Liberal Democrats care about our country’s problems. We have solutions for them. And we know how to pay for them.
A new Labour Government coming this year? They are going to need our help. And what they failed to address in their manifesto; we will need to persuade them to fix.
Some of our country’s worst problems were brought home to me in a Guardian front-page story last Friday. It was reporting on a survey from MDDUS, a medical defence organisation, of 1671 doctors from the four home nations. The survey found that 65% of doctors overall, including nearly four in five GPs, had been experiencing ‘moral distress’ because of the situations they had encountered in their NHS work. The leader of the BMA, Professor Philip Banfield said, “There’s barely a doctor at work in the NHS today who doesn’t see or experience this distress on a daily basis.” It is because the NHS is “impossibly overstretched”, with its thousands of vacancies for doctors and has a quarter fewer doctors per head of population than Germany. “In practice”, he continues, “that means we can almost never give the standard of care we would want, only ever the care we can manage.” This causes doctors the ‘moral distress’ described, and affects their own mental health.
The research shows that doctors are aware of how the cost of living crisis is damaging many patients’ health, with the long waits for treatment, and the facts of poverty or bad housing making people ill.
Backing this analysis up – as covered in the same Guardian edition – Citizens Advice has reported record numbers of people needing homeless services, food banks and energy bill support this past year. They referred more people to food banks and other charities between January and November this year – 208,000, more than in the whole of 2022 – and helped record numbers of people unable to top up their energy prepayment meters, together with record numbers of homeless people – 41,554 of them in 2023, up by 17% from the number in 2022.
These evils of increasing poverty, bad living conditions and ill-health blighting the lives of millions of our fellow citizens will need to be tackled urgently by the expected Labour Government.
Yes, we are ready to tackle poverty. Our Guaranteed Basic Income policy, which begins with topping up current inadequate benefit payments to working-age people in poverty, will if pursued over ten years – two terms of the next government – eliminate deep poverty and the need for the ever-expanding food banks.
Yes, we will aim to tackle the shortage of doctors, nurses and dentists in the NHS, together with the inadequacy of public services. We aim to fix social care provision by introducing free personal care, by introducing a Carer’s Minimum Wage and a pay progression similar to the one for nurses in the NHS. We will ensure every school has a dedicated, qualified mental health practitioner. And we will insist that all homes are insulated, and kept warm and dry, and will build 150,000 social homes a year, by the end of the next parliament. Where Labour fears to commit, we will challenge them to undertake these necessary improvements, and show how sufficient funding can be found.
Where is their commitment, this Labour Party which will not even agree to end the policy of welfare payments for only the first two children of a hard-up family? Will they welcome more immigrants to Britain to do necessary jobs after discouraging bigger home-grown families? Surely not. But where is the moral outrage they should be showing over the poverty and the lack of provision for the wellness and wellbeing of so many thousand fellow citizens? It is our right and our duty, in the tradition of our great party, to show them the ways forward now.
* Katharine Pindar is a long-standing member of the Cumberland Lib Dems
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Weekly Road Report - West End Ward #dundeewestend
Care homes under threat after Labour policy change
Three less conventional ways of looking at who supports Reform - The Week in Polls
Layla Moran on Gaza: "Starvation shouldn't be a weapon of war"
Peter Martin
Daniel Stylianou
Simon R
John Waller
Mick Taylor
22 Comments
Thanks to Chris Moore for mentioning this thread in two others! (Come on, you other male LDV commenters, join in here!) Meantime I’ve been myself enjoying comments in Rob Parsons’s excellent thread. I particularly like Robin Stafford’s suggestions that we should be challenging concentrations and abuse of power and wealth, rebuilding our public services, and making necessary investments to tackle climate change – oh, and tackling the problems of housing, infrastructure and the economy while we are about it. On the economy, I hope we are going to learn of Michael Gooding’s motion he is submitting for March Conference, which explains how we can probably raise the necessary billions for our policies, with a nod to Richard Murphy’s and Margaret Hodge’s suggestions.
This article points out some of our policies:
Guaranteed Basic Income;
£20 a week increase to Universal Benefit and legacy benefits;
The elimination of deep poverty;
Recruiting more doctors, nurses and dentists;
Introducing free personal care;
Introducing a Carer’s Minimum Wage and a pay progression scale;
Ensuring every school has a dedicated, qualified mental health practitioner;
Insulating every home;
Building 150,000 social homes a year, by the end of the next parliament.
