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We’ve heard recently how political parties are trying to grapple with the problem of inheritance tax affecting middle class families “affected” by property price rises rather than the “super rich” it was supposedly intended for.

Might I float a possible solution? Instead of a cash tax payable on inheritance of an asset, estates could split the property, passing a 99 year leasehold onto the beneficiaries of the estate and the freehold into a community land trust so that eventually the value and control of that land will pass back to that community.

This is after all how the “super rich” have mitigated their inheritance tax, through that august body the National Trust, for many years.

Most land price change has nothing to do with the current occupiers of that land, and everything to do with public policy and spending such as planning consent or the building of local infrastructure at public expense.

More crucially, land value is a “zero sum” game. Rising land values directly exclude whole swathes of a new “landless” class as a result. It is surely right that such inequity be redressed periodically. When better than at inheritance time? This method will at least not immediately harm the beneficiaries or force them to sell the family home.

Over a few generations such a mechanism could properly redistribute unearned wealth better than inheritance tax ever could.

...it's Parliament that makes the decisions.

I don't know how many times he's used this excuse in his interview with John Sopel so far. Detention without trial, ASBOs, House of Lords reform - "the government puts forward its policies but parliament makes the decision".

On the one hand, at least there is someone in the government that recognizes this basic tenet of the British democratic system, but on the other, we work on a majoritarian system; if government can't persuade its own people who are in that majority, surely it's not parliament to blame, but the government not putting forward policies even their own people can support.

Excuses.

Technorati Tags: house of lords, politics, ASBO, liberty

There's a new cover version of that popular jingle "Britain 'needs compulsory voting'" out by those wild and crazy dudes at the Institute for Public Policy Research. Backing vocals are provided by Pete "Ha-ha" Hain and Jeff "Ho-ho" Hoon.

But to make a mark in these days of digital media downloads, SMS voting and supermarket sweep the boards it would have to have that something special, and it doesn't. In Ballot Box Jury's "hit or miss" ratings, it gets a resounding "miss". Along with The Truants' version of "We don't need no edgewekashun" and ASBOs "Leave Them Kids Alone" it's always going to fail to sparkle unless some carrot goes with the stick.

To me the carrot in this case has got to be making that vote count for something. Is it any wonder that people lose interest when the voting system means that if you don't predict the (usually) one and only winner correctly you get nothing - nobody to represent your views. And even when you do, you get someone else's choice anyway in the form of a single party candidate.

When in many constituencies and council wards more than half the vote is literally wasted, counting for nothing, and people see little difference between one group of politicians vying for their vote and the next, just forcing them to make up their minds is a recipe for disaster. They even suggest having a "I don't care" box so you wouldn't even have to make up your minds, just tear your minds away from Corrie for half an hour to get down there and do your "civic duty".

No doubt it's another thing they want to add to the National Identity Register in time, and when we're all bar-coded or chipped and pinned or whatever the next stage will be polling station officers will be able to send out little electric shocks to people at five to nine in the evening if they haven't voted yet.

It's clearly policies that count the most though. When we do reach out to a lower than average voting group they do turnout. The Lib Dems have proved this time and again with the student vote. Make the effort and you can lift turnout. Okay, maybe it's not yet the most exciting thing on a student's schedule for the week, but we have turned the corner in many places of student voting apathy.

If you finalise your policies through a focus group intended to be the most bland cross section of everyone in the country round a table of six people, you're not going to produce something to engage everyone - just something that doesn't offend too many.

A couple of years back, Jon Snow, Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University was asked about voter apathy at the end of his Chancellor's lecture. I thought his response was spot on; people are not politically apathetic in the main, they just often channel those energies and opinions in other ways. They didn't see the ballot box necessarily as the way to make their feelings clear about the Iraq war, so they took to the streets in droves. They join Greenpeace or Amnesty. They shamed the government into action last January when they rushed to give their widow's mite to the Tsunami emergency appeal. Strangely, this was just what Peter Hain, in his more enlightened moments said in 2001 - why has he changed his mind?

So, IPPR, if you want to make a difference, perhaps you could have a little think about your initials:

Interesting Policies and Proportional Representation would change peoples' opinion and engage them, not yet more New Labour authoritarian compulsory schemes.

Technorati Tags: electoral reform, politics

I've made quite a big thing about Chris's European Parliamentary experience both in writing to him when encouraging him to stand and to other people. It seems to me that, now that Blair's pretty lacklustre presidency is over and with the sceptic Brown on the horizon and with Cameron likely to pull the Tories even further away from Europe there is no longer any desire to champion Europe in the higher echelons of the other parties and that pro-Europe voters have nowhere to hang their hats.

Chris is just what Britain needs in a champion for the European cause. As an MEP he's been at the heart of the working of the EU and, perhaps more importantly, in the representative part of the EU where he has scrutinised and held the other arms of the EU to account. For too long the political discourse on Europe in the UK has focussed on the supposed excesses and lack of democracy of the Commission or the inter-state wrangling in the Council. In Chris we have an opportunity to explain and promote how a truly democratic Europe can be made to work for us, its citizens.

We all seem to agree that we want a distinctive agenda marking us out from the other parties. In the next few years, while they do their best to look embarrassedly apologetic about Europe on the one hand or downright anti-Europe on the other with Chris we can be positive about Europe and our place in it. And vastly strengthen our position as the only party for pro-Europeans in the UK.