Lib Dems may vote with Labour on mansion tax Mr Miliband announced last week that his party backed the mansion tax as a way to fund the reintroduction of the 10p rate that was controversially scrapped by Gordon Brown. While not a pledge for the 2015 general election, politically it attempted to outflank both coalition parties, with Chancellor George Osborne under some backbench Tory pressure to reintroduce the 10p rate in his Budget in March. Liberal Democrats - backed by the respected Institute For Fiscal Studies think tank - argue that the Government's policy of reducing tax for low earners by raising the threshold at which income tax is paid is a more effective measure. I'm glad they've seen sense... it is an idea whose time has come. I think the Labour Party are probably playing political games but nevertheless it's welcome that they are endorsing it," Mr Cable told the Murnaghan programme on Sky News. Asked if the Lib Dems would accept Mr Miliband's vote challenge, he said: "It depends entirely how they phrase it. If it is purely a statement of support for the principle of a mansion tax I'm sure my colleagues would want to support it. The party has been frustrated in efforts to persuade the Tories to adopt the policy. But very often in these opposition days they can't resist the temptation to make party political point scoring and drag in other issues like the 10p rate and if that happens I am sure we will not. It is up to them to be statesmanlike and sensible. Mr Cable said he had first seen the tax proposals being put to the party's spring conference in March in newspapers today - despite the fact that they had been published on the party's own website. The internal policy consultation concluded there "may be merit" in imposing the 1% levy instead on anyone with a land and property portfolio worth above the £2 million threshold. And it mooted a wider French-style wealth tax on assets such as jewellery and paintings - which would involve tax inspectors visiting people's homes to verify the value of declared items. "Some of their ideas are interesting; some of them are a bit wacky," Mr Cable said. The idea of taxing jewellery is completely impractical and intrusive. The idea that you combine together people's properties probably doesn't make a great deal of sense because people's second homes are already subject to capital gains tax and income tax on the rent. There are ideas in there that I am sure will not get any further but we have a democratic process: we have activists who come forward with ideas, we debate them and then we make policy. But we are a long, long way from that and these ideas are most emphatically not party policy.