http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/17/this-lib-dem-myth

Next up, Fabian Review and Progress Magazine, Tim?

As long as the principles are principles you agree with then they are ok, but if you disagree with them they are bad principles and shouldn’t be held to. Classic.

No, that is not what I said. Principles that you hold to that stopping you from doing things that you would like to do are bad. I assume that the LD want to change the tax burden of the poor? If so, why pass up the chance because of some ‘principle’ that you are never going to get? If the cost of that ‘principle’ (in this case the Council Tax) too much for the poorest in society to bear, then what? Ignore their plight and stick it to the SNP?

Well done you got what you wanted and my mother will be shelling out in tax for that. Thanks.

I doubt any LD canvasser would show face round here, but what should he tell my mother? Your money is worth less than council autonomy!

But then I don’t believe the SNP stance is one of principle anyway.

Whereas the LD principle of kicking the lungs out of the poorest in society is perfectly acceptable? With ‘principles’ like that your Party should fit in with an incomming Tory Government.

Iain Coleman @ 120

well that happens with council tax already and there are existing redistribution mechanisms to deal with this.

What price local autonomy under those conditions?

We already have a system that means that rich areas are better off than poorer ones via council tax, where that autonomy was hurting in the poor in the poorest areas.

The LD could not support a fairer tax that sacrificed ‘local autonomy’ and fought to retain an unfair system that local autonomy needs to be tempered in a bid to redistribute revenue anyway? Even if that means the poorest people suffer in the process? And that is worth fighting for?

We’re talking here about the Lib Dem principle to local control over their own finances and governance, and the seemingly SNP principle of centralised control of local finances. The idea that Lib Dems should give up theirs while SNP don’t give up their own is, quite frankly, hypocritical a stance to take. But then I don’t believe the SNP stance is one of principle anyway.

A local income tax is perfectly feasible, and as for richer areas collecting more than poorer, well that happens with council tax already and there are existing redistribution mechanisms to deal with this.

The SNP have made mistakes and more than a few IMO, but propping up an unfair tax is not one of them.

@ 118

principles are bad…

No, ‘principles’ are not bad, but ‘bad principles’ are though. Any principle that stops you from backing a policy that will make taxation fairer is pretty bad in my book.

Can you explain what the point of propping up an blatenly unfair taxation policy has gained the Lib Dems? I hope they pay for that in the General Election.

Iain Coleman @ 117

Really, this has been done to death since the last election. It is difficult to see how 32 income taxes across Scotland could be made to work. Wouldn’t that mean that the richest areas would gather most money while the poorest required higher rates?

The devolved powers only allow for a 3 pence in the pound increase.

Why didn’t the SNP agree to allow local authorities to set the rate of local income tax? What important (to the SNP) principle stopped them from doing so?

Jesus…

Council Tax is an abominable tax, but scrapping it and replacing it with a tax over which councils have no control whatsoever, removing all fiscal autonomy from them is deeply undemocratic and illiberal.

The Council tax is not only an abominable tax, but it hits some of the poorest people in society. It seems that as long as it doesn’t hurt the middle income Lib Dem supporters, the Lib Dems are happy to have this burden foisted onto to people just as long as their ‘principles’ are not harmed. Like so much of the Liberal Democrat ideology, it is fine until you talk to the people who have to suffer.

The Liberal Democrats are quite happy to publish papers on policies in the full knowledge that they will never have to implement them. Up here, it is a slightly different matter. We have PR and hung Parliaments. We have areas where we are forced to co-operate and the Lib Dems are no longer able to stand aloof and pontificate, they are expected to contribute and make big decisions that actually affect millions of people. Guess what? The bottled it and our pensioners and low paid workers suffer because of it. Well done, LDs, your political conscience is clear and it only cost the incomes of the poorest in our society, the people who have least in which to fight back with.

So far, as I can see they have contributed a big fat ZERO, and for what? So that they can keep their electoral opportunities in the leafy suburbs.

My elderly mother pays close to a hundred quid a month in Council Tax. She only wants the bins emptied and anti social behaviour tackled as well as the streets cleaned. Do you think she shells out money from here meagre pension thinking how lucky she is that the local council have local autonomy? Do you think she cares two hoots for the electoral chances of Clegg? No, she is paying an abdominal tax through the nose, simply because the squabbling little boys could not sort out a deal, lest the Lib Dems face embarrassing leaflets in Surrey. Clegg wants to own the balance of power after the next election, well, I wouldn’t let the Lib Dems run a whelk stall.

