Didn't take long for the Hate Mail to start up

If you're well enough off to have a second home, you're liable for it; but, like the inheritance tax, it's a tax you really need to be rich to pay.

In some ways, this turns out well for the Tories; they fool the over-optimistic middle classes who think they're going to be rich enough to be liable for either of these taxes before the election that they're going to give them something; having got their votes, they can now say "can't do it yet/had to raise it, due to being in a coalition - blame the Lib Dems, if anyone" and still get the revenue from the taxes. Then when the next election rolls around they say "OK, this time we really will cut those taxes", and hope to use it as a manifesto point again.

(as a friend of mine terms it).

If the Daily Hate are so against it, then it can't be the absolute worst.

Their headline yesterday was something like 'A squalid day for democracy: Brown quits but tries cynical ploy to keep Labour in power by offering two-faced Clegg electoral reform'.

To this day I get gobsmacked by the way they present right-wing *opinion* as *news*. It would be one thing to use these RW one-liners as editorial titles but as *news* headlines????

It's interesting (and perhaps ironic) that the Daily Hate is in a way using the classical Marxist definition of the middle class, i.e. owning the means of production, receiving return on capital (hence being liable for capital gains).

This is of course different to contemporary definitions of middle class which includes middle-management, teachers, academics, doctors, senior nurses. Someone earning 25-40 thousand pounds a year could comfortably be described as middle class using modern sociological understanding. They would not fit the Daily Hate's definition of the middle class. It wouldn't fit the classical Marxist understanding of middle class either, even if members of the aforementioned job groups take on the cultural signifiers of the middle class (i.e. cultural hegemony).

I think we should be told, and we can rely on the Daily Heil to tell us.