Hopefully, they will all be in the manifesto, but the leadership are not talking about them.
@Michael BG
I suspect the leadership is concerned that all the policies you have mentioned will increase public expenditure at a time the UK already runs a budget deficit.
Katharine, you are absolutely right to express moral outrage about some of the awful problems you refer to, and right to be concerned at Labour’s lack of apparent ambition. But ambition needs to go hand in hand with practical, workable, economically sustainable solutions. Where’s the economic sustainability in everything you’re proposing? The promises you’re making look phenomenally expensive to me, but other possibly than the promise to build and insulate more homes, I see nothing suggested that will improve our infrastructure/ increase how much the UK produces per capita in order to be able to supply everything you promise.
Reading between the lines, I suspect you’re thinking, lots of tax-and-spend: That’s unlikely to be accepted by be the electorate at a time when overall taxes are already at a historically high level.
The necessary changes above are affordable.
One reason is that the Conservative and Labour governing castes see the always related matters of tax-and-public services upside down. Their aspirations/structured policies are to limit/reduce the socio-economic circumstances to match some decidedly dodgy book keeping.
This like a farmer saving money by not feeding his stock well enough.
“I was saving money marvelously, but then the blighters got ill and died!”
A realistic approach would be to cost the finances for running our country well, without 20+% of children permanently hungry/starving, doctors not leaving to other countries etc. and tax accordingly, equitably and clearly.
Reform of taxation would cover most to all of national socio-economic reform.
There are of course resources available. One that has received publicity recently is corruption in government. We know more about the COVID corruption. Another ongoing saga has been the ability of U.K. residents to move money easily to Jersey or the Isle of Man, and of course other countries. The Labour Party is right that taxation is too high for working people. We need someone to spell out where we should simply make people choose between being resident in the U.K. and pay U.K. taxes, or accept the consequences. A third would be the moving of money through the U.K. an example of this has been the movement of Russian money when the government of that country decided to facilitate the privatisation of their national wealth.
Good article Katherine. I do think we need to have an honest debate about taxation in this country. Our income and social security taxes are probably the lowest in Europe – especially for higher earners – and our services are probably the worst. We have previously had 50% and 45% tax rates for higher earnings and it was unwise to abolish them.
Watching ” Mr Bates V The Post Office”, we were in Government at the time of this Post
Office horrific sandal, still ongoing, I did not see any caring etc Lib DEm
Katharine Pindar: “Our Guaranteed Basic Income policy, which begins with topping up current inadequate benefit payments to working-age people in poverty”. Please could you explain the connection between the 2 halves of this sentence and then how a meaningful UBI would be affordable.
Fair Taxation should, in my opinion, be our first priority, but the leadership is scared of frightening the Conservative horses.
Fair Votes should be the second
Seeking to rejoin the Single Market should be the third. We need the courage to say it.
(Btw, we don’t have to have 5 pledges/policies!)
I understand that we can’t do anything if we don’t concentrate on winning seats, but we won’t win seats if the only thing that differentiates us from other parties is entertaining
stunts. To win the ground war, you need to win the air war first.
Hi, chaps and Mary, thank you for starting a discussion of the taxation needed for our proposed reforms. Simon R., yes, since the last GE inflation has been about 23% and we would need to increase £63 billion by 23% just to fund our 2019 spending commitments. To fund half of our policy to remove people out of deep poverty within a decade we would need a further £15 billion. That totals about £92,5 billion, and we don’t yet have the taxation policies at present to raise this amount.
But as Tom Harney suggests, resources are available, perhaps by cracking down on the movements of wealth within and out of our island, as well as making people resident here all pay UK taxes. Other resources have been suggested by the tax expert Richard Murphy, who has pointed out for example that no VAT is charged on the supply of financial services, and charging them might raise about £8 billion. And reducing the pension relief to the basic tax rate might raise some £13 billion. (To be continued!)
