Tag Archives: radicalism

What can the Liberal Democrats learn from New Zealand’s Opportunity Party?

By Daniel Duggan | Mon 2nd November 2026 - 12:42 pm

New Zealand’s Opportunity Party (TOP) could hold the balance of power after the 7 November election. A late-October poll put it on 7.2%, potentially securing nine MPs and entering Parliament for the first time.

For Liberal Democrats, TOP’s significance lies in its radical centrism: combining support for enterprise and growth with substantial reforms to taxation, income security and economic power. Its policies connect two questions too often discussed separately: how do we produce more wealth, and how should we distribute it?

Security and productive investment

TOP’s flagship proposal combines a Citizen’s Income of approximately NZ$19,400 annually for eligible adults with a 1.75% annual tax on residential and commercial land values.

A guaranteed income provides security and contributes to freedom from domination, while land taxation discourages speculation and encourages development. Buildings and improvements are excluded from the tax, preserving incentives to construct and improve homes. For too long, investors in the UK have been encouraged to pursue rising land and property prices because the expected returns exceed those available from investment in businesses, technology, and innovation. Taxing land values would help shift those incentives towards activities that raise productivity and create new wealth.

Together, these policies would use a share of socially created land wealth to finance individual economic security, while encouraging investment towards productive enterprise. Redistribution would therefore help create the conditions for growth, giving people the resources to develop their abilities and businesses stronger incentives to invest.

Competition and economic power

TOP’s support for business comes with a willingness to challenge powerful incumbents. It proposes stronger competition enforcement, including powers for the Commerce Commission to seek court-supervised break-ups of dominant businesses. It also supports increased research and development spending, technology adoption incentives, and business incubators.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged new zealand and Opportunity Party | 5 Comments

Why are we so timid?

By Michael Taylor | Sun 17th May 2026 - 8:55 am

The Liberal Party I joined in 1964 was not a timid party. Under Grimond’s leadership, it wanted major changes to the UK. It wanted devolution, voting and parliamentary reform, sexual and racial equality, supported joining the EEC, wanted nuclear disarmament and wanted more cooperatives amongst many other things. And it wasn’t afraid to say so.

Fast forward to today and we seem afraid of our own shadow. We say little or nothing on controversial issues for fear of offending anybody. Dig a little deeper and you find we probably support the same things that we did before but you’d never know. We are criticising Starner for being too cautious, whilst doing exactly the same ourselves.

Often our leadership wrings its hands about a perceived problem but makes no proposals to change them. Take the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of sex. We all know that the right thing to do is to change the law to make the equality act mean what we thought it did, but our leadership’s silence has helped the growth of anti-trans sentiment and made the lives of trans people more difficult. We have gained nothing but contempt for our stance and lost the support of many in the trans community.

We continue with the pretence that the answer to Brexit is to join a custom’s union, when the real problem is not being in the single marker. Obviously, some focus group has been telling the party that support for the SM or joining the EU will upset voters in some undefined demographic.