Labour’s socialist experiment in Wales should terrify us all.
At the rate it is going, there will be virtually no economy left at all
MATTHEW LYNN16 November 2023 • 2:43pm
You can’t drive more than 20 miles an hour across swathes of the country. If you need any public services the civil service is eyeing a four-day week, and there may soon be tourist levies to pay if you feel like visiting despite all this, . The Welsh administration has been quietly doing everything it can think of to make life in the country as difficult as possible. Now, it’s taking things a step further, planning what in effect will be the UK’s first “mansion tax”. Under the dismal leadership of Mark Drakeford, Wales is being turned into an experiment in what Joseph Stalin used to call “socialism in one country” – and the results will be catastrophic.
The “mansion tax” has been a favourite of the liberal-Left for the last twenty years, championed at different times by the Liberal Democrats and by the “two Eds” (Miliband and Balls for those with short memories) when they were in charge of Labour policy. Now Wales has decided to try it out. With a revaluation of council tax, the Welsh Assembly is planning to replace the current nine bands with twelve, with punitive extra charges for the most expensive properties. On a house worth £1.2 million or more, you will have to pay an extra £1,000 a year. And of course, that will just be for starters. In every meaningful sense of the word, it will be a “mansion tax”.
According to the Welsh administration that “would be a decisive move in the direction of fairness”. Well, perhaps. The only trouble is, it would also be a “decisive move” in the direction of poverty. Of the owners of the 40,000 properties that the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates will have to pay the higher levies under the proposed plans, it is hard to know how many will stay. But we have to assume that a fair few people will decide that living in Gloucester, all things considered, is just as nice as Monmouth, and that Bristol is just as nice as Cardiff.
They can still commute to work, and send their children to the same schools, but they won’t have to pay the mansion tax (and, heck, they can even rev their electric vehicle up to 21 miles an hour if they feel like going a little crazy at the weekend). The net effect could well be that house prices fall on the Welsh side of the border, and rise on the English side, as people move from one to the other. Indeed, if that drives Welsh house prices down the councils won’t even collect the extra money. Everyone will lose out.
The Welsh Assembly is increasingly turning the country into Venezuela, with sheep instead of oil. It is planning a “tourist tax” that would do significant damage to the holiday industry. It has pioneered draconian speed limits. It is eyeing a four-day week pilot for the public sector, and has already trialed a “basic income” where people get paid regardless of whether they do any work. The list goes on and on. The “mansion tax” is only the latest trendy idea to be tried out in Wales. It is already one of the poorest parts of the UK, with a dismal rate of growth and very little inward investment. At the rate it is going, there will be virtually no economy left at all – and it will all be the fault of the political pygmies running the Welsh Assembly. DT.
