council tax

Area planning decisions to be recentralized? Area committees disbanded? Is this Labour in Oxford's response to near universal calls, in political terms (not least from their own Communities Department), for greater devolution and localism in our government structures?

They're pretty much already committed to the Stalinist recentralization of all planning decisions, slightly modified now to have two wider area based development control soviets as well as a supreme soviet committee in case even these two go against the Politburo's diktat or predilections. All because Labour councillors seemingly cannot work out how they could possibly "lobby" for their constituents wishes on some applications whilst helping decide on neighbouring wards' local applications.

I prefer the Danish system I believe it is, where areas more or less the size of streets have small committees purely dedicated to development control.

But in the absence of that a much more open system of area committee planning hearings would be a step forward rather than Labour's regressive centralizing power grab. Colleagues in other authorities received different legal advice to Oxford's and hold open discussion at their area committees where parish council members usually attend en masse and they claim get better decisions, more local acceptance of decisions and an all round feeling of compromise giving the better solutions for all. The rationale is that it doesn't matter how much time objectors and applicants spend at any individual stage of the process as the applicant in particular can have all the time they like to argue their case at appeal - that it's the entire process from start to finish that has to be fair to both sides.

Despite an initial increase in time spent in planning as everyone wanted to have their say, in practice, area planning meetings are now quite sophisticated - nobody feels the need to fill five minutes because can because they know anyone else could raise questions and so few are repeated. Good chairing of course helps, something also sadly lacking in Oxford City Council in my experience.

But centralizing planning is one thing, now there are rumours that Labour wants to disband area committees entirely. I hope one of them is reading this and will assure me this is not the case, or that something better will be put in their place. I have long argued that Oxford should reparish the city, shrink the city council effectively to an executive committee and have much more local control through parish or town councils. It's really not that long ago (in its history of over a thousand years) that Headington was administered by the Headington Urban District Council for example. Parish and Town Councils can actually have quite a lot of power - indeed more or less anything a higher level authority wishes to delegate to them.

I was at Thame Town Council a few months ago doing a presentation on Community Land Trusts, and I got the great feeling that this body was one that was prepared to fight its community's corner against the district level council when it mattered. Much moreso than where the committee is really a "branch meeting" of that district and collective responsibility trumps representing your constituents. In other parts of the county parishes precept as much as the district in council tax. Even in the few parts of Oxford where there are parishes it's more like 10% of the district level rate. Headington - or rather the current North East Area Committee area - is half as big again as Thame; easily able to support a stronger more local decision making body if the City Council took its claws out by at least as much!

But again, if the nirvana of local parish councils is not available to them for some reason, there are ways in which area committees can be given real power. Again, colleagues elsewhere only appoint a handful of central portfolio holders on their executive board, and then appoint one member of each area committee as ex officio executive members. Bound by collective responsibility each area committee executive representative can take a decision on a local issue, but which would normally fall under the competence of the executive board, there and then at the area committee meeting, advised by the open discussion amongst councillors and interested public at the area committee. Further, when they are at the executive committee, these area representatives can carry a majority, so if they are mandated by their areas in respect of a proposal by one of the core portfolio holders, they can overrule the core portfolio holders; effectively giving real positive control to those local community meetings collectively.

So, Oxford Labour, I'm sure there's more than just me out there, even if we do not often attend your City Council branch committee meetings, who appreciate the fact that they exist for us if we want to have our say on something, who will be very disappointed if you dismantle this structure and, Jack Straw like, leave it half reformed and more centralized.

Who wants to join a campaign to parish Oxford city then?

First, let me welcome all the many new visitors who have been reading my blog, thanks to the free publicity of my Labour opponent's latest leaflet!

In contrast, I and the Lib Dem campaign across the city are focussing on the issues on which the city council can make a difference in local services and stressing our positive record:

• Keeping the council tax down.
• Improving council services.
• Reviewing, and hopefully abolishing, residents' parking charges.
• Improving the quality of private rented housing.
  
• What we have already been doing locally

Let me look at these in more detail:

Keeping the council tax down. Labour and the Greens in Oxford have voted for above inflation increases in the council tax set by the city yet again. We need to maintain pressure on council budgets to force managers to deliver more efficient services without asking more of the hard pressed tax payer. Council Tax is the most unpopular and unfair tax. The Lib Dems would abolish it nationally. Labour have fudged the issue after spending millions (of your money) on a report telling them what we all know.

