If only Vince Cable had looked around him. Winking from our British streetscape is the reason his proposed “mansion tax” was doomed to hit the rocks at the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth this week. The blocked-out windows of 17th and 18th century houses are still with us: a resentful reminder that people hate being taxed according not to what they earn or spend — but what they have and hold.

The hated Window Tax of 1689 varied according to the number of windows a house boasted above the threshold of ten. What you owned determined what you were deemed capable of paying. The tax was straightforward to assess, cheap to collect, simple to understand, conveniently “progressive” in its impact, and easy to justify in terms of principle. It had many rational arguments going for it.

It was also universally loathed. Householders bricked up windows to avoid it. Housebuilders constructed homes with pre-blanked windows so that buyers could decide for themselves how much glass they could afford to present. People accused the government of robbing citizens of light. Some say the expression “daylight robbery” can be traced to this tax. If my own years in politics have taught me anything about popular responses to taxation, it is that property taxes are an aching tooth which it never does to poke.

Any tax, of course, arouses antipathy, and the hardest to duck may be especially disliked for that very reason. But any experienced politician will tell you that public hostility to an impost does not vary simply according to the size of the impost. Most of us pay far more in VAT every year than in property taxes; and sales taxes (where the rich and the poor pay at the same rate) are undoubtedly a less “fair” way of raising revenue than council tax. Yet, though you see the VAT element as clearly on your bill as you see your council tax demand in the post, sales taxes never arouse the same fury. Some ways of taking money from people grate more than others.

I think I know why. In the case of property taxes, the psychological resistance is as irrational as it is potent. In proposing to his party this week that every home worth £1 million or more should generate a tax demand of 0.5 per cent, annually, of the property’s value, Dr Cable made the mistake of allowing the logical part of his brain to override the intuitive part. He forgot how a squirrel feels about the cache of nuts he has gathered, and buried — that it is his, completely his; and how a householder feels about the bricks-and-mortar nest-egg he’s worked for thirty years to own.

Dr Cable’s mansion tax is likely to have been quietly buried before the general election arrives. Already it is yesterday’s news. We needn’t waste time analysing the detail of proposals that are sure to be shelved.

There’s a danger, however, that once these proposals are withdrawn we may draw the wrong conclusion. We may think they need more work; that there are better ways to link the tax a citizen pays with the value of his property, and that Dr Cable’s mistake was not to consult and plan more carefully, to devise a better system.

That is exactly what tactful Lib Dems were telling their leadership this week: “Back to the drawing board” was the message. Perhaps impoverished widows should be exempted? Perhaps hard-up householders could accumulate a mansion-tax debt, to be satisfied, post mortem, from their estate? Perhaps a formula involving both capital assets and actual income could be devised, to rescue the asset-rich but income-poor? Or should the tax kick in at a quarter of a million, and be progressively stepped? Maybe it isn’t real estate alone whose ownership we should tax — how about gold bullion? Or private jets? Or yachts? Maybe we just need to revisit the value bands of our existing council tax system, so the property-rich pay more?

But the lesson all our mainstream parties should learn from the Lib Dems’ embarrassing tax wobble is different. Property taxes are in fact as fair as any tax on earth. Where rough-edged, they can be finessed. But you will never abate a public hostility which, though it may attach itself to any number of supposed (and perhaps soluble) practical objections, is rooted in something deeper. The core problem is with the whole idea. Human beings really, really hate being taxed just because they own something.

All of us, all our lives, strive for laurels on which we can rest; high ground which, once reached, offers us permanent security; shelter which, once built, endures; honour/dignity/ status/certificates/legacies/initials; farms, fields, flats, cottages or mansions ... things to our names which we can call our own and which, once secured, are ours. We crave what (I recall) on being elected to Parliament I said to myself the following morning: “Everything else may now go wrong and I may lose my seat; but last night I acquired something which nobody can ever take away.” You can have no idea what stupid pleasure it gives me to know that on account of having once been an MP I shall be in Who’s Who until I die.

Personal insecurity is the condition of all human beings. It follows that life is an always unsatisfactory pursuit of gains which, once gained, can be screwed down, locked away, deposited in a strong-box and counted as our own, immobilised, for ever.

We are inured to the taxation of what moves. As money flies in as income, we are inured to the State’s netting its share. As money flies out as expenditure we are inured to the State’s taking another cut. But we want to believe that having yielded our due as we earn, and paying our due when we spend, we may at least count what we have, keep and hold as our own. That an official should come calling, ask to examine our possessions, and demand from us money simply on account of our owning them, induces a rage born not only of greed, but of something more potent: insecurity.

That is why the idea of a mansion tax unsettles even those who do not yet — and may never — entertain any hopes of owning a mansion. It isn’t rational, but it’s human nature. Best, on the whole, Dr Cable, to respect it.

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