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Whilst I have only seen the electronic feeds from the Friday papers so far, after the extraordinary events of yesterday, as I commented elsewhere earlier it would be a surprise if the Lib Dems' tax proposals, despite all the work that has gone into them, made significant headlines, even if we were proposing replacing the pound Sterling with peanut M&Ms and shifting the entire tax burden onto sales of teabags. Of course we are suggesting neither of these, and the news media are giving us some coverage.

The BBC so far seems the most positive, concentrating mostly on the fact that up to two million people would come out of income tax and national insurance completely and presenting quite a benign picture of the size of the "green" taxes, especially on cars. If you are going to save a couple of thousand on income tax, do you really mind then paying £850 instead of £150 a year to run your Ford Mondeo?

The Guardian gives us a little snippet, again quite positive and focussing on the benefits to the lower earners who could come out of tax completely and the fact that the higher rate of income tax, still 40% as now, would not kick in till earnings reached £50,000 per year - reversing some of Gordon Brown's "fiscal drag" of only having raised the higher rate threshold in line with inflation and not earnings.

The Independent gives it a bumpier ride, seeming to want to portray those who will lose out as the vast bulk of the middle classes. It seems that we've been over this ground before. In "Just whose pips will squeak" I responded to a similar nonsense from Iain Dale where he was trying to make out that a huge number of middling income households would end up paying for the cuts at the lower end. In summary, the changes to Capital Gains Tax allowances and Pensions Savings allowances would affect mostly the top one and top ten per cent of the working population - people who, between them, own around 60% of all the financial wealth in the UK. It seems a reasonable price to pay for removing four times that number of people from income tax completely and reducing the overall burden for the majority of the remainder.

Incidentally, the Independent ought to note also that the Tory Bow Group suggestions published last month, remove all pensions savings relief on annual amounts of greater than £4,400 - a significantly deeper cut than ours affecting many more people a little.

The politics.co.uk web site gives a much more balanced review, highlighting prominently that we "would tax the rich and polluters to pay for huge tax cuts for the majority" - possibly the most radical aspect of the plan that the Independent neglects to mention: "cutting the basic rate of income tax by two per cent; raising the income needed to pay higher-rate tax to £50,000 removing 1.3 million people from the top band; raising the nil-tax threshold by around £2,500 to £7,185; and raising national insurance thresholds in line with income tax".

All of these (except politics.co.uk) highlight the possibility that the Tax Commission proposals may face a difficult time at party conference (unlike other parties we do at least have a democratic process at conference to adopt important policy like this, so it could yet change).

Evan Harris - clearly his science spokesman brief does not require much of an understanding of the "dismal science" - is leading the charge to retain the largely symbolic 50 pence top rate of tax (and which because of capping NI and Local Income Tax never really was a 50 pence rate when it came down to it). And then there are people like myself, land value taxers to the core, who would like to have seen us go much further towards our 1998 policy ambition of shifting taxation away from people, their incomes and savings, trade and profit, and much more onto resource use and especially land and economic rent.

It's all not as clear cut as it makes out though. There will still be losers even amongst those on lower incomes, as James Graham points out.

But the big battles ahead are likely to be over the 50% rate, and conference has been given a choice on this, as well as a proposal for a new national property tax that some of us see as paving the way for our Land Value Tax as soon as the work is done to show how it can be implemented. I hope both get at least as much attention in the debates now and at conference.

Potential supporters of Harris's demand to retain some headline grabbing "we're more socialist than you" 50% rate (and to increase the threshold at which it kicks in to an almost meaningless £150,000 of annual income) need to remember that it is peoples' surplus incomes - what they've got left when they've paid their living costs each year, their "profit" if you like - that gets salted away as capital wealth. They use the loopholes and complexities we want to correct to minimise their income tax bills anyway. We are likely to collect significantly more from such people by going for their accumulating wealth than their headline incomes. It is this surplus to requirements that has given them the massive advantage of owning such a huge proportion of the national wealth.

For me - I think we should be much less specific and talk much more of the direction of taxation policy. Whilst we have to be able to show that we can fund our aspirations for public spending through the different taxes we propose, producing illustrative numbers now, or even specific rates, leaves us hostages to the fortunes of the economy between now and any General Election for a start, and probably much longer before we are ever in a position to implement any of it.

