home | What the Lib Dems Stand For

Under Labour, britain has become more unfair, and the gap between rich and poor has increased. Someone needs to fix our broken tax system in which the rich pay lower rates than the poor.

The Lib Dems would close all the loopholes that people who can afford accountants use to dodge tax, and use the savings to raise the threashold at which we start to pay tax to £10,000 per year (roughly what a full time minimum wage job would bring in.) We would also scrap council tax and replace it with a local income tax; linking what people are charged with their ability to pay once more. Finally, we would also introduce a new Mansion Tax; a small annual levvy on very expensive homes, to make sure we can afford our other two changes. The Lib Dems are taking the lead on fairness, and the other parties don't seem willing to follow.

Did you know that in the UK on average, an intelligent, but poor child will be overtaken by a less clever, rich child by the age of 6?

The Lib Dems want to move £2.5 Billon into primary education, funding a massive reduction in class sizes and one to one tuition for children who fall behind. we would pay for it by removing high earners from the tax credit system, where they don't belong, and cutting wasteful programmes at the schools directorate.

We are also proposing phasing out tuition fees; we'd like to abolish them at once, but the public debt is too high for that promise to be credible. So, we will phase them out over six years; from the first academic year of a Lib Dem government no final year students would pay any fees.

The Lib Dems education strategy is rooted in our committment to equality, and we are the only party proposing such a massive shake up of state education.

The country left us by the boring old blue-red, red-blue politics has been pretty badly cared for; an economy dependent on fossil fuels, most of which we import, and casino banking in the City of London, most of the profits of which are exported.

These kinds of dependacies are neither fair or sustainable, and the Lib Dems are the only ones with the plan to tackle both problems at once. We would start by breaking up the banks; too big to fail is too big, thank you very much; and we would rebalance the economy by investing the revenue in green tachnology companies through tax breaks and incentive schemes, raising taxes on Carbon-intensive processes to pay for it.

The Liberal Democrats are the only party with the expertise to steer us out of recession, and rebuild and rebalance our economy on a foundation of sustainable technology.

The expenses scandal threw up a lot of dust; exposing our massively over-expensive parliament, and once again demonstrating our unfair voting system and unaccountable local services.

The Lib Dems would cut by a quarter the number of MPs and make expenses open and accountable; clean up political donations so that the British people are listened to before foreign businessmen by our politicians; introduce proportional representation so that a vote for your chosen party counts, wherever you cast it; place management of the police and NHS in the hands of locally elected officials so that public services are more locally accountable; and give people the power to sack corrupt MPs.

We aren't afraid of changing the status quo, unlike the old red-blue, blue-red consensus. The Liberal Democrats are the only party taking political reform seriously in 2010.