localism

Thanks to Stephen Glenn for pointing me to this lovely new descriptive word for the supermarket giants, and to the Lib Dem media release website for highlighting this issue via Tim Farron.  But I'm afraid unlike Stephen or Tim I cannot actually see just in what way the Lib Dems have any better policies than the other two vacuous parties on the issue of how to protect our farmers from exploitation by the supermarket oligrarchy, or, as the title says, the "trolleygarchy".

What I do see is all three parties falling over themselves to think of new things for the state to do to address some perceived problem that even the Competition Commission seems to have suggested was not such a big issue.  But I suppose it was a farming conference so they're bound to have been wanting to promise these potential voters that they would each do something to defend their interests in return for their earth salted votes - such is what politicians do.

But it provides a useful example as to what the real, liberal, process should be to such issues.  Why on earth are we, or anyone else, calling for more regulation, more bureaucracy, more costs?  Why don't we look at how this market got to this position?  At the state's role previously and now, in disadvantaging one group and protecting the other.  And see whether there are things the state should stop doing to make this a fairer market rather than creating another state bureaucracy to try and fix problems still being created by state action?

For on both the demand and the supply side of the market for this most basic of commodities, the food that keeps us all alive, we find a trail of evidence leading back to state action that has made it ever more likely that these giant retailers would emerge in the first place and dominate from then.  Not that I am saying that big is necessarily bad of course - if they are delivering what consumers want at the right price and quality, they could have a monopoly for all I care, so long as there are no barriers for others to enter the market should they see that efficiency slip and see a way of doing better for the consumer. 

But they have had help in achieving that dominance.  There's a huge amount of food regulation that, inevitably, the bigger firm is better placed to meet, and not just to meet, but to lobby regulators to suit them too.  On the demand side, state mismanagement of everything from money supply to housing markets has resulted in a vanishingly small number of households now being able to house themselves on one income, and so hard pressed home-makers juggling jobs and home life demand more convenience foods.  No longer is a leisurely trip to a local market for raw ingredients, freshness and quality decided by eye, nose and trust in the local man or woman behind the counter, followed by an hour by the stove and time to feed the family all at once the familiar way of doing things.  So there is more demand for, and thence regulation of, more conveniently packaged and ready-prepared food - ever more ranges to stock; ever larger stores to accommodate them.

On the supply side, we caved into the EU some years ago now in losing most of our local abattoirs, so farmers are more likely to have to sell into a mass market with smaller margins than be able to sell more locally with fewer middle-men taking a cut.  The fact that we do not charge for road use means that there are benefits of scale in moving food in huge quantities around the country, again meaning you are less likely to sell direct to local retailers, but through buying groups that aggregate whole regional and even national production and put pressure on prices.  This same factor means we are happier jumping in the car and traveling ten miles to a superstore than patronising local stores in a local supply chain - and those out of town stores are not fairly taxed on their land use, as they can offer massive free car parks with no rates on them.

As premium produce tends to be more labour intensive, our tax system, based on employment, creates big disincentives in an already narrow margin industry to employing those extra people and getting better prices for premium goods.  And on the retail side, low skill jobs that sometimes probably would not be worth the minimum wage to smaller retailers can be better afforded by big operators offering shift work and annualised hours to enable them to operate when family owned retailers would all want to be in bed because their overheads for waiting up for one romantic couple in aisle three at three in the morning are just too high.

So, whilst it is obvious that this is all a lot more complicated that merely being about defending the farmer against the trolleygarchy, it should also be quite clear that the trail of blame as often as not lies in earlier and ongoing state action that helps protect the big retailers and squeeze the farmers - we have not even looked at the history of land subsidy (how do farmers expect to make money out of things that only a few years ago, relatively speaking, we kept lakes and mountains of across Europe?).  Instead of having yet more bureaucracy and regulation, the liberal response should be to look at where the market is already heavily skewed by state action and stop doing it!

Employment regulation, food laws and "consumer protection" (once it was enough to ensure that the meat wasn't green and smelly when you bought it, now it all expires days or weeks before it would actually be unfit and so in thrown out), transport policy, taxation policy, the openness of our political system to lobbying for favours - always benefiting the bigger players, all these need looking at before another layer of regulatory bollocks is imposed.

But has anyone spotted the little irony - that one of the biggest retailers the farmers are complaining about, ASDA, was once a farmers' collective, and their last Chief Executive was also a Tory MP!

Powered by Qumana

I'm cold. There's no doubt about it, it is cold. But that's no good reason to deny what seemingly everyone else is saying - that it's getting warmer, and dangerously so - is it? But the fact is, I'm not a climate scientist; I suspect if I were I would probably be little the wiser. But since I'm not, I do not have the evidence to say whether they are right or wrong on global warming: is it different this time from previous warming or cooling events; if it is, is it man-made; can we stop it; should we stop it; what happens if we don't. Clearly a few scientists in one of the world's newest sciences has made the case, and we're all, or nearly all at least, listening, and scared. And yes, we want to do something about it, well, lots of us anyway.

However, watching the very few snippets of news coverage from Copenhagen I have seen just makes me realise how wrong headed all this is. It's just like that G8 lot that turns my stomach so. Look, if such a great proportion of people have voted to elect people around the world on the basis of their promises to do something about climate change, if global warming and the environment more generally are so high on peoples' priorities, why on earth, in the name of all that is holy, do they think politicians and state, or supra-state, action is going to do anything about it.

Look, it is the state that has got us into this problem of anthropogenic global warming, if that's really what is going on. As any good mutualist will tell you, exploitation is only possible when the owners of capital and the appropriators of natural scarce commodities harness the power of the state in the defence of their interests. That goes for the exploitation of labour, just as much as the ability to externalise costs.