Improving council services. The independent council watchdog, the Audit Commission, has reviewed the last two years of Lib Dem administered Oxford and given us high praise for improving the state of Oxford City Council and the services it delivers. We have more than doubled recycling and are about to take that to a new level with the pilot introduction in parts of the city of weekly food waste collections which will go to be composted and remove the need to have anything in your ordinary rubbish collection that can go off. We have cut the time council houses are out of action between tenants to just one fifth of what it was under Labour in Oxford.

Reviewing, and hopefully abolishing, residents' parking charges. The Conservative run county council ignored the wishes of residents in Headington Hill and Northway and many of you have told me on the doorstep how unfair you find it that you have to pay to park in your own street. Even those of you without cars and others with driveways to put theirs on understand that this is an extra tax on their neighbours. My Labour opponent opposed my campaign to have the major employers developing in the area pay for implementing a scheme if it proved necessary. Those same PFI developers she was so keen to support have made millions out of the contracts, and millions more through sophisticated financial wizardry while we are paying for what they have imposed on our neighbourhoods. Our streets belong to us - why should we pay twice for using them?

Improving the quality of private rented housing. All too often in Oxford people having to rent their home, and there are lots of us because of Labour's mismanagement nationally of house price speculation, have been used for far too long to accepting substandard accommodation run by landlords who, at times, let homes in a dangerous, unhygienic properties to the most vulnerable people. The Lib Dems in Oxford have started to introduce stronger checks on rented properties going way beyond the Labour government's minimum standards and the small number of only the largest properties they legislated for.

In Northway:

• We have recently agreed a near £60,000 package of investment in the childrens' play area in Foxwell Drive - an important facility that allows younger children in particular to get out and enjoy fresh air and physical activity in a safe, contained environment.

• My colleague Altaf Khan, city and county councillor for the area, has successfully campaigned against Tory cuts that closed the Northway IT hub. Instead the equipment is now in the Northway Community Centre and Altaf is now working towards getting funding to create a pleasant and appropriate space to host the IT hub and get more people learning about and using these fast becoming essential tools of modern communication.

In Headington Hill:

• I have been campaigning against flier and flyposting litter and many, though not all yet, of the venues and promoters are now being more responsible about how they distribute their adverts.

• And I successfully managed to get the city council to take some responsibility for the parking chaos on Pullens Lane caused by the new residents' parking arrangements in other parts of the local area.

I will be campaigning for better, safer, parking arrangements, especially near council built apartment blocks where space at the moment is woefully inadequate, and for new investment in the Northway Community Centre to restore it to a vibrant and well used community facility and hopefully to encourage many more residents to join the community spirit and participate in the sports and leisure facilities in the area. And I would like to help create a "Friends" group for Headington Hill Park and Dunstan Park to get regular users and neighbours involved in managing and developing these wonderful urban green spaces.

But yes, I admit, and am proud to do so, that I am passionate about reducing the dead weight the heavy hand of government at all levels imposes on our lives and communities. I am passionate about those communities instead being enabled to take ownership of local public assets and to meet their own local needs through their own initiatives. And I am passionate about individuals taking responsibility for their own behaviour so enabling us to reduce our addiction to government interference in our lives. And if you stick around a bit and read some more, you'll see I would bring to the City Council innovative ideas about how that could be achieved and financed without adding to the burden of the public purse and the taxpayers' pockets.

Do you have Facebook? Sign up to the elections event to tell me you are supporting me!

Quite by chance, as if on order to make the local elections more exciting in my ward, two local planning issues have suddenly popped up (not entirely unexpectedly it has to be said) that are likely to cause a deal of controversy when they get to decision-making time. I don't want to talk about their planning merits or otherwise on here. But I do want to use them because they are very good examples of why I am so passionate about land reform.

The first, in the ward in which I am standing is an application for new student residences adjacent to the site on which I am a warden proposed by my employers, Oxford Brookes University. To be fair it will make more of an impact on residents in the neighbouring ward, but it is the economics of it all I want to look at not the planning, to show why land value tax would be such a benefit to the community.

The second, just over the main road in the neighbouring ward but which will make a significant impact on neighbours in both wards one way or another is the news today that Tesco have bought up a local former pub building from a local bar/restaurant entrepreneur who had seemingly been knocked back in the early stages of planning such that he no longer felt it worth fighting for his ideas for the site. Here I want to look at how the planning system seems to favour the bigger developer with the financial clout and how this affects the fairness of land law.

