Last night’s ITV news and current affairs chat show, The Agenda, saw the clash of two of the biggest hulking political beasts of our age: Myleene Klass and Ed Miliband.
Klass, who reached a certain level of fame when she was in the pop group Hear’Say (which won an early X Factor-style reality music show, Popstars), and is now more recognisable for popping up in M&S ads, took Miliband to task over his tax proposals. Her main concern was that a £2m house in London – the value where Miliband’s mansion tax would kick in – would only get you a “garage”.
Here’s a clip:
And here are the best bits:
On the mansion tax
MK: “For me, it’s so disturbing – the name in its own right: ‘mansion tax’. Immediately you conjure up an image of these Barbie-esque houses, but in London, which is where 80 per cent of the people who will be paying this tax actually live, have you seen what that amount of money can get you? It’s like a garage.
“When you do look at the people who will be suffering this tax, it’s true a lot of them are grannies who have had these houses in their families for a long, long time.
“The people who are the super-super rich buying their houses for £140m, this is not necessarily going to affect them because they’ve got their tax rebates and amazing accountants. It’s going to be the little grannies who have lived in those houses for years and years.”
EM: “I totally understand that people don’t like paying more in tax. The values of my government are going to be different to the values of this government.”
On NHS funding
Ed Miliband: “The NHS is crying out for resources, we’ve got to make it more efficient, but let’s be frank about this, we’ve got to face the fact that the NHS is going backwards under this government, and it can’t survive with just the resources that it has.”
Myleene Klass: “But why? Aren’t there other options to save the NHS? Is that your only option? You might as well just tax me on this glass of water. You can’t just point at things and tax them. You need to have a better strategy and say ‘why is the NHS in this mess in the first place?'”
On Miliband becoming “isolated” in the discussion
MK: “Ed’s getting isolated because no one thinks it is going to work.”
As Hear’Say sang in the early Noughties: “I’ve gotta try and get through to you…”
UPDATE 10.52
If you feel sorry for Myleene with her swanky London garage and shiny tax-free glass of water, you now have an outlet. A charity JustGiving page has been set up so that the generous public can help her pay her mansion tax.
Please help poor @KlassMyleene by giving generously #TheAgenda pic.twitter.com/GV45gSxPT6
— Matthew Bingham (@mattdbingham) November 17, 2014
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