Everyone moans that libertarianism scarcely has anything to say about the environment. and it often seems that way, and even when it does its primary response is to talk about privatising the "commons" so that owners have a clear interest and a clear responsibility for the bits of it they use and if they abuse that in such a way as affects others' parts of it they can be held accountable. But I've now realised that that answer is merely touching on the symptoms, not the problem itself. And the problem is that it is the state that has created the very circumstances in which not only does such exploitation thrive, but that it is actually necessary just for economic actors to be able to deal with the economic disaster that is state "management" of macro-economic factors.

It is the state that fails, time and time again, to maintain a stable currency, resulting in great tsunamis of inflation against which producers have to swim just to stand still. It is the state that takes so much of its constituent economic actors' production that they have to double, literally, their production in order to turn an ordinary profit. And it is states that have given away huge swathes of "the commons" for virtually nothing, at the behest of the corporations who can best afford to persuade them to do so, without those corporations having to put a real value on those goods and account for them properly.

And all you folk think that states, even states working together - or herding cats as it is known - can put an end to all the environmentally destructive consequences of their previous folly? Utter codswallop. States can no more switch off the economic treadmill they have created and on which we must all run ever faster, unsustainably faster, than their leaderships appear to understand how it got started - for it is that treadmill that powers those same states, and their leaderships.

The power we need to learn to stop using, stop wasting, is that state power, which is so dependent on unsustainable economic activity to keep itself alive. It is not too late: people may claim that we have "reached the tipping point" and that things are now moving so fast that even if the real answer was once more "human scale production" and such mutualist niceties that would have meant we would have never got so far towards destroying the planet it's gone so far we need to reverse it, not merely slow down. But it's none of the sort - pull the plug on all the state protection of capital and we'd very quickly be able to shift our productive and innovative capacities into things other than the "thneeds" that economies (especially developing ones but certainly not exclusively) chuck out in unsustainable quantities because they are an easy way to maintain one's place on the treadmill.

No, I'm not a "climate change denier" - I just...don't...know. But what I am is deeply sceptical of "movements" demanding we all have to do this or that, especially when the thinly veiled, and at times over the last week or so not so veiled as the world-wide movement has become more and more shrill in its demands, calls are for some kind of world government action. If we, as individuals, really put this issue right there at the top of our concerns, then we, as individuals, will find ways, spontaneously, in a genuinely free market, one in which the actors cannot exploit either labour or nature because there can be no government to assist them in that, to respond to our demands.

And what I am sure about is that more state action is not the answer. It is that which got us to this point, and it is not that which will get us out of it, even if they can agree on anything meaningful. "Light Greens" know all this - inherently anarchist of the "human scale technology" school, brothers and sisters of mutualism and sensible liberal economics. But we are in the grip of the "Dark Greens" who appear to be nothing of the kind - a bunch of authoritarian crypto-communists who crave nothing more than some kind of world power pushing their message and the "initiatives" we will have to take to respond to that message. Let us not forget that it was and indeed is the most state controlled economies whose labour was forcibly cheap that belched out commons destroying pollution in unmatched quantities whilst doing absolutely nothing for the overall wealth of their citizens. Do we want to return to that sort of poverty - I suspect some would like us to, though they won't say so, because they know the prospect of their Green Dark Age is not one that will win them favours. They must not be given the opportunity to force us to do so.

All the emails, all the messages I've received over the last month, from demanding I get involved in something called "The Wave" to the endless e-mails from Avaaz and their likes claiming that our incompetent fool of a Prime Minister asked them to organise a world wide demo to show support for their negotiating position, have but created a movement feeding the ego-mania of a few individuals who see opportunities for themselves in global mandated action. They could have been used to create genuine democracy, operating through free markets, to create demand for the sort of innovations we will need if this "crisis" if that is what it is, is to be solved.

There are a few vocal Lib Dem members who appear to delight in every possible opportunity to denigrate libertarians in the party, and to dismiss us as the vanguard of a neo-Thatcherite "right" that they (correctly) feel would be incompatible with our party. I say that such denigrators are not only only being unpardonably rude and abusive to fellow party members, bringing the historical commitment to pluralism of opinion of the party and movement descended from the likes of J S Mill into disrepute, but also that they are themselves demonstrating a fundamental and pitiful ignorance of their own party's and philosophy's history. A history which both those who are now called libertarians on the one hand and the "social democratic liberals" that have tended to dominate the party and its descendents on the other for much of the past century share.

I can trace the moment of the beginning of my journey to libertarianism to a specific date, 28th May 2002, a lovely Tuesday afternoon in the Assembly Room at Oxford Town Hall. It was the first meeting of the tongue-twistingly Orwellian named "Economic and Social Wellbeing Overview and Scrutiny Committee" after I had been defeated in the local elections. I had been chair of the said committee prior to the elections and had been asked by the chair-elect, Lib Dem councillor Fiyaz Mughal, if I would mind attending the first one of the new council year as an observer in case there were any issues carried over from the previous year that I might assist with.

Being on the council one tends to get all wrapped up in the feeling that you are doing important work; that you are "making a difference"; "contributing to your community". And throughout my period on the council I had been known as someone who strongly believed that if we could only make government run service delivery that bit more efficient it would indeed be better than leaving it to private profiteering operators; that we might even make similar "profits" ourselves that could be used to fund other "good works" out of running quality services. So much enamoured was I of the possibility of public sector delivery being such a generator rather than consumer of resources I was known within the local party, and described at AGMs as "Jock, the one sitting over there on the far left".

