Both Lib Dems and Labour will be fighting on a manifesto of raising taxes, but both shy away from being quite as blunt about it as they should be, or couch it with awkward other promises and issues.
Labour are promising sizeable tax hikes for the wealthy, but are also trying to pretend they won't need any tax increases (no VAT, income, or national insurance increases) for the main personal taxes for the bottom 95% of the population. Which given they're trying to give massive tax injections to public services and afford a string of renationalisations, seems, uh, optimistic to say the least. It's not that the top 5% don't have an exponential-curve amount of wealth, but that isn't always accessible via their personal income, and given a lot of them can afford to shuffle money around you do get a problem where solely going after the super rich and not the moderately well off end up with it being really hard to estimate the returns. It's possible they have other tax rises in mind, but these would probably be less fair than just raising income tax. And basically this means Labour don't have to sell people the idea that tax is good, because they're telling just about everyone that it won't be them that pays.
The Lib Dems meanwhile are set to raise the basic rate of income tax, but hypothecate it (promising to spend it all on healthcare) which, eh, doesn't really work very well. But the party is at least set on selling people the idea that for social democratic level services, they need to pay higher levels of personal taxation. Unfortunately, the Lib Dems' problem is that they're also trying to scoop up Conservative leaning remain voters, so they're trying to combine this with some very un-Keynesian strict rules on attempting to run fiscal surpluses for non-infrastructure spending, which as broadly a Keynesian myself I think is nuts. That said, all the parties are claiming to be aiming for balanced budgets - I think it's the new cross-party economic madness of the day, honestly. So the Lib Dems are trying to sell the idea of broad higher taxation, but coupling it with a scepticism of state borrowing that I'm not sure will work well.
Meanwhile the aforementioned Lib Dem internal elections are over. Mixed result - I think broadly speaking the Federal Board swung to the left/radical side, and the Policy and Conference committees to the right/centrist side, though not by huge margins in any direction. The Radical Association held its leader's policy committee seat and was twenty votes off getting its treasurer on there too (which means he's high on the "reserve list" if members resign). One of the executive members also made it onto Conference Committee due to diversity rules, though FCC now looks noticeably less radical since three of the five most senior LBT women in the party resigned over the Phillip Lee affair. Most impressively, the Association's director topped the Federal Board ballot despite not being an incumbent. That said, the centre-right Liberal Reform group also got five of their candidates onto committees, so it's a mixed bag and I think a lot panned out more on who was able to campaign and mobilise their personal networks better - given the upcoming election there wasn't as much debate on party direction as there ought to be with these things, and what there was probably didn't get read by enough of the voters (the main official candidate discussion group on Facebook has 1200 members - but over 10,000 voted in the Federal Board election). The presidential race will be counted after the election, presumably to avoid it having any potential fallout for the candidate who's defending a parliamentary seat right now.