A tip off from a reader asks us to highlight a growing number of people who support our policy on raising the basic personal income tax allowance to £10,000, taking the lowest paid out of income tax altogether.

I understand crossbencher Lord Digby Jones supported this on Question Time, since it helps those on low incomes, and also helps get people back to work. One of the biggest disbenefits of moving from benefits to low paid work is the high rate of marginal tax you pay. You don’t just lose the income, and all the benefits in kind such as free prescriptions, you also face bringing less in from employment than you did on benefits.

From the Lib Dem blogging community, Charlotte Gore sees the tax policy as “our most important policy“:

Now, I’ll be honest, I love this policy for a number of reasons. First, it’s a tax cut, which I like. I’m against anything that punishes people for working or being successful, because working and being successful are actually good things that provide jobs and wealth and in doing that improves our health, increases our free time for leisure and personal pursuits and generally improves our quality of life.

It’s also a tax cut that does something about the problems faced by people moving from benefits into work, where, thanks to tax if you’ve got 2 kids you’re actually better off on benefits than a minimum wage job. That is, unless you’re willing to risk the tax credits system. Its painfully obvious that if you don’t take tax off people in the first place, you don’t need a monolithic, incompetent bureaucracy to then give it back again, wasting money for the sheer hell of it. Redistributing wealth from one group of poor people (those without kids) to another group of poor people is a whole new level of messed up politics, and one that people seem to blindly support.

Charlotte’s the least strange of the three supporters of this policy that I’m quoting here – but from her to the most strange – Norman Tebbit!

Speaking to the Bury Free Press (I’m not making this up!) Lord Tebbit said,

Lord Tebbit feels[…] that the current benefits system penalises couples for living together and mothers for going back out to work.

“It’s absolute madness. We put large barriers in the way of people going back to work,” he said.

He added that he backed Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg’s idea to double the tax threshold and raise taxes on the rich, helping to get more people into work and off welfare.

So – who else have you seen who supports our policy in this area?