Steve Beasant

By next April, thanks to the Liberal Democrats, the number of people lifted out of income tax will rise to more than 2 million. This year 21 million people were given a £130 income tax cut, this is on top of the £200 last year. And they will get a further income tax cut of £220 next year. Ordinary working people will be £550 better off thanks to the Lib Dems.

Our long-term aim is to shift the tax burden away from work and onto the wealthiest. We have already:

• Introduced a permanent Bank Levy, which will raise £10 billion during this Parliament alone
• Increased Stamp Duty for properties over £2 million
• Allowed Councils to increase Council Tax on second homes and empty homes
• Limited tax relief on pension contributions for the highest earners, raising over £4bn per year
• Increased Capital Gains Tax from 18% to 28% for higher rate taxpayers
• Invested £900 million to tackle tax evasion, tax avoidance and fraud. This will bring an extra £7 billion per year in tax revenues by 2014-15
• Stopped the rich avoiding Stamp Duty by making them pay an effective mansion purchase tax if their property is owned by an offshore business

Lower taxes for ordinary workers

What do we want?

We believe that everyone should pay their fair share of tax. That means the people who have the most paying more than those who have less. To help make that happen, we want to give a tax cut to every average worker in the country by raising the amount you can earn before paying income tax, initially to £10,000 a year.

This would give the average worker in the country a tax cut of over £500.

Hasn’t this already been done?

The Lib Dems have succeeded in raising the rate to £9,250, which will make a huge difference (from April 2013). Now we want to go further. Those on the lowest wages are still paying more than they should.

How would we pay for it?

Through a number of changes to stop the super-rich being able to dodge their fair share of tax, starting with a “mansion tax” on the property of the richest 0.1%.

Why do you need our help?

The super-rich are super-powerful and those that benefit from the current system will defend it. We need to show that most ordinary, hard working people believe that we should have fairer tax.

Join the Liberal Democrat campaign for Fairer Tax, visit: www.fairertax.org/