But first, the new proposed halls of residence. This site is approximately quarter remaining of a site the university acquired from the Department of Social Security about seven years ago now. When I was last on the council, just at the end, they had owned the site for about six months, if I remember correctly having bought the whole thing for either eight or eleven million pounds through a charitable trust set up for the purpose and were just getting outline planning consent.

The entire site had been only about a quarter used for several years since most parts of the DSS had moved out. And even when at "full capacity" it had been an egregiously inefficient use of a piece of prime inner suburban land - even for offices - since it was half car park and half single storey nissan hut type buildings.

Since it had been government owned, effectively there was no income to the public purse from this land. Once it was owned by a charity the empty land has generated no receipts to the public purse in the form of business rates. The charitable trust sold off about a quarter of the land to the adjacent Oxford International Centre for Islamic Studies, first for use as a contractors car park and now it lies more or less empty. A hectare of prime city centre building land. The university built nearly seven hundred student rooms in new halls on half of the original land and these were opened five years ago now. But it is the effect of this last quarter of of the site I want to examine and show how failing to encourage optimal use of land where it is available is a disaster for the rest of us.

The site is about a hectare. So if the original purchase price for the entire site was the higher of the two figures I remember hearing at the time - eleven million pounds, its share would be two and three-quarters million. The current application is for 335 study bedrooms and since the student halls market has changed out of all recognition in those seven years, commercial firms are willing to pay it is rumoured up to £45,000 per room for suitable land, as a site alone it would be worth more like fifteen million pounds.

Point one: whilst the local authority has received virtually nothing for this land in rates, the owners, either the university or the charitable trust, have effectively got a book profit of £12 million - a four hundred per cent return in seven years.

335 study bedrooms would, if theory, allow some 83 four bedroomed family homes to be freed up from the current student private rented market somewhere in the city assuming student numbers overall remained static. That's 83 largeish families who have been otherwise excluded from the housing market in Oxford for seven years because these halls did not exist. At its worst, that means that the tax-payer, through housing benefit, has spent upwards of ten million a decade supporting those households in private rented accommodation while they wait for "affordable housing".

Point two: the cost to the tax-payer of that piece of land laid idle and not producing any local taxation has been at least ten million in housing benefits to private landlords while the owners have made that massive book profit.

Now imagine if that land were taxed on its value at its most productive use - that's currently the £15 million or so a commercial halls of residence developer would pay for it. A ten percent land tax would now be yielding the public purse £1.5 million a year, and more importantly would have been liable for that tax all the while it has been so underused. No owner with any financial sense would have kept that land out of productive use with a tax bill like that. The land would have been brought into its best use long ago, either as housing itself or freeing up those equivalent 83 units for family use instead of student private lets, and the tax-payer would not have had to support 83 families to the tune of that £10 million pounds a decade in supported housing.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am neither criticising my employer nor demanding ten storey blocks of flats on every vacant site. But I am illustrating the cost to society of holding land out of use, and the unfairness where, in doing so, the owners have made a vast profit at the direct expense of the tax-payer. It's the system that causes this, not the participants in that system who are only following the rules everyone else plays by.

Now to the "Tesco pub". Some time ago this down at heel local pub was closed, its future uncertain. A well known local restaurant and property entrepreneur bought it up and a few months ago publicized his idea for turning it into a row of three shops and some flats above in a "landmark" new building. But with an ambivalent local reaction and, it seems, less than enthusiastic reception from the city's planners to the idea, this chap pulled his plans and decided to look around for a buyer. The land registry records show that the property had cost him £400,000 and that it was mortgaged so he had financed it empty for seven or eight months developing his ideas and the prospect of a long uphill struggle into the unforeseeable future in the planning system means he would be financing it empty for many months, if not a couple of years to come.

It is opposite a long established and not so long ago refurbished and extended local Co-op store (where I joined as a member of the Co-operative and where I shop several times a week in preference to all the other supermarkets around I could potentially choose from) and a less long established Costcutter store that houses the local Post Office and a similarly aged Chemist shop that replaced a locally owned and well patronized cycle and fishing tackle shop and an electrical retailer. It is, to put it mildly, on an awkward site, at a very odd junction just at the point the Marston Road becomes a dual carriage-way "boulevard" and buses turn right against the traffic whilst the off-road cycle lane comes to an end, the road splits into two lanes prior to a busy and slightly awkward double roundabout junction. There is just enough parking in the lay-by outside the existing shops for their customers and nowhere else for cars to park.