Thanks.

BTW what is ‘Liberal’ about the weakest members of society being saddled with a huge tax burden.

The SNP didn’t want to make any concessions in order to blame their failure on others. The LDs refused to back a policy that, while superficially similar, was in fact against the basic principles of liberalism, namely that decisions should be made locally.

Council Tax is an abominable tax, but scrapping it and replacing it with a tax over which councils have no control whatsoever, removing all fiscal autonomy from them is deeply undemocratic and illiberal.

Strangely, the Liberal Democrat party tends to not sign up to policies that are illiberal and undemocratic, even if the proposer tries to persuade the world otherwise.

SNP dropped the ball by not making the concessions necessary to get the Lib Dems on board.

What ‘consessions’ would the Lib Dems wanted? The Lib Dems are without a backbone and joined the Labour/Tory axis. People are fed up with all the Parties looking the same and this type of carve up just puts people off further. The SNP are the biggest Party and this was one of their major policies. The Lib Dems cannot be seen to support progressive taxation if they want Tory votes.

Except of course I’m still right that the Lib Dems stand behind scrapping the council tax for locally controlled more progressive taxation, and you’re still crying over the way the SNP dropped the ball by not making the concessions necessary to get the Lib Dems on board.

Yes, I too hope the poor and pensioners realise the Lib Dems will stick to their promises and won’t compromise to the extent the likes of the SNP wanted them to do so.

The bottom line is this; who suffers whilst the Lib Dems stick to their ‘principles’? The Council tax really digs into the incomes of the poorest earners in society, but at least the Lib Dems where shielded from making a decision that would had the potential to them unpopular among the middle classes. No doubt the Tories would have used this in their election leaflets.

OAPs can’t heat their homes with ‘principles’, Lee. The SNP were elected as the biggest Party with this policy as its flagship. The Lib Dems are little more than a crummy little Party who twist in the wind. They scuttled a policy that had wide support in the Country for short term electoral gain. Shame on the lot of them. No wonder there is a disengage in politics.

Yes, I too hope the poor and pensioners realise the Lib Dems will stick to their promises and won’t compromise to the extent the likes of the SNP wanted them to do so.

For the hard of thinking, such as Jim/MikeSC: Lib Dems don’t support a centralised additional tax, they support a local income tax delivered by local authorities that can manage their own budgets. Just because the SNP called it a “Local income tax” doesn’t mean it’s the same as what the Lib Dem’s wanted. It was fundamentally, at it’s core, a different way of taxation that would have benefitted some areas of Scotland and shafted others.

But then the hard of thinking don’t seem to care about details, as they show in this thread.

I don’t know anything about Scottish only politics as I’m not Scottish. However here in UK politics it is (as far as I can see) policy to try and phase out council tax. Want to try and avoid that reality with some other irrelevant political statements?

The only ‘irrelevant political statement’ I see is a Lib Dem manifesto ‘promise’. The SNP are in Government in a hung Parliament in Scotland and the lib Dems of course are able to sway policy. The SNP’s attempts to replace an indirect, regressive tax with a direct progressive tax. No-one was surprised to see the Lib Dems side with the Labour/Tory hegemony in thwarting that effort. Given the fact that they traditionally sway in the wind on most issues, when they had a chance to make a real difference, they bottled it.

We are told to judge the Lib Dems by their action when they have power. Well hopefully the pensioners and low paid remember that come May.

It’s relevant when you look at the Tories or Labour who’s democratic structures and routes to policy agreement within the party are non-existent. The Lib Dems seem to have a policy set out, voted for by the membership.

You can look at the Scottish example, but given the way the Lib Dems operate it is wholly irrelevant as they have decided going in to this election (and have had this policy for half a decade) to reduce the effect of council taxation and replace it with something less regressive to the poorer in the local authorities. I don’t know the details, but I would assume the Lib Dem’s had an argument about Scotland being different.

In fact fuck it, given that no-one criticising the Lib Dem stance here is actually willing to give anything other than conjecture, hearsay and half researched bollocks I guess it is down to me to actually look in to the “Lib Dem’s stop council tax scrap” claim myself…

…OK. So first of all it is SLD policy to scrap council tax just as it is for the rest of the LD party.

http://www.scotlibdems.org.uk/scrap-the-unfair-council-tax

Second, this issue of the SNP and LD clashing over removing council tax…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7882302.stm

LD’s didn’t want to back it because it would have turned the local income tax in to a secondary income tax that happened to go to Local Authorities. The point of LD approach to LIT is that local authorities retain authority over their budgets and managing the LIT levels to ensure those budgets can be managed.

