co-operative

 Well, I've been fretting for a few days about the bits I missed out of my talk at the Oxford "Speak Easy" last week.  Those who were there early enough heard me begin with a few lines from my notes, before I went rambling off elsewhere and lost my place, so whilst I mentioned that I'd like people to disassociate for the purposes of the discussion the (big-m) "Mutualism", the successor to the Individuality Anarchist movement, and the (small-m) "mutualism" that describes the use of a particular co-operative business form.  For whilst there are similarities, especially in their theoretical basis, there are also differences, especially in the way the Co-operative Movement in the UK operates.

But I think it is important to compare and contrast them, and I intended to do this on Wednesday night, but didn't get to that.  At the moment, politicians from all the main parties are talking about embracing mutualism, using co-operative businesses to deliver certain public services and so on.  And what worries me is that people will get the wrong idea about both co-operative businesses and about "Mutualism" and if these attempts to use co-ops in public policy do not work out as well as they are now being touted will be disillusioned with the idea of mutualism, and Mutualism, itself.

There has also been much discussion of this around the blogs and media recently, so I thought I would add my tuppence worth.

So some thoughts...

First the Co-operative Movement is innately anti-statist.  This may not appear to be the case in the UK where the Co-operative has established a political party, called, unsurprisingly, the Co-operative Party, and which many years ago now hitched itself to the party of the big state, the Labour Party.  But in its early years and, as some would say its hey-day, in which co-operative business forms were founded from the ground up, by ordinary people wanting to meet all sorts of their needs, for food, for insurance, for health care, housing and so on they worked in spite of the state which most often seemed to grant privilege to those who would rip them off.

Indeed, the first of the seven Co-operative Principles, based on those set down originally by the Rochdale Pioneers and now guarded and promoted by the International Co-operative Alliance reinforced that a co-operative is based on voluntary, open membership, for all people who are able to make use of the benefits the society is created to deliver.  It is inherently voluntarist - anarchist - the complete opposite of which is the sort of compulsory collectivist state socialism engages in.  Even when that state is apparently "democratic", it is still not voluntary in the same sense.  If you really don't like a democratic decision of your fellow co-op members, you can, ultimately part company; go and get whatever services or goods they deliver from somewhere else, or start another co-op.  Try doing that if you don't like the "democratic" decision that leads to one party running the country however they like.

So in this sense, the co-operative business form is a very useful one for those of us who see co-operatives and social enterprises not as a way of delivering government policies, but as a way to develop truly voluntarist means of doing what the state often does by coercive collectivism.  But it is only one business form of many, and to a large extent Mutualist-anarchists are agnostic about what business form should be used in any particular instance, just so long as it is not coercive.  

That said, there are some areas in which the co-operative form seems to me to give particular benefits; where for example a good or service is too big or difficult to procure individually, or where the different interests in an organisation, the workers, consumers, financiers and so on want to align their interests in the ongoing management of the organisation because of the nature of the sort of transaction they are involved in.  And schools might very well be a good example of this.  It's not something you want to change your supplier of every day.  You can buy your newspaper or groceries from a different person every time, but you will want some stability for your children's education.  So you may want to agree to participate in setting policy and direction in your chosen school alongside teachers and managers.  

Second, a co-operative business or a social enterprise is not a "not-for-profit".  I know that people have qualms about things they perceive as public services being delivered by organisations that aim to make a "profit", but it is simple fact that you cannot run a business without aiming to make a "profit" - to aim for "break even" is to fail.  What matters is what you do with that profit, perhaps.  And sure, in a shareholder owned limited company, the whole purpose of the business is to make financial gain for its investors.  But the same could be true of a co-operative.  There is nothing that prevents a co-operative business distributing its surplus to its owners.  In the case of the ubiquitous Co-operative Group retail businesses this usually involves sending us members discounts off our future purchases, but there's no reason why it should not be a cash dividend if that is what the co-operative membership decided.

But there are lots of other things that could be done with "profits" - there could be a policy to help finance other co-operatives start up, or local community activities or charities, or to reinvest everything into the profit generating organisation itself.  The really key thing about a co-operative is that it is owned by the members who join it because they benefit from the goods or services it delivers, as opposed to it merely being a financial investment where shareholders may have little interest or intention, or even ability, to use what their limited company produces.

And so, finally, to the various noises being made by political parties about "embracing mutualism", "encouraging co-operatives" and so on.  Of course, as someone who does not believe the state has legitimate roles in delivering what they call public services in any case, I also do not believe it has the right to control who delivers them, or to whom to devolve responsibility for some of them to.  The most state-collectivist activists would not accept a co-operative as a compromise in any case.  They would say that it is wrong in principle to incorporate what is currently delivered by a unique sort of an organisation - public custodians elected by everyone - because it creates an organisational form that is itself vulnerable to take-over.  Even if you establish your public service delivery co-operative as, to start with, a business whose rules say they must reinvest surpluses and so on, they will point to the demulualisation of our former mutual financial services sector as an example of where member/owners can be tempted out by big money and big business.

