Council Tax must be one of the most iniquitous taxes we’ve ever had. It takes little account of ability to pay, and penalises quality in the built environment. In those respects it fails the tests set out by Conference in the recent motion, passed at AGM 2004, seeking to develop improved policy on local taxation.

A stipulation of the motion is that our present policies on Economy and Land should be tested against each other for consistency. EC550 states that local taxes should be from a "range of options": as this doesn’t specifically exclude Land Value Taxation, this is of course quite consistent with our Land Tax policy, although, by implication, the "range of options" in EC550 would necessarily have to include LVT as a compulsory component. Assuming we want to keep this policy, perhaps this implication should be explicitly stated in the Economics section of the MfSS.

As regards distributing wealth between unequally affluent areas, credit creation by local community banks really ought to be all that is necessary. This would enable the best development of resources in the area, whereas the Citizen’s Income would all but abolish individual poverty and unemployment.

I do find the present EC550 & 551 too decentralist. It’s easy to pick on examples of repressive state legislation; however we shouldn’t forget that modern civilisation has largely been built upon the development of local communities, and the protection of minorities and individuals by the state. I can’t see negotiated altruism between local areas being a reliable solution to present inequalities.

I very much agreed with the main thrust of Molly Scott Cato’s article (SustEc 12/6), especially with regard to Citizen’s Income and New Labour’s essentially capitalist attitude towards work and workers. My one carp is with the quoted long-cherished Green Party principle that taxation should "shift the balance of taxation away from income ... towards assets". Sounds lovely: take the burden of taxation away from the poor downtrodden workers and instead tax our profligate consumption of natural resources.

Of course, this neat formula doesn’t compare like with like. It’s part of the Georgist attack on Income Tax, a tax which doesn’t penalise labour per se (certainly not in terms of useful work done) but income, and according to the size of that income. It has, therefore – rightly in my opinion – been described as the fairest tax. To move the burden of taxation "towards assets" logically would imply that we should tax the incomes of the resources – does oil get paid? No, it’s people that get taxed in either case: either fairly, according to ability to pay, or alternatively with more or less flat-rate, regressive taxation.

So I’m afraid I don’t buy this simplistic idea, implying, as it seems to, that we can help save the planet by moving ever closer to the extreme of completely regressive taxation. It wouldn’t work, and it definitely wouldn’t be nice. The balance we need is between progressive income tax, and, where necessary, regressive VAT, environmental taxation (really another form of VAT) and others, such as Land Value Taxation.

As stated in the aforementioned conference motion, present party policy is indeed to replace Council Tax with Land Value Taxation. However I can’t help but remember that way back at the time of the 1989 Euro Election (when the Party achieved 15% of the vote), we were promulgating a Local Income Tax as the initial replacement for the then (even more unfair) Poll Tax, with LVT as a more long-term goal. In my view, a Local Income Tax would provide by far the fairest, most acceptable form of local taxation. Of course, this needn’t imply that it couldn’t be supplemented by LVT, and perhaps by local environmental taxes, which could also play their part.

Land Value Taxation would clearly have its part to play in helping to ensure a more equitable distribution of land ownership, as well as promoting a healthier attitude towards land use. However, it has been pointed out that LVT alone would not be sufficient to correct the present massive concentration of land-ownership in the hands of the few.

That would require more radical action: if necessary, expropriation without compensation. Nice fiscal measures are all very well, but if the only means to redress the results of centuries-old plunder is to take back that which has been stolen, surely then that is what ought to be done? If the lack of compensation were to be an issue, it could be pointed out that it would more justly be paid to the descendants of those dispossessed by the Enclosures Acts etc., centuries ago.