Randomly Selected Article or Link

Good. No election. Well, I'll qualify that a little - the relatively short pain of a three week campaign could have seen friend and former council colleague Steve Goddard give Andrew Smith some unwanted leisure time for Christmas, which would have been fantastic - but I'm pleased we won't have to for now.

There may now be three, four, even five more party conferences in which to whip up a storm of revolutionary liberalism to really wow the electorate with a genuine alternative to the "cosy consensus" which, in my opinion anyway, is not evident right now in our policies. Time to give the FPC some breathing space from the poll obsessed campaign strategists to come up with really radical policies and instruct those strategists to sell them, not be hemmed in by what they say they can and cannot sell.

2009 will see the centenary of Lloyd George's "People's Budget" and we can develop a compelling theme in two years around "Liberal Britain: unfinished business" hijacked as the political landscape has been for a century alternately by the socialism and protectionism of Labour and Conservative governments, now merged into one amorphous mass of interfering statism.

That the hysteria of the past few days can be put down to a Tory announcement of a tax shift amounting to not much more than a half of one per cent of the government budget from the super-rich to the merely very rich just proves the paucity of imagination currently pervading both politicians and public. Ming Campbell has been right in suggesting that there's not a fag paper between the two halves of the statist party led by Brown and Cameron, and the past two weeks have seen nothing to disabuse us of that.

The time for radicalism is now. Radical liberalism. We don't merely want the "people to decide" but for the people to be able to take back power over their own lives. The power that once marked us out as British; dynamic, enterprising and freedom loving but which has been subdued, even nearly killed off perhaps through decades of dependency and government managerialism.

Tucked away in the comments to Lib Dem Voice's How rich are you? article comes this snippet from Tim Leunig (LSE economist, and member of the Housing Policy working party I was on a couple of years back):

"The obvious new incentive effect is on house prices. We would expect them to increase (by around 8x the level of council tax, so around £15k), as happened when rates were replaced by the poll tax."

Well quite. We in ALTER have been saying this since the Local Income Tax policy was first debated. We've gotten the impression that the rest of the party has not been listening. Hopefully someone as respected as Tim within the party will make someone listen with comments like that.

To reiterate...not only will most of your national income tax reduction be eaten up with your new Local Income Tax but if you happen to be in that growing group who are getting no help with housing costs and cannot afford to buy a home, you'll be likely to find prices even further out of your pocket by at least another half an income multiple.

Perhaps this is why the Lib Dem Youth and Students annual conference this year voted against Local Income Tax and in favour of Land Value Tax instead. That cohort is what we usually regard as our "core vote" I believe. Not the people you'd want to piss off I'd have thought.

"Axe the Tax" was, and remains, a great idea - Council Tax is as regressive and unfair as taxes come. Local Income Tax was an easier thing to sell, perhaps, than another type of property tax. But, as Keynes was it said "when the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?" it is time, three years on with property prices up another third, to think again about a tax policy that will extend the misery of those we want to help. There's no shame in changing policies if a better idea presents itself. Affordable housing is, as Gordon Brown said this week, right at the top of the agenda now - we should not continue with a tax policy, in the form of Local Income Tax, GUARANTEED to exacerbate the affordability crisis all parties appear to want to solve.

Technorati Tags: axe the tax, council tax, land value tax, ldys, lib dems, local income tax

Even if, like me, you have studiously avoided watching any of the Olympic coverage, you will probably have seen the odd medals table on a news program or something. They all show the glorious People's Republic beating the evil Empire and its Poodle into second and third place respectively. But hang on, the host nation is the largest nation on earth by population and, whether or not there has been any cheating, such as using babies in the gymnastics or whatever, the simple fact is that their human resources are vast. So, as a completely meaningless bit of fun, I have compared the medals table (at least those nations who have won golds) with their respective populations.

Looking at it this way, we find Jamaica in first place with tiny Bahrain in second. Georgia beats Russia by a mile. Team GB are down in 15th place, but that is well ahead of Russia (25), the United States (29) and the Glorious People's Fatherland is way down at 45th out of 53 countries who won any gold medals at all.

Eat your pants, China! If they had won just one gold, Taiwan would have beaten you by a country mile!

Here's the full list:

Now, after all the spin, I wonder how many of the Chinese gold medalists are going to have bits amputated by the Glorious Central Committee of the People's Games so that they might also win in the Paralympics?

I suppose it's probably a very long time since The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was required reading for a Labour minister. And maybe my initial calculations are wrong on the "budget"...

But am I right in thinking that those of us who labour all our lives but can't afford to buy a home are now going to be paying more in tax than the rack landlord on his buy to let investment he's fleecing us to occupy? In another era even the most liberal of economists would have recognized this as robbery of the returns to labour.

Nice one Dahling! New Labour, New Rentier.

Gordon Brown was quite effusive, for him, over the sad (though at ninety seven one could never say untimely) passing of John Kenneth Galbraith.

Maybe he should read "Money: Whence it came, where it went".

If Galbraith did one thing, I would say it was to challenge the idea that economists have some monopoly on wisdom that ordinary folk were excluded from. Rather, he claimed, they made up rules and complex models deliberately to obfuscate logic so that even the best educated who were not in their little club would accept their dictums unquestioned.

Too bad Gordon Brown didn't seem to pick that up in the advice JK gave him.