But more importantly, as in my first point above, co-operatives are about voluntarism and grass roots action by people who want to work together to secure some kind of a benefit more difficult or less satisfying to achieve on their own.  They are not, and should not, be agents of state policy, of top down devolution of something in which the state will then, inevitably, want to retain a significant amount of control.  

It has been incessant growth of state action in the spheres in which very many people were already making their own voluntary arrangements that has extinguished much of the thriving co-operative and mutual self-organised culture that previously flourished.  When Lloyd-George promoted unemployment insurance for example, he quoted in his budget that 90% of the people likely to benefit from the proposed state system were already covered through friendly societies and so on - so his state action was to replace all of this voluntary co-operation in order to fund a statist way of ensuring the other 10% had cover.

Whenever I was asked, such as in those "go round the table and introduce yourselves" moments, as a director or chair of Oxfordshire Social Enterprise Forum, or as a director of Social Enterprise South East, I would make the point that I was not a promoter of social enterprise for delivering on government commitments, but as promoting self-organised social market alternatives to government action.  And I hope other would be co-operators and social entrepreneurs will sup with a long spoon when the man from the government comes along offering them the chance to "run their own public services".

There has been a fair amount of comment on (mostly libertarian) blogs recently about "fake charities" - bodies that we are made to think are reliant on our individual, personal donations but which are in fact heavily subsidized by the state for promoting government objectives and messages. That is all fair - transparency is important, none more so than in the charitable sector which is legally constrained from engaging in political activity and if a "charity" is receiving a lot of its funding from the state (in whatever form including the National Lottery) and appearing to parrot government policy it risks confidence in the whole philanthropic ideal of the charitable sector.

However, I also notice that some of this criticism seems to be being, linguistically at least, sloppily targeted at the "Third Sector" generally. And I just wanted to say that there is a lot of good stuff, especially for libertarians, out here in the so-called "Third Sector".

I hate the very phrase "The Third Sector" - it seems to echo the whole "Third Way" idea that somewhere between the "First" and "Second" sectors (which are of course never referred to in this way) - government and private enterprise or vice versa there must exist this less-toxic-than-capitalism but less-interventionist-than-public-sector great thing that combines corporate 'efficiency' with 'social awareness'. Or something.

For a start then, what is termed the "Third Sector" should, to my way of thinking, properly be called the "First Sector" - chronologically I would say that charity and mutual co-operation predated either government or capitalism. Humanity got going as a clan through that sort of co-operative effort long before we were "ruled" in the sense we know it today or "corporatised". In that sense, the "Third Sector" is kind of like the "Oldest Profession" - it just exists, and has always existed, is part of the human psyche to help and be helped and to understand that economic incentives can benefit us all.

Then there's the oft misused term "Not For Profit" as if profit is a dirty word and a business that is "not for profit" epitomises this grand ideal that we can have capitalist efficiencies without the greed. "Not For Profit" is of course complete balderdash. To aim not to make a profit is to aim to fail. Or, in the context of this "fake charity" criticism to be so unsustainable as to need perpetual help from somewhere else. There are, of course, things in life that will not be likely to turn a profit, perhaps because they take on externalities that, costly as they may be, are unaddressed by other sorts of organizations. These are the proper targets of charitable and philanthropic giving.

But the other half of this "Third Sector" is made up of businesses, so called "social enterprises". Back in 2002 when I was standing for re-election to Oxford City Council, I had initiated a year or so previously some discussions about flogging off the city council's leisure facilities to a co-operative, social enterprise. As "public assets" they were clearly suffering from a combination of the "tragedy of the commons" and the "Cinderella service" compared with other statutory duties that consume most of councils' budgets, leaving these discretionary services to fight for the few remaining crumbs which were not really ever going to be enough to keep them remotely in shape or competitive resulting in further decline. They were a drain on the public finances being exploited by a really very small number of users - users that were more often than not the stereotype of more health conscious middle class residents who thought that supporting the council facilities was the "right thing to do" as well as being a good deal cheaper at the point of delivery than private gym memberships say. Typical "club goods" being dressed up as "public goods".

The then Labour leisure services spokesman on the council, notwithstanding the Labour movement's supposed sympathy with the co-operative movement, made some very public denunciations in the local media and in council that I was planning on "privatizing" the leisure facilities, and, by implication, that I was hell bent on someone profiteering from them at the expense of the residents who would have to pay more. As an aside I notice that the current Labour council in Oxford, strapped for cash, has just done exactly that - a huge U-turn for which I don't expect I'll ever receive an apology! Only now they haven't got a public receipt for the assets; rather they have given them away for a period in return for promises of investment. Okay, so that's a trade off that those off us who no longer have access to the full and dismal financial picture of the services cannot judge.

