to think mansion tax is an unfair tax on London and the South East?

[goodnessgracious]

I disagree with mansion tax but regardless it seems to me to be unfair on Londoners.

Aibu to think that it may also force some people to sell their properties who are income poor but property rich?

Cameron once said that those with the broadest shoulders blah blah and we're all in this together blah blah.

I agree, SWID. Tax 'em all!

It's swings and roundabouts.

Londoners get waaaay more spent on each child's education than us in the SW.We also have higher water bills due to the coastline.

I'm sick to death of the continual focus on London which the rest of the country doesn't enjoy.Quite frankly I think if Devon and Cornwall slid off the end of the UK Cameron wouldn't even notice.

When Dawlish lost it's train track in the storms there was a hysterical thing going round on Facebook mocking the London whining over getting to work with a tube strike on at the same time.It really sums things up as far as I'm concerned.

Londoners and the SE have it good,appreciate what you've got.

LePetit

Totally agree with your post, there seems to be London, the SE and then the rest of the country almost separated from what goes on down there.
You do have it very good down there and should thank your lucky stars and pay up

Don't forget free bus travel for children either LePetit That is a massive saving that the rest of us don't get.

Oh and hoards of Londoners used their expensive property as retirement funds selling up and buying up affordable housing down in Devon and Cornwall which pushes families out and decimates communities.That hacks me off far more than a wealthy few paying more tax.

ouryve Did you read my comments at all? I guess you didn't so I will repeat again for you. SOMEONE UP THREAD IMPLYED THAT WE DONT WORK HARD TO LIVE IN OUR HOMES

That is why I responded with 'and yes we work extremely hard' Did I once imply lower tax payers don't work hard? NO I did not. So stop trying to twist my posts to convey a different message.

He would notice if Cornwall slid off the end of the UK LePetit. I see his picture in the paper every summer with that blue shirt on dining out in Polzeath with Sam. Where would he go instead?

Presumably that is partly because everything costs more in London so you have to spend more (the staff cost more because they live in/near London and wouldn't be able to live without the London weighting, the buildings cost more to maintain because the council workers or private cos who do the maintenance get paid more because the live in/near London. etc) AND because there are more deprived people in London so they take more funding. It is the deprived areas of London which have the biggest funding.

The unfairnesses are someone with the £1.3m mortgage I had and other costs of full time wealth and nothing like £2m of assets, no savings would be subject to the tax but someone who has a £900k house, no mortgage, no full time childcare costs to pay and the £2m painting on their wall and £20m in the bank does not.
The other unfairness is you do not have the cash. If you are going to live in your house until you die as I will it is not cash in the same way as savings are.

Anyway we shall have to see. I can argue our house is under £2m, secondly the tax itself will drop prices further below £2m, thirdly people will split homes into two - 5 of us live here just about all adults; fourthly business properties are not caught so if people do have a business at home they may be outside the tax; fifthly some people will buy the luxury flat in Spain and the £1m pent house in the SE to avoid the tax. The other risk is that if you mess around the 1% of us who pay 30% of all tax (the highest percentage ever taken from the better off in British history) then we move. I sell my brain for money and that brain can be parked anywhere there is an internet connection. The children will be leaving school in the next few years.

If the UK as this thread proves is full of people who seem to have it in for those who in effect keep them then those of us who pay most of the tax will take our money elsewhere where we are actually wanted.

"Oh and hoards of Londoners used their expensive property as retirement funds selling up and buying up affordable housing down in Devon and Cornwall which pushes families out and decimates communities.That hacks me off far more than a wealthy few paying more tax"

Precisely what is happening in London too! Our property prices have only gone up because this is being done to us in equal measures! It's just the ripple effect of all these wealthy foreigners buying up our property for ever increasingly ridiculous prices.

"Londoners and the SE have it good,appreciate what you've got."

So very true. Aside from the free museums and all, one practical example I saw recently was while travelling from Brighton to London. At rush hour there must have been 10 coaches on that train. A regular, smooth, service, too - if one train is cancelled there's another along within the half hour.

Compare that to a commuters' journey of similar length in the North. Going from Manchester to Liverpool, or Leeds in rush hour, there are usually two carriages, and the service is invariably delayed.

Manchester to Sheffield is even worse.

The SE is just so, so, much better served by public transport it's untrue. It's cheap, reliable, and so well set-up that people can commute for work easily, thereby creating far more employment opportunities.

Haha try talking to people who commute from Brighton - I know a few and they are all in total despair about it. Regularly takes 2+ hrs to get home. Cancellations and delays all the time.

Greengrow Brilliant post.

