After the Crash (Final)

The challenges faced by the country in the next few years require those who share a commitment to equality, democracy and sustainability to form a coalition not of parties but of ideas. It has become clear however that a pre-condition for progressive change in Britain is the removal of Gordon Brown from Downing Street.

Progressives in all these parties are committed to greater equality and dealing with the challenge of climate change, but the binding value is pluralism. We recognise the value of difference, distinct histories and tradition but are using them to develop a shared project that is stronger because it is based on consensus-building. What we seek is not a big tent – that has been tried and failed – but a camp site where we keep our independence but grow stronger within common boundaries. This is not a coalition of parties and votes but of ideas and hope.

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The landed gentry wouldn’t stand for that and, having control of the House of Lords, vetoed it. This lead to two general elections, Asquith threatening to fill the Lords with his own placemen and the aforementioned restrictions on the Upper House.

A mere historical footnote? Well, two new reports would like it to be the shape of things to come. With the economy in the mess that it is in, land taxes are back on the agenda. Labour pressure group Compass has produced this report calling for council tax to be replaced by land value taxation, while David Cooper from the Association of Land Tax and Economic Reform has written this report for Vince Cable (PDF).

Opposition to this has come, unsurprisingly, from the Conservatives. Tory housing spokesperson has attacked this as a tax on homeownership, which it certainly is, but doesn’t appear to have engaged with the argument at all: specifically that the boom and bust cycle of the housing market is bad for the economy and encourages people to invest in property (a social necessity) and not stocks and shares.

Interestingly, the other critics are an organisation calling itself the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Media darlings, the TPA has recently been increasingly moving away from its brief of supporting reduced taxes and onto telling us what kind of taxes we should have. Land Value Taxation, if introduced instead of other taxes such as council tax or income tax, could see most taxpayers paying less and only a minority paying more. So which taxpayers does this alliance represent exactly?

The answer appears to take us right back to the landowners in 1909. The First World War destroyed David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill’s attempt to introduce land taxes back then; here’s hoping history doesn’t repeat itself.

* Declaration: James Graham works for Unlock Democracy, which runs the Elect the Lords Campaign. The views in this article are his own.

Coincidentally, an article appeared in the New Statesman just a few days ago which suggests just how much common ground there is for such discussions with Compass. In ‘No Turning Back’, the Compass Chair, Neal Lawson, and journalist John Harris, put forward perspectives which I think many Liberal Democrats share, and which I believe we should engage with constructively.

The overall thrust of the article is that in the current economic crisis, the Conservative and Labour leaderships are essentially arguing that the ‘downturn is there to be ridden out’ and that it will then be back to business as usual. The authors profoundly reject such an approach arguing that this thinking is as if Attlee’s government in 1945 had wanted to go back to the inter-war years, or if ‘Thatcher had turned out to be nostalgic for the three-day week’. Lawson and Harris argue that we now ‘have an opportunity to change society profound ways’. Why should this be welcomed by Liberal Democrats?

First of all, the authors recognise that we have been arguing for a different future. They point out that many people in the party understand ‘that the era of market worship is over’, and point out the effectiveness of Vince Cable in describing the flaws of the economic system. No doubt they would be encouraged by the extent to which the idea of a ‘different future’ was central to Nick Clegg’s speech at the Liberal Democrat conference on 8th March. Some Liberal Democrats will probably ask, why then don’t they just join us? But I believe that approach would be simplistic because of my second reason for engaging with them.

Lawson and Harris call for ‘a more equal, sustainable, democratic and liberal Britain’. They offer ten specific proposals to achieve this, under the following headings:

1. Electoral reform
2. Introduce the Tobin tax
3. 35-hour week
4. A living wage
5. Radical localism
6. Re-mutualise and re-regulate the banks
7. A maximum wage
8. A Green New Deal
9. A tax on land
10. General Well-being Index

Some of these are already Liberal Democrat policy, and others are close to it. Other ideas, such as a maximum wage, and a 35-hour week, are more obviously associated with a different political tradition to our own, and are ones which we might not instinctively suggest. Yet because they may well have a role to play in the kind of future we want to see, I believe it is crucial for us to engage with these ideas from outside the Liberal Democrats.

Let me make it clear that I am not suggesting any return to so-called Lib-Labbery with talk of agreements or deals – and I don’t believe anyone else is either. Indeed, many of those involved in Compass are not in the Labour Party. But I do think we can benefit from an open and honest exchange of ideas – we may learn nothing and just fall back on our own policies, and if we are confident in our own ideas, we have nothing to fear from such a debate. If that exchange of ideas reveals room for working together on practical issues – such as in the recent cooperation between the Liberal Democrats and backbench Labour MPs to secure mandatory corporate reporting on carbon reduction – surely that can only be a good thing. So I very much hope that Liberal Democrats can engage in an open-minded discussion with those in and around Compass, partly along the lines suggested by Lawson and Harris, but also by putting forward our own proposals.