I suggest that our Federal Policy Committee should investigate the tax changes listed by Richard Murphy, which were in fact heard in a discussion publicised here on LDV some months ago, together with the 100 tax reliefs that Margaret Hodge spoke of in the House of Commons. But just now I want to thank Steve Trevethan, for his very sensible suggestion that ‘a realistic approach would be to cost the finances for running our country well’, and John Kelly, for pointing out that our taxes and social security payments are low compared with much of Europe, while our services are often worse than theirs.
BC Gardner, I have touched on the cost of our proposed Guaranteed Basic Income in my previous comment, but please note that we are no longer aiming for Universal Basic Income. As to costs, our leadership should not be afraid as the Labour leader has more reason to be, given the Corbyn extravagance of the past as well as the current state of the national finances, but calmly in my view should explain all that needs to be done and show that it can be paid for.
@Tom: Any money lost to corruption/fraud during Covid, however regrettable, is now lost. You can’t use money that’s already lost to fund future spending plans! Besides, even if we could somehow recover some of that money, it’s a one-off amount, whereas Katharine is proposing extra spending that must be sustained permanently, year in year out, and therefore requires a permanent income source.
Regarding money moved abroad, I assume you’re referring to tax havens and tax avoidance/evasion. Unfortunately that is and will always be a game of cat and mouse as HMRC seeks to crack down on ever-more-sophisticated avoidance schemes. It’s not something where you can wave a magic flag and instantly get £tens of billions more income a year. Besides, we don’t generally have jurisdiction over the tax laws of foreign countries.
@Katharine: Thanks for the honest answer and approx. figures for the amount needed. Unfortunately, while it’s honest to admit that we don’t have taxation policies to raise the required amount, that doesn’t sit well with the optimistic statement in your article, “And we know how to pay for them.” 🙂 (and is not going to fly in a general election either)
Simon, there are major jobs to be done for the betterment of our society, and we will need to press the next government to do them. If the Labour Party leadership won’t straight away show moral fibre, take up the pressing needs of our citizens and find means to pay for them, we must prompt them to do so. It does seem that with the ideas of Richard Murphy, Margaret Hodge and some of our own activists the requisite funds can be nailed down, and I believe it will happen, and that the Manifesto will show the precise accounting necessary
.
But the other point I am making, as I wrote in a previous piece here, is that our party at least has nothing to lose by being bold in our attempts. It is high time. Only today I happened to read about the extraordinary wealth of providers of some dubious Covid PPE, Baroness Mone and Mr Barrowman, at the same time as I read about the struggle to make ends meet of an ordinary citizen who had had means enough for the future, until years of caring for a sick husband at home ruined her prospects. Inequality and poverty. Let us remind the Labour party to fight to reduce them.
Mary Fulton,
It is likely you are correct. The leadership seem to be following the Labour Party’s playbook, but we didn’t do this in 1997. Blair’s Labour Party promised to keep to Tory spending plans but we had policies to spend:
£335 million to put 3,000 additional police officers on the beat;
£1.005 billion to abolish eye and dental check-up charges;
Plus a further £2.255 billion on the NHS;
And £10 billion for education of which £1.55 billion would not be covered by our 1p on income tax. (We said our 1p on income tax would raise £1.85 billion a year, while now just 1p on the basic rate would raise £6.9 billion. This give a sense of how much the 1997 figures have to be multiplied by to get the current value – 3.72.)
John Kelly states that our taxes are lower than those in Europe. It seems that the British public want good quality public services and it is time there was a realistic discussion on how we can change our taxes to pay for them.
BC Gardner,
It is our policy to increase Universal Credit and legacy benefits by £20 a week in the first year of a Liberal Democrat government and to increase them to the deep poverty level within the decade. This means increasing benefits to 50% of the median income for household types. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation currently this would mean a single person would receive £137 a week and a couple £236.
I want to see our leadership now thinking about how we are going to relate to a majority Labour government. It won’t be a coalition and probably no red lines we can draw, though if any, reform of the voting system ought surely to be first. But I think our strategists should be planning: what are we going to push them on, and what, offer co-operation on? Shall we be as far as possible partners with them? On both Europe relations and climate-change matters, one sees the similarities. But push on poverty and the standard of living and services. They have some radicals we can relate to in advance, I suggest.