The site might have been viewed as ideal for shopping or catering uses complimentary to the existing neighbouring shops. Extending the range of goods and services people could get in a single visit to the local shops. All very sustainable. And contributing to the local economy and the success of local entrepreneurs - all of which tends to keep more money in circulation more locally in Oxford, making us all better off.

But now Tesco have the site. Obviously, they are in competition with two of the existing local stores. For many, they will do a better job of supplying their grocery needs and at lower prices. That too is good for peoples' pockets and therefore local wealth retention. But since, if they've borrowed to buy it at all, as opposed to taking the purchase price out of the weekend's take from the nearby Tesco out of town superstore, it's probably a tiny dent in their current income rather than a major liability as it would have been to the local entrepreneur who had borrowed to buy it as a significant chunk of his portfolio. And they can afford to sit on it until the planners give in, until attrition of any opposition to the idea gives them an easier ride in the planning process.

At the moment I wouldn't dare to have made up my mind about the idea of Tesco Express there. On the one hand, competition is good for the consumer. On the other, Tesco has such financial clout that it could send its competition to the wall and leave it eventually and open field to increase prices because of its local monopoly. And there again, whilst as a member I would be very sad to see either of the two existing competing stores fail, they would almost certainly then be occupied by some other, and probably local, entrepreneur with another great idea that would compliment rather than compete in its turn with the Tesco store. Again, this increases the range of goods and services a person can get in one trip to the local shops.

But all I am highlighting is that because the planning system causes a proportionately greater opportunity cost to fall on the smaller businessman it actually favours the big financial muscle of large corporates who can afford to take the risk for longer. It is not a level playing field. But, as in the previous story, it's the playing field on which all would be developers have to play. On the other hand again, it would be quite wrong for the planning system to become a tool of protectionism, benefitting one business or businessperson over another by preventing competition. Perhaps in an LVT based system the tax payable on a site should be suspended for the time during which the planning bureaucracy was deciding on a proposal to concentrate the minds of planners on getting the best deal for all parties in the minimum time possible and enabling people to get on with running their businesses, extending their homes, or whatever the application was for.

Anyway - all that was a bit of a marathon use of two local and serendipitously current issues illustrate quite well some of my hot button issues on land reform, free trade and anti-protectionism and localism.

So, we're going to get to hear later today what Dave means by "localism":

BBC NEWS | Politics | Tories offer votes on council tax:

Councils should hold referendums if they want to bring in "high" council tax increases, Tory leader David Cameron is due to say. If people voted against a rise, they would get a rebate the following year, he will add in a speech in east London. This would replace the current system of central government "capping" bills in England and Wales...Mr Cameron is expected to say he wants to improve "democratic accountability".

Under the plan, there would be a "trigger threshold", above which councils would have to hold a referendum. In England this would be set by Parliament, with the Welsh National Assembly deciding the level for Wales. Bills sent out to households would ask whether they supported any "excessive" increase, with a referendum form attached. In his speech in east London, Mr Cameron will say: "All politicians in opposition talk about giving more power to local councils. But all governments seem to end up centralising power.

Right - so how are we going to reverse that, I wonder? Oh yes, we'll decide at Westminster what's excessive and force local government to hold a referendum. Like that's decentralizing? Not only that, but a post hoc referendum which will, it appears, do nothing to tell a local authority what it ought and ought not to be spending money on, and after the budget is set.

It seems to me that this is a man making a bid for power on behalf of his party. Power which, in this country, will allow him more or less to do as he pleases with local government. And yet not only is he not making any visible attempt actually to do something about what he describes as and the Taxpayers' Alliance found in summer polling to be the most hated tax, but he's taking the current system and adding another layer of Westminster control over it.

Dave, it's this simple - you cannot make local government more accountable without making it raise more of its own money. The very fact that your Westminster cronies set the levels of central funding that goes to councils means that council up and down the country have to make up for shortfalls with disproportionate council tax changes. If you want to set them, and local people, free, you need to trust them to raise their money and trust local people to boot them out of power at local elections on the whole of their record.

This has got to be one of the most inept, unimaginative, populist policy pronouncements yet from Dave, displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of something he has repeatedly said is at the centre of Tory policy - localism. I do hope the speech is better than the press release.

News reaches me of moves at long last by Lib Dem led Oxford City Council to get more private sector landlords' properties licensed to ensure a basic decent standard:

BBC NEWS | England | Oxfordshire | Licence plan for more landlords:

There is a "widespread" problem of sub-standard conditions in rental properties across Oxford city, a councillor claims.

