Imagine if George Osborne had beef with chip shops instead of landlords. What do you think he would have done? Let’s reimagine his speech from July 2015 in an alternate world where this is the case.
This what he said about landlords. Word for word apart from the obvious changes. Could you even imagine this happening? I can’t and yet that is what happened. This is a snip from a slide from the talk I delivered yesterday on tax policy.
When you think of this analogy it makes you realise that the government must really not have liked landlords!
Now back to chip shops what type of thing would cause a rule like that to be put in place? Perhaps if there were not enough potatoes to go around? Rather than block full relief for chip shops though I suspect they would insist on the growing of more potatoes!
To keep this silly analogy running a little longer that’s where we are with houses. We could turn literally every single house in the land over to the local authorities and there would still not be enough. Perhaps we should drop hint to them to get on and “grow” some more and then it wouldn’t be necessary to find a scapegoat in the us landlords