Tag Archives: tim montgomerie

Vince pushes the ‘mansion tax’ – could the Tories yet be persuaded to take tax reform seriously?

By Stephen Tall | Published 22nd January 2012 - 2:15 pm

Shock! Horror! Lib Dem business secretary Vince Cable advocates Lib Dem manifesto policy!

The Telegraph today reports that Vince’s policy — which would levy a 1% annual charge on all properties valued above £2 million — is still on the table as the Coalition writes its second budget:

Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Business Secretary, is pushing for a mansion tax to be introduced on properties worth more than £2million in this year’s Budget. While the policy is likely to be opposed by George Osborne, the Chancellor, Mr Cable said that he had spoken to Conservative MPs who backed the plan.

“A mansion tax is still very much on the agenda – it is a very good idea,” Mr Cable told The Sunday Telegraph. “It is good for two reasons,’’ he said. ”It would constitute a tax on wealth rather than income, which we believe to be right, and also in economic terms it creates the right sort of incentives for the property market.”

Mr Cable added that it was “perverse” that rich “foreigners” could buy expensive properties in Britain and contribute just £1,000 a year in council tax towards the public finances.

3 ways of reading Vince’s comments

There are a couple of ways of interpreting this fresh pitch.

Posted in News | Also tagged mansion tax, mark reckless, tax, vince cable | 18 Comments

LibLink: Mark Pack – 2011 was a year of treading water

By NewsHound | Published 28th December 2011 - 10:25 am

Yesterday The Times ran a set of op-eds looking at how the parties did in 2011, featuring ConHome’s Tim Montgomerie, Ed Miliband biographer Mehdi Hasan and The Voice’s own Mark Pack.

Here is a flavour of what Mark had to say:

This year has certainly not been short of Harold Macmillan’s “events, dear boy, events”. Political and economic turmoil disrupted even the usually quiet periods deep in August and the final shopping days before Christmas.

Yet at the end of the year the political rollercoaster has left all three main parties in remarkably similar situations to those in which they found themselves

…

Posted in LibLink | Also tagged mehdi hasan, nick clegg | 7 Comments

Get your skates on and submit a motion to Liberal Democrat conference about wealth taxes

By Mark Pack | Published 27th December 2011 - 9:25 am

Nick Clegg’s recent ‘open society’ speech confirmed that increases taxes on wealth in some form is very much on the political agenda. However, the default party policy option – a mansion tax – was highly controversial in the party when it was introduced (which is rather a polite term for the rolling lesson in how to bungle a policy launch, annoy MPs, irritate party members and feed negative stories to the media all in one fell swoop).

In other words – now is a very good time for the party to be debating what form of wealth taxes it favours, especially after the opportunity was missed at the party’s autumn conference. As I wrote at the time in Tax: The missing ingredient from the Liberal Democrat conference agenda,

Posted in Op-eds, Party policy and internal matters | Also tagged david laws, featured, land value tax, nick clegg, tax, vince cable | 35 Comments

Alex Wilcock writes… Tory boy throws toys out of pram: not exactly Man Bites Dog

By Alex Wilcock | Published 26th August 2011 - 3:27 pm

British politics is known for its name-calling and point-scoring rather than adult debate, and few sane voters find the bearpit of Prime Minister’s Question Time very edifying. But since no party won the election, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have tried to do the mature thing, with neither getting all of what they want because the voters didn’t give either party absolute power. The voters don’t matter, though, to Tory Boy Tim Montgomerie, who today screams and screams until he’s sick that With every passing day the Liberal Democrats are dragging the Coalition further away from the …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged ConservativeHome | 19 Comments

Opinion: Cameron’s ten big mistakes – more please!

By Paul Walter | Published 17th July 2011 - 9:25 am

In the Telegraph, Tim Montgomerie, editor of ConservativeHome, outlines the results of a recent survey of Tory party members.

