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Why Nick Clegg's still taxing Cameron and Miliband

Gavin Kelly

This post originally appeared on Gavin's New Statesman blog

It remains a curiosity of today's political scene that a small and unpopular party bumping along on 7 to 10 per cent in opinion polls is making the waves on the central issue of tax policy. On this one issue at least, the two main parties find themselves reacting to the gauntlet the Liberal Democrats have laid down.

Nick Clegg's recent speech to the Resolution Foundation making the case for going further and faster in reaching a personal tax allowance of £10,000 has been widely reported as a significant moment in the genesis of the forthcoming budget which due to the precarious position of the economy, and the increasingly creaky nature of the Coalition, is destined to be a highly charged affair both fiscally and politically.

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Family debt

The onslaught against working families continues

Gavin Kelly

This post first appeared on Gavin's New Statesman blog.

If today’s report proves correct then tomorrow Nick Clegg will announce a further blow for low-to-middle income families in order to pay for a new programme for the young unemployed.

Let’s start with the better, latter, half of that sentence. The new programme will, according to insiders, walk and talk like Labour's 'Future Jobs Fund' which offered incentives to employers to take on 18-24 year olds who had been out of work for more than 6 months.

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