"A bold, imaginative, exciting,..." way to line the pockets of lazy landowners

So said Nick Clegg today, when visiting some college somewhere with housing "supremo" Sarah Teather and national "bread head" Vince Cable to announce something or other about housing policy.

Oh yes, they want to take a bunch of my money, who does have a job but not a house, mash it up a bit in some kind of Westminster alchemy pot, which gives out less than you put in, naturally, and give it - yes, give it free, at least nearly half of it, or lend it "cheaply" to the others, to some people who own a spare sodding house but are too lazy or miserly to do anything with it, even if it would make them money if they did. 

Then, if I am lucky, which I won't be because there aren't enough of those spare houses here to make one iota of difference to me, because, you see, a lot of them are in places nobody actually wants to live, I can start shelling out to those same people to whom I have already had money stolen from me, there is no other word for it, stolen from me - I'll say it again - to give to them, to put a roof over my head.

Now, Vince and Nick, well they're both Vice-Presidents of the party's land tax campaign group, so one might think that they would know better.  Sarah, well we can forgive her cos she just glazed over when several of us tried to explain it to her a while back when we took a day off work (without expenses) paid to go to London (without expenses) for a meeting which turned out after we had arrived to be a bit inconvient for the three MPs (with expenses) we had arranged to meet with a month before.

Which Lib Dem manifesto theme does this fit into?  "Fairness"?  Bollocks does it.  Not unless fairness suddenly means taking from the beleaguered tax-payer and giving to the lazy landowner who can't be buggered to make use of the assets he or she owns.  Even if you believe it is the state's right to try and tell those landowners what to do with their property, giving them my money to do it is not "fairness".

Five years ago nearly now, when we sat around a table in a Westminster Hall committee room to inaugurate the Housing Policy Working Party the first question I asked was "when are we going to talk about Land Value Tax" to which the housing policy team responded that "oh, that's a fiscal measure, we can't discuss that, the Treasury policy team will deal with that when they do a review" and so we spent months developing housing policy with our best hand tied behind our backs.  And when the Treasury policy team, better known as the Tax Commission, did get round to discussing policy, they welched on Land Value Tax too.

Steve Goddard is a lucky man, our PPC for Oxford East is one of the nicest politicians you could want to meet, if that's not an oxymoron, and if it weren't for the fact that I so badly want Andrew Smith out of this seat, with policy like this, it might very easily be "the 964 club" rather than "the 963 club" tonight.

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