1,500 of them were asked to name “what they saw as Cameron’s three biggest errors”. The resulting Top Ten makes an extraordinary epistle from Planet Tory. Several of the points on the list would be regarded by many as Cameron’s greatest non-mistakes:

“Supporting climate change policies” – mistake? Well, perhaps only when ConHome add the highly debatable non-sequitur of “…that will increase energy bills”.
“U-turn on NHS reforms” – mistake? Hell, no. “Hurrah!” – Say many of us.
“Agreement to Nick

…

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged ConservativeHome, david cameron | 21 Comments

Anonymous Tory MP launches broadside against “hypocritical, immature, manipulative” David Cameron

By Stephen Tall | Published 26th June 2011 - 10:15 am

There’s a quite extraordinary broadside against David Cameron’s leadership in today’s Mail – written it appears by a current Conservative MP who chooses to remain anonymous — accusing him of “cynically manipulating” the party’s candidates’ list to stuff its green benches with “friends who went to the same school or moved in the same social circle”.

Here’s a flavour:

Speeches Cameron made before the Election about a new politics gave us great hope. But before too long, the less appealing side to his character became clear as he displayed an immature tendency to poke fun at certain individuals or groups

…

Posted in News, Opposition watch | Also tagged conservative party, daily mail, mark pritchard | 11 Comments

Three-quarters of Lib Dem manifesto becoming government policy – independent research

By Mark Pack | Published 2nd May 2011 - 5:53 pm

Sunday’s Politics Show featured the results of research by independent academics into how each party in the Coalition Government is doing at getting its polices enacted.

The conclusion? Three-quarters (75%) of the Liberal Democrat manifesto is being turned into government policy, compared to noticeably less (60%) of the Conservative manifesto, as illustrated in this screenshot:

Politics Show screenshot

(For a sample of those Lib Dem policies being put into action see the excellent site What The Hell Have The Lib Dems Done?)

Conservative blogger Tim Montgomerie and Lib Dem …

Posted in News | Also tagged av referendum, hopi sen, linda jack, shane greer | 1 Comment

LibLink: David Allen Green – Why I have joined the Liberal Democrats

By Stephen Tall | Published 12th April 2011 - 4:10 pm

Over at his New Statesman blog, David Allen Green — the magazine’s legal correspondent and author of the Jack of Kent blog — has explained his decision last week to become a fully paid-up member of the Liberal Democrats.

To be more accurate, he first lists all the reasons why he will be a dissenting member of the Lib Dems [is there any other kind? - Ed.]… before then highlighting how he was finally persuaded to join by ConservativeHome’s founding editor Tim Montgomerie analyses that ‘the current government is significantly more liberal than an entirely Conservative administration would otherwise be’. …

Posted in LibLink | Also tagged david allen green | 3 Comments

Back from the Brink: the extraordinary fall and rise of the Conservative Party

By Mark Pack | Published 8th February 2011 - 10:25 am

Peter Snowdon’s history of the Conservative Party in opposition, quickly updated last year to include the final stage in their recovery, has four white men on its cover striding towards the reader – Cameron, Osborne, Hague and Clegg. It tells you immediately the sort of book that Back from the Brink: The extraordinary fall and rise of the Conservative Party is: tightly focused in on politics as seen from and carried out in Westminster.

This is an account of senior political figures and their political, policy and media manoeuvrings. The public feature very rarely (unlike in Deborah Mattinson’s memoirs from …

Posted in Books | Also tagged conservative party, david cameron, featured, john howard, peter snowdon, william hague | 18 Comments

First election debate: winners and losers

By Mark Pack | Published 16th April 2010 - 9:35 pm

Now the dust is starting to settle after the first debate, who are the winners and losers – aside from the party leaders?

Winner – liberalism
Loser – hostility to foreigners

Praising some aspects of immigration, talking about no like-for-like replacement of Trident, pledging to scrap tuition fees, promising to cut taxes for most by raising taxes for the very rich – Nick Clegg won the debate not by abandoning policies for some mushy middle ground, but by sticking to core liberal beliefs. Those beliefs were carefully wrapped in language and arguments designed to be appeal to a wide audience – but …

Posted in General Election, Op-eds | Also tagged david cameron, gordon brown, iain dale, john sharkey, leaders tv debate, nick clegg | 2 Comments

Don’t take it out on Vince, guys, just ‘cos you’re stuck with George

By Stephen Tall | Published 11th April 2010 - 8:30 pm

I’ve been amused to see the rush-to-rubbish Vince Cable today among some right-wing bloggers following his appearance on BBC1′s The Politics Show.

