MR. LLOYD GEORGE'S CONFERENCE.
IVE are far from joining in the attempt to make party capital out of Mr. Lloyd George's act in sum- moning a Conference to discuss the difficulties of answer- ing the questions in connexion with the new Land-taxes. We think the new taxes absolutely bad, and the whole principle which underlies them—of taxing a man not according to his wealth, but according to °the nature of his property—utterly vicious. But as the new taxes are part of the law of the land they have to be paid • and it is all to the good that if any simplification can be intro- duced into the bewildering questions, and any injustice can be removed, through the agency of a Conference, these things should be done. Of course in summoning the Conference Mr. Lloyd George made certain admis- sions. But we hold that candour should be encouraged in our public men. When a Cabinet Minister takes a candid course we should avoid as far as possible making him look ridiculous because of it. Mr. Lloyd George displayed the best—the conciliatory—side of his political character in declaring his willingness to talk things over in an informal way. He has often earned the respect of his opponents by these methods, and we can only regret that there should be so notorious a dissimilarity between his reasonableness in informal discussion and his frenzied irrationality in his public speeches. When we have said this much about Mr. Lloyd George's motives in calling the Conference, however, we cannot unfortunately go on to find much cause for congratulation in the results. The contention of some Liberal newspapers that Mr. Lloyd George has removed every objection to the Land-taxes which had any substance in it is more absurd than the opposing argument that in summoning the Conference he admitted that he no longer felt able to defend the taxes. Mr. Lloyd George has recognised the reality of grievances here and there,. and has promised to consider them, but the objection to the new taxes remains exactly as it was.
It is not easy to imagine anything more hollow than the argument that because the experts at the Conference found no difficulty in understanding the sense of Form IV., therefore no difficulty exists. They would be very poor experts if they could not find their way through such verbiage as that of Form IV. The real point—the only point we ourselves have cared to insist on—is that the language of Form IV. is hopelessly bewildering to the ordinary man, and that he cannot properly answer the questions without paying for professional advice. Mr. Lloyd George asserts that professional advice is quite un- necessary. All a taxpayer is bound to do, he says, is to give the answers that come within the range of his knowledge. For the rest, he can say that he does not know, and this confession of ignorance will be " accepted as satisfactory." We are glad, at all events, to have this confirmation of advice which we ventured to offer to our readers a fortnight ago. We then said :—" It does not appear that there is any obligation resting upon the individual to put himself to any trouble to answer the interrogatories of the Board of Tnland Revenue. Such information as he has readily accessible he ought to give, provided he is quite sure that he understands the questions he is answering. All other questions he will wisely answer Not known.' It may be that by so doing he will incur the risk of a penalty of £50, though we do not believe for a moment that any Court of Law would enforce such a. penalty against a man who had answered the questions which were obviously within his ken, and had refused to answer those involving legal points or questions of fact upon which he had no precise information."
Mr. Lloyd George spoke at the Conference as though the idea that a reference to lawyers might be necessary was a sort of malicious invention by his political enemies. But this air of injured innocence is really unimpressive. Does not he remember that one of the forms sent out by the Commissioners of Inland Revenue contains the follow- ing words ?—" If the person making the return desires that communications should be sent to an agent or solicitor on his behalf, the name and full postal address of such agent or solicitor." There must be thousands of taxpayers who took those words as an instruction to seek legal advice if they wished to avoid the penalties for not sending in proper answers to the questions within thirty days. Nor is it only the threatened fine of £50 which has hung over the very numerous small owners in this country. They feel that in answering questions which they do not understand they may be giving a pretext to the Inland Revenue officials to overtax them. The same fear haunts them if they give no answer, and it is a fear which may be only too well grounded. No normal Englishman likes putting his name to a document which he does not understand. It is an elementary rule for a cautious man not to do such a thing. Yet if he is to understand it he must have professional advice. Let us quote once more the definition of the " total value " of land :— "The total value of land means the gross value after deducting the amount by which the gross value would be diminished if the land were sold subject to any fixed charges and to any public rights of way or any public rights of user, and to any right of common, and to any easements affecting the land, and to any covenant or agreement restricting the use of the land entered into or made before the 30th day of April, 1909, and to any covenant or agreement restricting the use of the land entered into or made on or after that date, if the restraint imposed by the covenant or agreement so entered into or made on or after that date was when imposed desirable in the interests of the public, or in view of the character and surroundings of the neighbourhood."
Mr. Lloyd George tells us that the ordinary man can understand that labyrinth of words, and quotes as proof that the experts at the Conference (who admittedly need not be consulted) find no difficulty with such things. This is logic which would have charmed " Lewis Carroll."
In another respect Mr. Lloyd George gave an under- taking quite in the right direction. He admitted the principle that an owner who does not care to give information about his property to the local officer, who may be his rival in business, should be entitled to give it to the district surveyor. We call to mind that this reform was suggested in a letter to the Times by a distressed correspondent who signed himself " Radical Election Agent." We turn to another matter. Some Liberal newspapers appear not to have blown that a large number of questions like those, or the same as those, in Form IV. have been put for a great many years to occupiers who pay Income-tax under Schedule A, and also for the purposes of the quinquennial assessment for the Poor-rate in London. They are there- fore delighted with Mr. Lloyd George's statement that there is nothing new in the new taxes. " See the proof of your insincerity !" they exclaim. " For sixty years the same questions have been answered without a murmur by a certain class of Income-tax payers. And for forty years they have been answered by many payers of Poor-rates. If they found no difficulty, why should you ? " We answer that Schedule A, which after all contains only a portion of the questions put in Form IV., and only a very small portion of all the other questions put to property- owners, is not at all an easy form to fill up. What has been the cause of much worry, and often of expense, to a relatively small class is now taken as a model, multiplied several times over (till it reaches the proportions of those piles of papers which have lately been seen in the homes of all landowners), and then applied to an enormous class. This is said to be a very simple and eminently reasonable pro- ceeding ! We say that it is not,—that it is an entire revolution of the old English Liberal idea of simplicity of governance and ease of taxation. Life has ceased to be simple in Great Britain. A poor man is now prevented from becoming the owner of his house because he shrinks from the worry and uncertainties of these strange Henry- Georgeite taxes. The very men who ought to be encouraged to save, and to experience the joy of possession, are violently discouraged. A working man who cannot afford temporarily to live on the land and in the house which he has bought by great exertions is actually to be penalised at the time when he can least afford it by being required to pay Increment-duty and Undeveloped Land Duty. These taxes are all part and parcel of the self-same spirit which, we regret to say, inspires both political parties, though naturally it manifests itself in different ways. The State is accepted as the universal manager, and every day another blow is given to the old idea that what an Englishman requires is perfect freedom to work out his own salvation with as few interruptions as possible.
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