This meeting blew a gaping hole in that rosy view of public sector delivery. I have always subsequently described it as a "meeting to discuss what they wanted to talk about next time they met to discuss what it was they were going to discuss in future meetings". It's not that I don't believe that most of the "elected ones" sincerely believe, or have convinced themselves at least, that they are well intentioned, and that a few of them actually are, but if they could see what I saw, "from the outside", I really felt that most of them, at least any with the vaguest modicum of intelligence, would begin to see that there could, nay must, be other, better, more efficient and even more "democratic" ways of delivering the sort of things they believed needed to be done.

I cannot think of any other sort of an organization that would allow policy and delivery to be handled through multiple meetings of rank amateurs who often don't really understand the report they are reading, and certainly don't appear to appreciate how tortuously slow the process is compared with any efficient organization whose ability to survive financially if nothing else would be compromised by such Byzantine processes demanded of a "democratically elected body" that was responsible for "spending others' money wisely".

But nothing, in that moment at that meeting, changed the reasons I had wanted to be on the council in the first place: that I thought that was the preferred way of helping make a difference for people less well off. I merely felt, albeit very powerfully, that this "representative government" thing was not the mechanism that could make people better off, more equal, more free. How I have moved from that small realization, to the position I hold today that almost no other mechanism could in fact be worse than this "representative government" thing; indeed that the heavy hand even of local government and other state sponsored interventions in fact stifles other potentially much better ways (such as through my own experience working on Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts) is a much longer tale.

Thankfully, with or without state attempts to prevent it, horrors such as the Soham murders and mercifully very few and far between. Strangers remain a much smaller source of abuse than people who are known to their victims - usually within families or extended family groups. The more recent case of "Baby P" in Haringey just goes to show how, even with the intense scrutiny of the state child protection apparatus, the worst cannot always be prevented.

But the idea of bureaucratically vetting virtually everyone, even in informal arrangements, who will assist in keeping kids activities going through volunteering to drive their own and their friends' kids to clubs and events and so on seems to me to threaten what must, or at least ought, to be the first line of child protection - friends and local communities.

A quick check on a database is not going to get to the source of abuse, it's just going to make people more suspicious of others. It is the mother who, taking their own child to school or the football match calls in to pick up one of their friends who will notice first a child that is showing signs of stress at home - upset when they leave the house, or upset when it's time to go home. Small character changes over time - maybe more sullen or moody or nervous or tired. All that sort of thing. They may pick up on a bit of yelling. Their own child may be more reluctant to travel with someone else's parent because they're always shouting at the kids and so on.

So, if you are at all nervous about something in your past (whether child related or not - a quarter of the adult population are not going to understand the nuances of what appears on a CRB check and may not want to take the risk), perhaps you decide that if you cannot be part of the match-day lift rota the best thing would be to withdraw your kid from that activity. So fewer and fewer people are in your informal support network, your child gets even more under your feet stuck at home all the time or making particular calls on your time because you're not sharing the burden with anyone else. Well, that's when a short temper might tip over into abuse where it would not have done previously.

You see the problem for me is that we have, over time, put far too much trust in the state to carry the responsibilities that we all, as families and communities, should really bear, and, in fact only can bear - for 200 staff at some government agency (even when augmented by stretched and harassed police or social services departments) cannot possibly build that sort of incidental and pervasive knowledge of all the families in informal community networks.

The fact is, that harassed by the state for the best part of half our labour, harassed by the state's protection of landed interests and the banking cartel making the big ticket items in life so much more expensive than they would be otherwise, we are more and more forced to work so long and so hard that we do not have as much time as we once did for these sort of community networking activities. Yet another example of the state taking away with one hand and then having to go to extraordinary, disproportionate, and I predict ineffectual lengths to try to make up for the consequences of their predation on ordinary people.

This pandering to the "something must be done" culture, is not necessarily about child protection as much as about getting more and more information about people and their networks into central databases. That is how the state, especially the "transformational state" works. And it must be resisted. What "must be done" instead then...

How about instead of all this futile bureaucracy, a "Good Samaritan" law that places a duty on people to act when they see or hear indications that a problem may be developing. Not as snitches necessarily, nor accusatory, but as someone who asks questions when they see a child in distress or behaving unusually, who can offer some support and, if problems don't resolve themselves, then an early intervention from more experienced assistance.

Put a bit of responsibility back onto friends, connections and communities, instead of trying to absolve them of all responsibility - and taking more of their money to do so. They are the only ones who really can logistically do the job.

Basically our system of government is so undermined and the problems facing the country so great that I do not any longer believe that parliament can fix this on its own. As regular readers will know I'd personally prefer to do without them entirely. Their infantilizing tendency is a drain on the country and their propensity to claim to be able to act on almost any issue in all our names is repugnant to me. Putting this right cannot be the work of a general election process, as parliamentary reform will be subsumed within a mish-mash of policies covering every area pressing the country and there is a grave danger that any parliament so elected will feel itself cleansed and only needing minor tweaks to rebuild confidence.

This must not be allowed to happen. The combination of the contempt in which parliament is now widely held by the people of Britain and the economic situation is, to me, an unprecedented and unmissable opportunity for the widest reforms since 1649. I believe that a centralized parliament at Westminster and a government accruing more and more powers is no longer required in the 21st century, having evolved throughout eras where even travel within Britain was difficult and when the monarchial system required ministers to be physically at court in order to advise and have laws approved.

Central government is no longer even a "necessary evil" to me but an unmitigated disaster that does more harm than good to this country and the freedom, prosperity and happiness of its people. And this is an opportunity to begin to wield the grim reapers' scythe on its powers and constitution. But if members are going to vote themselves an opportunity for repentance and expiation by accepting the SNP/Plaid call for immediate dissolution and an imminent general election it must not be allowed to believe that any parliament elected is thereby cured of these ills. The new parliament must have only one effective function - to be a temporary body in which to agree the ground rules for the new Britain that will take us into the twenty first century as a modern nation of sovereign individuals requiring as little government as possible, and so I put forward the following amendment to next week's debate:

1. Lest any parliament elected as a result of this Act consider itself to have been cleansed of miscreants and absolved of blame, it is hereby enacted that this parliament shall sit for no more than one year, and shall be dissolved on a date to be decided by said parliament but in any event not after 9th July 2010.