With more than 1,000 complaints last year Councillor Patrick Murray wants more residences licensed.

This is something I fought for not far shy of ten years ago now when I was on the council. In some predominantly student areas of other cities quality has been driven up by voluntary schemes run by organizations such as UNIPOL housing which we tried to whip up some enthusiasm for in Oxford ten years ago. But to little avail. And why should they - in some cities, students have a choice, and the difference between being licensed and not being licensed could be the ability to let your property at all. Here in Oxford the market is so tight it's nearly always a landlord's market.

Patrick knows, and I know, that there are some scummy shitholes out there that get in under the wire of compulsory licensing. If you want to provide boarding kennels for animals you've got to get them licensed. If you want to feed us kebabs at three in the morning you've got to get licensed. Yet if you want to house people, you can more or less do as you please. I've seen bare wires, broken bogs, even still some outside privies. And as to what passes as "furnished" the thought even for me, slob as I am, of sitting let alone sleeping on some of the fleabitten stuff turns my stomach. And in Oxford students often end up taking whatever they can get.

However, there is a market mechanism for achieving a similar outcome. Let's use Land Value Tax instead of Council Tax. Council Tax falls on the occupier. Land Value Tax on the owner. Council Tax combines the value of the location and the property to produce a taxable value, Land Value Tax just acknowledges the value of the location.

So a landlord offering a scuzzy shithole in an in demand location is going to have most of his income taken from him in tax unless he bucks his ideas up and produces a property which people are actually going to pay a premium over location value to rent. It would also prevent those landlords not renting out part of their properties to avoid the current compulsory system as they'd be losing out on income from the bit that is theirs, the property value, whilst still having to pay the tax on the location value.

Oh, and of course, it would promote the redevelopment of some sub-standard housing into dedicated single person housing more appropriate for the student and young professional market, taking some of the heat off family housing.

Today's Guardian carries a nice enough piece by Simon Jenkins in praise of devolution and localizing taxation, in particular through "ability to pay" local income tax. Clearly Daahling has yesterday set the scene for another big spat about Council Tax as it seems that the local government settlement is going to leave little option but for local authorities to raise the hated tax by more than they otherwise would.

Of course I think Jenkins, and the Lib Dems, are wrong on LIT - and are certainly wrong on removing all forms of property tax - but we in ALTER are prepared to accept LIT I think now on the proviso that we replace some other tax with a land tax at a national level (preferably a whopper like income tax for me!). Anyway - here's a taste of the Jenkins article (of course he's also wrong that it was a Tory script Daahling was cribbing from but don't let that get in the way of an otherwise good article!):

It was a Tory tax proposal that rewrote Darling's script:

The way forward can only be the European way, to devolve a major slice of spending on public services back to where it was before the mid-1980s, to local authorities. There it must be covered by some element of ability to pay - as bravely proposed by the Liberal Democrats. Darling cannot go on financing central programmes with above-inflation rises in a partly regressive property tax. There is no alternative, one day, to some form of local income tax. Council tax could be cut by a quarter with roughly one pence on income tax. Scotland is even now contemplating such a proposal. Yet ask Brown or Cameron for a view on such fiscal devolution, and they will look as if you wanted to murder their cat.

Giving taxpayers some scope to determine the level and quality of their public services is the only way to sustain future rises in public expenditure. That scope can come only through the local ballot, over health, police, education or whatever. Local income-related taxes exist in almost every country in Europe. They are intelligent taxation. Only in Britain do they scare party leaders witless.

ConservativeHome on Sunday included this little piece of hubris. Now, it is true that, somewhat inexplicably to me, Gideon's announcement about raising the Inheritance Tax threshold, something that everyone seems to acknowledge affects just 6% of estates (about 30,000 families each year) currently, seems to have done them a lot of favours, positioning them in the public perception at least as a tax cutting party.

But it would be quite wrong on a number of levels to say that they are lowering taxes:

• First, they are simply shifting the burden. Sure, it is shifting from a few relatively wealthy households (with average house prices once again below £200k having a housing asset over £350k is still in the top quintile nationwide) who can and generally do vote to a very tiny number of households who generally can't and don't vote. But shifting, rather than cutting, it undeniably is.
• Second, even if it were not the "revenue neutral" shift (after all they have also promised to stick to Labour's spending plans so need the money from somewhere) it would amount to a tax cut of just 0.88% of the government tax take (that's central government by the way - i.e. excluding local taxes). If a party that has regularly claimed to be managerially superior and capable of saving government wastage cannot "lose" less than a measly one per cent of its revenue in efficiency savings, they're clearly not the competent financial managers they would have us believe!

