The first is that she will abolish stamp duty. The aim, she says, is to help young people buy homes. What she has very clearly never done is look at the data on what the impact of changes to stamp duty have on house prices. Almost invariably, cutting stamp duty results in an increase in house prices.
So cutting stamp duty on shares will increase share prices and so increase investment.
The case against the Financial Transactions Tax is proven……
One of the hazards of Spud’s life. Say anything and he contradicts something he said before. It’s only going to get worse as he goes round the bend even further…
Stamp duty was never paid on new issue shares. And they are investments. The issued share market is a zero sum game. The buyer’s investment is the seller’s disinvestment.
So sure, it’ll make a slight difference to the attractiveness of buying a new issue because when you come to sell it as an issued share, the profit should be greater by the stamp duty amount. But in practice, the effect would be trivial. What’s important is the earning per share which translates into share price.
Stockbrokers will be pleased. Abolishing stamp duty will make churn cheaper. More lovely commissions!
For how long? Won’t competition drive them back to their current margins, or close to it?
Tim, I’m in an ethical pickle. Do I slag off Ritchie or Kemi? Both are pitiably easy. 🙁
OK: Kemi. Stamp duty is a bizarre choice to build your sink-or-swim keynote pitch around. Not saying anything about the economics of it, just from a political pov.
Does stamp duty come up in doorstep conversions often with the Tories’ 6 remaining activists? She might as well have picked insurance tax or something. Stamp duty might well be important, but I don’t think it has much persuasive power. I just don’t think people think about stamp duty very much. Maybe they should, but it’s hard to imagine stamp duty inspiring protests or riots, no? Suggesting this is not the peg Kemi should have chosen to hang her jacket on in these emotional and distressed times. It would have been a great pitch circa 2008, but now?
Sort of like promising to radio for help an hour after Jap bombers started firing torpedoes at your battleship. At least Admiral Phillips had the decency to go down with his ship. I expect Kemi to commandeer a lifeboat tho.
What you say is true, Steve, but at this stage she’s fighting to hang on to her job as Tory leader rather than win a general. In that context Stamp Duty is a winning topic ‘cos Tories still care a lot more about house prices than they do about foreign occupation.
Ooh, you’re right. I’d completely forgotten Kemi’s idea of political positioning is whatever she last read in the Daily Mail. Tbh if they didn’t have a conference this week, I could easily have forgotten Kemi exists.
It was a belter of a speech that might just have changed the course of political history. Some of our best leaders are black don’t you know.
I care a lot about both, but I’m not a Tory.
Everyone gets their knickers in a twist about Boomers sitting on the property wealth of their under-occupied vast houses and insist they downsize. A large number look at the costs of doing so and realise that after those costs they’ll simply be considerably worse off with little to show for their expenditure, so sensibly enough they sit tight instead.
In two years I’ll want to “downsize” from my very pleasant 2-bed flat in leafy but increasingly diverse Norf Lahnden, and buy somewhere modest outright in somewhere hideously white. To do this I need to extract the most equity I possibly can from this flat. Stamp duty, and the way it is tiered, hits me hard both directly and by depressing my flat’s potential selling price, although not a hard as Reeves’ threatened wealth tax @ £500,000 will.
Downsizing and moving for older people has obvious costs other than financial. One has to endure the disruption, make a new life and friendship circle at a time when it is difficult to do that. If you want to encourage older people to do it, make is as cheap and easy as you can for them.
Incentives – and disincentives – matter.
I certainly don’t think anyone should be encouraged to downsize.
Foreigners should be compelled to fuck off in large numbers instead.
Britain would benefit hugely from a house price crash. Always boiled my piss seeing those stupid stories in the Daily Mail celebrating rising housing costs. I’m a homeowner too but my house is not an “investment”, it’s where my family lives. I’d rather houses were cheap as chips to benefit our people as a whole even if it means I can never move.
I think Kemi is trying to play a long game, correctly in my view. She was elected with a promise to spend time in introspection because the Tories were utterly spent and utterly untrusted. You don’t fix that with a new logo and heady rhetoric.
You stay relatively quiet and then come back with a modest, roundly welcome policy with no great political benefit.
Low-key and sensible – that’s what may start to rebuild trust amongst the salt-of-the-earth folks the Tories need to win back. It’s what she was elected to do and it’s a harder road than noisy Labour bashing. Eroding trust in them doesn’t automatically build trust in you.
Of course, Reform may well smash ’em to bits anyway but I’m more willing to listen now.
PS, is anyone else impressed by Zia Yusuf’s media performances?