Liberal Democrat conference

The Liberal Democrats have been meeting in Bournemouth this week (if you hadn't noticed the wall to wall coverage they have received...) at the first of the Party Conferences in the lead-up to election year. Some highlights thus far are:
Vince Cable's (doesn't everyone just love him?) speech on the floor of the conference. He announced a tax on houses worth more than £1 million which has been dubbed a 'mansion tax' by the papers and will probably hurt the LD's in key LD/Tory marginals (including possibly Cable's own Twickenham seat). On the policy itself I am not certain how I feel. New Zealand local councils use a similar rating system which forces homeowners to pay a percentage of their home value in tax. However, the big problem with such a tax is that it forces people to pay based on an asset that appreciates or depreciates arbitrarily. For example, when I worked for a MP in New Zealand, I dealt with a constituent who told me he was a pensioner surviving on the basic state pension, and had bought his house for about $10,000 in 1970 but could now no longer afford the rates on the house because it had appreciated over the years to be worth more than $1 million. If there is going to be tax on things like land or shares, it is much better that the tax be taken from the profit gained from the sale. In London itself one can imagine that there are a number of properties that are worth in excess of a million pounds where the owners are not in a position to pay thousands of pounds a year in extra tax.
And other highlights? Well........
...
I'm sure there were some... Well, one hilarious happening was the exposure of an 'unemployed' man who was part of a TV audience and who laid into the Liberal Democrats as a member of the Tory Party and a former Conservative Councillor.

How's it been going for the Lib Dems? To be honest, not well. The party is fundamentally confused over whether to target the Tories or Labour. Efforts to displace Labour in the north and policies to appeal to voters in Leeds, Manchester and Scotland will alienate voters in LD seats in the South-West. A misjudgement could see the LD's losing large numbers of seats to the Conservatives, while failing to make major headway into Labour's heartland.

Another fundamental confusion is the seeming divergence of views between Lib Dem activists and voters over who to support in the case of a hung Parliament. If neither party has overall control, Lib Dem activists want the Party to support Labour, while overwhelmingly Lib Dem voters would want the party to support a Conservative Government.