If you are generally a supporter of the government, read Version A. If not, read Version B.
Version A
In excellent news that the government is taking cracking down on tax seriously, the government has appointed a heavy-weight team of tax experts to review the case for introducing a General Anti-Avoidance Rule (GAAR). The selection of legal, judicial and tax experts means the case for a GAAR will receive expert scrutiny and make it very hard for the government to reject any recommendations for action.
Version B
In appalling news that shows how the government has sold out to rich tax-dodgers, …
The VAT rise will mean tighter purse strings for everyone, with the poorest being hardest hit. But there is an alternative which some sections of the media and certain politicians seem reluctant to talk about, let alone act on.
The £120bn tax gap is more than the NHS budget and over three times the budget for education. It dwarfs the £13bn brought in by the VAT increase. At a time when George Osborne is telling the British public that we’re all in this together, 38 Degrees members are calling on him to do more to make sure everyone plays by the …
Welcome to the latest in our occasional series highlighting interesting findings from academic research. This time it is a paper from David Brockington (University of Plymouth) and Todd Donovan (Western Washington University) looking at the political impact of increasing taxes.
After reviewing the work of others in this area, they focus in on council tax levels and election results in English local councils, comparing the performance of Labour and Conservative against changes in council tax levels:
We have tested if governments that presided over marginal increases in existing taxes lost vote share and seat share in the subsequent election. We find that
Over on the IEA blog, Mark Littlewood recently repeated a very commonly made point by those of a more low tax persuasion:
It’s worth noting that the relatively affluent in Britain pay a very high proportion of the overall tax take. In terms of income tax, the highest earning 1% contribute nearly a quarter of all receipts and the top 10% account for well over half.
There’s no prizes for guessing what conclusion Mark drew from this, but turn the point on its head and it serves just as well for the opposite political perspective.
The annual allowance for tax-privileged pension saving will be reduced from £255,000 to £50,000, and the lifetime allowance will be reduced from £1.8 million to £1.5 million. This will replace the complex proposal legislated for by the last Government in the Finance Act 2010.
“Tax-privileged” is a tax break to you and me by the way. The governments estimates that in a normal full year these changes will bring in an extra £4 billion and affect around 100,000, four out of five of whom have incomes of over £100,000.
Reducing tax breaks for the most well off has long …
Sunday lunchtime saw Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander address Liberal Democrat conference. The packed nature of the hall, the fullest it had been so far save for the rally on Saturday night, reflects both the importance of Danny’s role and the interest from many members in hearing direct from him.
What’s really happening with the cuts? How much is fairness figuring? And can Danny present the message successfully? Not being David Laws is a burden that has hung over his early days in office and this speech was his opportunity to establish himself in party eyes as his own …
The Chancellor George Osborne and Exchequer Secretary David Gauke today established the Office of Tax Simplification (OTS).
The Chancellor has appointed a Board of tax experts who will be responsible for leading the work of the OTS over the next year. The Board Members are Michael Jack (Chairman) and John Whiting (Tax Director).
Their responsibilities will be to identify areas where complexities in the tax system for both businesses and individual taxpayers can be reduced and to publish their findings for the Chancellor to consider ahead of his Budget.
The OTS will undertake two initial reviews over the
In amongst the debate over capital gains tax and the politics of whether the Budget leans more towards the previous Liberal Democrat or Conservative policies on the topic is a significant issue of principle.
The Liberal Democrats (and previously the Liberals in particular) have traditionally been much keener on the idea that the tax system should treat ‘unearned income’ more equally to earned income, and so tax more equally the growth in capital value of assets compared with salaries.
Of course the use of the word ‘unearned’ is itself the trigger for a whole range of debates as increase values …
Although when talking about other parts of the agreement I’ve sometimes being quite critical about the parking of issues with commissions or reviews, the commission on long-term care is a good move. It has a clear remit, has to report within a year and tackles an area which requires policies that have a chance of long term cross-party agreement given the nature of the subject. The failure of cross-party talks prior to the election means the …
What can we expect from the Government on tax avoidance and evasion?
Cast your mind back to the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto launch in April. A major theme was the plan to raise £4.6 billion by tackling tax avoidance.