2. That the sole purposes and business of this parliament shall be to:

• a) oversee and co-ordinate the process of research, consultation and formulation of new constitutional arrangements to apply to future legislative and government institutions;

• b) agree by a two thirds majority a definitive declaration of the economic and fiscal problems facing the country in order that in any future election the electorate will be able to know that proposals for economic and fiscal policy to deal with these issues are based on a common understanding of what the problems actually are.

3. In respect of 2.a) consideration of constitutional reforms to include, inter alia:

• i) reformation of the methods of election of members of all parliaments, assemblies and local government bodies throughout the United Kingdom;

• ii) reform of the methods of selection or election of individuals carrying executive responsibility in any part of the governance of the United Kingdom;

• iii) the introduction of fixed term parliaments;

• iv) the introduction of an English Parliament;

• v) the abolition of parliament;

• vi) reform of the second chamber;

• vii) abolition of the second chamber;

• viii) devolution of any or all powers and competencies of parliament and ministers to government structures closer to the electorate, including structures not heretofore in existence that may be recommended by these reforms;

• ix) widespread reformation of those local levels of government to enable them to take on new roles devolved from Westminster;

and

• x) any other matter referred to the parliamentary commission on petition of more than one hundred thousand (100,000) ordinary electors of the United Kingdom.

4. In respect of 3.

• a) that members of all political parties who have contested national level election in the past two parliaments be invited to participate in these reviews on an equal footing with members elected at the forthcoming election;

• b) that professional experts in constitutional arrangements in other countries and in political science more generally be invited to participate;

• c) that leaders of each existing local authority and their opposition lead members be convened to a parallel reform body co-ordinated by the Local Government Association to be consulted by and to propose initiatives to the parliamentary commission on reform;

• d) That local groups of interested citizens be formed to scrutinize the work at all stages and to be consulted on all proposals

• e) If the new consitutional arrangement call for a parliament to be elected at Westminster, elections to said parliament under the new arrangements will take place not earlier than 10th October 2010 and not later than 31st October 2010.

5. That on or before the last day of the incoming parliament as in 1) above a series of options numbering no fewer than two and no more than three presented by the parliament and, with the consent of both houses, up to a further two options presented by petition of half a million (500,000) electors or more shall be put to the electors of the United Kingdom in a referendum conducted under a preferential voting system in which the option achieving 50% or more of the votes cast in the referendum, or, if none, the first to achieve 50% after elimination of the least favoured options and transfer of their votes to remaining options shall become the initial constitutional arrangements with effect from 10th July 2010.

6. In respect of 2.b)

• a) agreement of a majority of two thirds of the interim parliament shall be required to confirm the list of economic and fiscal problems;

• b) if, by a date no later than 28 days before the end of this parliament, 10th June 2010, no agreement has been reached by a two thirds majority of the parliament, the session on that day shall not rise until it is able to reach a two thirds majority, with no adjournment for refreshment or rest after midnight on 10th June 2010.

Now all the caveats about difficult cases and bad law notwithstanding, and the sensitivity of the case, being one of a severely wounded veteran fighting this government's ridiculous war in the arse end of the world, it is, quite categorically, none of Downing Street's business to be interfering in a local development control decision:

Joe Townsend lost his legs while serving in Afghanistan

Gordon Brown has ordered a council which told a disabled soldier he could not build a specially-adapted home on his grandparents' land to reconsider.

Wealden council had said the planned building in Pevensey, for Royal Marine Joe Townsend, 20, who lost his legs in Afghanistan, would be "intrusive".

But Downing Street said the "country owes Joe huge gratitude" and said the authority must "do the right thing".

The Sussex council said it had told the government it hoped to find a solution.

A statement issued by the Prime Minister's office said: "The whole country owes Joe huge gratitude for the sacrifice he has made for our country, and it is unacceptable that he is being stopped from having the home of his choice.

"Wealden District Council must do the right thing immediately and reconsider this case." [From BBC NEWS | England | Sussex | PM orders rethink on soldier home]

Now, I'm no great fan of the present development control system. It allows too many interfering busybodies to poke their nose into what people choose to do with their own land. A better system would be based on private negotiation with land occupiers surrounding the site who would be most directly affected.

However, with the benefit of modern technology, it is possible to have a look at such planning applications nowadays and see what was actually said by the council. What is also interesting to note is that the same grandfather made a similar application for a detached house in the grounds of his property seven years ago, and unless young Joe was a child soldier of thirteen, which even the British military seems to frown upon these days, it was not for him presumably!

The council made exactly the same observations in that case too - the proposal was for a building outside of the area designated for housing in a rural setting which would be intrusive into the rural views. Now whether that is actually true, or reasonable, of course I cannot tell from a distance, but they do at least appear to have been consistent.

What is more, they do not appear to be refusing outright any facility for Joe, but suggesting that it be attached to the existing house. There are all sorts of good reasons for this - not the least of which is the question of what happens when the specific need is no longer required, or when someone wants to sell the main house.

So, it would appear on a cursory investigation that Downing Street has been dragged into something that has been going on for a number of years - starting with a speculative application to create a new house for no specific purpose other than as an extra asset, in an area which the local plan seeks to preserve as rural open space, and which, on the face of it is now using poor Joe to achieve a similar aim.

