Author Archives: Mark Valladares

Naturally, here at Liberal Democrat Voice, we receive a great many approaches from individuals and organisations, inviting us to publish something from them on our site. Many of them are the usual spam, telling us how wonderful the site is, how much they enjoy it and that an article on property renovation is exactly what our readers would most need. Oddly, we tend to ignore most of them so, if you’re one of those people, and you are reading this, please stop.

Yesterday, we had an e-mail from a (presumably) young man at the Taxpayers’ Alliance, headed;

New polling from the TaxPayers’ Alliance shows tax cuts are key to winning working class votes

I can almost hear you thinking, “Well, there’s a surprise!”. But I’m a generous soul, and so I responded, noting that, whilst the polling appeared to quite conclusively demonstrate that voters want to pay less tax, there didn’t seem to have been much effort to spell out the consequences, i.e. more tax in other areas or cuts to public services. The (probably charming) young man replied by saying that their methodology was the same as the NHS spending polling over the summer – and the recent Oxfam/Tax Justice UK poll from September on wealth taxes – i.e. they had tested propositions, not the implications of each proposition.

You may conclude, as I did, that he hadn’t really answered the question. And so, gentle reader, I turned down his offer to write something for us.

However, the polling is, in itself, interesting, if only to know how voters think when the consequences of the offer before them are not signposted. Here are the highlights as suggested by the Taxpayers’ Alliance;