Thursday, May 26, 2005
No mistake
Since most of us are not privy to the arguments going on within the Liberal Democrat parliamentary party, we must rely on the briefing and counter-briefing going on in the media to guess what is happening.
The latest episode in the local income tax saga occurred on Wednesday morning, when Charles Kennedy was interviewed on Radio 4's Today programme (you can listen to this six-minute interview again here).
For the record, Kennedy was not "disappointed" with the election result and the party's tax policies were not a "mistake". He added, "we will be continuing to argue for a local income tax policy" and later, "we will be sticking with local income tax".
If you are not getting rid of your tax policies, what is the point of reviewing them? Kennedy has a smart answer. The purpose of the forthcoming policy review is to "update" tax policy rather than jettison existing policy (which, by the way, was never in any doubt, in case earlier denunciations by some of Kennedy's colleagues had created a different impression).
So that's settled, then.
PS: Press reports of the Kennedy interview appeared on BBC News Online and in the Guardian and Scotsman, amongst others.
