Uk politics

The Liberal Democrats unveil their tax plans later today, and Nick Clegg insists that his radical plan will “put fairness back into the tax system”. It is expected to be a left of centre plan: don’t expect to hear anything about “savage cuts”. The Mansion Tax is back, albeit in slightly more expensive clothes. The original proposal levied a 0.5% charge on properties valued at over £1million, which was a determined effort at suicide. Following criticism from senior MPs, staring nervously at their irate constituents, Clegg and Cable have raised the threshold to £2million and the levy to 1% – a humiliating retreat, revealing the dangers of making policy on

That Zac Goldsmith has non-dom status is an embarrassment to the Tories. Given the anti-politics mood in the country, the whiff of hypocrisy is extremely dangerous to any political party and for the Tories anything that helps Labour’s effort to portray them as a party dominated by a wealthy clique is damaging. I suspect, though, that this story will only get bigger if it turns out that there are other Tory candidates who have non-dom status. Given the way candidate selection has been handled in recent years, there is no guarantee that CCHQ has established that all candidates are both resident in the UK for tax purposes and do not

In the politics column this week, I write about how the Tories plan to hand over many of the traditional policy making powers of the Cabinet to a seven man policy board. The Cameroons are going to do this partly because it is a model that has worked well for them in oppoistion and that they are comfortable with but also because the Cabinet is just too large for effective, detailed discussions about policy. The shadow Cabinet currently has 34 members in it. In government, this number will have to drop by at least ten. But still, a 24 person group is, probably, too large to foster constructive and detailed

Is the British economy turning Japanese? Since asking the question last year on Coffee House, the evidence has been piling up – and it makes for a cover story in this week’s magazine (which I have written with Mark Bathgate). The similarities are as follows: 1. Japan’s bust followed years of debt-fuelled growth which vain politicians saw as prosperity. 2. When the bust came, Japan’s government kept on spending. They did so in the name of Keynsian stimulus, thinking this would in itself kick start a recovery. All it achieved was to sink Japan deeper into debt. 3. Crucially, Japan didn’t do full disclosure on the collapsed banks. To fix