This has been reduced to a single bullet point in the coalition’s Programme for Government, a promise to “make every effort to tackle tax avoidance, including detailed development of Liberal Democrat proposals.”
Vince Cable remains committed, telling the Telegraph soon after his appointment as Business Secretary that, “tackling tax avoidance by businesses is essential and this is an area that I …
It is worth spending a moment reflecting on just how remarkable today’s Queen’s Speech is from a Liberal Democrat perspective.
We have become conditioned to believe that the policies we develop will never be implemented. A good intellectual exercise but nothing more. Yet here we have a programme for government of which we can be proud. It contains an extraordinary list of Liberal Democrat commitments on which we fought the general election.
Right from the start the speech grabs attention:
My Government’s legislative programme will be based upon the principles of freedom, fairness and responsibility.
Who would have dreamt of those words introducing the Queen’s speech just a few weeks ago?
Last week The Voice ran a piece from Eleanor Black of the Don’t Judge My Family Campaign opposing Conservative plans to introduce a tax break for marriage.
David Cameron’s policy to give £3 a week in marriage tax allowance to a third of married couples is to ‘send a signal’ that marriage is better than any other type of relationship. Today, a new campaign launched to ‘send a signal’ back: don’t judge my family.
Inspired by JK Rowlings’ attack on the policy last week, The Don’t Judge My Family campaign (www.dontjudgemyfamily.com) is seeing people sign up in droves. The issue has clearly touched a nerve: in just a few days 1,500 people had signed up to the Facebook page, before the website had even …
Stuart Adam and Mike Brewer of the Institute of Fiscal Studies argue, in their April ‘observations’ piece on Liberal Democrat tax cutting policies, that it is meaningless to make the claim that the poor pay more of their income in tax than the rich.
However, no sooner do they make this observation than they go on to confirm that official statistics show this is the case. No one, they explain, disputes the ONS data which shows that the poorest fifth of households paid 38.7% of their income in tax. Neither is there any dispute that this compares with a tax take of £25,926 or 34.9% from …
THE WRATH of the Perthshire business community came down on Perth and North Perthshire’s Tory General Election candidate Peter Lyburn yesterday after he used names on an open letter without permission, The Courier can reveal.
One of the prominent business people who feels “used” is Perthshire Chamber of Commerce president Paul Shields.
A letter, sent to The Courier and other newspapers on Thursday by Mr Lyburn, was critical of Labour’s planned 1% rise in National Insurance and supported Conservative plans to thwart it…
Mr Shields declared, “I haven’t seen an open letter. I haven’t signed an
A tax-break for married couples, is how the Tories are trying to spin it. The reality could scarcely be different – here are the groups of people the Tories are now officially classifying as undeserving:
Two married teachers bringing up a child.
A co-habiting couple who have lived together for years but not married.
People whose partners have abandoned them and their children.
A widow whose husband has died in Afghanistan.
But perhaps I’m being unfair … after all the Tories will reward some people at the expense of those clearly undeserving groups:
Those happily married for 50 years.
Over a million people in Britain who have separated but are still legally married.
Somebody who abandons their partner and children and then remarries.
The Tories’ feeble defence of their Edwardian tax-war on groups in society they regard as unworthy is that it their £150 a year will help solve the much-talked about ‘Broken Britain’ – so what will the Tory policy do for those living in poverty?
For the past week, the Tories have been decrying Labour’s plans to raise National Insurance, pledging to reverse the rise but with a startling lack of clarity about how they will pay for it – beyond vague talk of ‘efficiency savings’, the kind of fantasy finance David Cameron and George Osborne would be quick to scorn if other parties tried it on.
Today Nick Clegg is showing that NI cuts may be popular with business – but they have to be paid for by someone, and the most likely people to pay the price of the Tories’ cuts will be …
Gordon Brown has today announced one of his election pledges: Labour has no plans to make our tax system fairer. Or has he put it: Labour will hold the basic income tax rate at 20 pence in the pound.
Lib Dems, too, are committed to keeping the basic rate of income tax at 20p. But, unlike Labour, the party would make a priority of lifting the personal tax allowance to £10,000, ensuring millions of low-earners and pensioners will stop paying taxes altogether.
The Tories’ pledged this week to reverse Labour’s National Insurance tax rises by increasing the UK deficit. Today Labour’s Lord Mandelson accused the Tories – seemingly without a trace of irony – of “peddling deception”.
