Randomly Selected Article or Link

Sometimes it only takes the back of an envelope to verify rough tax calculations. Clearly e-Tory Iain Dale doesn't keep real envelopes any longer when he says that in his interview with Andrew Marr this morning Ming Came Clean on Tax Hikes:

Well if you're a lobby journalist scratching your head about what to write tomorrow, Ming Campbell's just given you your story. On the Andrew Marr programme he readily admitted that the cost of his so-called "Tax Cuts" would see "the rich" (which he couldn't define) paying £40-£50,000 a year more EACH in tax, as a result of his reform proposals. Let me spell that out again...

£40-£50,000 MORE in tax per year! Each!

Feel those pips squeak! This will apparently enable him to fill the £12 billion hole in the LibDem tax calculations. I suspect that although they might be able to fill the hole in the first year, the would reoccur in the second. Why? Because every so-called "rich" person will have left the country. Perhaps someone should remind Ming of what Abraham Lincoln once said...

You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer.

Aside from the fact that Ming did no such thing as anyone who watched it could see he was reacting guardedly to a set of figures thrown out by Marr himself making assumptions about who would be targetted by tax increases. Marr's researchers had suggested we were talking about, I think he said, the top 250,000 wealthiest households. So just who are they and what difference would it make?

Well 250,000 households are about one per cent of households. Most statistics seem to show that the wealthiest one per cent in the UK own between about 20% and 23% of all the wealth in the UK. By contrast, fully half of the UK adult population shares 7% of wealth including housing wealth between them, or just 1% without housing wealth.

Now the wealth of this 250,000 wealthiest households is growing, at average returns (and in fact they tend to grow faster than the average), at about £50,000,000,000 a year, of which we may or may not want to capture about £12,000,000,000, or around a 25% tax rate, in order to bring my and other average earner's tax rates fall to about 34%.

Seems like a good deal to me for the vast, vast majority of the British public. Scaremongering Tories beware - when people realise who is affected one way or another, I think they will be pleasantly surprised.

Technorati Tags: lib dems, taxation

This month it will be ten years since I made a decision that would change my life. I joined a political party for the first time. Naturally it was the Liberal Democrats. Why naturally? Well I had been brought up in a Scottish non-conformist family all of whom had always, at least as far as I can remember of family discussions, voted Liberal. At least in my grandparents' day the Conservatives in Scotland were the party of the Kirk and the middle classes and Labour the party that the Papist working class were told to vote for by their bishops. So both sets of grandparents, Gospel Hall Brethren, had voted for that nice Mr Grimond.

Having been educated privately, however, mostly as a result of being predominantly either ex-patriate or just plain itinerant in my childhood, we were drilled not to vote Labour, because they would, obviously, close our beloved schools. And I certainly couldn't vote Tory in 1987 or 1992 in Birmingham, Edgbaston for that wicked old bat Jill Knight, sponsor of section 28 and staunch supporter of abandoning free eye and dental checks - an issue which was probably and somewhat surprisingly the first in my voting life which moved me to write to my MP (setting aside my eleven year old self writing to a lady called Shirley who was education secretary to complain about the punishments meted out - like not being allowed tuck - at the private prep school I attended!).

I instinctively wanted less government interference in our lives and choices. It's maybe hard to imagine for someone not affected by such seemingly arbitrary rules, but for someone growing up gay to feel that you're very being is somehow illegal, second class, it can be a powerful motivator (I'll never really understand gay Tories to be honest).

But that's not to say that my support for the Lib Dems was just a protest against the others. The issue that I remember most that clinched my vote though was a peculiarly wonkish one - PR. It had seemed to me during my teens that the sort of majorities enjoyed by the Tories under Thatcher were bad for politics and bad for the country. I had a sense that it didn't really matter what the policy agenda of different parties was so long as they didn't have an inbuilt monopoly on power and that dissenting voices had a fair shout in government. I had always been keen on devolution for Scotland also - I was always less convinced about the Principality for some reason! And this too seemed like Liberal policies. And personality wise, I just liked Paddy, as my parents had liked both the Davids, though especially David Steel, and my grandparents had liked Jo.

