Labour’s victory is total. Socialism is back

In Rachel Reeves’s brave new world, meritocracy is out – redistribution, welfarism and enforced equality are in Daily Telegraph 26/11/25 link This is it, the day we all dreaded, a milestone in Britain’s descent into collectivism of the most repugnant kind.

We have just witnessed a monstrous Budget delivered by the worst Chancellor in living memory, an obscene mix of untruths and delusion, a farrago of bile, envy and nastiness that will vandalise our economy and ruin our society. Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer evidently lied their way to power, pledging to keep tax rises to £8.5bn and to govern as centrist technocrats; instead, they have unleashed full-blooded socialism on a country that never voted for it, raised tax by about £68bn a year over two budgets (according to the Resolution Foundation) and declared war on property rights and the productive class. Reeves’s socialism may well be reluctant, forced upon her by her own weakness, incompetence and inability to control her backbenchers, but this is no excuse. Labour promised not to put up income tax, and yet she is upping rates to 22p, 42p and 47p on income from interest, rents and dividends. Reeves swore that she wouldn’t introduce any kind of wealth or mansion tax, and yet she is launching a devastating attack on those who own expensive properties. She is hammering salary sacrifice pension schemes, raiding employee ownership funds, increasing fuel duty and taxing milkshakes. These levies have one thing in common: they sever the connection between effort and reward, between work and success, between thrift and wealth. Meritocracy and incentives are out in Reeves’s brave new world; redistribution, welfarism, randomness and enforced equality of outcomes are in. Reeves increased spending by another £11bn by 2029-30, primarily to pay for her about-turn on welfare cuts and to lift the two child limit in universal credit. Society’s net contributors will pay a debilitating price. She is taking tax from 34.7 per cent of GDP last year to a record high of 38.3 per cent by 2030-31, with total government receipts hitting 42.4 per cent. The share of taxpayers paying the 40p or 45p rate will have jumped from 15 per cent in 2021-22 to 24 per cent in 2030-31, normalising extortionate marginal taxation. Yet it is Labour’s taboo-breaking tax on expensive homes that is the most dangerous of all: it is tantamount to a quasi-authoritarian reopening of settled property rights and fundamentally reorders the relationship between citizen and state. Her scheme begins to abolish freehold property, turning yeoman-owners into leaseholders, with politicians the ultimate landlords. Her “high value council tax surcharge” is best understood as a rent, to be paid to Reeves for the right to stay in one’s own home. Labour hates ordinary landlords, but is desperate to turn the state into the most exploitative of rent collectors. It’s sub-Marxist nonsense, a form of legalised theft. Her cash grab – £2,500 a year for homes worth £2m, £7,500 a year for those over £5m – is the thin end of the wedge: just as hardly anybody paid the 40p tax rate in the late 1980s, the threshold at which the “surcharge” kicks in will be lowered over time, snaring many more. Just as obviously, the levy will eventually be made even more punitive, as with the introduction of the additional rate of income tax. Reeves’s aim: to invent a new category of taxation on the stock of existing wealth, in addition to hammering assets when their value goes up and is realised (capital gains), when they are sold (stamp duty) or when they are passed on to children (inheritance tax). Council tax, itself a terrible levy, at least purports to fund local services; Reeves’s wealth tax is simply a cash cow for central government, an act of class war against the despised “rich”. It is a seminal moment in Britain’s descent into hardcore egalitarianism. Don’t you dare live in a nice house, we are being told for the first time since the 1970s: you will be punished severely for doing so. This is the final death of Thatcherism, of the British dream, of the idea that ordinary people, through hard work, can climb the property ladder: Reeves is the most anti-capitalist and anti-aspiration Chancellor since Denis Healey. She will destroy incentives to extend or refurbish high-end properties – woe betide anybody whose home rises too much in value – cripple the top of the property market and chase away yet more successful people from the UK. Many on the radical Left believe they are entitled to confiscate privately owned assets, for any reason, and are finally getting their way. They believe that it is “unfair” people don’t pay more tax if they own an expensive home. But why should anybody pay any tax on their property at all, other than a basic fee for local services? It’s legally theirs, so they should not have to hand over any money to keep hold of it. In a conservative and capitalist society, property is a foundational, natural right, not a privilege. Where are the human rights lawyers when we need them? The logical extension of Reeves’ property tax grab is that the state will eventually start to expropriate a percentage of bank accounts and pension pots too, at least those deemed “too large”. Reeves is violating every principle of just taxation. Wealth taxes are “dry”, a disaster for the asset-rich but cash-poor, such as pensioners who bought their home decades ago and have accidentally become paper millionaires. To avoid such people having to sell family homes to pay her abhorrent levy, and the accompanying PR nightmare, Reeves is likely to introduce another sinister innovation. She may allow her tax to be “rolled up” and paid when pensioners die, or when they choose to sell their home. This sets another terrible precedent: the Chancellor no longer needs to consider affordability when determining tax. She can simply punish people as harshly as she wishes, and then collect the cash when they die. Her new tax – a toxic mix of two hated levies, council tax and IHT – is equivalent to detonating a time bomb under Middle England. Socialism is back, and the property-owning democracy is out. Labour has declared war on social mobility, on petit bourgeois values, on the consumer society and on conservative Britain. Starmer and Reeves’s mission was to keep Labour MPs on side. They are about to find out that the rest of the country has no time for their deranged, embittered class warfare.