The Lib Dems’ shadow chancellor Vince Cable is having no truck with the Labservative approach:
Labour and the Tories are as bad as each other. Under both their plans, public finances would be driven into the ground. Whether it’s for tax cuts or filling in the deficit hole, both parties seem to be in a competition to see who can come up with the
A while back, Left Foot Forward ran a piece attacking the party’s tax policies for not being progressive. That results in manyresponsesaroundtheplace defending the party’s policy and today Left Foot Forward runs a piece from Danny Alexander defending the party’s policy:
As the person responsible for drafting the Liberal Democrat manifesto I wanted to respond to the report on our proposal to raise the income tax threshold to £10,000 – paid for by closing loopholes that unfairly benefit the best off, a new mansion tax, a crack down on tax avoidance and
At Comment is Free today, Steve Webb MP reiterates the Liberal Democrats’ focus on redistributive policies and fairness.
He’s replying to Tim Horton’s suggestion that the Liberal Democrats have seen a “rightward shift” under Nick Clegg, at the expense of the party’s progressive credentials.
Webb responds with the £10,000 tax allowance, smarter public spending (including introducing the pupil premium and scrapping ID cards) and the Lib Dems’ fairness in politics agenda:
We have argued for an effective cap on political donations, so that no political party in Britain can be bought by sectional interests: the two old parties have, not surprisingly,
The Labour-supporting Left Foot Forward blog prides itself on being evidence-based. But not, it seems, when the evidence doesn’t support the conclusion they’ve already written.
That seems to be the only explanation for their slanted weekend posting that Lib Dem tax policy “fails the fairness test”, which appears to rest on two points: 1) that people who don’t pay tax won’t benefit from tax-cuts, and 2) ignoring completely the redistributive wealth tax rises that Vince Cable and the Lib Dems are proposing.
Perhaps the authors, Tim Horton and Howard Reed, hoped nobody would notice the sleight-of-hand; or at least that it …
That’s the question a series of governments across Europe have been grappling with in the last few months. Stolen Swiss bank data reveals key evidence about tax evaders from several countries. Not only is it stolen data but it is only being made available at a price:
A CD identifying around 1500 Germans who have illicit Swiss accounts was procured by a former employee at the Geneva branch of HSBC bank. The disc, which could return an estimated €200 million ($393 million) in lost revenue, was offered to the German Government for €2.5 million…
Merkel and her Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schuble, initially
Despite their professed enthusiasm for having a bonfire of the quangos, in practice the Conservative Party keep on announcing new ones – and have rather run in to trouble when pressed to explain what’s going on the bonfire (both points I wrote about here).
The tally of new quangos the Conservatives is now at least 19, which sits rather oddly with the rhetoric about culling them. However, that doesn’t mean all the individual proposals are bad ones.
One in particular which appeals to me is an Office of Tax Simplification.
Regular readers may have noticed my love of tangling with bureaucracy. (I …
By Stephen Tall
| Sat 13th February 2010 - 7:45 am
Here’s your starter for ten as we experiment with a new Saturday slot posing a view for debate:
Belief in equality is, as the preamble to the Lib Dems’ constitutions states, one of the fundamental values of the party. But, as with all values, equality can mean different things to different people.
There has long been tension between liberals who believe the role of government is to aim for equality of opportunity for everyone, and liberals who believe government must promote equality of outcomes. The former will tend to stress the importance of education as the chief means by which individuals …
The Guardian’s monthly ICM poll, published today, asks a couple of intriguing questions.
For a start, we discover where Lib Dem supporters perceive they sit within the class system (however self-defined) – 50% say they are middle-class, and 48% that they are working-class. This compares with 38% middle-class to 61% working class for Labour; and 56% to 39% for the Tories.
(Slightly bizarrely, it turns out the Lib Dems have more supporters who identify themselves as upper-class (2%) than the Tories do (1%); the poll’s margin of error may explain that finding.)
