At a stroke, Boris Johnson has undermined the capital the Conservatives have made out of the 10p income tax fiasco. It isn’t that the cheap oil deal with Venezuela was defensible - it wasn’t. It was this sort of tokenism that disqualified Livingstone from office in the eyes of most Londoners. But no-one begrudged low income earners from getting half-priced travel. In Crewe, the Tories ground Labour into the dust attacking them for doubling the 10p rate and blithely ignoring the impact it would have on low income earners. Now the Tories have imposed swingeing cuts on a very similar group in society.

What’s worse is the timing: on a bank holiday weekend just hours after winning the Crewe by-election during which time they had very carefully kept quiet about the plans. It is clear they don’t plan to offer people on income support any alternative, otherwise why the stark announcement rather than a more cuddly “consultation” about how to continue paying for the scheme? It is clear they knew it would be politically damaging. And it is abundantly clear that was not merely approved by CCHQ and Cameron but crafted by them in the first place. Make no mistake - this was Cameron’s decision.

Expect this issue to become a Focus leaflet staple, within London at least. I can think of no better symbol of how paper thin the “new” Conservativism really is. Scratch beneath the surface and the nasty side is just itching to come out. At least now we know, but is has the public already made up its mind?

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The above title is also the name of Henry George’s greatest work (which I strongly recommend everyone on the planet to read). I mention this because, while the Lib Dems broadly voted the right way during their poverty debate yesterday afternoon (certainly in rejecting the option to support differential age rates for minimum wage), I couldn’t help but feel there was an enormous Georgist hole in the paper.

Why? Because despite what we managed to do today, you can’t divorce taxation from issues relating to poverty. One point I didn’t make this morning was that one of the other poor decisions the party made on its tax proposals yesterday was the decision to effectively kick our “long term goal” of removing people on incomes of less than £10,000 from income tax into even longer grass. This has been sacrificed in favour of a crowd pleasing commitment to cut income tax by 4p in the pound (entirely neutralised by an income tax hike due to the introduction of LIT). Just as Labour does, we will continue to force people on minimum wage to pay income tax - not only is this unfair to the individual, but it adds inflationary pressure onto the minimum wage (since one of the considerations is not unreasonably whether you can afford to live on it) and thus discourages employers to recruit in this country.

I supported the amendment to introduce flexible working for all employees (not that I had a vote…) but again, this adds to the costs of labour. If such policies are to be successful we must somehow relieve the pressure on employers in other ways, and that brings us back once again to personal allowance.

On the other hand, so much of this paper was concerned - rightly - with housing. Yet the focus seemed to be on targets and empowering local authorities to tackle the issue themselves (there is, come to think of it, a slight oxymoron there). I remain sceptical of the rose-tinted view that all of this can be achieved by fiddling with planning law and introducing Community Land Auctions: we need a more fundamental shift in approach.

Of course, LVT would have both enabled us to take the bottom bracket out of taxation, create greater incentives to build housing and dampen speculative investment in property. It’s no accident that George’s book, which develops the argument for authorities to collect economic rent, has as a starting point the need to attack poverty. It just seems that we are attempting to tackle this area with one arm tied behind our collective back. Worse, by scrapping residential property taxation in the form of Council Tax, in many ways we make it worse.

The Federal Policy Committee really need to throw us a bone here. At the very least, so as to demonstrate that our commitment to LVT is more than just “jam tomorrow” they should commission a review about how we might facilitate its introduction. Tony Vickers’ book Location Matters vividly spells out what a government would need to do to introduce the tax and it would certainly take a while. But if we aren’t prepared to even think about it until the start of a second term, then what we’re really promising is to not introduce the tax until the start of a third term. It’s no wonder that Georgists feel as if they are being paid lip service and nothing else.

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Madeline Bunting purports to be thinking the unthinkable in her Guardian column this week, calling for the UK to consider population controls. Indeed, I made a similar point when reviewing the Centre for Um’s recent pamphlet on demographics. Sadly though, I must add my name to the members of the blogosphere who think she must be tad confused.

The most fundamental point which she seems to miss is that, leaving aside immigration, indigenous European population growth is rising extremely slowly. It is hard to see what sort of policy you could adopt in a liberal democracy that could slow it further still, and something tells me Ms Bunting wouldn’t approve of, say, scrapping maternity allowance (which, for the record lest there be a misunderstanding), I wouldn’t approve of either! If all you’re going to do is spend lots of money on advertising campaigns around slogans such as “Stop at Two” I suspect you’ll be on a hiding to nothing in a society where so many families now stop at one.

Secondly, adopting a zero net immigration policy - which she appears to be endorsing (while tutting the BNP for having similar policies) is going to do precisely bugger all to stop population growth. The problem is not UK population growth, or even European population growth: it’s global population growth. Even if you could stop people from coming here - illegally or otherwise - the problem is that in developing countries people are breeding at an unsustainable rate.

The solution? Well, perhaps instead of telling us how we need religious people at the centre of political discourse, Madeline should be more vocal in her criticism of the Catholic Church which actively encourages people in developing countries to have as many children as possible and even spreads lies about condom use? Getting control of family planning in developing countries would have three effects: fewer people desperate for work spilling out into other countries, national economies that are better able to manage themselves and - as a massive positive side effect - better control of the HIV-AIDS pandemic. And that’s before you even get into the wider issue of the environment and population.

If we can’t sort that out, then talk about population controls are meaningless. This is probably why, apart from the danger of sounding like a Nazi, so many are unwilling to engage in the debate. The fundamental problem is not trendy secular liberals baulking at nanny-statism but your buddy Benedict XVI (not to mention fellow theocrat George W): deal with it, Maddy.

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Jonathan Calder points us to a fascinatingly revealing quote from Gideon Osborne:

“Of course we want a very dynamic and successful City of London. But Britain cannot just be the City of London and then 50-odd million people living off the back of those who work in financial services.”

This line has clearly been carefully crafted to simultaneously look like a genuine concern for the poor, while making it absolutely clear to the city that the Tories not only are not having a go at it, but consider it to be the main source of wealth. According to this rubric, a speculator who has been profiteering on the selling on of financial products based on unsecured loans to the poorest in society is creating wealth, while someone who works a 48 hour week in a factory (longer, if Gideon and John Redwood have anything to do with it) is a parasite. The conclusion is that the rich City stoke broker must pay less tax while the “recipient” (i.e. everyone else) should be prepared to make up the shortfall.

This really is the world turned upside down. I’m looking forward to the Jock Coats response.

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