Today’s ICM poll for the Guardian appears to show that the public are open to tax rises as well as public spending cuts. The findings appear to undermine a Sunday Times report from September 13th that, “Voters are overwhelmingly in favour of cutting public spending rather than tax rises to close the budget black hole.”
At the United Nations today, China is expected to announce new measures to cut pollution. India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, told the Guardian his government planned to make “aggressive” cuts in India’s emissions. Business leaders are also taking positive stepstest
Conservative Party Chair Eric Pickles writes in an email to activists that, “Thousands of Lib Dems are choosing the Conservative Party.” But Tim Montgomerie on Conservative Home outlines that, “A ComRes poll [shows] … Only 16% said the Conservative Party and 31% said the Labour Party.”
Campaigners have reacted with anger to reports over the weekend that the Treasury is blocking German and French plans for a tax on currency transactions – a “Tobin Tax” – which would be used to help the world’s poorest nations. Estimates suggest that $17 to $33 billion could be raised by the tax depending on which countries took part.
An exclusive poll carried out by YouGov for Left Foot Forward reveals that 63 per cent oppose the Government’s plans to renew the Trident nuclear deterrent while a diminishing number of people believe that nuclear weapons make them safer.
The Liberal Democrat conference starts in Bournemouth with two new announcements. The party is to propose an annual levy of 0.5 per cent on homes worth mo £1m, cutting tax reliefs that benefit the best-off, and raising the basic starting-pointtest
Ed Miliband has launched a campaign to get his boss, Gordon Brown, to join him at the Copenhagen talks. Meanwhile, the international online civic organisation, Avaaz, have sent an email to their 300,000 British members urging them to, “flood a UK online poll [and] … send Gordon to Copenhagen.”
An article in today’s Daily Mail willfully misconstrues the findings of a Joseph Rowntree Foundation report. While the article says the research goes against Government work-life balance policy, the report itself says the opposite.
Barack Obama’s decision to scrap a missile defence shield in central Europe receives a mixed reaction. The Guardian calls it, “arguably the most concrete shift in foreign policy from that of the Bush administration.” It’s a “massive foreign policy gamble”test
The Independent today headline, “£2,840 – cost to every family of filling public finance black hole.” The problem is that the number is only half right.
