A Wealth Tax Would Signal Britain Is Closed for Business
Soaking the rich is the wrong way to fix the country’s fiscal problems.
A wealth tax is the wrong answer to mending Britain’s finances.
Photographer: Jennifer West/BloombergAs the UK teetered on the edge of an economic precipice 50 years ago, Environment Secretary Anthony Crosland, Labour’s leading public intellectual, warned improvident local councils that “the party is over.” The author of the optimistic tract The Future of Socialism was sounding the death knell of an era of seemingly limitless public spending.
Crosland’s speech, written by my former Times colleague David Lipsey who passed away last weekend, detonated like a bomb. Many Labour party officials, however, responded by sticking their fingers in their ears — the left opposed fiscal restraint even when Britain had to turn to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. Margaret Thatcher, the newly elected Conservative opposition leader, however, took Crosland’s words to heart and waited for her moment.