But the ICM/Guardian question which interested me most …
David Cameron said he could not guarantee a Conservative government would be able to offer a tax break to married couples, despite having personally supported such a move. “It’s something within a parliament I would definitely hope to do,” he said, but insisted the state of the public finances prevented him from offering any guarantee. “We’re not able to give people absolute certainty
On Friday, Nick emailed all members to outline our position on the abolition of tuition fees. It was great to see our position, agreed by both the Federal Policy Committee and the Parliamentary Party, broadly welcomed on LDV and elsewhere.
Saddling students with huge debts as they leave universities, particularly at a time when many are failing to find jobs through no fault of their own, is clearly wrong. And the prospect of such debts putting talented young people off going to university is equally wrong. That is why our plan to scrap tuition fees over 6 years from the election will be one of a very small number of core commitments in our manifesto.
Over at the Mail, Lib Dem shadow chancellor Vince Cable previews this week’s pre-budget report, says what the Lib Dems’ priorities would be, and and argues that the banks should pay back the taxpayer for saving their business. Here’s an excerpt:
This week the spotlight switches from bankers’ bonuses to government deficit. The collapse of the banks and the recession has devastated public finances. In Wednesday’s Pre-Budget Report, taxpayers will get the bill and the debate will begin as to who pays and how and when. … Unless painful budget measures accompany a fairer tax system, the public will be very angry. … There has to be a clear plan to bring the finances back into good order. Otherwise, there is a serious risk of a collapse of confidence leading to much higher interest rates and a weaker economy for a long time. It will not occur this side of an Election. …
I guarantee, on my party’s behalf, that we are prepared to take unpopular decisions – albeit with a commitment to distribute the burden fairly.
Timing is very tricky. Rushing into painful cuts or tax rises will plunge the country back into recession. … The Liberal Democrats and I have already indicated some of the programmes that could go: ‘baby bonds’, tax credit for high earners and identity cards. There will be defence cuts, providing these don’t affect the kit for our soldiers in Afghanistan; the Trident missile system is one item for the long term. Unless politicians spell out priorities, we shall get indiscriminate, damaging cuts to valuable services. …
Taxes should be cut for those on low and middle incomes by lifting the income tax threshold to £10,000
a year, £200 a week. This should be paid for by removing tax reliefs which enable the very well-off to avoid income tax. I am sticking with the idea of a mansion tax, a one per cent charge on property over £2 million. This is also a way of getting non-doms to pay tax; you can’t move a mansion to Monaco or the Caymans.
If we are looking for more tax money, the place to start is with the banks. Some are making very large sums on the back of a taxpayer guarantee and we should demand a fee for this – ten per cent of profits. These are the people who got us into this mess and splattered the nation’s account in red ink. They should get out of their pin stripes, roll up their sleeves and take the lead in cleaning up.
By David Lawson
| Fri 4th December 2009 - 10:05 am
There is a set of well known slights aimed at the Liberal Democrats. First, no one knows what they stand for. Or maybe they stand for lots of things but too complex and subtle for anyone to bother with. Secondly, they are just somewhere in between Tories and Labour. And that means you don’t need to listen to what they say because you can just take a bit off the edges of Tory and Labour.
Sell it right and this week’s tax policy is the sort of thing that will at least chip away at those preconceptions. Conveniently it may also be right.
The key part is – or should be – the abolition of income tax on the first £10k of earnings. That is a policy which can be sold from the left or the right. And we should do it openly and hard from both angles.
Ruth Bright @Paul is surely right, do we have age breakdowns for stats on members and active supporters?...
Tom Bailey Alex Macfie says:
"He [Farage], has just seized on one case of supposed “anti-white bias” by the police (the only one available)"
So the 3 decades of Brit...
Alex Macfie @Simon Robinson &c: Please stop pretending Nigel Farage is acting in good faith. He has just seized on one case of supposed "anti-white bias" by the police ...
William Wallace Simon:
Please give us your 'What to do' proposals in a future post. Getting to those who have switched off from conventional politics is difficult - even mo...
Alex Macfie @Chloe: Well the time Bijan Ebrahimi was arrested instead of his future murderer was on video. It didn't lead to any rioting or "vitue signaling" from what I re...
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Remembering Liz Truss and her dogs that barked at drones
We do have a two-tier policing system but it is not what our homegrown racists think it is.
From Norman settlement to a civic square
Church Green video
Ruth Bright 
Tom Bailey 
Alex Macfie 
William Wallace 