The demise of the ship-building industry that had given one grandfather his livelihood and the destruction of the coal (and steel) industry that had given the other his appalled me, as did the virtual civil war that caused, but I'm not entirely sure that I connected it with "government" so much as a general decline in heavy industry as other world industrial powers came on-stream - the era of Kobe Steel and Korean supertankers. I worked on the stock exchange through most of the period of the big privatizations and though I somehow instinctively liked the idea of widening asset ownership, I could see in the way that people cheated the system (at least in spirit) to get share allotments and then sell them for a quick buck that this great asset give-away was not necessarily the way to achieve that. Nor were taxes a huge issue. The poll tax had made me angry, but otherwise, whilst it was nice that they were falling, somehow I knew that death and taxes were inevitable and that they could go up or down all they liked and you'd still end up paying them.

Ultimately, even had I thought about voting for anyone else, the sleaze stories of the Major government repelled me and I could not quite trust Labour, riven as it had been through my formative years with the Militant battle. I had felt encouraged when the "Gang of Four" left Labour, believing that this was a chance to reinvigorate three party politics and break the duopoly of Labour-Tory dominance. I could probably have voted for a party led by John Smith, but never got the opportunity. It seemed to me however that New Labour had an innate artificiality about it. And this was reinforced when, during the 1997 election, I wrote to Millbank asking them about specific commitments on gay equality and was told there were none - manifesto commitments that is.

 I'm sure the celebration that followed Tony Blair's entry to Number 10 was genuine, if you were a Labour supporter, even at that point a broad left Labour supporter who may have hoped that "The Project" was a mechanism for getting into power that would be relaxed afterwards, but for me it seemed like insufferable arrogance. And so it was that in the September of 1997, I took a leap into the unknown and decided to put my money where my vote was and join the Liberal Democrats. I felt I didn't want to do anything else at first than be an armchair member, so I decided to make my subs the equivalent of a "recommended annual" subscription every month naively thinking that this would prevent me having to actually do anything, or at least allow me smugly to refuse to do anything! Eighteen months later - fifteen of which I had not engaged in any party activity locally - I was a City Councillor! And from a relative political bystander, it was suddenly a huge part of my life.

Next: Ten years; left, right but always liberal.

...who seems as appalled as I am at the relish with which our party has taken to banning a four hundred year old "pleasure": Forceful and Moderate: Smoked out....

Now, I accept the public health arguments, and I accept in particular (as a member of UNISON how could I not) the arguments about the dangers to staff. Yet still there are ways round having to illiberally ban something. Many people take on jobs that have risks to their health or personal safety. Health and Safety legislation tries to get employers to minimise those risks in most cases (for example with protective gear) but in some cases, when all that's done and risks still remain, employees can command a premium.

If 80% of people really want to eat and drink in smoke free places this is plenty incentive for the industry to give them that option. Since more than 20% of people smoke anyway (and it's higher amongst the young adult population), isn't there a good chance that only those who do would be prepared to work, for more money if possible, in an establishment that permits smoking - I know almost everyone in my SU bar are smokers - they get extra breaks!

As a party we have, or had at least, policy in our "abolish regulation" stuff to replace the national minimum wage with a more flexible arrangement negotiated and enforced thropugh trade and workers associations on a region by region basis so it could reflect the costs of living in different places. We could add into this premiums for working in smokey bars perhaps. A real liberal response to this would be to try to level the playing field in favour of the workers, not outlaw something (especially something that is still so very, even if inexplicably, commonplace).

Incidentally, does anyone know how this affects hotel bedrooms? I have a get around in my mind already. Small hotel, bedroom suites rented by the hour with more settees and tables than beds, room service delivering booze. Get the picture? The wealthy can get round anything.