Downing Street, of course, all too keen to be seen to be supporting "our boys" where they have so signally failed them previously - through lack of equipment in theatre, lack of facilities for wounded veterans of a conflict we shouldn't be in, and a complete disregard for the military covenant they owe to the good people they send out on their crazy geo-political adventures - appears to have become embroiled in a most inappropriate way in the affairs of the legal planning authority for the area.

Astonishing that they (the government or the BBC) can do what appears to be less investigation than I have managed in half an hour! But then that's meddling Gordon for you. Controlling everything but in control of nothing.

Of course, if my cursory investigation and resulting opinion is totally wrong, I shall retract all of this - but there is more than meets the eye ging on here and Downing Street have cocked up in "instructing" a local council to "do the right thing".

UPDATE:  It seems that lots of people have been getting involved in this.  The Fister's reaction appears to have been brought on by populist TV tosspot Noel Edmonds who featured the decision on his Sky TV show as mentioned at the Press Association here.  I wonder if Noel was given the full history?  It is also mentioned at the Telegraph and Guardian who both mention that David Cameron has got involved. 

Now, it may be that both this decision, and the decision seven years ago to refuse a similar applicaiton were a "matter of balance" as planners would say, and that reconsideration of the application, without an appeal, is warranted. 

But there's also a matter of principle here, that number 10, nor really David Cameron (the council is Conservative controlled incidentally I believe), should be butting in on the basis of a television program.  I wonder how his Tory councillors elsewhere feel about DC telling some of their number what to do - is this their definition of "localism"?

If this was a court of law (and development control is a "quasi-judicial" process) Noel Edmonds, the Fister and Dave would be held in contempt I think and any decision made on the basis of their intervention somewhat tainted.

Over the years the government's regional governance strategy has been a complete and utter shambles. The Regional Development Agencies are QUANGOs unaccountable to anyone other than within what was then the Department of Local Government, Transport and the Regions. Then a layer of pseudo accountability was added in the form of not directly elected Regional Assemblies(most members were at least appointed by local authorities to which they had themselves been elected). Their attempt to give the regions more "autonomy" by setting up directly elected assemblies foundered at the first attempt in the North East referendum. And justifiably - there was very little additional power being devolved to them and to all intents and purposes they appeared to be designed to accrete more power from lower level tiers of government like counties and districts.

So when they abandoned that idea they decided to replace the half-democratic Regional Assemblies with a minister and parliamentary select committee for each region. So what a surprise to see the results of yesterday's Commons' debate on the establishment of the regional committees. Yup, you guessed it, they have somehow contrived to make a practically undemocratic system somewhat less democratic and accountable.

The government has decided that, unlike with local government or even the half-bakedelected Regional Assemblies, they are going to keep a majority on every committee, irrespective of the proportion of MPs each party holds at Westminster for each individual region. Not only that, but they will allow the importing of MPs from other regions whose constituency responsibilities have nothing to do with the region they are going to be deliberating about.

So, a region in which the party of government holds the fewest number of Westminster seats will have a committee with a majority of members from the governing party scrutinizing the decisions and plans of a minister from that governing party which that region rejected when given the chance.

Democracy eh? Dontcha just love it! Here's the story from the Lib Dem newsfeed:

The Liberal Democrats yesterday accused the Government of abusing the opportunity to provide decent regional accountability by imposing its parliamentary majority on new regional Select Committees, even in areas where they have the fewest MPs. Shadow Leader of the House, Simon Hughes MP, challenged the proposed make up of the new committees in a House of Commons debate, as MPs voted in their favour yesterday. The need for the Committees to reflect voting patterns was, he said, a "central obligation" of devolution and something the Government had "failed to grasp". Simon illustrated the problems with the proposal by highlighting the situation in the south-west region...(read more)

There's been a bit of a giggle going round the blogs over Johann Hari's three point plan for revitalizing our democracy. The Centre Forum's Free Think blog described them, I hope with tongue firmly in cheek, as "radical"; they do not even trim the overgrown leaves of our democracy, let alone get at the root of the problem. Tom Papworth offers a characteristically more critical appraisal and says much that I would have said about Hari's ideas themselves ('boneheaded' and 'rent seeking').

But as his suggestion about compelling students to take a newspaper rather shows, Hari is one of the current establishment and it is that centralized establishment that is at the heart of the problem. Our politicians are so remote that we are being told we must rely on people like him, who few of us will ever know personally well enough to tell whether they're honest or not, in the pockets of the trough feeders, or even at the trough with them, to interpret accurately what's going on it the Westmonster village. This is not democracy in anything other than name.

If we want to make politics the topic of discussion around kitchen tables, in the pub or at coffee after Mass, democracy needs to come down to that level. Street level democracy. Most of the parties witter on a lot about "localism" (I notice "localism" seems to have replaced "devolution" largely in their lexicons), perhaps especially the Lib Dems, for whom devolution of power to the lowest practical level is part of the pre-amble to our constitution, the touchstone of our supposed beliefs. Yet even we don't really explore really radical alternatives.

And that's what we need. Our system of democracy was designed in an era in which central government didn't actually do a lot compared with today. Our "representatives" (of curse really only the representatives of the landed population) got themselves elected by a few sheep and packed off to Westmonster for whole sessions at a time - you could hardly hold surgeries in Edinburgh one evening and be back at Westmonster the next.

The civic movement grew up as a more local parallel system often in response to industrialization and urbanization and, at the height of its power was responsible for most welfare, health and education provision, policing and most local infrastructure like sewage, water supply and later still energy supply, whilst private interests built inter-city infrastructure such as toll roads and later railways. And even that was a centralization of power in cities from the previous parish system - you can still go round and see "Parish School" above the doors of those Edwardian school buildings - Glasgow has some particularly good examples. Until as recently as, I think, 1938, Oxford, for example, had at least three pretty well autonomous local authorities responsible for different parts of the city. A few years before that it still had separate public boards to deal with public health issues and so on.