But the point is, as social businesses, whatever ownership form they take - co-operatives, industrial and provident societies, community interest companies, friendly societies, they all have to be functioning, profitable businesses if they are to continue to exist for long enough to dispense the social benefits they seek to achieve. Some of us in the Social Enterprise sector like to call them "more than profit" businesses. The profit motive is still the lifeblood of what we do, because it is only that that enables us to be generous and of social benefit rather than a social drain on precious resources.

Social enterprise is for me a political priority. It is the primary way in which we can wrest functions from the state and return them to the realm of voluntary co-operation. Of taking them out of the hands of those who seek power over us and into the hands of real people, working with each other to meet their own needs between themselves.

And excuse me, but in a world where private corporations get favourable deals from government and contracts and bail outs and protectionist regulation, if there's any little pots of money on offer to help make get genuine social enterprises off the ground (often made all the more frustrating by the demands of statists to jump through regulatory and reporting hoops) and be sustainable and in the process reduce the size of the state, I'm certainly not going to apologize for taking it. It's not our raison d'etre, but it could make the difference between getting off the ground or remaining a frustrated good idea. But the fact is that in many cases, the best source of money to get such things going, start up funding, actually comes from the real charities like Esmee Fairbairn, established with a specific aim of finding market solutions to social needs by genuine philanthropists.

Last year there was an almighty row, aided and abetted of course by politicians taking opportunist (but unrealistic and possibly illegal) positions ahead of elections, about huge rent rises in the five year Covered Market rent review process. A modicum of peace was restored when the city council pledged to spend the paltry sum of £50,000 on some painting and decorating. Today we learn that the cash strapped spending slashing council has withdrawn the funding and, quite rightly, some of the traders in the market are pretty pissed off.

Image copryright SteveBell @ Flickr (I hope I'm allowed to use this!) Not only that, but today we also learned that retail property is at the head of the rush downwards with average values now below those when the rent review period began in 2003. So not only has the council managed to snag peak of the market rents but has now slashed the only sop to the traders it offered.

It's time to realize that the City Council is incapable of being a good landlord to such a sensitive building and it local trader tenants. For many people in Oxford the Covered Market is the jewel in the crown of local retailing. Many suburban centers have lost their fresh food outlets- butchers, green-grocers and so on - and on top of that the market can offer a range of products that only the center of gravity of a city could realistically support.

Whether the Westgate redevelopment goes ahead and when is also critical, as that will move the center of gravity of the city westwards, alongside the redevelopment of the whole south western quarter of the city, and the Covered Market and the surrounding streets need their landlords to plan investment now to try to maintain footfall at that end of the city center when the time comes. It will be a fair trek on foot between Waitrose and the new car parking attached to the Westgate center and the High Street, and the further reduction in scheduled bus services stopping in the High will make things even worse.

Instead of reining in its expenditure on its estate, which is largely to the east of St Aldate's and Cornmarket - the area that will be most affected by these changes over the next few years - the City Council needs to find a way of taking the lead in investing in this part of town. We all know they cannot afford to do so themselves in the current climate as they are slashing away at any expenditure they can so they need to change the way their interests in these properties are handled so that they can attract outside investment.

A Property Investment Partnership would fit the bill. The City Council, and any other landlords who want to participate to keep their estate's value up when all the changes happen, contribute the properties as owner partners, the tenants put in their rent as occupier partners and we go out and find an investor partner or several to put in whatever capital is required.

Ownership is not ceded to anyone else in the long run, the new facilities improve footfall and therefore takings, which is reflected in a higher yield from the whole development, since traders' occupation payments are based on their turnover rather than mere "rent" changing that from a fixed cost to a variable cost at this time of great pressure on retail. Everyone wins. You could even throw in other facilities such as a customer loyalty card, selling small shares to the customers so they also become partners in the thing they value so highly.

Let's face it, the city has finally realized it cannot possibly finance its leisure centers properly and has now given them away in a U-turn since castigating me for suggesting it in 2002 (which would have saved them millions over those years, enough to finance all the projects they are slashing to make ends meet today). So it has no excuse now for not looking at more imaginative ways of dealing with the rest of its non-core operations. And failure to invest now risks their long term future income faced with all the challenges I've already mentioned - which would surely be, foreseeable as it is, maladministration if it comes to pass.

Oxford City Council is set, it would appear, to cut its funding for the City Centre Management Company, OX1 and "repatriate" many of its functions to the bureaucracy of the City Council. In another U-turn from its former support of the idea of a city centre management company the Labour administration thinks that it will be more "transparent" if things are run from the Town Hall again.

New manager 'set to run Oxford' OX1 is to continue as an independent representative body for businesses Oxford city centre is to have a new manager to oversee improvements designed to benefit residents, shoppers, visitors and businesses. Currently £105,000 goes to a company called OX1, a group representing firms which organised events this year to promote the city centre. [From BBC NEWS | England | Oxfordshire | New manager 'set to run Oxford']

When they first pushed the idea back in 1999 I was fundamentally against establishing OX1 as a sort of a "closed shop" of retailers and other economic interests and wanted a much more open structure which would enable users of the city centre, workers, shoppers, citizens, culture groups and so on to take a real stake. I proposed then what I called a "City Centre Management Co-operative".

