What do the Scottish Greens and Guido have in common?

Both today are calling for Land Value Taxation, or at least they seem to be.

The Scottish Greens certainly are. Municipal tax reform in Scotland remains in deadlock and dependent on at least one other party agreeing with the principle of local income tax. That seems unlikely at the moment, even if the Lib Dems capitulate over the SNP’s insistence of greater centralisation (which does not look likely; what would they gain except appalling policy?).

Meanwhile, Guido is raving about the reprinting of Fred Harrison’s Boom Bust: House Prices, Banking and the Depression of 2010 (Guido also pats himself on the back at his prescience for predicting the housing crash in September 2007; modesty prevents me from mentioning that my first blog post on the subject was July 2006 and frankly I could have told you what was going to happen a long time before then).

Fred Harrison? You might remember me linking to this video earlier in the year. Harrison, aka the renegade economist, is a keen exponent of land value taxation and regards it as a crucial tool in the armoury against boom and bust cycles (actually, as the video indicates, he goes a lot further than that).

So yes Guido, Gordon Brown was very very wrong. But somehow I doubt your mate Gideon Osborne is going to be interested in Harrison’s prescription. The son of a baronet and Shadow Chancellor for the Conservative Party, it is his job to protect vested interests, not challenge them.

7 comments

  1. Re: Gideon – you spent a lot of time covering his arse last week.

    Re: LVT – it is absurd to praise Fred Harrison’s prophetic powers while disagreeing with his analysis.

    Re: redesign. Fair enough.

  2. It is absurd to refer to “Gideon Osborne” but not “James Brown” – unless you’re going for the politics-of-envy that marked Labour’s oh-so-successful Crewe & Nantwich campaign…

  3. What on earth makes you think I’m envious of the name “Gideon”? It’s the politics of twattery. James, if I do say so myself, isn’t a twattish name.

  4. Well, I would agree that James isn’t a twattish name.

    But even if Gideon is, it’s illegitimate to use as a piss-take since Osborne doesn’t use it, and wasn’t responsible for it.

    Now, if he were to name his son Gideon, that would be a different story.

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