Office to letStamp duty is a tax “easily raised, widely diffused, pressing little on any particular class, especially the lower orders of society, and producing a revenue safely and expeditiously collected at a small expense”.

One might be forgiven for thinking that these words must have been uttered during the course of a Budget speech made by Gordon Brown in the first term of the current Labour Government when the order of the day was to raise taxes, but without anybody noticing.