But in any case, OX1 has never been given the clout or profile it would need to do a decent job. Indeed it has at times become the excuse for a city council not investing in the centre - such as this year when the Christmas lights underwhelmed it was pointed out that it was not the council's job - that it funded OX1 to do that sort of thing (funding which, it would appear, is less than half what the council itself spent on lights ten years ago). Indeed privatizing the provision of Christmas lights was one of the leading drivers behind the CCMC in the first place - we were told that by giving it independence from the council's financial strictures it would be able to produce better investment is such promotional activities.

Oxford city centre is a confusing enough place as it is - not only is the city council responsible for all sorts of statutory administravia, but it is also a significant landlord in its own right. There are competing pressures for its meagre resources there too - it will make a lot of money out of the redevelopment of the Westgate shopping centre if that continues but will likely in turn lose out on its properties in parts of the centre that will lose footfall - such as the High Street, Covered Market and Broad Street areas.

Perhaps more than most other city centres there are powerful local interests outside the city council - the university and colleges own much of the commercial property, as well as, in a sense, "controlling" much of the consumer side of the city's commercial scene. The county council is not such a significant landlord but does control the access in the form of responsibility for roads, traffic and public transport. So there are real conflicts of interest here that could do with sorting out, rather than, perhaps, exacerbating by re-centralizing more of the administrative functions into the city council. And on top of all that, the city council has been utterly incompetent in its execution of the services it provides in the city centre as well - street cleaning, rubbish collection and so on.

So what is needed is to look again at my original idea of a city centre partnership or co-operative in which all users and providers in the city centre can participate and take a real stake. And all the more so in this frightening time when the economic situation may see our high streets decimated with both chain stores and local traders under real threat of closure.

Landlords could be persuaded (led by the city council itself whose investment ability is hopeless anyway) to put their properties (including, perhaps especially, the Covered Market) into such a partnership, allowing finance to be raised for improvements and changing the rent structure which currently threatens to cripple many businesses, especially the local traders. Traders are also not going to survive without customers, so city centre users could be encouraged to join in solidarity with the business they will no doubt regret losing if they go, with perhaps some kind of city centre dividend paid for out of improved revenues from the resultant customer loyalty.

Oxford city centre is a centre for people from throughout the county and region, who have just as little a say in how things are managed there by the city council as do the businesses OX1 was initially setup to represent. Mutualizing the city centre in such a partnership would enable all of these people, as well as Oxford residents to have a real stake and a real say in how their city centre serves them.

...that "government is the problem", or because anti-regulator Alan Greenspan named Ayn Rand as his biggest political influence, it's time you did some reading.

Each year the Libertarian Alliance awards the Chris R Tame Memorial Prize (named for the late founder of the Libertarian Alliance) for the best essay on a title chosen by its Director, Dr Sean Gabb, and this year's winner was announced this weekend at the Libertarian Alliance annual conference at the National Liberal Club - more on which in upcoming posts.

The Libertarian Alliance is the biggest grouping of the broad church known as Libertarianism in the UK, and this year's essay title was set just ahead of the main round of recent financial market troubles but focussing on the common idea that Libertarians would demolish the state, leaving what we currently know as big corporate capitalism to run amok. The full brief for contestants ran as follows:

Essay Title: "Can a Libertarian Society be Described as 'Tesco minus the State'?"

Explanatory Note

Many socialists and conservatives regard libertarians as cheerleaders for big business. Our belief in free enterprise is understood as support for the bigger, and therefore the more successful, corporations - General Motors, Microsoft, HSBC, Tesco, and so forth - and for an international financial system centred on the City of London.

Some libertarians are happy to be so regarded. They dislike the way in which big government provides opportunities for big business to acquire privileges that shelter it from competition. Even so, they believe that a world without government, or a world with much less government, would be broadly similar in its patterns of enterprise to the world that we now have. It would be much improved, but not fundamentally dissimilar.

Other libertarians disagree. They regard big business as fundamentally a creation of big government. Incorporation laws free entrepreneurs from personal risk and personal responsibility, and allow the growth of large business organisations that are bureaucratically managed. These organisations then cartellise their markets and externalise many of their costs. The result is systematic distortion of market behaviour from the forms it would take without government intervention. These libertarians often go further in their analysis by denying the legitimacy of intellectual property rights and ownership rights in land beyond what any individual can directly use.

Where do you stand in this debate? Are you broadly comfortable with a global capitalism that is raising billions of people from starvation towards affluence. Or are you a radical with a vision of a society that has never yet been tried and is as alien and even frightening to most people as anything promised by the Marxists.

You tell us.

No go and read the winning essay. Congratulations go to Keith Preston, for his entry entitled "Free enterprise: the antidote to corporate plutocracy"

But if you are too lazy to read the whole lot (c 3000 words - so no more than one of my usual posts!), it concludes...

