A lot of opposition to cut through

Having been active in campaigning for LVT for almost forty years and with nothing to show for it, I have long concluded that our main difficulty is the little matter of vested interests to overcome.

Landowners (half a dozen aristocratic families own most of central London, the same as in 1700), the banks, who are de facto major landowners since they hold the titles of all property which is used as securities for loans – that is their standard business model; some of the ancient educational establishments; the home-ownerist party whose members had done so well under the present system almost continually up to 2007. It is a lot of vested interest.

Yet another vested interest comprises those who are committed to a particular body of theory and feel that it would be a climb-down to revise their thinking. They will tell you that land ie location doesn’t matter any more (an obvious nonsense which any street beggar will refute) – and will refer to a hypothetical Google-type operation running on a remote island in the South Atlantic or from a spare room in a council flat on the edge of Sunderland. They will also mention the 97 year old widow living on a state pension in the same crumbling 2-up/2-down terrace house she moved into in 1946, which is now worth £2 million.

Further objections will be Marxists and anyone influenced by Marx – heaven knows why, but it does not fit with the Master’s theory and amounts to a fair proportion of those who ought in principle to be in favour of the measure.

I am not going to stop campaigning but we do need to keep in mind that there is a little bit of opposition to cut through.