I get sick of the constant London bashing on MN. Some people feel such vitriol towards the capital that they just hear the word "London" and you just get instant knee jerk responses like 'Well, if you can't afford to live there, just leave' or 'Oh, I feel so sorry for you living half million pound house' interspersed with tedious comments about how rude we all are and all spend all our time ignoring or snarling at other people and think we're better than everyone else.
DH and I bought a 2 bed house in 1996 for £70,000 and sold it 5 years later for £220,000. This meant that we could put a large deposit on our current 3 bed house which we bought for £285,000 with a £195,000 mortgage. It's now worth £750,000. So far, so smug. BUT it doesn't help us when we're trying to meet day to day living expenses.We'd love to buy a 4 bed house (have 3 DCs and the smallest bedroom is basically a box room) but we can't because a 4 bed house would be £900,000.
DH and I are both nurses and haven't had a pay rise for 5 years.In that time, fuel bills have gone through the roof and DS2's nursery fees went up by 40% and after school/breakfast club for older 2 DCs went up by 20%. We can't go to Tesco and say, "Sorry, we don't actually have any money but our house is worth £3/4 million".
These stupid prices don't actually benefit any Londoners except those who want to sell up and move out. All DH's siblings still live in NI - most of them have houses twice the size of ours but they're worth half as much. They also have much more disposable income than us. Who, in reality, is actually 'better off?' It really isn't that hard to understand.
Yes, London gets a lot of money spent on it but it generates far more for the economy which benefits poorer parts of the UK.
Perhaps London should vote for independence - then everyone can stop moaning about us and we'll keep all the money we generate from banking, tourism etc.

There are other unfairnesses in the tax system too Greengrow, but they never elicit any sympathy. I often talk about the child benefit issue where one family on 50k with one earner lose it and another family on 98k keep it. No one seems to think that is unfair. I am caught by this and I couldn't afford to buy a house of mansion tax proportions in a million years. I am not rich, but the government seems to think so. People with £2 million houses are rich in my opinion. That is a lot of money, and even if they bought it 20 years ago they would have been earning a sizeable sum to have afforded a 400k property then. All taxes have cliff edges, however, some on here seem to elicit more sympathy than others.

I was very when I saw the difference in public transport spend.

The Transpennine Express is a joke - the fact that it's called 'express', I mean. But the bones are there to build a really good system that links up the north properly and helps encourage businesses to move up here and thus spread round some of the jobs a bit.

The widening economic gulf between the north and the south (or rather, London and the regions) at the moment can't be good for either side, really. I can't help thinking everyone would have a better quality of life if it was spread around a bit so moving out of London actually became feasible for more people.

YANBU it is deeply unfair to Londoners and a stupid move by Labour who need to win London if they want a majority. Just re rate council tax for fucks sake and introduce additional bands if needed. I would also abolish stamp duty and charge capital gains tax on all property sales.

If you are struggling to pay your 1.3 million mortgage you could maybe downsize?

Greengrow - if money's all that's keeping you here, as you say, plenty of opportunities elsewhere.

The self-delusion that 'in effect keeping up the rest of you'. That's what fires the disdain?

Any one who thinks London transport of cheap (we have the highest tube fares of any capital in the EU I think and it costs about £10 a day just to go from my house into London on the tube and back) and that commuter over ground trains are some kind of heaven in London just has no idea. London is full of scruffy run down areas. I go to the North East where I am from and even the roads seem to well kept - there are none of the massive pot holes we have here. It is as if all that state spending Londoner's fund is channelled out to the regions and never ends up here.

Perhaps the time has come given there are more in the M25 than in Scotland that those within the M25 declare UDI and we can leave the rest of the UK to keep itself.

What is very clear is there is no low tax small state party in the UK and all of them seem committed to ensuring we continue to spend a lot more than we recover in tax, spending keeps rising and all kinds of taxes get larger and larger.

AndyWarholsOrange - given what you describe, I genuinely don't understand why you don't move out. If you're nurses you can get jobs elsewhere, surely?
(But then, dh and I come from professions where you don't get an awful lot of choice where you work, so living near family and friends is an impossible dream anyway, and we regard ourselves as damn lucky to have fetched up in York rather than being forced to live in the south-east but don't quite understand why people who have a choice would stay in London if they don't like it as much as they imply.)

Ihate

And yy re the CB unfairness.

Frankly I think the more pushed out of a London the better as perhaps more will get to see how unfair the set up is and actually experience how the rest of the country lives with it's crappy public transport,lack of investment,poorer job opportunities(because London hoovers up a lot),crappy housing because Londoners retire out or buy second homes,less money in schools etc,etc

Surely the difference in public transport spend has something to do with the fact that London has to move millions of people around every day. I should imagine a few go across the Pennines but tbh they would mainly go by car in any event as it is hard to live in a rural place without one. (did you know autocorrect thinks Pennines is Penises btw)