Iain Dale (how does he get hold of Liberator before I do as a subscriber?) detects some disharmony in Lib Demmery over the "Tax Shift" policy and the fact that it might leave people paying more in income tax because of Local Income Tax.

Anyway, it's nothing that we at ALTER haven't been saying for ever really. Through Tony Vickers, one of the authors of the Liberator article and a member of the Tax Commission, we fought to ensure that, whilst we supported the great potential of switching from income/production based taxes to resource use the balance was not yet there to make a convincing Tax Shift when one included Local Income Tax. But we were happy at Conference that the party voted to investigate a bigger switch by looking at land taxes at the next stage.

The Liberator article really bemoans the fact that at this next stage the Tax Commission have failed to get to grips with that part of Conference's mandate. Though it should also be noted that it was written a few weeks ago and since then TPTB are rumoured to have conjured up an additional chunk of national income tax cuts.

If Iain wants a real story on this, he could perhaps highlight that the Lib Dem Youth and Students group also comprehensively bunked Local Income Tax in favour of Land Value Tax, by a huge majority, at their recent conference. It would have been more newsworthy than his "Land Tax campaigners in campaign for Land Tax shock" story.

I note also that the first comment to Iain Dale's story is something about the Lib Dems will never be able to reconcile the socialist and libertarian tendencies within our ranks...which is precisely why we have set up The 1909 Group, because we believe that a return to the distinctively liberal economics of Lloyd-George, Churchill, MacKenzie King, Henry George and others that got lost in the great battle between capitalism and protection and socialism of the twentieth century can unite these two tendencies.

Of course our first lesson could be taken from Keynes: "when the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?" Local Income Tax as a policy came two years before the Tax Commission and the desire to make the switch from incomes onto resource use and unearned wealth. To hold LIT now as sacred in that context is a millstone that we ought to dump. LVT would still fulfill the aim of ditching a ridiculously unfair and usually regressive Council Tax whilst enabling us to continue a real switch away from taxes on income and productivity.