A commitment to Social Justice must be at the heart of Lib Dem Tax plans
September 22, 2009 11:10 AM
Vince Cable MP, Lib Dem Shadow Chancellor, delivering his keynote speech at Conference 2009, Cllr David Kendall looked on
Having just returned from the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth to attend an important Borough Council Planning meeting, Parliamentary Spokesman Cllr David Kendall draws out some of the key points from Vince Cable's speech on the state of the economy and highlights some of the key measures the Liberal Democrats would introduce regarding taxation.
Cllr Kendall said:
"The Liberal Democrat approach to tax is fundamentally different from the Tories. The Tories' top priority is to cut taxes on millionaires. Our top priority is fairer taxes for those on lower and middle incomes. It would be dishonest and unbelievable for any political party to say that taxes should never rise. But the Liberal Democrats starting point is to aim for fairer not higher taxes. We believe it is wrong that people on the minimum wage should be dragged into paying tax. Lifting the tax threshold to £10,000 would mean that 4 million low paid workers and pensioners would no longer have to pay any income tax.
"Our priority would be to cut income tax for those on low and middle incomes. Any such tax could be paid for by closing tax loopholes and privileges enjoyed by the relatively wealthy: the big differential between top rate income tax and capital gains tax, the exceptionally generous tax relief on large pension pots, and the blatant abuse of tax haven status including businesses paying stamp duty offshore.
"We would also propose a 0.5% tax for properties over £1m to tackle council tax anomaly. Current Council tax bands mean a property worth £750,000 is taxed the same as one worth £10 million. We propose to introduce a supplement to Council tax to tackle this distortion. The supplement would be 0.5% of a residential properties value above a threshold of £1 million per property. This would effect around 1% of the most valuable properties in the UK but would lift 300,000 low paid workers and pensioners out of paying tax altogether.
"We also want to shift the tax burden further from income - work, savings and innovation onto pollution - the green tax switch. Switching taxation onto financial pollution - questionable transactions of no social and economic value and on to land values instead of penalising productive investment."
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