We don’t usually do individual polls on The Voice, relying instead on Stephen’s monthly round-ups. But we do make exceptions when there’s something particularly striking or interesting about them and one of the recent YouGov questions falls into this category.
With the usual caveats about it a poll that is carried out in the middle of one party’s conference and that policy proposals can look different once they’ve been subject to constructive debate frequent attack from other parties, here it is:
The Liberal Democrats have proposed a new tax on the most expensive houses. Householders would pay an annual tax of 0.5% on the value of their house over £1 million, with the money raised being used to take people earning less than £10,000 out of income tax. Do you support or oppose this suggestion?
Support strongly 34
Support somewhat 35 (Total support: 69%)
Oppose somewhat 14
Oppose strongly 10 (Total oppose: 24%)
Don’t know 8
(The polling was carried out 22-23 Seoptember, a shorter time period than usual, but YouGov look to have taken a sensible approach to dealing with the problems of traditional snap poll as explained by Anthony Wells here.)
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5 Comments
“The Liberal Democrats have proposed a new tax on the most expensive houses. Householders would pay an annual tax of 0.5% on the value of their house over £1 million, with the money raised being used to take people earning less than £10,000 out of income tax. Do you support or oppose this suggestion?”
YouGov goes down drastically in my estimation, for agreeing to put such a blatantly misleading question.
The “mansion” tax would raise nowhere near enough money to “take people earning less than £10,000 out of income tax”. It was estimated it would raise about £1bn out of the £17bn required for the whole package.
I did the poll, giving Nick and Vince my complete vote of confidence for going out ahead of the party on this matter and breaking with our usual timidity on policy..
My problem with the authenticity of the poll though is that it was on an open site, not the members’ forum, and having read the comments that accompanied it I really wondered if some of the respondents were tories. There was a tiny dash of that slightly vicious style one sees in tory posters in the national press.
You could check it out on the members’ forum; you might get a higher %, especially after the Com.Res. poll.
@herbert brown do you really think that adding the word help as in
‘with the money raised being used to help take people earning less than £10,000 out of income tax’
would have made a significant difference?
I suspect that it would at most make a few percentage points difference/
Peter1919
I didn’t say anything about the effect a more accurately worded question would have had on the result of the poll.
The point I’m making is that it’s grossly misleading to give people the impression that this tax could yield anything like enough to raise the income tax allowance to £10,000 – in fact it would raise only 6% of what would be needed.
Herbert is quite right about the question.
Not surprisingly this idea from Vince (it isn’t “policy”, thank goodness) is going down like a lead balloon in the London target seat where I’m canvassing :o(