BRIGHTON, England — U.K. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said there are more ways for the government to raise funds from the top 10 percent of earners through further taxes on capital gains and the most expensive property transactions.
Asked Sunday on BBC Television’s Andrew Marr Show whether he could persuade his coalition partners in Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party to back a wealth tax, Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, said that “there is a very considerable chance because we’ve already done a lot of it to make sure the top pay more tax.”
There are “numerous ways that you can do more of it,” Clegg said. “Whether it’s on capital gains, whether it’s on high property transactions; all of that we can do more of.”
Clegg, speaking on the second day of the Liberal Democrats’ annual conference in Brighton on England’s south coast, is seeking to recoup poll losses and highlight differences with Cameron’s Tories.
“Liberal Democrats will start at the top and work down” when the government needs to raise more money, Clegg told party activists in Brighton later in the day. “We will not allow some of these vile suggestions that have been made from the right of British politics that all the savings should be made from welfare.”
While “the reality unfortunately is more belt-tightening in the years ahead,” Clegg said, “we will do it fairly.”
Clegg also reiterated Sunday his backing for the idea of a tax on higher-priced homes, though he said he hasn’t yet managed to persuade the Conservatives to introduce it.
“I believe in a mansion tax,” he said. “I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone thinks it’s OK that if you’re an oligarch in a [$5 million] house in the middle of London you pay the same council tax as the family next door.”
Liberal Democrat Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander announced that the coalition government is taking extra measures to crack down on tax avoidance by the wealthiest.
The moves include extra scrutiny of people whose assets are worth more than $1.6 million, stopping the highest-paid British Broadcasting Corp. executives from using tax-avoidance ploys and fining soccer players and managers who avoid tax as much as $160,000, the Mail on Sunday newspaper cited Alexander as saying in an interview.
“There’s a continuing lingering sense of resentment that people have, that at atime when real incomes are squeezed hard, some people who ought to be paying their share are managing to get round it,” Liberal Democrat Business Secretary Vince Cable told activists in Brighton.
The opposition Labor Party accused Clegg of hypocrisy, pointing to the coalition government’s decision in its last budget to lower the top rate of income tax to 45 percent from 50 percent.
“Nobody will be fooled by Nick Clegg’s empty words on tax,” Rachel Reeves, one of Labor’s finance spokesmen, said in an e-mailed statement. “This is the man who backed a [$4.8 billion] tax cut for millionaires in the budget while asking millions of pensioners and families to pay more.”
Clegg also announced a “pension-for-property” plan that will be introduced by the government to allow parents and grandparents to help their offspring to buy a home byusing their pension assets to secure mortgages.
“We’re going to allow those parents and grandparents to use their pension pots to act as a kind of guarantee, if you like, so that youngsters, their children and grandchildren, can take out a deposit and buy their home,” Clegg said.
The Liberal Democrats have lost support since breaking a pre-election pledge not to raise university tuition fees, something Clegg apologized for Wednesday. A pop single satirizing that apology, remixing his words to music, entered the Top 40 iTunes U.K. downloads Saturday.
Clegg insisted Sunday that he “will not flinch” from staying on as party leader until the next election, scheduled for 2015.
“The idea that when you’re halfway up a mountain you suddenly bail out, when the journey gets most difficult you suddenly flinch, I’m not going to flinch,” Clegg said.
Information for this article was contributed by Robert Hutton of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 09/24/2012