POD! On The Abundance Agenda this week, Martin tells the extraordinary story of how Natural England has prevented 20,000 homes from being built in Sussex, and I wonder if the Tories have been abundance-pilled. Plus we speak to Praful Nargund from the Good Growth Foundation about four tricks to speed up housing development, and how to bring cross-channel trains back to Kent. Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or Substack!
I have a chip on my shoulder.
Even though my politics have moderated as I teeter on the edge of middle age, and though today I’m an establishment shill who feebly sucks at the teat of the status quo, I still find myself occasionally transforming, Hulk-style, into a raving Marxist.
It happens most often when a broadsheet newspaper publishes yet another woe-is-me piece, bemoaning how difficult it is for the wealthy author to pay their kids’ private school fees.
And it happened again, this time in The Times, earlier this week.
In this case, it’s unclear exactly which school the author was trying to get her child into, but the school she went to today charges £17,558 per term. This is up from the £14,690 that it would have cost had Keir Starmer’s proletariat revolution not imposed VAT.
Anyway, the reason pieces like this have me singing verses of The Red Flag is obvious. Unlike a wildly disproportionate slice of my industry, I am from a significantly more normal background. I went to a comprehensive state school, my parents didn’t go to university, and my childhood holidays were spent in static caravans in Cornwall – not skiing in the Alps.
I don’t explain this to try and show off, even though (ironically) claiming a poor background can actually grant you status in modern politics. I can’t really do this, as annoyingly, my circumstances aren’t quite humble enough for that. My parents had a mortgage and worked white-collar jobs, and we sometimes went to Spain. And as an adult I live a relatively comfortable, middle-class professional life.
Anyway, I point all of this out because of a recent post by the new ‘eco-populist’ Green Party leader, Zack Polanski. Since taking his party’s top job in September, he’s been a loud advocate for one of the splashiest policies in the 2024 Green Party manifesto: the promise of a wealth tax on the richest people in society.
Needless to say, not everyone is a fan of this idea. Earlier this week, The Spectator published a piece by Matthew Bowles critiquing the idea. Unlike what you might expect, this wasn’t some simple witless woke-bashing. It’s actually a pretty serious piece, engaging with the complexities of how such a tax might work.
Unfortunately, though, Polanski didn’t really participate in the battle of ideas in his response. Instead, he pushed back by pointing out that The Spectator has an extremely wealthy owner, arguing that it must surely be this fact that drove the famously conservative magazine to publish it.
Now, obviously I’m not massively sympathetic to Paul Marshall, who also owns GB News and UnHerd. I think most of his ideas are bad.
But despite this, and though I’m from a much more humble background with a slightly more modest income (don’t forget to subscribe!)… I also think that Polanski’s pitch for a wealth tax is basically utter nonsense.
So I thought as someone who is less posh than both Marshall and Polanski, and as someone who won’t ever have to worry about wealth taxes, I should explain why I think the idea is basically a mad fantasy that nobody should take seriously.
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