Now, whilst we live in a fast moving globalized world, I question whether we actually need to rely on one representative for sixty odd thousand of us each packing off to Westmonster and fighting for our local hospitals, say, with a bloke from Hull, or having our policing priorities set by a woman from Redditch. I don't much care how they see such things in Redditch or Hull, it's Oxford I'm interested in and all these decisions ought to be more, much more, accessible to me made by much more locally accountable people. Even many of Westmonster's international negotiating functions are much less needed today. We trade for ourselves with people and businesses all over the planet. The sense that we need a national level broker wheeling and dealing in what is almost always rent-seeking and protectionist ways is diminishing rapidly.

Now there are two approaches to devolution and subsidiarity I'd suggest. The one, it seems the preferred one at Westmonster, amongst all the parties, is for we, the people, to wait for the crumbs to fall from the top table. Look at the department for Communities for example. It is this part of centralized government who announces initiatives, looks for councils to fight amongst themselves for a share of the resources to pilot them and ties them up in knots reporting back on outcomes so that "Communities" can decide whether to make those initiative compulsory on the rest of the local authorities, continue funding them and so on. I suggest that this gradualism is an excuse for the centre holding on to power. Each successful initiative dictated from above is a reason to keep these trough feeders where they are. Any ubnsuccessful ones of course are the fault of local authorities themselves or even ourselves, showing us not ready for such freedoms in their eyes.

But far better to my mind is actually reinventing our democratic structures fit for the modern era. Hari, I think, is wrong to say that nobody talks about government and politics. I hear people all the time complaining about politicians. It is, perhaps, comforting even for people to moan about government and politicians - we are able to assign responsibility for cock-ups to someone else. Someone far away in Westmonster and usually, since only about one in six hundred of us actually gets to vote for the individual who will become Prime Monster, someone we didn't put in power. Even local government does it, though often this is with half an eye on political gain at that higher level - persuading your Tory borough's population that something is Labour's doing at Westmonster is part of the "game" of getting a Tory MP elected next time, or vice versa. It is no wonder people are cynical and disengaged, if that's what they are.

And so I'd like to introduce you, if you haven't already heard about it, to the idea of "cellular democracy". Some commentators in the US (where they already have substantially more local freedoms than we do to innovate and compete with other localities of course), in what I see really as a modern development of Hume's "Perfect Commonwealth", suggest that democracy is no longer at a "human scale". Because we elect to remote bodies people we are likely never to meet (at least for more than their allotted ninety seconds on your doorstep when they want your vote) the system itself inflates the cost of democracy. Parties have to spend lots of money getting a nationwide message out. We rely on people like Hari, whom we don't know, to provide commentary and interpretation. Most importantly, perhaps, parties form their policies not around what is good for particular communities but around what is acceptable to the floating voters in a small number of marginal constituencies.

The idea is that we turn our system on its head. We say, as so many politicians like to claim to believe, even if their actions speak to the contrary, that government literally comes from the people, that we cede only so much of our individual sovereignty to some collective body as is necessary to meet those needs we are incapable, for reasons of economic efficiency usually, to provide for ourselves. You have the principal tier of government at a local level. A very local level. A street or small neighbourhood. Usually of no more than a few hundred residents. Candidates are likely to be known, approachable - you bump into them walking the dog or standing at the bus stop. They get their message across to you through real local contact - not some party worker umming and erring for a few seconds on your doorstep or increasingly over the phone, facelessly. Some even suggest that, like a party caucus in the US, these elections could be by show of hands once a year at a local meeting. In a sense, to the successful candidate, knowing who didn't vote for you gives you an incentive to find out why and work with those neighbours, for they will all be neighbours on whatever issues put them off voting for you.

And that's the only vote you get - except for the right of each five hundred strong neighbourhood to recall their representative. By default it is in the remit of those very local authorities - perhaps twenty members each elected by five hundred residents to meet all the needs of that community that must be delivered through collective action, voluntary co-operation. When they find that they cannot possibly meet some need for their 10,000 strong community - they couldn't, for example, justify building a large general hospital just for their small community - but they could decide to join up with other communities to form a second tier of government, to whom a representative will be delegated by the first level authority and a by-election held, or the runner up, or an alternate, would take their place on the first tier authority. These higher tiers need not even be geographically linked. They may decide to join up with others on particular functional issues. Take the hospital again, here in Oxford the John Radcliffe hospitals serve folk from Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Berkshire and so on so even ceding more control to a body based on the boundaries of Oxford or Oxfordshire does not serve all its users.

If a higher tier wants to raise some money, that request is passed down through the various levels and discussed in these local caucuses. People can really decide whether these higher tiers are offering them value for money, or whether they could meet those needs for themselves better. Each higher level authority, however, is only ministering to the needs of its member authorities in turn so it should be easier to follow the money trail and identify whether something is in fact good value for you, the individual, or your small neighbourhood.

Some will say this gives rise to all sorts of problems about "free loading" - communities that decide not to participate in higher level authorities but gain the benefits of their collective efforts. In such a case, perhaps the authorities that have collaborated could decide to charge more for people from the community that didn't collaborate on a particular facility or policy to access that facility - they will, I am sure, soon find it would be better to join to get the "members rate". But ultimately, one has to ask whether "free-loading" is any worse a problem than the egregious rent seeking and bloated costs of our existing system.

Wouldn't Barrie's Palace of Westminster make an interesting "novelty hotel" - just like Oxford's former prison has here. Or perhaps just a prison. That would be quite fitting, considering everything its occupants have stolen from us for decades. David Hume said that we ought to be ready with new ideas of government for the day when, perhaps, by common consent the existing system is seen as broken. I suggest that the epochal changes in communications and trade that have been made in the past twenty or thirty years is just such a moment, and if we are not to lose our democracy through lack of interest on the part of the electorate, it is more urgent than ever.