It astonishes me that a measure that would be felt my fewer than 30,000 families per year can be spun as some major step forward in tax shifting, let alone tax cutting. Compared to the Lib Dem proposals - abolishing the Council Tax (the tax most respondents found unfair in recent polling by the Tax Payers' Alliance) would be immediately felt by virtually all households; reducing national Income Tax by four pence in the pound would be felt by every individual earning anything more than the personal allowance, the Tory changes to IHT and Stamp Duty on homes, are small fry - mere plankton in fact.

But both parties of course propose changes that are "revenue neutral". Nobody seems to be advocating real tax cuts. And maybe when the population wakes up to this fact they will see through the spin and reject those attempting to hood-wink them into believing they will somehow be much better off. On balance of course, the Lib Dem proposals would leave far more people better off, if they tread lightly on the resources of the planet, for most of our tax cuts are to be funded by increases in taxation for environmentally damaging behaviour and life-styles.

Vince Cable - the best prospective Chancellor by far?

So why is it not us that have made eleven percentage point gains in the polls? For I have to say, compared with either Gideon, Gordon, Balls or Darling I find Vince Cable the most palpably honest and certainly best briefed potential Chancellor of the Exchequer in mainstream politics right now. Might I suggest that it is a lack of clarity, especially about who gains and who loses under our proposals. This was most obviously apparent when Charles Kennedy famously fluffed his interview on Local Income Tax during the 2005 General Election campaign.

Our Green Taxes and local tax reform ideas have been criticized by others:

• as affecting the annual family holiday (wrong - they do however aim to penalize those very lucky tiny few who have the time, lack of domestic commitments and financial wherewithal to take weekend breaks abroad every month or two - where their flight costs pale into insignificance compared with hotel and entertainment costs)
• to hit the poorest households' motorists (wrong again - the 33% poorest households by and large still do not even have access to a private car and would in fact be likely to benefit from the resultant investment and better efficiency in public transport)
• or to greatly increase the income tax of those two young nurses of CK's fluffed interview (still wrong - the four pence in the pound reduction in national income tax is intended to more than cover the Local Income Tax and they won't be paying Council Tax on top).

So why can't we get that across to people? It's a far more compelling package than the Tories and their tax cuts for the rich - which is jam tomorrow for even those who might benefit and jam never for most of us.

Now, you would not expect me to comment on tax policy without mentioning my pet pair of elephants - Land Value Tax and Citizens' Income . I maintain that by adopting the "Single Tax" of Henry George - that is taxing the unimproved value of all land as a replacement for (most*) Income Tax, Capital Gains Tax, Inheritance Tax, Corporation Tax, and, if Europe were to agree, Value Added Taxes and returning most of even that Land Value Tax to the people to spend in the form of "an unconditional, non-withdrawable income payable to each individual as a right of citizenship" (the description used by the Citizens' Income Trust) would so transform our economy and environment that government expenditure could be reduced to just a fraction of the proportion of the national income it is today.

Couple this with monetary reform that would see a national credit authority, free of government and politicians' interference, creating just the right amount of new currency needed by the economy to account for each year's growth in the economy instead of privatised debt creation doing the same job with a lot less stability as recent weeks in the financial markets have shown, we would have virtually no need for taxation at all (except perhaps as a behaviour modifying mechanism)

Pie in the sky? Well, it may be. But surely that sort of promise is worth investigating at the highest level. We assume the way we currently operate - coercive taxation and state capitalism - is the only one possible. It is true that, as the joke goes, in order to get to that fiscal nirvana one would not start from where we are, but the potential attractions are so enormous that we ignore them at our peril. Land Value Tax has some heavy-weight supporters historically - Adam Smith, J S Mill, Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, Milton Friedman and others cannot all have been wrong, surely?

I stumbled across this group of bloggers the other day called the "Low Tax Coalition" .  I considered applying to join their number, but so far as I can see not one of them even dares to imagine the sort of low/no tax economy I set out above.

*I say "most" Income Taxes (and possibly CGT too) because I am becoming more convinced that some of these taxes on (some of) the highest earners may be necessary in the short to medium term to recoup the "embodied advantage" they have gained under the current less fair system. For an example of what I mean, look at the current Sainsbury take-over where the shareholders are about to crystalize property values worth up to around £10bn effectively valuing the grocery business at nothing despite its obvious earnings history and potential.