Angelina Jolie, Mansion Tax and Celebrity Blackmail: Don't Be Fooled by UK 'Mass Exodus' Threats

So this is the narrative: Ed Miliband's mansion tax proposal (boo-hiss) is so horrid, it will make all those lovely luvvies on TV abandon their luxury homes in London and go and live abroad.

"Who cares?" you might ask. Well, in the world obsessed by infotainment - wrapped around a right-wing agenda - there's no better practitioners of that dark art than the Daily Mail/Mail Online and the wannabe Maily Telegraph. It is the cause celebre du jour(nalist).

The latest glitzy recruit to their crusade is Angelina Jolie, who allegedly said the mansion tax "could put her off" buying in London. Only she did not, really. In a throw-away answer to a question about London's hyper-inflated property prices in which Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow muttered "...and the mansion tax..." Jolie demurred giving basically a non-answer.

View Here (at 5:32)...

Think about it. Brangelina are worth hundreds of millions of dollars and they have, according to reports, been viewing London apartments worth £25m. Do you think they are going to baulk at a insignificant payment that is going to come out of their petty cash box.

Meanwhile, unlike Griff Rhys Jones, Myleene Klass and Sol Campbell, who have gone into the financial equivalent of anaphylactic shock at Labour's new property tax proposal, Jolie comes from the United States where such taxes are normal.

Furthermore, if you explained to Jolie – a philanthropist and doer-of-good of global renown – that the tax was going to fund the NHS, to heal the sick and cure the ill, do you not prefer to believe she would put her hand in her pocket pretty quickly?

Yet, if she turned out to be a fake and followed the Mailygraph "doomsday" scenario and joined on the plane out of Blightly with Klass, Rhys Jones and Campbell et al, then what? What is more relevant to your life? Who's packing out lunch at London's Chiltern Firehouse or whether you or your loved one gets top-quality treatment for a life-threatening illness or injury.

Blackmail threat is sleight of hand

This blackmail threat to leave the UK, is a cunning plan to intimidate the miserable "Baldricks" (you and me) that would be left behind, bamboozling us to acquiesce to the greedy demands of our betters.

The bankers are masters of this feint. Standing amid the rubble of the great credit crash of 2008, threatening to do-one to Geneva or the Cayman's Islands if anyone gets in the way of the charge to the trough, because they are the "talent" (that is satire, right?), don't you know.

But, I say "go, already!" (and leave your British passports the first-class check-in on the way if you are not prepared help your country when it is in need) because there is a Polish economics PhD who serves me a white Americano every morning who can run that investment fund and a cohorts of crack dealers in every London sink estate with the skillset to fill the boots of absent forex or Libor traders.

This myth of the exodus of creative talent is now being exploited to discredit the mansion tax by its political enemies (FYI: A Sun poll found that 30% of voters "tended to support" Labour's proposal and 42% of people "strongly supported" the policy).

So do not succumb to the professional fear-mongers. If a handful of red-carpet reptiles crawl away, do not be alarmed; the lights will stay on at the theatre, music will still be played, pictures will still get painted and there will still be nothing to watch on the box.