UK Politics

Should you have the world’s tiniest violin to hand, prepare to play it. This week, English councils gain the power to double council tax on second homes, and the holiday-cottage-owning classes are fuming. “Nothing but a racket,” thundered the Daily Telegraph, dismissing a supposedly “vindictive” raid on weekenders that was (gasp) “socialist” to boot.

Its Sunday sister paper further tugged on readers’ heartstrings with tales of homeowners who had inherited a second place somewhere lovely from their parents, and bridled at being asked to pay a few thousand pounds more a year to keep it in the family. In the Times, a retired barrister who felt forced to give up the seaside pad she had bought in her mother’s native St Davids complained of the tax “destroying generations of community-building”, as though houses sitting empty all winter were the one thing really guaranteed to bring a thriving community together. To which one can only say: people, learn to read a room(s). You’ve certainly got enough of them.