That is a simple statement of fact, publicly on record & I ask you to retract your claim.

On your 2nd point – I have stated that the party & party members supported (ex-)Nazis openly committed to & engaged in genocide in Croatia, Bosnia & Kosovo. Do you deny that the party supported these people, that they were in several cases unrpentent ex-Nazis who served Hitler, that they were publicly committed to genocide & were engaged in same? If not then everything I said is truthful. If so on what particular point do you dispute.

If you do not dispute the facts what is your basis for saying anybody unwilling to censor evidence of genocide should not be allowed to be a member of the “Liberal Democrats”?

No it isn’t.

Accusing fellow party members of being fascists might well be, but nothing you have said (at great great length!) on this site comes close to providing any evidence for these sorts of claims from yourself.

You have repeatedly called various Liberal Democrats fanatical, near-Nazi supporting right-wing extremists.

I am not surprised if people found that such views were not compatible with you being a member of the party yourself.

Actually, I’d be interested to see some more reaction from Lib Dem councillors.

What do they think of this target of cutting government expenditure by 3-4%? Do they think cuts of that size in local government spending could be achieved without harming public services? Or is local government supposed to be exempt from the cuts (which, of course, would imply they would be correspondingly deeper elsewhere)?

Or do they take a more cynical view – that there’s no danger of this policy doing any harm or incurring any unpopularity, because it’s never really going to be implemented?

Gordon, the crucial thing our party finally appears to be grasping is that “ability to pay” needs to relate to unearned asset wealth at least as much (and ideally much more than) it relates to productive earnings. That is the key to shifting the tax burden off the poor.

And as the poor become financially emancipated of course, welfare state dependency becomes less necessary.

Our long-term “management” strategy should be to reduce the need for state management of individuals altogether – setting people free, economically and socially.

I share your concern that we must have a properly funded state sector … but I am convinced that cutting the overall burden of taxes as well as – and this is crucial – making them fairer in terms of ability to pay. This is in sharp contrast to the Tories whose plans are always utterly self-serving though all dressed up in pseudo-liberal economic language.

Labour may have spent a great deal more but their best idea seems to have been that if they throw enough money at a problem some will eventually stick. Well it doesn’t. More than anything this is where Lib Dems have to distinguish themselves from Labour.

Caring, yes. For a fairer society, yes. For a properly managed state sector, yes. For wasteful spending, NEVER.

I hope this is going to be properly thought through :-

High Speed Rail Links CAN be :-

a) energy inefficient
b) huge consumers of limited funding
c) beneficial to the wealthy (who tend to make long-distance rail journeys) at the expense of the less well-off (who tend to make shorter rail journeys, or use buses).

Do hope somebody is thinking this through.

A characteristic of the statist social-liberal tendency, surely?

Examples include:

Leading the way on nuclear disarmament (hardly a right wing policy)
State investment in high speed railways
Devolving local health services
The ‘pupil premium’

All of these suggest a centre/centre-left approach rather than a sudden leap to the right.

…shaved mine off on joining ALTER and have just been into Crabtree & Evelyn for new supplies, thanks!

You might say that having pushed for the policy change your self for some time now, just as I might entirely agree with you, having also wanted us to go down this route for some while too .

I don’t expect the party to go down the route of a tax revolution, but I do hope this change could act as a catalyst for us to rediscover some of our neglected & thoroughly subversive economically liberal past, i.e. of asset taxes and ‘ownership for all’. One day proponents of LVT will loose their beards and the whiff of BO.

Now don’t get me wrong, we do have perfectly valid reasons for our reversal of policy, it is critical support I am offering. As Anders says, it is the right policy at the current time. It’s just that we mustn’t get carried away. Frying pans and fires come to mind.

Dogmatic, ideological tax policies are what is wrong. Labour’s big-promises-big-plans-big-bills policy is wrong, because it leads to overspend and waste. But the Thatcher-Major cut-cut-cut ideology was equally wrong, and they left government in tatters. Schools and hospitals in a mess. Never enough money to do a job properly. Resources wasted on emergency repairs and rework to put the original botch job right again. For those who take pleasure in being too young to have lived the history – do please read the books. Those who cannot learn from history are condemned to repeat it!

Given that this government have been touting as their achievment the longest continual period of growth in history or whatever it is Gordon keeps saying I don’t think it is disingenuous at all. “Real terms” to me means an overall increase ahead of inflation, not necessarily share of GDP.

The fact is that massive amounts of additional money has been available as a result of that growth and has not produced the sort of benefits the real terms increase in spending ought to have produced.

In that respect what Gideon and Dave (sounds like a good name for an Oxford Ice Cream Parlour!) have been saying about storing up some savings in the good times should have been happening for ten years.

Major’s years were indeed years of higher spending, proportionally speaking, but that has also got to be seen in the context of the bottom of the previous cycle in the early nineties. The fact that we are nearly at those levels at the end of the upward part of the cycle is indeed awkward for anyone wishing to take over managing the economy.

Your concerns about slowdown etc are exactly why in my opinion this must be sold not as a penny-pinching managerial efficiency measure, but a systemic change in the *way* we tax – that, as in 1909, we must ask not just “how much have you got” but also “where did you get it from” and tax those things that contribute most to the uneven playing field that currently gives big advantages to big business and the already wealthy.

For example, the best time to implement a wholesale switch from income to land taxes would be at the bottom of a property market cycle in order for it to have a sustainable buffering effect against future boom-bust type bubbles.

It must not be “savings” that can be characterized as “cuts” by those who don’t share our ambitions, but a tax revolution (I don’t believe a “tax switch” is now enough, given that this is the second summer we have published this sort of policy and nobody even remembers that we did it last year with the “lowest income tax rate since 1916″ policy.)

Savings are a turn-off for many as it’s all been said before and never implemented. A tax revolution is a more engaging prospect to me.

I could go on and on…

But hey a few Tories might vote for me.