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Thursday, October 09, 2014

More trouble for Miliband

The Labour leader may have forgotten about the deficit when delivering his conference speech but that could be the least of his worries as one of the Labour Party's biggest donors have now rounded on it over its tax plans.

The Times reports that Assem Allam, the owner of the Premier League football club Hull City, has derided Labour’s plans as an economic “fallacy”. He said that Mr Miliband’s proposed income tax rises and mansion tax policy were a “disastrous decision”. As if to add to his woes, the Labour Party national executive committee has denounced Miliband's plans to freeze child benefit.

Mr. Allam, who is an Egyptian-born millionaire, has donated £210,000 to Labour since 2010, placing him in the top five for individual donations to the party since the last election:

He attacked Mr Miliband’s plans to place an annual charge on all properties worth £2 million or more: “The mansion tax is a very bad idea. It’s a vote killer. He will lose more votes than what he will get.”

The move “will reduce prices in the market place”, he warned, and he said that reduced property prices would mean reduced stamp duty revenue.

Dr Allam also criticised Labour’s plan to hit the rich with high tax rates and urged Mr Miliband not to implement a policy that he believes would harm the economy by compelling many wealthy individuals to flee the country, taking their money with them.

Questioning Labour’s economic calculations, he added: “It is a fallacy really that to gain votes the politicians keep telling people ‘Tax the rich, do this to the rich, do this to the rich’. It sounds nice for the voters, but it isn’t good for the economy . . . The only way to raise the standard of living in society is by encouraging more people to be rich.”

Dr Allam, who owns an industrial generator manufacturer and has property development interests, argued that high net worth individuals were essential for wealth creation and generating jobs.

He also accused the Labour leadership of trying to gain political capital by twisting the economic reality of raising taxes for higher earners and by deploying divisive rhetoric. “I hate the idea of misleading people for the sake of votes . . . You want to increase the number of rich people and stop talking about the societies of the poor and the rich. It is one society, where one person is more capable of generating wealth,” he said.

Some more things for Ed Miliband to forget about perhaps.
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