Tag Archives: taxes

Lord William Wallace

Tax increases needed to counter Trump’s full-frontal assault on liberal democracy

By Lord William Wallace | Tue 18th February 2025 - 1:00 pm

So now we have no alternative.  We have to raise taxes.

Trump’s appeasement of Russia threatens European security.  But it also poses the full extent to which the Conservative government ran down Britain’s public capabilities – and, let’s be honest, the Coalition also underfunded our public services and infrastructure, and so did the Labour government (and the Thatcher government) before that.  Since the election we have been learning about the appalling state of our hospital and prison estates.  We already knew about the desperate shortage of social housing, the poor condition of many of our roads and the backlog of investment in public transport.  Inadequate pay for teachers in state schools means that we’re losing them faster than replacements are being trained.  Local authorities are struggling to avoid bankruptcy.  And alongside all that, our armed forces are smaller and weaker than they have been in our lifetimes, and the US Administration has just given us notice that it won’t defend Europe if Russia extends its aggression against Ukraine into hybrid or conventional attacks on the rest of Europe.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 13 Comments
Kevin Langford

We should not oppose some stealth taxes

By Kevin Langford | Wed 2nd November 2022 - 7:30 am

The autumn statement on 17th November will probably provide reassurance for the markets, but bad news in other respects.  We don’t yet know how the unpleasant ‘medicine’ will be mixed, but it will include higher taxes (including stealth tax rises through long term freezes to personal allowances), cuts to services and to government investment, and real terms cuts to some welfare payments.

Elements of our response to the forthcoming statement are easy.  1 The Tories got us into this mess through the Truss shambles, through Brexit, and through the lack of policies to build a decent economy over many years of poor stewardship.  2 We don’t want cuts to services and to welfare.  3 We should increase levies on companies which have happened to have benefitted from the war in Ukraine.  But when it comes to any tax rises that may be proposed in the statement, we need to think carefully.  We need to balance the short term expediency of pointing out everything the government is doing which could be unpopular, against longer term considerations of how to deliver a better society.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 26 Comments
Stephen Tall

Higher-rate tax and Danny Alexander’s time-limited dead body

By Stephen Tall | Wed 5th February 2014 - 8:30 pm

This was the couldn’t-be-clearer headline in the Mirror today, atop an interview with Lib Dem chief secretary to the treasury Danny Alexander:

danny alexander mirror headline

Defiant Danny Alexander today opened up a fresh rift within the Coalition Government by vowing to block Tory plans for yet another tax cut for the rich. … His comments will enrage Conservative MPs who are pushing to slash the rate from 45p ahead of next year’s General Election. It comes just days after David Cameron refused, on three occasions, to rule out cutting tax. But

…

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Posted in News | Also tagged , and | 31 Comments
Stephen Tall

LibLink: Jonathan Portes on wealth taxes & ensuring the ‘rich’ pay their fair share

By Stephen Tall | Tue 2nd October 2012 - 8:25 pm

Jonathan Portes, director of NIESR and former senior Treasury official, is not a Lib Dem — he recently contributed to LibDemVoice to critique the Coalition’s economic policy — but he is addicted to robust evidence. And the recent spate of right-wing commentators rubbishing the Lib Dems’ call for increased wealth taxes to help tackle the current economic crisis has roused his ire:

The Liberal Democrats call for a “mansion tax” (that is, a higher rate of council tax for the most expensive properties), possibly supplemented by some form of wealth tax seems to have provoked a peculiarly illogical misuse of

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Posted in LibLink | Also tagged , , , and | 6 Comments
Stephen Tall

The Tories’ and Labour’s collective tax omnishambles

By Stephen Tall | Wed 18th April 2012 - 8:55 pm

Labour is against reducing the 50p top-rate tax to 45p for those earning more than £150,000. What could be clearer? As it happens, quite a lot could be clearer.

First, the omnishambles…

Given how widely predicted George Osborne’s decision to reduce the top-rate was you would have thought Labour would have anticipated it and worked out their line. They failed to — as Mark Pack noted here, Labour’s Shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna contradicted himself within 24 hours, while Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls declined to declare his hand.

When Labour did …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , , , and | 3 Comments
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    In the above, it should have said $100 billion EACH YEAR from 2009....
  • David Murray
    Something like International Development Bonds will be needed (with safeguards) to fill the vacuum left by cuts in foreign aid. Back in 2009, developed countrie...
  • tom arms
    Alan Jeffs, I don't have an exhaustive, but out of the following countries: Kenya, Zambia, South Africa, Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana, Botswana, Senegal, Tanzania...
  • Simon R
    Interesting idea. It would though effectively amount to loans, which would therefore place developing countries even more in debt - and there are still ongoing...
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    The problem with your scheme is that the developing world has a nasty habit of not paying its debts....