So actually, fool on me for taking Jim at his word, his obfuscation worked a little more than I thought it had.

Can we get back on point then, that the Lib Dem’s are still the only party out of the big three that want to even do anything about council tax?

In Scotland, the SNP government proposed replacing council tax, not with a local income tax, but with a centralised income tax: the government would gather up this tax and dole it out to local councils according to its own formula.

This would remove the last vestiges of local government financial autonomy in a massively centralising move. Lib Dems are committed to decentralisation, and freeing up local government.

It should be no surprise that the Lib Dems refused to back the SNP’s proposal. However, the fact that what the SNP wanted contained the words “income tax” in its name seems to have confused some commenters here. I trust this is merely an inadvertent confusion due to paying little attention to Scottish politics, rather than a deliberate attempt at obfuscation.

“- It explains why it is reasonable to consider the choice of measure in its own right, and also considers it as part of a broader package, which says that taking this into account we still have a regressive gradient in distributional gains between the bottom and the middle.”

is desperately weaselly.

(a) You know perfectly well, Sunder, that the paragraph I quote where the authors discuss the impact of including the tax rises is the only bit in the paper where the rises appear. They are not worked into the figures, they are not worked into the graphs. They are mentioned in the passage I quoted, they are admitted to change the appearance of the graph quite fundamentally (by throwing the gain for the top decile into reverse) and then dismissed.

(b) you can’t consider the raising the PA half of the proposal alone because if you do that, your argument becomes circular. You are supposed to be arguing that the whole proposal is “regressive” and that the money raised by higher taxes should be spent elsewhere, right? Well, you can’t do that if you simply omit the money raised by higher taxes from your “regressiveness” calculation! It impacts directly on what result you will get.

Look again at the passage where the “justification” for considering half of the package in isolation is offered:

“This is not simply because a decision about how to spend revenue is to some extent
independent of how that revenue is raised – and so can be judged separately, especially when that policy is worth £17 billion. (It is worth putting on the record here that we support some of the Lib Dems’ very good proposals to ask the super-rich to pay more in taxation. But that should not translate into support for their whole tax package if its overall effect would still be unfair.)”

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that this explicitly ignores the *stated aim* of the tax package to be revenue neutral (which means it cannot simply be considered as another part of revenue and expenditure – see above in this thread), look at the closing sentence: “that should not translate into support for their whole tax package if its overall effect would still be unfair”.

Its “overall effect” must include the tax rises, because they make a fundamental difference to the distribution of the benefits. This is the contradiction at the heart of the report and the graph is a symptom of it.

Surely it is relevant to consider what the Lib Dems actually did when they had the chance to scrap council tax, when considering their stated policy positions?

This is not a partisan point – applies equally to Labour or anyone else.

It is like when the Tories say they want to give a greater role to local charities while merrily cutting their funding and taking away their voting rights on local partnerships.

I don’t know anything about Scottish only politics as I’m not Scottish. However here in UK politics it is (as far as I can see) policy to try and phase out council tax. Want to try and avoid that reality with some other irrelevant political statements?

I believe the Lib Dem’s are still the only party that are committed to scrapping council tax and replacing it with a less regressive tax?

Not in Scotland of course. The SNP attempts to scrap the hated council tax ended in tears, not least because the Lib dems refusal to back its scheme.

Sunder.

The graph used does not depict the actual effect of the Lib Dem proposal. It depicts the effect of half of it. The report does not, in fact, appear to contain a corresponding graph depicting the full proposal. That is why I have an issue with it. If you claim to be unable to see why it is a problem, when writing a report attacking a policy, to create a graphic which does not actually show the effect of that policy, then you run the risk of looking completely ridiculous.

“we still have a regressive gradient in distributional gains between the bottom and the middle. ”

We’ve already dealt with this “regressive gradient”. It reflects the fact that the number of people with incomes of less than £10k increases as you go towards the bottom of the deciles (scattered throughout various types of household). Therefore they cannot benefit full from a tax cut on earnings up to £10k. This is just a statement of fact. The graph does not demonstrate that the tax cut is “regressive” because a “regressive tax cut” has a specific meaning. Which you’re STILL not acknowledging.