Coalition Split Over Taxing The Rich.

For the last two-and-a-half years we've been fed a steady diet of "there's no alternative" as the coalition have squeezed the poor to pay for the banking crisis and allowed various corporations to raise prices in order to increase their profits. The young have been calously sacrificed, the disabled vilified and persecuted even as property speculators, bankers and rentiers have been pampered. "We're all in this together," David Cameron famously told us and then used the recession as an excuse to steal the NHS, undermine workers rights and conditions and cut taxes for the rich. Soon "We're all in this together" became "You f**cking plebs should know your place." Taken by surprise when the "plebs" took exception to this, the coalition had no choice but to back-pedal a little in order to maintain at least a thin veneer of decency. How thin the veneer actually is was revealed when the LibDems floated the idea of increasing taxes for those who live in mansions worth more than £1 million. The cabinet immediately split along party lines with Tories such as Chris Grayling, the Justice Secretary, Grant Shapps, the Conservative Chairman, Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, and Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, howling at the very idea. With the need to reduce the deficit suddenly becoming a secondary concern, it is middle- and upper-income voters in Tory-controlled parts of south-east England that are now of paramount importance. The usual nonsense about not taxing "wealth creators" won't wash this time since the personal assets of company directors are entirely divorced from their business activities. Nor does the other hoary old lie, that raising such a tax would actually return less money, hold water. The rich can hardly claim that a mansion in the Home Counties is actually located in a convenient tax haven. It's even more unlikely that the owners of such properties would immediately decide to vote Labour. This then is nothing more than an open admission that we are certainly not all in this together and that shielding the rich is the Tories only real concern.