An upbeat letter arrived recently from my local council, which is the London borough of Islington. Despite cuts in central government funding that mean the council has had to find £122m savings between 2011 to 2015, the letter was pleased to say that the council tax would be frozen for the fifth year running, thereby saving the average payer £375 to date. As I'm in band G, the second-highest, the tax due during the next year will again be £2,101.45 to be divided between Islington and the Greater London Authority, minus a discount of £100 given to "older persons".

To hand over £167 a month in exchange for schools, libraries, social services, road mending, street cleaning, refuse collection etc looks a tremendous bargain, though, of course, the expense of these things is mainly met from the business rate and general taxation via central government grants, which have also subsidised the freeze. The controlling instinct of Westminster never lets local government get above itself. And property ownership, being the a sacred fact and leading aspiration of British life, mustn't have too noticeable a cost other than interest on the money borrowed to pay for it.

That property is also the easiest thing to tax, being immobile and easily calculable for size and comfort, stands out as an invitation that every recent government has chosen to refuse.

The consequences are absurd and unfair. The last property revaluation took place in April 1991, when Islington judged my house's worth to be somewhere in the band between £160,000 and £320,000. Its value adjusted for inflation would now be four or five times as much, but my good fortune – a matter of being in the right place – has attracted no penalty. A few miles to the west in the far richer borough of Westminster, the situation is even more extreme. Council tax there has actually decreased by 0.6% this year over last, and the most a householder can pay – in band H, for properties valued in 1991 at more than £320,000 – is £1,353.48. In Islington, the equivalent would be £2,521.74, in Waltham Forest £2,902 and in Blackburn £3001.72. The average property prices for those areas in June last year were £1,383,454 (Westminster), £580,300 (Islington), £269,825 (Waltham Forest) and £115,939 (Blackburn). The differences between them will have widened since. So, the more your house is worth, the less you pay for services.

It was into this welcoming scene that (for example) Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine's richest man, moved in during 2011. A typical oligarch, Akhmetov made his money during the collapse of the Soviet Union by acquiring public assets at bargain-basement prices, and has since denied allegations of past links to organised crime. He is the owner of System Capital Management, a holding company that from its headquarters in Donetsk runs a steel and coal empire, as well as banks and media businesses, and the football club Shakhtar Donetsk. As an ally and backer of the departed pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, he sat as a powerfully influential member of the Ukrainian parliament. In January, his companies reportedly won nearly a third of state tenders while his son's companies won most of the rest. Forbes magazine estimated his wealth at £10bn in 2011.

What was the price of a London house to this man? Nothing at all. A penthouse? Why not a penthouse over two or three floors? Why not one off Knightsbridge with an uninterrupted view of grass and trees? Akhmetov set a new record for London house prices when he paid £136.4m for two flats spread over the top floors of One Hyde Park, a new shops-and-flats development designed by Richard Rogers and owned by a company registered in Guernsey that is in turn owned by the developer Christian Candy and a former prime minister of Qatar. Every aspect of it was designed as a snare for the impressionable rich; the name of the architect and the address, the absurd prices, the wine cellars, the promise that the adjacent Mandarin Oriental hotel, which services the flats, would treat every owner as a permanent guest. And for all the benign externals – the social and physical infrastructure that separates Knightsbridge from Donetsk – Akhmetov is liable to pay Westminster council £1,353.48 a year.

Journalists lucky enough to live in redbrick Islington terraces pay more, as do doctors in Walthamstow and teachers in Blackburn. Even by the indulgent standards of recent British governments, this is an inexplicable attitude towards the plutocracy. Boroughs such as Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea could multiply their top rate of council tax by 100 and it would still be chicken feed, the equivalent of a day's hard-going on a credit card, to the new owners of the best London addresses. (George Osborne introduced a new charge that particularly targets the foreign ownership of expensive property, the Annual Tax on Enveloped Dwellings, but its application is limited to houses owned by companies.)

The effect on the rest of us is the corrosion of our assent – our agreement to pay taxes and obey the rules in the belief that our good behaviour is essential to a decent society. Instead and increasingly, a different voice whispers to us, "Why do it? Why pay? He doesn't pay and he's a billionaire, so why should I pay? I won't be taken for a fool."

India's high-tech, private township

More property news arrives in an email from Delhi announcing a change of address for my publisher there, Penguin India, now amalgamated to become Penguin Random. The old address was homely: 11 Community Centre, Panchseel Park. The new one reads: 7th Floor, Infinity Tower C, DLF Cyber City Phase III, Gurgaon – 122 002 Haryana. Almost every line is dystopic. Infinity Tower C implies Infinity Towers A and B, and maybe D, E and F. Cyber City Phase III suggests two other phases completed and who knows how many to come. And DLF stands for the Delhi Land & Finance, which has done more than any other private company to enormously extend the urban face of India – making its boss, Kushal Pal Singh, one of the world's richest property developers.

Rana Dasgupta tells the story of DLF in his just-published and compelling book, Capital, which portrays modern Delhi as a city obsessed, invigorated and corrupted by vast flows of new money. The company began as a builder of settlements for refugee families from Pakistan soon after partition, and then, when city regulations made further expansion inside Delhi impossible, started to buy up land south of the city near an obscure village called Gurgaon in the expectation that population growth, if nothing else, would one day guarantee profit from it. Even in the late 1970s, little happened in Gurgaon "beyond the wanderings of goat herders on the baked earth", but 20 years later it had utterly changed. Microsoft, IBM and Ericsson arrived, and with them, golf courses, gated communities and shopping malls. Gurgaon became the largest private township in Asia, "a dusty expanse of hypertrophic, high-security apartment complexes which looked down on a landscape of pure commerce", writes Dasgupta.

An interesting thing is the nomenclature. The roads and streets of New Delhi, which was originally a British creation, bear the names of rulers and politicians (Prithviraj, Aurangzeb, Minto, Tilak), artists (Amrita Sher-Gil) and orientalists (Max Müller). Panchsheel, from where the publisher is moving, commemorates the treaty Nehru signed with China in 1954. No similar humanity complicates Delhi's satellite city, Gurgaon. The future is Tower Y, Phase X. An editor friend already thinks of it bleakly as Cyberia.