Iain Dale (but of course) was first up to tweet: “Well done Jon Sopel for finally exposing Vince Cable as the overrated flipflopper that he is.” He was soon followed by ConservativeHome’s Tim Montgomerie, and Wall Street Journal’s Iain Martin, who has a pet-obsession with Vince’s popularity.

Having missed the show at lunchtime, I sat down nervously to catch up on iPlayer (Vince’s inteview begins about 3 minutes in) fully expecting him to be eviscerated by Jon Sopel.

In fact, what I watched was a robust interview in which Vince more than held his own, and made the key points that (1) the Labservatives have consistently opposed Lib Dem attempts to clean up our politics, and (2) the Tories need to explain how they’re going to fund their various tax-cuts if not through raising VAT.

Why have the Tories got it in for Vince?

Which left me wondering: what got Iain, Tim and Iain so excited that they dashed into the twitblogosphere to try and swing the media narrative against Vince? (Besides the inevitable election-time partisan point-scoring, that is).

Posted in General Election, Op-eds | Also tagged andrew neil, george osborne, iain dale, iain martin, vince cable | 13 Comments

Indy bigs up Mark Pack but exposes Twitter’s weakness

By Iain Roberts | Published 11th January 2010 - 1:30 pm

The Independent today asks “Could the next election finally provide a reason for the [Twitter] microblogging service?“

There are many reasons for Twitter, some better than others, but if today’s Independent article is anything to go by, the General Election won’t be one of them.

“It’s Twitter that will make this election unique.”, the Indy proclaims, before going on to show why that claim is almost certainly not true.

The paper lists the political twitterati, a mixture – it turns out – of established figures doing a bit of tweeting and political bloggers.

Most excitingly for us at Lib Dem Voice, our …

Posted in Online politics, Op-eds | Also tagged alastair campbell, john prescott, lynne featherstone, mark pack, vince cable | 9 Comments

To be fair …

By Stephen Tall | Published 29th September 2009 - 9:40 am

I made clear my view on Sunday that the BBC’s Andrew Marr was bang out-of-order to ask Gordon Brown whether he uses prescription drugs seemingly on the basis of nothing more than Internet rumour:

… in making it an issue on the basis of no evidence, Andrew Marr and the BBC have done a real disservice to serious political reporting.

I stand by my assessment. However, I also pointed out that, at the time of writing, no-one from the right-wing blogosphere had taken Mr Marr to task. It’s only fair, therefore, to note that Tory MP Nadine Dorries yesterday broke ranks with the fellow members of her tribe to post a stinging denunciation:

Posted in News | Also tagged andrew marr, gordon brown, iain dale, nadine dorries, nick assinder | 6 Comments

Where I disagree with ConHome over the BNP’s Buckingham Palace Invitation

By Richard Huzzey | Published 21st May 2009 - 1:28 am

There will be – and should be – widespread disgust at the suggestion that BNP leader Nick Griffin is going to attend a Buckingham Palace garden party, hosted by HM the Queen. For the overwhelming majority of Britons who support racial and cultural diversity, it is offensive to see the British National Party attending a function hosted by the Head of State in honour of public service. It would be embarrassing for the Queen herself, who has been rightly keen to emphasise she is constitutional monarch for Britons of all faiths and races.

However, it would be mistaken to focus …

Posted in Op-eds, Opposition watch | Also tagged bnp, buckingham palace, ConservativeHome, jonathan isaby, nick griffin, richard barnbrook | 18 Comments

Tag Archives: tim montgomerie

3 ways of reading Vince’s comments

Why have the Tories got it in for Vince?

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