It's astonishing quite how long people can believe things which just aren't so. Polly Toynbee is, rightly enough, casting around for some method of paying for the social care which an increasingly elderly population requires. In doing so she alights upon property - there's a stash of economic value which can be taxed!

The thing is though she's wrong:

Property is undertaxed in Britain so there’s symmetry and fairness in reaching into home values to pay for care.

Undertaxed compared to what? For as we've pointed out before Britain gains more of its tax revenue from property than any other OECD country. Vastly so in fact. The OECD average is under 2% of GDP, we're at over 4% of it. We gain 12.5% of our total revenue from it, the average is 5.7%.

Any comparison with that reality around us isn't going to leave the impression that we undertax property, is it?

It's not actually the being wrong which bugs so much. We have in fact told Polly this, directly, a number of times over the past decade. And yet still she insists upon what just ain't so.