TODAY is the final day of the Lib Dem conference in Bournemouth.
If it’s anything like the political conferences I’ve been to, there will be some participants who’ve drank three months’ worth of booze in the last five days.
There will be some delegates nursing sore heads as they put on their sandals this morning, that’s for sure.
But there’s been some social policy in amongst the socialising this week as well.
As the third party, it’s always hard for the Lib Dems to grab the media’s attention in the way that Labour and the Tories do.
But they’ve managed it this week by voting for a policy of tax cuts.
The Lib Dems want to slash 6p off the income tax rate.
Sounds good on paper, none of us likes paying tax. But alongside this pledge to cut taxes comes a promise to cut spending by £20bn – which sounds rather less good.
It’s quite a turnaround for a party whose best-known policy of recent times was the promise to increase income tax by a penny to pay for better schools.
Indeed, the Lib Dems are currently the only of the three parties committed to going into the next election with a tax-cutting agenda.
Why this change of heart?
Well, it seems to me that it’s all about electoral politics. The Lib Dems have a lot of seats in the affluent South which are at risk from a Conservative surge at the next election.
So, a tax-cutting policy might go down well on the doorsteps in Torquay and Bournemouth.
But this rather begs the question, have the Lib Dems given up on the North?
They have lots of councillors here – in Huddersfield and the Colne Valley for instance – but very few MPs.
Do they really think that tax cuts will win over disaffected Labour voters in the North? Or are they more concerned with trying to hang on to what they’ve got down South?
