I WOULD never begrudge our political leaders a place to relax.
On the contrary, I often wish they would take longer holidays, so they haven’t got so much time to dream up laws which mess up life for the rest of us.
If Angela Rayner wants to spend her weekends vaping in a rubber dinghy off Hove’s shingly beach before retiring to her new £700,000 beachfront flat, then good luck to her.
Except, that is, the Government seems to have been doing all it can during its first year in power to dissuade the rest of the population from the dream of acquiring a holiday home.
Rachel Reeves jacked up the stamp duty rate for second homes and investment properties by two per cent.
The Government has overseen the introduction of a second homes premium on council tax — originally dreamed up by the Conservatives — so that owners in many parts of the country now pay double what owner-occupiers do.
What’s more, housing minister Matthew Pennycook , who answers to Rayner, has complained in Parliament of “negative impacts of excessive concentrations of short lets and second homes” which he says are pricing locals out of the market.
He was presumably referring to places such as Hove, where a report by the council in 2022 warned that the average house price was £467,622, more than ten times the average household income of £36,788.
To be fair to Rayner, she does at least want more homes built.
She has set the Government a target of building 1.5million of them over the course of this Parliament.
We’ll need them just to keep up with the Deputy Prime Minister’s growing property portfolio.
She also owns a £650,000 house in her Greater Manchester constituency as well as enjoying the run of a grace and favour apartment in Admiralty Arch , a stone’s throw from Parliament.
Nevertheless, the hypocrisy of buying a second home when you also have use of a third home — at a time when your own department is waving a stick at second-home owners — does somewhat leave the mouth hanging open.
Rayner’s office has stated that she will be paying the second homes premium on her Hove flat.
Yet, outrageously, MPs have had their allowances increased in order to cover the extra council tax bill on their second homes.
Rayner , it might also be remembered, did extremely well out of the Right to Buy scheme when she bought her council house in Stockport at a 25 per cent discount in 2007.
She later went on to sell the property for a £48,500 profit, without which she would have been unlikely to be able to afford her new flat.
Rayner has since watered down the Right to Buy scheme , to make it harder for other people to benefit as she did.
Day by day, the Labour Party is coming to resemble the communist parties of Eastern Europe, which unashamedly worked on the principle of one rule for them, another rule for everyone else
Day by day, the Labour Party is coming to resemble the communist parties of Eastern Europe, which unashamedly worked on the principle of one rule for them, another rule for everyone else.
It would not surprise me if, besides Chequers and Dorneywood, it turned out that deep in the countryside there is a secret compound where senior party figures can retreat to enjoy tax-free luxury every weekend while millions struggle with tax rises and household bills .
That is exactly what former East German leader Erich Honecker and his cronies used to do.
They had their own little village in a forest clearing north of Berlin which locals dubbed “Volvograd” on account of the posh cars that sat on the driveways.
This was at a time when ordinary East Germans had to wait years to buy a creaking little Trabant — one of the worst cars ever produced anywhere.
It was only a few weeks ago that the homelessness minister Rushanara Ali was forced to resign after she was found to have terminated her tenants’ rental contract at a £1million property in East London and then re-advertised the property at an extra £700 a month.
The only consolation for English residents is that things are even worse in Labour-run Wales
That is something the Government is in the process of banning under the Renters’ Rights Bill .
The only consolation for English residents is that things are even worse in Labour-run Wales.
There, the Government has allowed councils to charge second home-owners a 300 per cent premium on council tax.
The premium also affects holiday lets unless they are let for more than 180 nights a year — a pretty tall order in most cases. Councils’ greed has helped to decimate Wales’ tourist industry.
With a bizarre lack of insight, the Welsh government is now bleating that the number of holidaymakers coming to the country has plummeted.
Worse still, it turned out that the First Minister who introduced the extra charge, Mark Drakeford, himself owned a holiday property in Pembrokeshire which was exempt, on the technical grounds that it had a restriction preventing it from being used all year round.
I can’t emphasise enough that I would have no problem with senior Labour figures owning multiple properties — or Jaguars in the case of Rayner’s late predecessor, John Prescott — if they were not simultaneously doing all they can to squash aspiration among the rest of us.
In a few weeks’ time, the Budget looks like bringing yet more misery for homeowners, with rises in council tax mooted as well as the removal of capital gains tax exemption on sales of main homes.
But you can be sure that government ministers will find some way of shielding themselves from the pain.
Sorry, but this government is beginning to reek of double standards.
