THE Liberal Democrat party chairman, Matthew Taylor, is an honest man. He twice received cheques from the BBC for broadcasts he didn’t make — they were intended for the similarly named director of the left-wing think-tank IPPR — and sent them both back.
Having a political namesake can be frustrating for an MP, especially when you get letters saying that a broadcast by the IPPR’s Matthew Taylor “proves how the Lib Dems are Labour in disguise”. Taylor’s party is also in an identity crisis, albeit a welcome one. The Lib Dems are used to targeting Tory marginal seats, but their three most recent gains were all from Labour and Taylor believes they can win more Labour seats in the next election. “No seat is now unwinnable,” he says.
The Lib Dems last week launched a “pre-manifesto”, which sets out their stall on a range of issues. Each page is topped with the words “our policies are fully costed”, a reaction to criticism that Lib Dems are often optimistic of how far they can stretch tax revenue.
That doesn’t mean taxes won’t rise under the Lib Dems, but Taylor emphasises that he wants a “fairer, simpler tax system”. His party would replace council tax with a local income tax, which he says will benefit 60 per cent of households and 90 per cent of pensioners.
“Most people will be paying less if they are taxed on their ability to pay,” he says. But the typical household income is not much more than £20,000, if you take into account pensioners and families where only one parent works. Taylor admits that when a family’s income hits about £40,000 — or the equivalent of the salary of a young couple who both work in the public sector — then they would start paying more.
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It’s the filthy rich that Taylor has in his sights, however. The 1 per cent of the population that earn more than £100,000 should pay income tax at 50 per cent, he believes, “and that won’t include many public sector workers”.
That would bring in £4.7 billion extra a year, and Taylor has a shopping list of how to spend it, topped by two vote-grabbing policies: to scrap tuition fees (cost: £1.2 billion) and introduce free personal care for elderly and disabled people (cost: £1.4 billion).
And while the Lib Dems “don’t plan to increase the overall spending envelope” beyond that, they do want to shift £5 billion of spending from government pet projects to their own. Instead of the Child Trust Fund — or “baby bonds” — Taylor wants the money spent on early years education. He wants to scrap ID cards and spend the money on 10,000 extra policemen.
Unlike other parties, Taylor shies away from the “c- word”: choice. “Labour and the Tories are in a Dutch auction over choice, meaning you can pick one failing hospital over another. I think, bluntly, that if you have a heart attack you want to know your nearest hospital is good enough.” But beyond promising to cut red tape and recruit more doctors — and they don’t say where that money will come from — the Lib Dems are vague on how they’ll make hospitals better.
On education, they would slim down the national curriculum, allow less academic children to do some vocational training and drop testing of seven-year-olds in favour of a record of achievement.
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Taylor hopes that the pre-manifesto will mark the Lib Dems out as different enough from Labour to make significant election gains. But they’re not quite there: on the same day as his namesake had espoused a new Labour policy on the radio, Taylor was approached by Shirley Williams, the leader of the Lib Dems in the Lords. “She said she had heard my interview and agreed with what I said,” he says.
Born: January 3, 1963, in London
Career: After being President of the Oxford Union, his first job was as a research assistant for David Penhaligon, MP, in 1986. But when the MP was killed in a car crash that Christmas, Taylor was surprisingly selected as the candidate for Truro and St Austell, and elected in 1987. Has served as spokesman on energy, education, the environment and economics, and since 2003 has been party chairman.
What he says: “We won the battle for increased investment in public services. Now we must move on.”
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Little-known fact: He is a classic car enthusiast whose pride and joy is his racing green 1967 MGB.