LVT and You and Me
Currently reading Fred Harrison’s book on land and taxation. LVT seems like a particularly good idea, and liberal to boot. Yet, a quick perusal of the policy papers on tax reform shows minimal interest and essentially just says “we’ll think about it”.
Would this not be a good policy to pull ourselves away from the crowd?
Why isn’t the party taking it more seriously?
The “axe the tax” anti-council tax campaign has always done well for the party. So introducing a general land tax is probably seen as a vote-loser.
I think most of us who campaign for LVT have accepted that the commitment to LVT runs deeper than it sounds in existing policy documents. Much of this is to do with the timings of the two Tax Commission groups over the past two years. We were pretty disappointed in the second one, as we felt we had been promised that it would take the LVT commitment much further than it did on paper, but when it went to conference there was a genuine underlying feeling from people like Vince Cable that actually we had made the argument, we now (even if at some unspecified time in the future) had to work out where it fitted in.
For some of us, and people like Harrison, of course, it’s blindingly obvious where it fits in! You are right of course that it is fundamentally liberal and no liberal economic and fiscal regime could be properly said to be complete without it.
There are a couple of great quotes about it from Asquith at the bottom of my post here. We’re also beginning the process of compiling a book of essays seeking to “mainstream” this view of the “liberal economic tradition”.
As ever, there’s going to be an ALTER event at Liverpool spring conference you might like to come along to if you’re going to be there.
PS - what’s “done well” for the party is debatable. It’s the most remembered fudge of the 2005 General Election I’d suggest, and whilst the Local Income Tax is superficially better than Council Tax that doesn’t mean we can’t do better and still “Axe the Tax”.
>Would this not be a good policy to pull ourselves away from the crowd?
Yes!
>Why isn’t the party taking it more seriously?
God only knows.
Thanks for the information. For me, the bonus of LVT, beyond its inherent liberalism, is the way it can reduce the complexity of taxation to one simple idea. I would think that this would be a particular vote winner.
Unfortunately I doubt I’ll make the spring conference currently being out of the country and all but the ALTER group looks like it is doing good work. The website hasn’t been updated in a while though - I was wondering whether it was still going?