“Before anyone passes final judgement on Bournemouth, don’t forget there’s rather more to any conference than getting the message across to the electorate…”

That paragraph is all true as far as it goes, but let’s face facts. The success or otherwise of a Conference is measured entirely by its outward-facing aspects. If it has a positive effect on the electorate it is a good conference; a negative effect makes it a bad conference; and a neutral effect makes it marginally worthwhile as a party fund-raiser and jolly.

What is interesting is that the effect of the press coverage seems to reflect the factual aspects of reporting rather than the opinion pieces. The op eds and comment pieces were fairly critical, but it seems be have been the bits that conveyed our message that voters listened too. This is interesting and perhaps useful. I believe that we need to recognise that conference is entirely about conveying our message and that we therefore need to have a much closer eye to how it will look, but it does appear that we can worry too much about what the Sniping Heads say.

Having said that, the Mansion Tax announcement was handled badly and Clegg should have either prepared the ground for backing off the tuition fees promise or avoided picking the fight. We still have a habit of making publicity blunders around Conference time.

Hmm… Another formatting error :o(

Bournemouth – disaster or success? While I wouldn’t go so far as to use the word ‘disaster’, Iain Roberts’s conclusion that the conference was “something of a hit all round” just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

The conference was a wasted opportunity. We are at one of those historic turning points – 1906, 1945, 1979 – when the prevailing orthodoxy has failed and the country needs to choose a different direction. And the 2010 general election should be a ‘big choice’ election.

The Liberal Democrats need to exploit this opportunity. The party’s central message should be its distinct vision of the ‘good society’ rather than the pain it seeks to impose, even if some pain is part of the package. Instead, the party offered a combination of muddle and empty slogans.

Let’s deal with the muddle first. On the Saturday of conference, advance copies of the press release of Nick Clegg’s rally speech spoke of ‘savage’ cuts. On delivery, ‘savage’ was changed to ‘serious’. At a press conference the next day, Danny Alexander denied there was any significant difference between ‘savage’ and ‘serious’, prompting BBC reporter Iain Watson to observe that no-one had ever been ‘serioused’ by a dog. This shambles was just the first in a series of hour-by-hour policy shifts and ‘clarifications’ that succeeded only in delivering mixed messages to the outside world.

Then there was Vince Cable’s announcement of the ‘mansion tax’ – a potentially good policy but it turned out that no-one knew whether valuations would be based on house sales, Land Registry figures, or a complete revaluation of properties across the country. Nor did it take account of the high value of relatively modest homes in London. And of course, none of the other parliamentary spokespeople had even been told in advance – let alone consulted – about this new policy, so some of them responded by attacking it in public.

Then there was the biggest row of all, on tuition fees, which was totally unnecessary but which was provoked deliberately as part of a half-baked ‘Clause Four Moment’ strategy intended to make Nick Clegg look ‘strong’. As James Graham pointed out, “conference felt like having a drunk pick a fight with you in a pub”. But all that this posturing achieved was to create confusion about what one of the party’s flagship policies now is.

And the worst of it is that the party’s media spinners had the sheer brass neck to claim that the conference’s problems were due to ‘unruly delegates’/‘beards and sandals’/‘left-wing trouble-makers’ (take your pick) when the true culprits were in the leader’s bunker.

A ‘successful’ conference would not have provoked 18 members of the Federal Policy Committee to write a letter to the Guardian. It would not have provoked a row at last Tuesday’s parliamentary party meeting. And it would not have been used as a platform for ‘policy-making by PR stunt’, such as the mansion tax debacle.

Then there is the problem of empty slogans. ‘A Fresh Start for Britain’ is littered with them, as was the leader’s speech. What do such over-used words as ‘fairer’, ‘greener’ and ‘stronger’ actually mean? As Bill le Breton put it, in his article in the September edition of Liberator, “The trouble with using advertising executives in politics is that you end up with your values described in the same words they use in their day jobs to sell toilet disinfectant.”

Quite apart from his infatuation with advertising executives, Nick Clegg’s basic problem is his refusal to repudiate neoliberalism, the dominant ideology of the past thirty years and the bad idea at the heart of this country’s woes. This prevents him articulating a trenchant critique of the economic crisis and it prevents him sounding sufficiently distinct from New Labour or the Tories. The party’s lack of impact stems from this reluctance to let go of TINA (‘There Is No Alternative’).

For me, the failure of the conference was summed up by an experience on the Tuesday evening. I returned to my hotel room before dinner and turned on the TV news. The conference rated below a story about the break-up of Chas & Dave. And in view of all the confusion and bickering on display, perhaps it is just as well.

Nor did it take account of the high value of relatively modest homes in London.

I wish people would stop repeating this stupid talking point. Yes, houses in London are more expensive than everywhere else but a cursory search on Rightmove for properties between £700k-£1m shows that you can get pretty much any size of house any normal person/family requires (there’s a six-bed semi in Acton for £700k) without dropping seven figures on it – in fact, there are plenty of 4+ bed houses for sale in London for less than half a million pounds. If your house is worth £1m then you’re loaded, or you’re very lucky to have benefitted enormously from house price inflation and now have a very valuable asset to sell or borrow against.

Or not very well off at all and have a large mortgage!

… and what are they using to pay that very large mortgage, exactly? Is it money? Even at 2% over 40 years, a £500,000 house would entail repayments of £1500 per month. At 5%, it’s £2400 per month! A £1m house at 5% is going on £5000 per month – that’s a salary of £90k just to pay the mortgage, all other costs aside.

My and my partner’s salary combined is about £50k, we have a large deposit and our bank won’t lend us £300k, never mind £1m. What planet are you on?

“So why not just tax income?”

I’d be happy with a system whereby income was actually taxed. The problem with the system (as well documented) is that too many people are able to avoid paying income tax. It’s one of the superficial attractions of a Unitax system.

Taxing fixed assets is considerably easier in practical terms as no-one has yet managed to move a Knightsbridge property to a tax haven.

Oh, and don’t forget that there’s an awful lot of money sloshing around in this country that was not taxed as income when it was received and so moving to a purely income-based system would give the existing owners of capital an even bigger free ride than they are already getting.

(Is that a muddled enough combination of glibertarianism and tubthumping socialism for you? 😛 )

Er, move house…?

Yes, because no-one ever redevelops larger properties into flats. This is all sort of tangential to your original point, of course, which was that incomes should be taxed instead of wealth, and hopefully I have gone at least a little way to suggest why one might want to tax wealth.

re mortgages, sanbikinoraion is missing my point.

Surely you would accept that someone with a 1m home and a 200k mortgage is better off than someone with a 1.2m home and a 500k mortgage? (ceteris paribus)

Hence Vince’s idea (and let’s be clear, this is an idea, not party policy) is a very blunt instrument and an extremely poor proxy for a tax on wealth

Interesting though it is to read about sanbikinoraion’s household income, it’s really not very relevant to this thread …