"An economy organized on the basis of worker-owned and operated industries,peoples’ banks, mutuals, consumer cooperatives, anarcho-syndicalist labor unions, individual and family enterprises, small farms and crafts workers associations engaged in local production for local use, voluntary charitable institutions, land trusts, or voluntary collectives, communes and kibbutzim may seem farfetched to some, but no more so and probably less so than a modern industrial, high-tech economy where the merchant class is the ruling class and the working class is a frequently affluent middle class would have seemed to residents of the feudal societies of pre-modern times. If the expansion of the market economy, specialization, the division of labor, industrialization and technological advancements can bring about the achievements of modern societies in eradicating disease, starvation, infant mortality and early death, one can only wonder what a genuine free enterprise system might achieve, and would have already achieved were it not for the scourge of statism and the corresponding plutocracy. "

Now, you may still not be convinced that "government is the problem", but do us the decency of not conflating "deregulation" with "evil right wing global corporatism" and blaming "libertarianism" for the great big pile of dog-doo the state and economy is in right now. Especially those of you who claim to be Liberals, fellow travelers of Libertarianism for the past 150 years.

A week or so ago Mike Killingworth challenged us on Liberal Conspiracy to show what "Lovable Banking" might look like in response to the daily emerging news that we've been shafted regularly by the banking system since, oh, at least 1695. Some of you will know that I have long taken an interest in things like local currencies and mutual finance and perhaps also that I've been looking into the use of the Limited Liability Partnership structure as a way of building multi-stakeholder less toxic alternatives to purist shareholder capitalism.

Well a couple of weeks ago I was contacted out of the blue by a chap, Frank Churchill, also in Oxfordshire, who has been looking at similar structures. In his case originally I think as a less toxic alternative to developing world microcredit systems (did you know that the effective interest rate including all charges and so on on Grameen or Kiva micro loans can get as high as 80%!) and as a way of monetizing voluntary work - mainly involving carers. We've both been steadily battling along on our own on this, trying to understand the structures and build solutions to common issues around them - in my case, mostly things like affordable housing and supporting local businesses.

And so we've got together and are, hopefully, on the verge of setting up a "think and do tank" (to coin a strap line from another - less popular amongst liberal economics followers - organization, the New Economics Foundation; but don't let that put you off - some of the issues are the same but we believe the responses are more mutual and liberals than theirs) in the form of a "Community Finance Partnership".

The Limited Liability Partnership structure was created, ironically perhaps, to get the professional firms such as accountants and lawyers out of being personally liable for the debts of their partnerships - the vast accountancy partnerships in particular were worried about the sort of "Enron scenario" of being held liable for multi-million pound lawsuits and were threatening to move their registered offices away from the UK if we didn't give them limited liability. But inadvertently they have created a beautifully simple mechanism for bringing all the parties to an enterprise - the providers of capital, landlords, customers, workers and suppliers and so on - in, if they wish, to share in the risks and the rewards of pooling their contributions to the success of that business as partners.

A partnership agreement can involve different classes of partner receiving different shares of the profits depending on the worth of their input to it - just as a co-operative structure does. Companies may be partners, or even other LLPs as well as individuals. And the partnership itself is tax transparent so each partner is responsible for accounting for the profit or loss in their own tax affairs. Some of you will be aware that I think limited liability in general is a Bad Thing that takes the personal responsibility away from business owners, but in this case it matters very little since every connection with the business could become a partner and share that responsibility explicitly.

The Community Finance Partnership can we believe fulfill a great number of roles, offering a portfolio of products for consumers and a steady return based on those to investors - the aim is to produce an index-linked rate of return in the form of a "rent payment" for the use of the capital partners' (investors) funds. "Customer partner" products might include interest free mortgages - called Property Investment Partnerships, personal loans such as with Credit Unions and business finance "repaid" through a portion of the successful businesses' turnover.

One "flagship" product we are hoping to develop is the idea of a local complementary currency, probably in the form of a Nectar-like loyalty card system that businesses with a base in the geographical area can buy into and which would be able to monetize currently unpaid work like volunteer carers whose value to the local community and especially health services is enormous. The possibilities are almost limitless. For example another idea would be to finance the equivalent of PFI schemes - for example if Oxfordshire County Council wants to rebuild some schools, but with local investors sharing in the reward. And such a structure could be used to provide the mutual finance system for universities I mentioned earlier today.

Think a cross between a loyalty card system, a credit union (more on the US or Irish style than the British), a mutual building society but with the ability to lend to business and not just on homes, and possibly a friendly society offering local mutual insurance and pension products. It's early days yet, and we're still working up what each product would look like in financial terms and the sort of prospectus we'd be able to offer investors, but I'm very excited about it! We think the time is ripe for a return to more human scale financial institutions that people can become a part of on a local more human scale.