Simon R,
In the pre-manifesto passed at Bournemouth we have said we would reverse the Conservatives’ tax cuts for big banks, and abolish the separate Capital Gains tax-free allowance. The first of these will raise about £1 billion and the second between £5.6 billion (2019 manifesto figure) and £12 billion (Richard Murphy’s figure). If we keep our 2019 policies of reforming Air Passenger Duty this would raise about £4.9 billion (2019 manifesto figure) and introducing a Cannabis duty this would raise about £1.5 billion (2019 manifesto figure). Katharine has already mentioned two policies to raise £21 billion. In my LDV article in October (https://www.libdemvoice.org/ending-deep-poverty-by-april-2029-74037.html) I pointed out that eliminating capital gains tax uprating at death would raise around £1.2 billion, and extending National Insurance to all incomes would raise around £6 billion. The two Labour Party policies of abolishing the non-dom status and putting VAT on school fees would raise about £4.9 billion. Richard Murphy (https://taxingwealth.uk/2023/09/13/the-taxing-wealth-report-2024-recommendations-to-date-and-their-suggested-value/) states that his 24 proposed tax changes would raise about £111.4 billion a year. Some of them are included above and some further ones I think are worth considering are creating an investment income surcharge of 15% on investment income and capital gains from investments which could raise about £18 billion, abolishing Capital Gain Tax Business Disposal Relief, known as entrepreneur’s relief which could raise about £2 billion and increasing the higher National Insurance rate to 10% which could raise about £10 billion. Are there any you would recommend?
Stop Press. Sky TV review of the Sunday papers reveals that the Sunday Telegraph’s front-page headline is, “Sunak: I’ll cut tax by curbing welfare”. Enough. The gloves must be off now between this current Prime Minister and all upholders of Social Justice.
Those jumping to Murphy’s report should probably remember we’d realistically need a de minimis for administration, which we are heading towards anyway from April (in line with discussion from the now defunct Office for Tax Simplification). If we seriously wanted to abolish it and have a single allowance, we probably need to consider full merger of capital gains and income tax; which realistically needs a return of indexation to not tax paper gains. That will raise much less than what Murphy is suggesting (the £12 billion figure quoted above is for the alignment of CGT with income tax schedule, not getting rid of the tax free allowance – Murphy himself only discussed lowering it to £1000 pa). Indexation might well be needed if you want to tax gains on primary residences at disposal, and it would need to be the final disposal, such as death or merger of households, otherwise it would function similarly to SDLT does on labour mobility atm.
Should also mention in the discussion Murphy does not discuss behavioural effects, nor does he set out to do so, that may or may not reduce the estimates. Murphy makes it harder to take him seriously when the signature of his report suggests that wealth is undertaxed by £170 billion which is not a particularly serious idea (it is true we have generous reliefs but not to that extent.)
Good to start discussion on Richard Murphy’s suggestions of how extra billions of revenue can be found, thank you Brandon Masih. I am told by some activists that there won’t be time for Conference to discuss that in our York Conference, but it seems to me that there should be discussion as soon as possible, before the costings of the Manifesto are resolved.
Meanwhile Rishi Sunak was disappointingly unchallenged on ‘cut taxes by curbing welfare’ by Laura Kuennsburg in her interview with him seen on BBC1 this morning.
Brandon Masih,
I do think our existing policy on taxing capital gains the same as income includes some allowance for inflation. In our 2019 manifesto costing document we stated that our reforms to capital gains would raise £5.66 billion, but it might not include everything we passed as policy in 2018. Perhaps you are correct and some of Richard Murphy’s estimates are optimistic. However, I think it is clear that he wants capital gains taxed at the income tax rates when he wrote, “Aligning capital gains tax and income tax rates” and “The tax owing on capital gains should in the future be taxed as if they represent the top part of the income of the person making those gains in the year that they arise”.
Thanks Michael for that, I can see it in the 2018 policy – just have more referenced the 2019 manifesto which only makes reference to the abolition of the separate allowance, and for the single allowance to include capital gains too. No reference to rate of return, I think my line of thinking was that Murphy’s £12 billion figure for alignment of CGT schedule with income tax probably doesn’t include any Rate of Return allowance given when I looked over it he didn’t make reference to as such, not that I’m denying he also wants to align rates.
Where’s the money going to come from to pay for all this? We need an overhaul of out tax system with a comprehensive wealth tax, tackling tax evasion along with an increasing carbon tax on those who are involved with fossil fuels.