Pinched from the Labour Land Campaign FAQs:
Today, discussions held with Treasury officials, politicians and academics frequently end with them saying they agree that an annual LVT is a good, sustainable, redistributive, fair and green tax but after the poll tax riots it would take a courageous government to introduce it!
The LLC respond thusly:
This is not a logical response and makes no sense to dismiss a tax that will not only benefit business, workers, the environment and the economy but help to rectify an injustice inflicted on people over centuries.
To describe this as "not a logical response" is an insult to not a logical responses.
The point about the Poll Tax riots was, if you give one million really wealthy households a high profile tax cut of £10,000 each and impose an in-your-face tax (or benefit cut) of £1,000 each on ten million poorer households, you get riots.
So doing the opposite i.e. scrapping the Poll Tax and reinstating Domestic Rates would have led to fewer riots. Keep going in the same direction and replace Domestic Rates with LVT, you'd get zero or a negative number of riots, if there is such a concept.
And the harsh fact is that wealthier people are relatively docile when it comes to tax hikes, especially when it comes to 'national' taxes. There were no 50% or 45% income tax riots. There were no riots when they took away child benefit from the top ten percent of earners. There were no riots when they hiked VAT by 5% or when they hiked National Insurance by 2%.
So if we scrapped a shedload of bad taxes and replaced them with LVT, does anybody seriously think that Poor Widows will leave their mansions and throw their Zimmer frames through plate glass windows? Will merchant bankers in balaclavas be firebombing the nearest HMRC office or town hall? Will the Dukes of Cadogan and Westminster be looting their nearest Curry's or JD Sports?
And if it comes to it, for each Poor Widow, merchant banker or Duke, there are a hundred thousand people who'd be considerably better off each year, and I doubt that they would come out in sympathy.
Debate Magazine