It seems slightly odd to me that I have only ever written once about Higher Education policy, given that I am a governor of my university, and hear about it all the time in meetings. But it has become a big issue at the moment in the Lib Dems, and seems to have been one of the major discussion areas at the Liberal Youth conference over the weekend, so I thought it might be time for me to jot down a few thoughts.

One thing that seems clear, and I believe this is common currency in university board-rooms across the country, is that the current muddled system cannot go on. 98% I believe it is of courses are charging the full top-up fees, and even they do not make up for the real terms fall of over 60% in funding per student over the past decade and a half or so.

On top of that, it fails to create any kind of price mechanism where people might be able to see what value a university or rather its applicants put on a particular course at a particular institution. It is a nonsense to think that three grand at The New University of Bloggshire is as good value as three grand at one of our world leading institutions like Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial. Instead we rely on very subjective analyses of the National Student Satisfaction Survey and even that is difficult as the organizers may put a good course in a subject area in which an institution is not so excellent and devalue that one course.

What also seems clear is that the value of a first degree is, shall we say, not as high as perhaps it was when all those who say "I got university free, so I'm damned if I'm going to see the next generation up to their necks in debt" went to university. It is a very generous sentiment, and, whilst I didn't in fact go to university I do recognize the hypocrisy - had I taken my school teachers' advice I would have had free higher education and a living grant too. That may not of course be the fault of the Higher Education Institutions so much as primary and secondary education - I don't suppose many students in my day would have had to be taught remedial English and maths at university as we are told some are today in order to get the most out of the Higher Education experience. Additionally, many more students than previously feel the pressure to do second and subsequent degrees in order to stand out in the job market as perhaps a first degree would have done for them in previous generations.

I think the majority feeling in those university board-rooms is that they would prefer to see the fees cap lifted completely when the opportunity arises sometime after 2010, even though by that time many may not want to charge too much so as to be in competition for a smaller number of students when the 18 year old cohort dips significantly in around 2012. We are also on tenter-hooks waiting to see how economic troubles in the wider world will affect student numbers - in previous recessions there has been a boost to Higher Education as people out of work re-train, but faced with fees and debts and an even more uncertain economic outlook, we wonder whether this will be the same this time round.

So, regardless of how our policy affects students themselves, the universities are in an ever more uncertain position. Whatever option we choose, we must see to it also that universities get sufficient funding. There will be no merit in having free Higher Education if the universities themselves cannot deliver that within the budgets allowed.

Anyway, I wanted to suggest an idea with this post. It's somewhat half formulated, and I certainly have not tried to run any figures on it yet, but I hope you might get the idea and maybe be willing to help develop it in the comments.

I have always regarded universities as social enterprises, mutual institutions of a sort. Indeed I once tried to persuade Brookes to adopt a more overt mutualism in its management structure. During the Great Depression in North America, when students were still having to pay fees but had very little money left for anything else, many embraced mutualism as a way to get through. This was the era in which the co-op meal plan, the co-op houses and halls of residence, and the university credit unions burgeoned. Partly as a result of this they have a much stronger alumni culture than we have here.

A credit union type system could be used to enable universities to charge a full market rate for their courses whilst financing all students "needs blind" so that they do not have to pay anything until they are earning. These credit unions would enable alumni (and possibly applicants before they are at university) to save, with interest, in less toxic investments than they have been in the banking system of late while funding current students through university and who would then be expected, as part of their "pay back", to join and save, investing in the next cohort of students, when they graduate.

On top of this we need a package of measures perhaps to encourage the development of low cost co-operative halls of residence and mutual housing societies to prevent the basic accommodation needs of students becoming the £5-7,000 per year drain that the big corporate halls providers expect to charge and the private rented sector delivering second class housing for students.

Up and down the country local authorities, independent retailers and residents complain that rents are squeezing out interesting independent retailers and creating "Clone Town Britain".

Well, I have an idea. This week the Co-operative Group agreed terms to acquire Somerfield supermarkets. There are some, say management, which directly compete with existing Co-op shops and so one or other may be up for sale. One of these is in Headington in Oxford where there is a fairly recently refurbished MidCounties Co-op store on one side of the road and a Somerfield on the other.

Some people are all excited that someone like Waitrose might step up and buy it - and in a sense there could be no better buyer as far as the Co-op goes - the other end of the market and a sort of a worker co-operative in its own right.

But as I was in a social enterprise meeting earlier today my mind wandered to Headington supermarkets (!) and I wondered if, given it is the Co-operative who have bought them, there might be mileage in proposing a sale to a more local group - perhaps a permanent base for an indoor/farmers' market, or a space which, like the Covered Market in town, could provide "protected space" for independent retailers we wanted to see revived in Headington, set up say as a secondary co-op or a community land trust type structure (or even bought by MidCounties from Co-op Group) enabling local people a say in its management, policies and ownership.

It would require some work of course actually to work out whether the relatively recent decline of independent fresh food retailers in Headington for example has been, as often claimed, because of rent and rates issues where such a facility might be able to help by lowering the cost of access. But if it does seem viable would it be worth trying?

