Southend on Sea was the battleground for the latest Taxpayers’ Alliance skirmish against high taxes and government overspend. Local TPA veteran Eddie was joined by grassroots campaign manager Jennifer Salisbury-Jones, volunteer Anthony Ward and policy analyst Harry Fairhead.
Delivering a message of stamp duty reduction, the team found a very receptive audience in the Essex public. With 500 leaflets handed out and twenty more people signed up to the TPA cause, it was a very successful afternoon.
There was outrage that one in five Southend house purchasers would pay over £12,300 for an un-progressive slab tax with large financial penalties for those on the wrong side of an arbitrary line. And there was frustration that the taxman’s proclivity for pecuniary pilfering is so great that stamp duty is the second time income has been siphoned off to fund an overspending government.
The TPA is clearly on the side of all of those with home ownership aspirations; it is a case of continuing to drive home the message. Over and again the response from the man on the street was that too much tax was being taken and with too little to show for it. A winnable war? Certainly. And in Southend today, financial sanity gained some ground.