The treatment of Mr. Lloyd George's land proposals by Lord .
Oxford is sagacious. Lord Oxford presumably is a little alarmed.by the proposals and knows that there is much opposition to them in the Liberal Party. Accord- ingly he has -proposed that the National Liberal Feder- ation should convene a special Conference to consider them. The Conference will be summoned when the urban section of the Report has been issued. In a speech at Manchester last Saturday Mr. Lloyd George foreshadowed the urban recommendations. They amount to a taxation of land values with particular reference to the increase of values caused by new arterial. roads. We fancy that the Liberal Party, remembering the sorry history of the taxation of site values in the past, will not be more pleased with.the urban part of the programme than with the rural. After the Budget of 1909 there was almost a dead stop in the building of small houses. It was not true that land had been generally withheld from sale for building in order to allow the value of the land to increase while only agricultural rates were paid on it. Land could always be obtained easily enough. But when the " unearned increment " tax had to be paid few building speculators would buy land. * • *
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