Bu what are the key ideas they have offered today to try and turn the UK economu around? Well one is the moving of the free tax band to £10,000. I like this idea. It works in combination with cutting back on benefits - someting which the Lib Dems allude to but do not say. It is a step forward to making work pay.
Also they have a good idea in breaking up the banks - whatever people say, too big to fail is true. We need to get out of this mindest and also the huge scale of the banks makes them unweildy organisations even if the profits are good.
They have identified some good cuts for public expenditeu too, £3.1 billion, not enough but a start.
Sadly then it starts to go wrong, a huge greenwash scheme to flush all this money away on useless windfarms and other green guff. Oh dear and a limit on bankers bonus's - oh dear, the politics of envy. And then the need to publish public companies salaries of more than 200k, again, why?
And then onto the mansion tax, and the increase in pension taxes for all higher rate tax payers and then a ludicrous idea of regional stock exchanges - AIM is struggling how on earth are regional ones going to get any liquidity.
All in all this is less Lefty Wibble than it could have been, but is far closer to the Labour manifesto than the Conservative one. There are some good ideas, but the tinkering and social micromanagement is more statist than Labour - where is the Liberal in Liberal Democrat?
8 comments:
"where is the Liberal in Liberal Democrat"
Shurely all this started with 'The Famous Four', wiping their foreheads dramatically, (that's David Owen, not Shirl), and saying that they were the Real Social Democrats' and were just helping the Libs to achieve "a presence"?
And we still don't understand what they were talking about then, let alone now!
(Nice to hear David Steel on PM tonight though; I always rather liked him as a bloke).
There is no liberalism in the Liberal Democrats. I don't think liberalism survived the merger at all.
It's the usual mix of "much better than what NuLab or BluLab offer" and "even worse than what NuLab or BluLab" offer, but the good bits are only a third of what UKIP propose - Nick Clegg's statement that "People earning less than £10,000 won't pay any tax" is a massive f***ing great lie because they will still pay NI contributions on earnings over £110 a week.
PS, Mansion Tax, excellent plan, in isolation. Taken together with other 'bash the rich' measures, terrible plan.
MW - Agree with all that. Hate mansion tax as an idea - all smacks of just pure bashing the rich.
overall the idea seems to be in their UK you can be free to be poor but not to be rich.
Life is simple. Work, you eat. Don't work, you starve. If you strike it big and someone takes it from you, hang-em-high.
All talk about fairness from Clegg.
Its only 'fair' that poor people pay the same proportion of tax as rich people.
Great news i thought.
He's raised the personal tax allowance from £6,475 to a % of salary.
£64,750 for a 100k salary.
Gets my vote.
Anon - as if.
I agree with your sentiment of the futility of just bashing the rich with taxes, but when these riches have been earned in a massively skewed system, within cartels which lobby Govt for every break it could get, and when bonuses are awarded without any correlation with the succes of the action the bonus was awarded for, then yes, they should be limited and they should be taxed till they bleed. Warren Buffet made the point himself in a Radio 4 interview, do these mega-rich people really believe they did it all themselves? Without the framework of society, the infrastructure laid in place by Govt (paid for by everyones taxes) and without the people they quite frankly exploit do they really think they would be that rich? On their own? Without anything to leech off? If you think that then you're deluded and if you don't think that then you should agree with some punitive taxing to somewhat redress the balance, even if it is marginal. And it's not politics of jealousy, it's just politics, the general public are jealous and the Lib Dems are reflecting the public. That's just politics, even if the public is wrong.
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