Area planning decisions to be recentralized? Area committees disbanded? Is this Labour in Oxford's response to near universal calls, in political terms (not least from their own Communities Department), for greater devolution and localism in our government structures?

They're pretty much already committed to the Stalinist recentralization of all planning decisions, slightly modified now to have two wider area based development control soviets as well as a supreme soviet committee in case even these two go against the Politburo's diktat or predilections. All because Labour councillors seemingly cannot work out how they could possibly "lobby" for their constituents wishes on some applications whilst helping decide on neighbouring wards' local applications.

I prefer the Danish system I believe it is, where areas more or less the size of streets have small committees purely dedicated to development control.

But in the absence of that a much more open system of area committee planning hearings would be a step forward rather than Labour's regressive centralizing power grab. Colleagues in other authorities received different legal advice to Oxford's and hold open discussion at their area committees where parish council members usually attend en masse and they claim get better decisions, more local acceptance of decisions and an all round feeling of compromise giving the better solutions for all. The rationale is that it doesn't matter how much time objectors and applicants spend at any individual stage of the process as the applicant in particular can have all the time they like to argue their case at appeal - that it's the entire process from start to finish that has to be fair to both sides.

Despite an initial increase in time spent in planning as everyone wanted to have their say, in practice, area planning meetings are now quite sophisticated - nobody feels the need to fill five minutes because can because they know anyone else could raise questions and so few are repeated. Good chairing of course helps, something also sadly lacking in Oxford City Council in my experience.

But centralizing planning is one thing, now there are rumours that Labour wants to disband area committees entirely. I hope one of them is reading this and will assure me this is not the case, or that something better will be put in their place. I have long argued that Oxford should reparish the city, shrink the city council effectively to an executive committee and have much more local control through parish or town councils. It's really not that long ago (in its history of over a thousand years) that Headington was administered by the Headington Urban District Council for example. Parish and Town Councils can actually have quite a lot of power - indeed more or less anything a higher level authority wishes to delegate to them.

I was at Thame Town Council a few months ago doing a presentation on Community Land Trusts, and I got the great feeling that this body was one that was prepared to fight its community's corner against the district level council when it mattered. Much moreso than where the committee is really a "branch meeting" of that district and collective responsibility trumps representing your constituents. In other parts of the county parishes precept as much as the district in council tax. Even in the few parts of Oxford where there are parishes it's more like 10% of the district level rate. Headington - or rather the current North East Area Committee area - is half as big again as Thame; easily able to support a stronger more local decision making body if the City Council took its claws out by at least as much!

But again, if the nirvana of local parish councils is not available to them for some reason, there are ways in which area committees can be given real power. Again, colleagues elsewhere only appoint a handful of central portfolio holders on their executive board, and then appoint one member of each area committee as ex officio executive members. Bound by collective responsibility each area committee executive representative can take a decision on a local issue, but which would normally fall under the competence of the executive board, there and then at the area committee meeting, advised by the open discussion amongst councillors and interested public at the area committee. Further, when they are at the executive committee, these area representatives can carry a majority, so if they are mandated by their areas in respect of a proposal by one of the core portfolio holders, they can overrule the core portfolio holders; effectively giving real positive control to those local community meetings collectively.

So, Oxford Labour, I'm sure there's more than just me out there, even if we do not often attend your City Council branch committee meetings, who appreciate the fact that they exist for us if we want to have our say on something, who will be very disappointed if you dismantle this structure and, Jack Straw like, leave it half reformed and more centralized.

Who wants to join a campaign to parish Oxford city then?

Nick Clegg, upon his election as Lib Dem leader, said that he wanted to break what he called the "cosy consensus" between Labour and the Tories that has impoverished Britain's political discourse. With Labour now nicking policies on welfare from the Tories, and both vying to be "tough on the work-shy", now is surely the time to offer a radical alternative.

It is not just their approach to benefits that is backwards in vision, but the whole assumption that "full employment" is the thing we should be aiming for. Such a policy actually highlights even more starkly the difference between being independently wealthy on the one hand and having to work for the basics of life on the other. In an era in which more and more of our tasks can be automated or even exported we should be aiming more to live off the financial assets that past productivity has created.

Liberals have, for a century, harboured the secrets of changing all that. Shamefully, over the past quarter of a century we have dropped every one of those secrets from our policy platform, presumably so we could compete in that "cosy consensus". We are only just on the cusp of really rediscovering the oldest of these...

Three key policies in particular would end this cycle of dependency once and for all. A bold claim for sure, but why not? We have gone through sixty years of the welfare state and are still arguing about the outcomes of welfare, health, housing and education, just as Beveridge was trying to address in his report.

The Single Tax - the one policy we are slowly re-engaging with. Though we seem to be stuck on the idea that LVT is simply an alternative tax, we need to get beyond that and understand that it goes to the very core of our relationship with the planet. Land, economic land that is, "everything in the material universe not created by the application of labour and capital" (so basically the things of nature that we all have to share between the 6bn of us born here), is the third factor of production. David Ricardo pointed out nearly two hundred years ago now that land, especially where it is a monopoly, such as with a physical location or site in the built environment or, say, a section of EM Spectrum that can only be used by one wireless operator at a time, tends to absorb the surplus value created by the labour and capital expended around it that makes it a popular location. Ground rent is created where there is more than one potential occupier that could make good, productive use of a site. It creates a massive transfer of wealth from those who don't own a popular site to those who do, through no effort on the part of the owner of that site.

