Picture the scene. Ed Davey is on Question Time. He has just made the case for fixing social care, rescuing our crumbling roads, or matching our European allies on defence. And then it comes, the question every politician dreads: “That all sounds lovely. But how are you going to pay for it?”

Here is the reply I would love to hear.

“I’m glad you asked, because it’s the wrong question, and I think most people at home suspect as much. You’re asking how we’d fund twenty-first-century public services with a tax system built for a different century. Council tax based on what your house was worth in 1991. A National Insurance system designed so governments can raise your taxes without admitting it. Thresholds frozen so quietly that a nurse is dragged into the higher rate while the genuinely wealthy barely notice. That isn’t a tax system: it’s a museum with a collection box.

“So no, I won’t promise you a magic number. I’ll offer something better: a Liberal Democrat plan to reform the whole thing, simpler, fairer, built for growth, so most working people pay less. It draws together the long-held views of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Resolution Foundation and a long list of tax experts. What’s been missing is a party honest enough, and free enough, to act on it. That’s us.”

Of course, Ed did not say that. But there is no earthly reason he could not.

Everyone is stuck in the same trap

Every party is trapped by that question, because every party plays the same rigged game. Promise not to touch income tax, National Insurance or VAT, two-thirds of all revenue, and you’ve boxed yourself into the same dingy corner. What’s left are the levers nobody defends in daylight: frozen thresholds, stealth raids on savers, and a council tax so out of date the Resolution Foundation calls it “the modern poll tax.”

Labour walked straight into that trap, exactly as the Treasury Select Committee warned in 2021, and the Conservatives before them. The script never changes: impossible promises, then the lever voters can’t see, then the U-turn. November’s threshold freeze, billions raised quietly through fiscal drag, is the latest verse of a very old song.

We don’t have to sing along.

Why this is our fight to lead

There’s a reason this argument belongs to us. Reforming the system means saying the system itself is broken, and neither Labour nor the Conservatives can say that, because they built it and still defend it. We can.

We also have form. Our biggest coalition achievement, taking millions of low earners out of income tax by raising the personal allowance, was a tax idea, and a member-led one. A platform that scraps council tax for a fair property tax, ends the National Insurance con by taxing all income the same, and cuts the bill for most modest households is exactly that kind of idea: liberal to its bones, on the side of the person trying to get on.

Honesty is the strategy

The temptation is to win that exchange by out-promising the other side. That’s the trap: our edge isn’t to out-promise, but to out-credible.

So align with those the public already trusts. When the IFS says reform is the prize, a well-designed system raises the revenue you need at lower cost, we should be the party quoting them, not picking another tribal fight.

It also means honesty about the hard part. There’s a real debate, from Gary Stevenson’s case for taxing wealth itself to those who warn the wrong wealth tax drives people away, which we needn’t resolve tonight. But we can hold both truths: that inequality matters, and that credibility means reaching for instruments that actually work.

And yes, the sums still need doing. A reform platform must be costed before it goes near a manifesto. But that is a reason to start now, not an excuse to dodge it.

The ask

So here’s my plea. Let’s issue a call for evidence and find the accountants, economists and council-finance experts already sitting in our local parties. Let’s give tax reform real time at conference, not a fringe slot at nine in the morning. And let’s reach the next election not with a hasty reaction to Labour’s next Budget, but with a comprehensive, expert-grounded plan to fix a system everyone knows is broken.

Because the next time someone leans across a TV studio and asks Ed Davey how he’ll pay for it, I don’t want us to flinch. I want an answer so good that it makes them rethink the question.

* Jamie joined the Lib Dems in 2014 and was elected as City Councillor for West Chesterton in May 2018.