Randomly Selected Article or Link

I spotted someone seemingly scouring my blog for articles relating to "citizens' Income" and came across this now seemingly very prescient post I did nine months ago about our tax policies hitting the mark or not.

Thales, the successor to Thomson CSF, has won the first contract to start the design process for the National Identity Register which will be the more sinister side of the whole ID card system. For those of us committed to opposing ID cards and the NIR at every opportunity and wanting a way to boycott suppliers this presents a challenge. Many of the possible suppliers of course are not ones with big "brand names" you can easily boycott. Thales itself is mostly a government contractor, making war machines. And they are nearly a quarter owned by the French state. Both of these in my opinion make their appointment even worse (not because it is French, per se, but because it is partly controlled by a foreign state, however currently friendly that state may be).

But they do make, through their Thomson media subsidiary, a few things we can target. They are, for example the largest or perhaps sole supplier of the BT Homehub kit (and its equivalent from Orange). They also do an awful lot of facilities stuff for film, advertising and television (they own the Thorn EMI filming facilities firm), but it will always be quite difficult to find out which programs, films or advertisers are using them.

So the main real consumer product they can be identified with is Homehub. So, if you happen to be a BT subscriber and use one of those sexy boxes, maybe it's time to switch your communications provider?

(They also make set-top digital TV boxes and DVD equipment if you want to do some more digging around).

The Telegraph reports that the government is to force councils to raise Council Tax by more than inflation so he can divert more central money to the NHS and education. Responding,

Eric Pickles, the Tory local government spokesman, said: "Council tax is starting to become unbearable. Gordon Brown is using smoke and mirrors which is shameful. But, I think people will recognise what is going on. Mr Brown has already fooled them before in this way."

Funny that. Not so bad that it deserved your attention when deciding which tax to cut last week was it, Mr Pickles? Starting to become unbearable? Your own Tory party polling showed that it was the most unbearable tax already. Only one of the mainstream parties wants seriously to address this regressive tax:

Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said: "Council tax is a particularly regressive and hated tax which has already put a massive squeeze on household incomes."

Now that should be bigger news than the Tory tax cut for about five richest per cent of dead people, don't you think? Even if I do think they want to do it the wrong way.

It’s wonderful, while most students are in recess, to see our streets, lamp posts, telephone boxes, park fences, trees, pavements, footpaths and so on clear of the detritus of advertising fliers and posters that make them so tatty during term time.

Once upon a time the City Council and universities collaborated to provide “fly posting boards” in strategic places around east Oxford and Headington. But they’re no longer enough it seems, and we must be deluged with these execrable bits of paper daily while the students are here.

But I believe that the new licensing laws put some power back into the hands of neighbourhoods and residents. A bar or club can have its license reviewed at any time following complaints from the public about anti-social behaviour.

So I would like to put bar and club operators on notice that once the students return, I shall be documenting and collecting such advertising litter around my area (Headington Hill) and ask the licensing authority to do something about the many repeat offenders I find so regularly.

I believe the new law means they cannot hide behind the claim that promoters of individual nights’ events are wholly responsible for advertising if their venue appears on that advertising. Are they willing to put their licenses on the line to prove it?

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.