As a non-land example, the UK government has auctioned off the part of the EM spectrum that carries the new WiMax wireless network signals to a single enterprise, Freedom4 for the whole of the UK. They now hold a monopoly on something that is a gift of nature that anyone else wanting to develop WiMAX networks have to use. They can therefore charge more or less what they like for licenses to others to use that part of the spectrum whilst doing precisely nothing to develop the services that would run on it.

Creating so called "free land" by capturing the value of these natural assets for the common wealth rather than having to tax economically beneficial processes like work and trade is absolutely essential to achieve equity. And the best time to do it would be the bottom of a property cycle. Hint. Hint!!

Citizen's Income - this is the real challenge to the "cosy consensus" that has emerged in the past few days on welfare. It was, I believe, Lib Dem policy up until around 1991. At the top of the recent property cycle there would have been enough land tax (on residential locations alone, setting aside what might be available through commercial, industrial, central business disrict or agricultural locations, airspace, EM spectrum or other forms of economic land) available to pay a citizen's income of about £100 per week per adult and a proportion of that for children depending on age. Further reforms, for example on seignorage - the extraordinary "profit" that creating money as debt gives to the banks that is rightfully part of the common wealth (since the money they "create" is denominated in our national currency) - would enable us to pay for the current health or education budgets if we wanted to, or to add around another £1,000 to the adult Citizen's Income.

People seem to have a problem with the idea of giving everyone an unconditional and non-withdrawable payment like a Citizen's Income because, they say, it will entrench the work-shy in their bad habits, maybe even create more of them. But let's face it, if Joseph Rowntree's lot reckons you need £13,400 to live a basic but comfortable life in the UK, less than half that is hardly going to be comfortable. And it's not meant to be comfortable. It is meant to be hard enough to persuade anyone who wants anything more than the basics of life to do something to earn some additional money. Minimum wage would be scrapped so people would be free to choose to accept a job for whatever they like - just to be able to top up their citizen's income to whatever level they want, but crucially, it would not be withdrawn when people start earning, so there is every incentive for all that nearly ten per cent of the population trapped on various benefit systems to work, even if only a little.

Yes, in the light of campaigns by the tabloids against "benefits scroungers" and the "something for nothing culture" it will be a difficult alternative to sell, but we should be prepared to do it. Think of it the other way around - if we all contribute to the value of locations by our activities around them, why should the dividend from that only go to those who can't work, say? Why not to all of us. It creates a cushion to fall back on in hard times and the ability, even if only for a short while, to be more choosy about the work we accept. No longer do we have to accept the lowest job just to survive. Instead of only the very wealthy gaining financial independence by privatising the collection of land rents, everyone gains a measure of financial security from the common wealth we all contribute to creating.

You could then say that any additional "benefits" must be provided locally, through locally raised taxes and much more accountably than at present. The "parish rate" would have to be used to provide say a basic education for those who were not earning anything more than their Citizen's Income and A&E type health services. But remember, much of the illness in society is because of the sort of poverty that both the Single Tax and the Citizen's Income would eradicate. And not having to pay several taxes on incomes - employers' and employees' NI, income and capital gains taxes - would enable more people to save more of their incomes in productive financial assets for their old age reducing the reliance on a crumbling state pensions system. And, apart from say the armed forces, the troughs at Westminster could be emptied and everyone sent home (and James Purnell would have to find a real job, or discover how life is on the dole perhaps!)

Ownership for All - this third plank of Liberal "redistributive" policy came to the fore in the middle decades of the twentieth century, this is crucial to creating more financial independence for more people. I'm not talking about the sort of free for all sale of state companies as in the eighties, which became in effect a gambling opportunity for anyone who had a few quid stashed away - "Let's have a flutter on Sid" type thing. This is about creating structures in which the workers can share in the success of their employers by becoming part owners. Much more like, say, John Lewis, or, in the seventies, the National Freight Corporation. And things have moved on even since then. New corporate forms such as limited liability partnerships enable different types of partners entitled to different proportions of the profit, not just the providers of the capital.

Again, with the Citizen's Income behind them enabling people to turn down work that does not offer optimum returns to the worker, more and more employers would have to offer the sort of package of benefits that enables ordinary workers to build up a financial stake for the future. These financial assets are fairer than putting all your capital assets in the single basket of one's home, which is not really "net wealth" in any case. More liberal than both socialist style "common ownership" and ownership solely by the capitalist, such partnerships would generate real wealth that can produce an income when you no longer want to work for whatever reason.

-------------------------------------------------

These three measures are, I believe, essential to a truly economic liberal platform. They share, equitably, the common wealth created by us all, and distribute more fairly the ownership of financial assets between those who provide capital and those who provide labour to an enterprise. They would reduce the cost of the basics of life by removing tariffs, subsidies and the private collection of rents and so instantly make people better off. They would leave a vanishingly small number of people genuinely unable to fend for themselves and the "parish rate" system would enable localities to support them while the work-shy would have a hard time surviving only on their Citizen's Income and those who are currently trapped on benefits have every incentive to take up even small amounts of work to top up their Citizen's Income.

It is time for such a revolution, for the Liberal Democrats and for the country. You don't have to be the first country on the planet to do this, but whoever does will instantly become the most liberal and economically just country on the planet and a magnet for international trade seeking to avoid damaging tariffs. We have gone sixty, a hundred, even, if herbert Spencer is to be believed a hundred and fifty years tinkering with redistributive policies involving moving incomes that people have worked to achieve around and still have not achieved the "greater good". The recent press coverage of the Welfare Green Paper shows that the politics of envy and "deserving and undeserving" are still alive and well. It is time to try these different strategies instead of "more of the same" attempts to be tough on the undefined undeserving.

And the biggest prize of all - it would enable us to get rid of vast swathes of bureaucracy and get those state employees into real productive work generating real additional wealth for the country instead of pushing other peoples' around the corridors of Whitehall.