So what? That was my response to this headline in the Guardian. No doubt more ink will be spilled in pious expressions of disapproval. None of the commentators, probably, will make the obvious point that leakage is inherent in the concept of using the taxation of incomes and profits for public revenue. The only way to prevent these losses is by substantially replacing these existing taxes with an...

Dear Caroline Lucas, I was disturbed to see that Richard Murphy mentioned your name in connection with his economic proposals for growth, which he outlined in an article in the Guardian yesterday.

The LibDems’ proposal for some sort of land value tax has attracted a little bit of coverage recently, but it is not clear exactly what is proposed. The root of the trouble seems to be that Liberal Democrats (and politicians generally) and press reporters and commentators have only a shallow understanding of LVT. It is not helpful that not all LVT supporters seem to have real depth of understanding...

Having been active in campaigning for LVT for almost forty years and with nothing to show for it, I have long concluded that our main difficulty is the little matter of vested interests to overcome.

Commenting on the U-turn over the proposals for prison reform by Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke, veteran journalist Simon Jenkins said this ‘As long as politicians pander to media-fed paranoia rather than calmly publicise facts, and as long as they delegate policy to the worst recesses of the press, money will be wasted. Families will be destroyed, drugs will proliferate and penal policy...

A win for the Alternative Vote (Yes) could have opened the door to other political groupings that could present other ways of looking at the world than the received ones. So in the long run it might have helped change things for the better. With the two party system entrenched for a least a generation, political discourse will remain locked down whilst both groupings collude in sustaining the false...

The Liberals’ battering at yesterday’s election should give LVT supporters no pleasure, but it is well-deserved. Given the first serious taste of government since the end of World War One, they failed utterly to present the party’s distinctive philosophy. LVT, together with free trade, was an important component of that. Even today, two members of the cabinet claim to be LVT advocates,...

“The crisis facing our country needs a new approach,” says spokesman. A new political party with the slogan ‘No taxation without repression’ has been formed by rebel MPs taking a lead from Sarah Palin’s runaway success in America . Although too late to have a conference this year, the new party plan to issue a Press Release stating their objectives. We have been fortunate...

The Swedish election result has produced no overall majority for the two main party groupings. The alliance parties (Moderaterna, Centerpartiet, Folkpartiet, Kristdemokraterna), have a combined strength of 49% in the Swedish parliament, the Riksdag. The Social Democrats (Socialdemokraterna) have done badly, with only 30% of the votes, a drop of 5% since 2006. This leaves them no longer the largest...

Be prepared! Anyone advocating LVT needs to have ready answers to the objections given here in this article speaking up for LVT. Better still, we need to have a programme for the introduction of LVT that is not vulnerable to these objections. Many of them are actually invalidated if LVT is based on annual instead of capital values.