Won’t somebody please think of Britain’s poor £2m homeowners? Oh, wait – everyone already is | Jonathan Liew

The new “mansion tax” announced by Rachel Reeves in last week’s budget is estimated to affect around 165,000 property owners, and on current trends the British media is forecast to have interviewed every single one of them by the end of the year. How else to explain the chorus of squeals we’ve been exposed to from the impoverished victims of Esher and Pimlico, whose only crime was to own a house worth over £2m in an era of egregious wealth inequality?

We hear, for example, from Philippa in Kensington, who tells the Telegraph that the new council tax surcharge on her two small mews houses will “wipe me out”. We hear from Paul, who owns a £2.5m house in Cobham, who tells the same newspaper that the move has wreaked havoc with his retirement plans. We hear in the Times from a property investor called Mark in Wimbledon, whose £9.5m house has been on the market for over a year, and gripes that he has had “almost no viewings in the last five or six months”. The Sun, for its part, evokes the spectre of “grannies being forced to sell up”, and condemns the levy as “a back-door way to seize chunks of family homes when hard-working Brits pass away”.

Perhaps in a country ever more dramatically stratified by wealth, nobody ever truly believes themselves to be rich. On Nicky Campbell’s BBC Radio 5 Live show last week, we heard from eight separate people who thought the tax was a bad idea until, almost half an hour into the show, Campbell finally read out a text from someone who liked it. By which time we had already been treated to a long and lavish diatribe from Kirstie Allsopp, self-appointed champion of the Great British mansion owner, distraught at the impact of the tax on our ailing luxury homes industry.

For Allsopp, expensive houses are what make this country great. “People who live in £2m houses are maintaining them,” she said, sidestepping the question of what she thinks the rest of us are doing. “They are improving the gardens … Part of what attracts tourists to this country … is the look of our streets. I live in Notting Hill and you should see the number of tourists walking around taking selfies.”

Quite apart from the unforeseen impacts on the selfie-taking economy of Notting Hill, there is a sly subtext at work here. That those who own big houses are, in fact, the true heroes of the economy: more assiduous, more valuable, perhaps even more noble. And perhaps it is no coincidence that as well as being significantly more affluent, these people also trend older, and congregate overwhelmingly in London and the south-east. The former chancellor Philip Hammond has described the tax as “a very clear transfer of spending power from the south to the north”, to which the only legitimate response is: don’t threaten us with a good time.

But, of course, this is more than simply a small group of concerned citizens pushing their interests. Attention, column inches, the cogs of public discourse and the ear of policymakers: none of this is an infinite resource. Whoever gets it denies it to someone else. And 200 miles from Kensington, a group of homeowners in much more modest houses are discovering this the hard way.

Since the start of the summer, the residents of the Henford estate in Tyldesley, Wigan have been watching in horror as the developer PLP began construction of four logistics warehouses just metres from their homes and gardens. When complete, the structures will stand 18m high: blocking out light and overlooking a nearby primary school. Cracks have reportedly begun appearing in nearby houses and gardens have begun to flood. In the meantime, residents have been forced to endure the roar of around 250 lorries working 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

But beyond a few local journalists, there has been no media stampede to Tyldesley. No bombardment of the airwaves, no blue-chip property experts being quoted on how the slump in local property prices might affect the wider economy. PLP has reportedly refused to answer several key questions put to them by local reporters. For its part, Wigan council insists there have been no breaches of planning controls, and have rejected an application for a temporary pause on the basis that it might expose the council to legal action. And so despite a 10,000-signature petition and the tireless work of a local action committee, the residents of the Henford estate have very few levers left to pull. Perhaps they should have taken better care of their gardens.

All across the country, families are living in substandard housing, half-built housing, overpriced housing, housing under threat. Students in York have seen their rents nearly double in six years. New homeowners in Darlington are living on unfinished estates after a developer stopped work, citing “unforeseen technical challenges and ecological requirements”. Elderly residents in Southend are protesting about the neglect of their sheltered housing block, claiming at least eight lift breakdowns in a year. Imagine if just a fraction of the spume and righteous fury over the new surcharge could be redirected to those who really need it.

Instead, we will continue to be treated to the whining of a tiny group of affluent homeowners scandalised at the idea of paying a £2,500 tax, and the battalions of property experts and lobbyists happy to sing backing vocals for them. Never mind that this is a tax they are likely to be able to defer paying until selling their house, a tax that, though a step in the right direction, hardly touches the sides of wealth disparities in the UK, that is to genuine wealth inequality what your dinky Etsy face mask was to the global spread of Covid-19.

This is not so much a failure of circumstance as a triumph of structure. The system working as it was intended to work. Who gets to complain about housing policy in this country? Depends where you live, and how much your house is worth.

• Jonathan Liew is a Guardian columnist

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