ALTER would like the Party to mark the centenary next April of the 1909 Peoples Budget, a landmark of the last Liberal Government, by responding in equally historic fashion to possibly the worst economic crisis since that time. The Motion would require the Party to make further proposals - beyond those made in 2006 & 2007 - on Tax Shifting.

If you are (or know) a Voting Conference Representative, please help us gather well over the necessary ten signatures of support for this Motion to be debated. Just send an email in response to the one notifying you of this, to ALTER, giving your
name,
Local Party name and
Party membership number, with (in the Subject line) ...
"I SUPPORT the New Peoples Budget motion"!

Three quarters of the candidates for election to Federal Policy Committee who responded in October to us agreed that the issue of land taxation needed to be addressed again urgently in the light of the Credit Crunch. This Motion will mandate FPC to do just that.

The Motion is.....

Conference

iii. to demand infrastructure investment and job creation through government spending money into circulation, rather than inflationary interest-bearing borrowing from banks.

Dovetailing nicely with ALTER's own Jobs First campaign to strengthen existing Lib Dem policy on LVT, a new cross-party initiative among LVT groups in the UK has just been launched, with which ALTER is associated. The Coalition for Economic Justice has resolved to seek cross-party agreement in manifestos for the next general election on the need for nation-wide LVT - with the means of achieving it left to each Party.

A Press Release went out on 27 December. The full text of the Mandeville Place Agreement, drawn up at a meeting hosted by the School of Economic Science on 27th November, is as follows:

“The current economic crisis highlights, again, the inadequacies of the economic system which is unstable and deeply flawed. It is clear that events are demonstrating the common feature of repeated economic booms and depressions in the speculative rise in land prices.

We believe, however, that it is unproductive at this stage for our respective groups to attempt to agree how to achieve this. An agreement by the main parties on the need for a nation-wide tax on the value of land would trigger completion of the registration and valuation of land within a single parliament. We therefore commit to trying to persuade our parties to agree to this being a manifesto commitment.”

Since its first meeting, attended by 29 people from 10 organisations and belonging to five UK political parties, the coalition has added the Green Party to its membership and appointed a coordinating committee to take forward its agenda. The first event to be planned will be a seminar, hopefully in February at Westminster and hosted by Vince Cable MP. Vince has hosted two previous meetings on LVT at Westminster since becoming Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats.

In this issue of Landscape, we contribute ideas for ensuring that the UK comes out of economic depression sooner and more sustainably than it otherwise would. Although Vince Cable led the world in forecasting why and how the downturn would arrive, he has been held back by lesser mortals from pressing on the Party a more urgent and radical adoption of the classical Liberal idea: Land Value Taxation.

Recently adopted Lib Dem Tax policy takes us in the right direction - but too timidly, without conviction. ALTER is working with like minded radicals across the political spectrum to address this deficiency in political debate: how to capture Common Wealth to stabilise the global economy and secure economic justice.

Instead of prescribing more of what got us in this mess (feel-good, consumer-led debt), we propose investment-led wealth creation, the reward being a continuous stream of revenue from the uplifted rental value of land.