Unsurprisingly then, I would much rather we set out that we would like to enable more people to make their own way in life through work and savings by cutting taxes on incomes and capital accumulation much more deeply. Transferring the burden to land, economic rent and resource use will greatly help in spreading economic prosperity around the country and begin to enable us to reduce the vast payments government currently transfers from economically successful areas to less economically successful areas. We could keep up the same sort of levels of spending on capital and infrastructure projects if that is what we want to do and on quality public services, whilst a reducing dependence on benefits allows us to cut the overall tax burden.

But we can only hope to produce these effects if we start pointing the way now. In recent weeks and months commentators from all sides of the political spectrum have begun to take things like land value tax more seriously, from the Institute of Economic Affairs and Country Life editors, to Will Hutton. If it's an idea whose time has come, then political parties need to grasp it and start to explain it to people. The potential benefits we claim for it are enormous. Much more significant than haggling over whether we want to send a signal that we still view those who work hard as "the enemy" to be fleeced if we can. It could give us the sort of political advantage of promoting a radical shift in the way the tax system works and what it sets out to achieve as Thatcher had with monetarism leading up to 1979. Of standing out from the increasingly monotone crowd.

Fairer, Greener, Simpler - Land Value tax meets all three better than anything in the current offering.

Technorati Tags: land value tax, lib dems, politics, property tax, tax shifting, taxation

Hat tip to US Georgist tax researcher "Taxpayer" who highlights that Fred Harrison has made a seven or so minute introduction/video advert for his book "Ricardo's Law: House Prices and the Great Tax Clawback Scam"

If you want to understand a bit about just how unfair a tax system based on incomes is, have a watch, and hopefully buy the book - it goes into a lot more detail and will leave you I am sure convinced of the place of LVT.

Maybe I'm a "man out of time" but nothing in politics makes me more nauseous than Tony Blair or David Cameron strutting around seemingly proclaiming their unique ability to govern. To me, even as a Catholic who you might think would be more used to authority and conscientious obedience to such a figure, the leader, whether of party or government, should be no more than "primus inter pares" and probably more administrator-in-chief pulling together the ideas and energies of those around him or her.

And so I was already in the mood to comment on Linda Jack's blog on Friday, outlining a paper that went to FPC stressing that we needed our "Narrative" (what?) to hook into Ming as leader. But now I presume that paper is the one by Greg Simpson ("head of policy and research" for the Lib Dems) that's been leaked to the Independent and about which Andrew Grice has written at some length today.

This seems to have met with some approbation, not least by Linda herself again, but also so far with Paul Walter on his own blog and Richard Huzzey writing at Lib Dem Voice. So I'm going to be slightly contrary and demur from this Ming-fest. Not because I don't believe Ming capable of it. Far from it. I think he has more wisdom on his shoulders than Blair and Cameron combined - and some of the more intemperate and personal remarks that always surface about him after a policy announcement say to me that many have no counter to him other than ad hominem.

But I do not believe that pandering to the cult of celebrity that has permeated politics as much as our prime time television is the radical liberal way to "re-establish in the minds of voters the 'anti-establishment' core of our liberal philosophy." Indeed, I'd say that one of our weaknesses as a party continues to be not that the leader is invisible, but that voters have even less idea of who else might be in a Lib Dem government than they do of a Tory or Labour government. SImon Hughes can't do everything you know! Okay, that's a bit harsh - many of our front bench team are getting better coverage than ever previously - but you know what I mean.

Our credentials for government do not stand alone on some "narrative" centered on the leader (I've still to work out what this actually means, and I think "ideology" is sufficient). A leader who is already (and in some circles for a long time before he even became leader) the most recognized figure, but on the radicalism of the whole party.

We are already way out of my personal "comfort zone" by being too pedestrian, not radical and not liberal enough. If Greg's advice is important it is in his exhortation to be more radical. But it applies to us all. And the way we choose not to thrust forward a leader as some kind of party champion or "born to govern" chief like Cameron can be part of that radicalism. I hope we don't join the cult of personality crowd that this advice seems to advocate, though I don't doubt Ming is up to the task were we to.

Technorati Tags: narrative, radicalism, lib dems, ming campbell