Or would Waitrose or Sainsbury still be a more attractive offering?

I hate the G8, there's no doubt. I find the whole idea a nauseating display of mankind's folly that a few people with power can do more or less anything, from manipulating the world's climate to holding in their grasp the lives of billions whose lot in life those leaders of the industrialised nations can barely comprehend, let alone decree how to change.

It epitomizes to me why nation states are vile, unnatural divisions of humanity and the planet which, frankly, seem to have more to do with protecting the wealth of the few and patronizing the poverty of the many on this earth. Their leaders pose, Atlas-like, for photo-calls after their vacuous pronouncements, like some cabal of gallactic princelings in some dystopian Sci-Fi vision of a future inter-stellar imperial court.

Yet I'm no crusty protester you'll find scaling fences at Gleneagles or taking a bullet in Genoa complaining that these neo-cons and neo-liberals want to sell our world to the most hated capitalist profiteer. Oh no. Business, amongst other examples of voluntary human co-operation, has a huge part to play in addressing the needs of everyone on the planet. If only it could all be carried out on a billiard-table-level playing field.

And this is the greatest power these eight chattering onanists have - they could, if they chose, level that playing field tomorrow, or at least leave Japan this week having agreed to do so. But they don't want that, do they. because they also represent the businesses already raping the planet and its people by dint of playing on a skewed field.

They make me puke when I think of them, quite literally. I am nauseous writing this to be honest. I do not believe there are eight people on the planet, in fact not 2008 nor yet even 200,000,008 endowed with the wisdom of gods and strength of titans who could do any better at securing the future of this planet than the possibility oif billions of us being able to communicate and co-operate directly among ourselves.

At the top of my front page you will find what must be one of my favourite quotes from any politician, in this case the truly radical, Richard Cobden:

"Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less." 150 years later, like infants only learning to crawl, we still rely on those protectionist, egotistical, smugly self-important governments despite the evidence that they cannot and will not deliver on their promises.

Whilst I certainly do not agree with all their policies, I find the idea of SimPol, in which we use modern communications technology to get ordinary people throughout the world, in diverse and distant countries, to voice together our aspirations and make those same sort of global changes on a consensual and co-operative basis.

Y I H8 G8.

Quite by chance, as if on order to make the local elections more exciting in my ward, two local planning issues have suddenly popped up (not entirely unexpectedly it has to be said) that are likely to cause a deal of controversy when they get to decision-making time. I don't want to talk about their planning merits or otherwise on here. But I do want to use them because they are very good examples of why I am so passionate about land reform.

The first, in the ward in which I am standing is an application for new student residences adjacent to the site on which I am a warden proposed by my employers, Oxford Brookes University. To be fair it will make more of an impact on residents in the neighbouring ward, but it is the economics of it all I want to look at not the planning, to show why land value tax would be such a benefit to the community.

The second, just over the main road in the neighbouring ward but which will make a significant impact on neighbours in both wards one way or another is the news today that Tesco have bought up a local former pub building from a local bar/restaurant entrepreneur who had seemingly been knocked back in the early stages of planning such that he no longer felt it worth fighting for his ideas for the site. Here I want to look at how the planning system seems to favour the bigger developer with the financial clout and how this affects the fairness of land law.

But first, the new proposed halls of residence. This site is approximately quarter remaining of a site the university acquired from the Department of Social Security about seven years ago now. When I was last on the council, just at the end, they had owned the site for about six months, if I remember correctly having bought the whole thing for either eight or eleven million pounds through a charitable trust set up for the purpose and were just getting outline planning consent.

The entire site had been only about a quarter used for several years since most parts of the DSS had moved out. And even when at "full capacity" it had been an egregiously inefficient use of a piece of prime inner suburban land - even for offices - since it was half car park and half single storey nissan hut type buildings.

Since it had been government owned, effectively there was no income to the public purse from this land. Once it was owned by a charity the empty land has generated no receipts to the public purse in the form of business rates. The charitable trust sold off about a quarter of the land to the adjacent Oxford International Centre for Islamic Studies, first for use as a contractors car park and now it lies more or less empty. A hectare of prime city centre building land. The university built nearly seven hundred student rooms in new halls on half of the original land and these were opened five years ago now. But it is the effect of this last quarter of of the site I want to examine and show how failing to encourage optimal use of land where it is available is a disaster for the rest of us.

The site is about a hectare. So if the original purchase price for the entire site was the higher of the two figures I remember hearing at the time - eleven million pounds, its share would be two and three-quarters million. The current application is for 335 study bedrooms and since the student halls market has changed out of all recognition in those seven years, commercial firms are willing to pay it is rumoured up to £45,000 per room for suitable land, as a site alone it would be worth more like fifteen million pounds.

Point one: whilst the local authority has received virtually nothing for this land in rates, the owners, either the university or the charitable trust, have effectively got a book profit of £12 million - a four hundred per cent return in seven years.

