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Draft Motion for Spring Conference: A New "Peoples Budget"

December 31, 2008



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

1. notes that 2009 is the centenary year of the celebrated People’s Budget of the last great reforming Liberal Government, Parliamentary rejection of which helped entrench poverty and exacerbate wealth inequality to the ongoing detriment of subsequent generations;

2. also notes that the Party's current tax policy was agreed before the Credit
Crunch arrived;

3. maintains that a free, fair and sustainable society can only arise when tax is switched from wealth creation to wealth appropriation and from value added to value removed.

Accordingly, Conference

A. reaffirms the progressive legacy of the People’s Budget through Liberal Democrat commitments to switch the fiscal burden from productivity to pollution and privilege;

B. endorses Liberal Democrat plans to cut the basic rate of income tax by 4%, targeting waste and inefficiency and closing tax avoidance loopholes for those most able to pay;

C. asserts the need for subsidiarity and choice in revenue raising, so that best practice in redistributive and sustainable economics is encouraged locally and regionally too.

Conference therefore calls on the Party’s Treasury Team

i. to develop fiscal options for UK-wide, local and devolved government during 2009, consistent with our enduring economic values and social vision;

ii. to begin the work identified in our 2006 policy paper Fairer Simpler Greener, which aspired to enlarge the tax base by developing policies for land taxation and to lift National Minimum Wage earners out of tax;

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

Posted by Tony Vickers

Coalition for Economic Justice launched

December 29, 2008



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.

In order to address this problem we need to suggest to the wider world that it is possible to create a new approach that delivers both economic justice and prosperity for all. This solution must be based upon the annual collection of land value for public purposes.

This meeting agrees that there is an urgent need to convince policy makers of this, and for them to develop (with our assistance) policies to capture unearned land values. Such policies would enable taxes on labour and enterprise to be minimised. Investment in necessary public infrastructure would thus be recovered for public benefit.

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.

Posted by Tony Vickers

Announcing "Jobs First" Campaign

December 26, 2008



LANDSCAPE winter 08.doc

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.

Posted by Tony Vickers