DEPUTY Prime Minister Nick Clegg is urging his Tory coalition partners to impose a levy on Britain's super wealthy to fund a £1 billion tax giveaway for ordinary families.
The Liberal Democrat leader said he wanted Chancellor George Osborne to take advantage of the improving economy to raise the threshold at which people start paying income tax to at least £10,500 before the next general election in May 2015.
At the same time, he criticised the Conservatives for their "ideological" commitment to a permanently smaller state.
Mr Clegg said his plan to raise the personal allowance would be worth £100 a year to 24 million ordinary rate taxpayers while taking about half-a-million people out of income tax altogether.
"As the recovery is finally taking hold I think it is important that as many people as possible feel they are benefiting from it," he told BBC1's The Andrew Marr Show. "Of course, I need to persuade my Conservative coalition partners. In the past, the Conservatives have tended to have a different set of tax priorities."
While the Lib Dems have seen the coalition achieve their manifesto commitment to raise the personal allowance to £10,000 - which was finally reached in the last Budget in March - Mr Clegg said he had to fight the Tories all the way.
"I have had to argue for each step in the increase in the allowance. The Conservatives before the election felt this was not an affordable policy. I've insisted all along that it is affordable," he said.Mr Clegg said he believed that a further increase in the personal allowance could be funded by a levy - such as a "mansion tax" on the very wealthiest - but the Conservatives were opposed.
In a further move to distance himself from the Tories, he rejected David Cameron's call in his Guildhall speech last week for a "permanently" smaller state sector.
"You have this view from the right that taxes should never go up and that you should be shrinking the state to an ever smaller size in an ideological way. I don't think we should be ideological about this," he said.
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