335 study bedrooms would, if theory, allow some 83 four bedroomed family homes to be freed up from the current student private rented market somewhere in the city assuming student numbers overall remained static. That's 83 largeish families who have been otherwise excluded from the housing market in Oxford for seven years because these halls did not exist. At its worst, that means that the tax-payer, through housing benefit, has spent upwards of ten million a decade supporting those households in private rented accommodation while they wait for "affordable housing".

Point two: the cost to the tax-payer of that piece of land laid idle and not producing any local taxation has been at least ten million in housing benefits to private landlords while the owners have made that massive book profit.

Now imagine if that land were taxed on its value at its most productive use - that's currently the £15 million or so a commercial halls of residence developer would pay for it. A ten percent land tax would now be yielding the public purse £1.5 million a year, and more importantly would have been liable for that tax all the while it has been so underused. No owner with any financial sense would have kept that land out of productive use with a tax bill like that. The land would have been brought into its best use long ago, either as housing itself or freeing up those equivalent 83 units for family use instead of student private lets, and the tax-payer would not have had to support 83 families to the tune of that £10 million pounds a decade in supported housing.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am neither criticising my employer nor demanding ten storey blocks of flats on every vacant site. But I am illustrating the cost to society of holding land out of use, and the unfairness where, in doing so, the owners have made a vast profit at the direct expense of the tax-payer. It's the system that causes this, not the participants in that system who are only following the rules everyone else plays by.

Now to the "Tesco pub". Some time ago this down at heel local pub was closed, its future uncertain. A well known local restaurant and property entrepreneur bought it up and a few months ago publicized his idea for turning it into a row of three shops and some flats above in a "landmark" new building. But with an ambivalent local reaction and, it seems, less than enthusiastic reception from the city's planners to the idea, this chap pulled his plans and decided to look around for a buyer. The land registry records show that the property had cost him £400,000 and that it was mortgaged so he had financed it empty for seven or eight months developing his ideas and the prospect of a long uphill struggle into the unforeseeable future in the planning system means he would be financing it empty for many months, if not a couple of years to come.

It is opposite a long established and not so long ago refurbished and extended local Co-op store (where I joined as a member of the Co-operative and where I shop several times a week in preference to all the other supermarkets around I could potentially choose from) and a less long established Costcutter store that houses the local Post Office and a similarly aged Chemist shop that replaced a locally owned and well patronized cycle and fishing tackle shop and an electrical retailer. It is, to put it mildly, on an awkward site, at a very odd junction just at the point the Marston Road becomes a dual carriage-way "boulevard" and buses turn right against the traffic whilst the off-road cycle lane comes to an end, the road splits into two lanes prior to a busy and slightly awkward double roundabout junction. There is just enough parking in the lay-by outside the existing shops for their customers and nowhere else for cars to park.

The site might have been viewed as ideal for shopping or catering uses complimentary to the existing neighbouring shops. Extending the range of goods and services people could get in a single visit to the local shops. All very sustainable. And contributing to the local economy and the success of local entrepreneurs - all of which tends to keep more money in circulation more locally in Oxford, making us all better off.

But now Tesco have the site. Obviously, they are in competition with two of the existing local stores. For many, they will do a better job of supplying their grocery needs and at lower prices. That too is good for peoples' pockets and therefore local wealth retention. But since, if they've borrowed to buy it at all, as opposed to taking the purchase price out of the weekend's take from the nearby Tesco out of town superstore, it's probably a tiny dent in their current income rather than a major liability as it would have been to the local entrepreneur who had borrowed to buy it as a significant chunk of his portfolio. And they can afford to sit on it until the planners give in, until attrition of any opposition to the idea gives them an easier ride in the planning process.

At the moment I wouldn't dare to have made up my mind about the idea of Tesco Express there. On the one hand, competition is good for the consumer. On the other, Tesco has such financial clout that it could send its competition to the wall and leave it eventually and open field to increase prices because of its local monopoly. And there again, whilst as a member I would be very sad to see either of the two existing competing stores fail, they would almost certainly then be occupied by some other, and probably local, entrepreneur with another great idea that would compliment rather than compete in its turn with the Tesco store. Again, this increases the range of goods and services a person can get in one trip to the local shops.

But all I am highlighting is that because the planning system causes a proportionately greater opportunity cost to fall on the smaller businessman it actually favours the big financial muscle of large corporates who can afford to take the risk for longer. It is not a level playing field. But, as in the previous story, it's the playing field on which all would be developers have to play. On the other hand again, it would be quite wrong for the planning system to become a tool of protectionism, benefitting one business or businessperson over another by preventing competition. Perhaps in an LVT based system the tax payable on a site should be suspended for the time during which the planning bureaucracy was deciding on a proposal to concentrate the minds of planners on getting the best deal for all parties in the minimum time possible and enabling people to get on with running their businesses, extending their homes, or whatever the application was for.

Anyway - all that was a bit of a marathon use of two local and serendipitously current issues illustrate quite well some of my hot button issues on land reform, free trade and anti-protectionism and localism.