type of weekend trouser. If red slacks did not exist I am sure they would be walking up and down the Fulham Road in their underpants. Tax those, Mr Clegg, and nobody will raise an eyebrow.
Mustard cords
Rich bastards looking for loopholes will no doubt be advised by their devious accountants to move completely over into these heretofore occasional alternatives to red legwear, and thus you may find yourself compelled to tax these as well, to stop the fiscal leakage. Consider also a levy on green quilted bodywarmers.
“Builder’s Tea”
Drunk only by squawking posh hags in the South of England. Actual builders, as everyone knows, drink Red Bull for breakfast.
Labradors, Gordon setters, golden retrievers, Weimaraners, pugs, Afghans . . .
Slap huge licence fees on these elitist hounds (your spin guys should be looking for the headline “Capitalist Dogs!”) but nothing at all on pit-bull crosses, Rottweilers or Dobermans, so that your core working-class voters can still afford something to kill their toddlers, savage their nans and crap on the middle-class pavements where they take them for their morning toilet.
Heroin
As the fallout from the death of the Rausing woman has shown us, the truly super-rich can honk their way through absolute kilos of the stuff. A “smack tax” would be a great way to batter the idle rich while passing it off as some sort of namby-pamby health tax.
Football tickets
Nobody poor has been able to afford one since the end of the last century anyway. Time to profit from or tax into extinction this ridiculous pastime of the unimaginably wealthy.
Electric cars
Also, hybrids, gas-powered vehicles, bicycles and horses. Everybody knows that environmentally sustainable travel is a luxury of the super-rich. Who have you ever seen getting out of a Prius apart from Gwyneth Paltrow or Bill Gates? Honest working people drive gas-guzzling rust buckets because they don’t have the spare cash to indulge in luxuries like saving the planet. So, tax heavily any non-petrol or petrol-efficient vehicle and slash the deficit with absolutely no knock-on hardships for the poor. This is about squeezing the rich and saving the nation — the Earth can go screw itself.
Windmills/wood-burners/solar panels etc.
Same principle as above. If you’re not relying on cheap fossil-generated energy from the National Grid then you are almost certainly super-rich scum and we’re going to soak you with petrol till your eyes pop out. A 50 per cent levy on all carbon-neutral energy sources will pull us up to a practically German level of economic strength, and teach those jewellery-rattling bankocrats a lesson or two.
Books
Come on, name a poor person who reads books. You can make this looks like a tax on educational elitism, entrenched values, old technology and Bunterish Tories with their own libraries who hate black people, but in fact you’re just taxing people who think they are too good for television.
Art galleries/museums
And all other places where they serve muesli crunch bars instead of ham rolls in the canteen.
Fresh food
Who apart from the wealthy can be bothered with farm shops, farmers’ markets and little independent grocers? Frozen supermarket ready meals and fast food are good enough for the poor, so let’s put a whopping impost on any foodstuff that is less than a week old and has travelled fewer than 300 miles — the surefire indicators that evil wealthy customers are the target. Working-class voters waddling down the fizzy pop aisle at Lidl with their faces in a Ginster’s pie won’t even notice.
Thinness
Who is thin these days apart from the wealthy? With their fresh food and their moderate alcohol intake and their gym memberships ... they make me sick (which is great because vomiting keeps me thin). Everybody’s annual tax liability must be divided by the square root of their body mass index (BMI) to create a final payment inversely proportional to how fat they are. Proper huge Northern fatties will pay practically nothing, as is only fair, and bony-arsed gold-hoarders like the Ecclestone girls, the Duke of Westminster, Seb Coe and Selina Scott will be stripped clean. The obese (or “meek” as they used to be called) will truly inherit the Earth.
Flights to Italy
Only rich people go to Italy, to buy castles off each other and whang on about the sodding tomatoes. So, double the cost of flights there, cream off 90 per cent of the revenue towards the deficit and secure more votes by using the rest to subsidise flights to such places as Faliraki and Puerto Banús where poor people like to go to get horribly burnt and beat each other up.
The Guardian
A newspaper run, written and read only by rich people, who take this miserable blatt full of leftist cant and lachrymose inclusivity bilge to assuage the guilt they feel about their rich parents, public school education, high salaries and huge Victorian houses in Hackney. Add another pound to every copy and the soppy rich gits who buy it will never notice, and nor will the poor, who will, as ever, carry on buying something jolly with bare norks in it and the odd free holiday offer for 30p.
The Lib Dems
A party that is the eccentric luxury of super-rich voters and is run entirely by people who went to Westminster School. So, slap fifty quid a year on party membership, which will either raise pots of cash to halt the slump or result in the disintegration of the party and an end to the annual deluge of unworkable hippy-dippy taxation wheezes. So, the nation wins either way.
When I first read this, I remember thinking how it could so easily have been written by the great wordsmith himself, Alan Coren. I hope it brought a smile to your face on a drizzly February afternoon in Lockdown. I wonder if we’ll all be smiling after the real Budget on 3rd March?
As always, if you have any questions about this piece or any other finance related matter, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
Yours sincerely
