Vote Green and pay more tax?

“So” – asked Mark Denten, interviewing me for BBC’s Politics Show – “your manifesto says you would increase taxes to create a ‘fairer’ society. Are you telling people ‘Vote Green – and you’ll end up paying more tax’?”

Well – you can find out my response at the time when the show is broadcast on Sunday, but as they say ‘repartee is what you think of on the bus back home’ – so this is perhaps what I should have said:

“The Green Party manifesto addresses the recession, jobs, threats to public services, climate change and peak oil. We are trying to move towards a fairer, more equal, greener, lower carbon society. Our spending plans – centred on the Green New Deal – focus on this; where we propose cuts – they cut schemes and projects that do not contribute to these aims.
We are told that any government will need to introduce taxes equivalent to 6p on income tax – but while the other parties are taking an ad hoc, vote-garnering approach – but we propose to use the tax system constructively towards creating that greener, more equal society.

“So – yes, we will increase taxes – as would every other party – but we will be rehabilitating progressive taxation and Green taxes. The rich and those generating environmental damage will bear the brunt.
Our taxes to reduce inequality include:
• 50% income tax on earners over £100k
• abolish the upper limit on National Insurance contributions (and raise the lower limit)
• increase Corporation Tax to 30%, but reduce it to 20% for small firms
• base inheritance tax on the wealth of the recipient rather than the value of the estate
and – crack down on tax havens, tax evasion and tax avoidance”

That’s what I should have said – but then Mark asked two other questions, and I knew I only had 45 sec total time, so I think what I actually said was OK.

County Council and Council Tax

The County Council – or rather than new Unitary Transitional Authority – received a very generous settlement grant from Government for next year. In fact, that’s one of the good things about the new unitary authority – the Government are going to be pumping resources into the county to make sure their decision proves right.

Of course, it all depends on how you spend the extra money – which is why the County Council’s announcement that they’d be limiting their Council Tax rise to 1.8% - and how they’d do that, is so interesting.

In giving us a unitary authority – which will allegedly and eventually save us £17M a year – the Government has already decided that we would prefer low taxes to democratic accountability. Now the County Council are backing this up with an implicit decision that we would prefer low taxes to decent services – or services free at the point of delivery. It’s the sort of thing I’d expect from a Conservative government and council – but not from a Labour government and council. Though – these days it’s very hard to tell the parties apart.

It certainly doesn’t make sense to put the burden of the cost of home care and day care for the elderly and disabled on the most deprived people rather than share it out more amongst those who can afford it.

And it doesn’t make sense to penalise A-level students on travel costs when you’re trying to raise educational aspirations in the county.

I don’t have a huge income (no! honest!) but I’d be prepared to pay more than a 1.8% increase in council tax if I knew the money was being well used.

Now, I may be out on my own here – maybe people do prefer lower taxes and poorer services (or ‘small government’ as the Republicans put it). But for me, the sign of civilisation is that the strong protect the vulnerable – and taxation is just a way of institutionalising this.