small government

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.

Okay, so it should now be clear and out in the open that my preferred society would not have a politically organized coercive state government of any kind. It should be equally clear that this is not because I don't care about the least well off in society, but precisely because I do. And because I believe, in a creed consistent with that of some of the great thinkers of the "individualist left" of the past two centuries, that the state actually makes things worse for the people whom, nowadays at least, it (and therefore most of those active in the political "scene") claims it most wants to help. This alone should be enough to want to find an alternative solution to the questions of "social order" than the coercive state, setting aside all the questions about whether the mechanisms the state uses in its failure to achieve it stated aims are themselves just, and let alone the possibility that there are powers the state takes for itself that are almost inevitably unjust, such as waging war.

So, how can an avowedly anti-state campaigner work with those who not only accept and promote the need for a state but who also seek power for themselves or their associates within that state? Chris Mounsey, communication director of the Libertarian Party of the UK (LPUK) and blogger "Devil's Kitchen", said in his talk to the Libertarian Alliance Conference last weekend that LPUK would say that they seek power to get into the position of being able to abolish themselves and the structures they fight against. The same cannot be said of parties who, as one Lib Dem put it the other day, "see a positive role for an activist state". That is, after all a point of fundamental difference. They want a state: they are statists. I am a non-statist: I do not want a state. They believe a state can be inherently a force for good; I believe a state is inherently evil but at stages on the journey to eradicating it, it may appear to be a necessary one.

Well, here my own journey to my current anti-state position might be illustrative. My Mutualism did not spring fully formed in a political vacuum. I was a Liberal Democrat first, a Georgist second and lately an Individualist Anarchist. Indeed, it is worse: I was an active politician. A city councillor, no less. And rose to the dizzy heights of Deputy Satrap for Housing and Economic Destruction, as I put it last week. Hell, I even used to believe that if only, as a city council, we did things better, more efficiently and more business like, we could even make profits to use on other desirable projects instead of continually tapping up the tax payer for them. I could hardly have been more "statist" in some ways!

And yet, I know as I write that that does not tell the whole story. I had always been a civil libertarian (there is something about growing up gay in the 1980s I think that made me realize very personally the effects of the state interfering in private lives and people's emotions). And I was a vocal advocate of co-operatives and social enterprise, even for delivering what had been "state" provided goods. So I was the first to try and propose establishing a social enterprise to take over the city's underfunded leisure services. And I attempted to build a case for co-operative housing being included in the options available to local councils for housing stock transfer. I was the city council's rep on both the Oxford Credit Union and the Oxfordshire Social Enterprise Forum.

Two things happened when the good people of Risinghurst decided they no longer wanted my services as a city councillor. First, I was asked to go along to the first meeting after the elections of the scrutiny committee I had chaired in case there were odds and ends to pass on to the new committee. And, for the first time viewing a city council meeting from outside their little bubble around the big table, I had this overpowering sense that it was all one big talking shop. And often a talking shop with the least appropriate inexpert lay people on it. Second, a number of messages of commiseration from city officers said that my ideas would be missed, and I thought "well, if my ideas are really that good and so obviously beneficial why should the people of Oxford be deprived them by the political whim of a few hundred voters in one corner of the city?" Why should I not try and carry on to do them anyway. And so, by a variety of routes comes my involvement with Community Land Trusts, local financial initiatives, promoting social enterprise and so on.

Becoming, if you will, a businessman, albeit a "social entrepreneur" (I hope that's not stretching the term too far to fit what I am, which is hardly, thus far, terribly successful in that respect) has further entrenched my growing realization of how state interference can disrupt even the most socially necessary projects for which there is virtually unanimous community consent. And in getting to understand the property development business, its costs and practices and so on, has created a very powerful and practical understanding of how state protection of interests causes more problems that it then needs to try and solve - tight planning and housing regulation for example meaning that we end up subsidizing landowners even more to provide "affordable" housing whilst landing those who can lobby the best extraordinary profits for being the one site allowed for housing or whatever the case may be.

Couple all of that with a decade in which the role of the state in generating international hatred against us has been debated endlessly as a result of wars and foreign policy; in which spin has outshone substance at home, in which despite massive investment in public services changes for the better seem to have been few and far between whether you judge that by health outcomes, education outcomes, homelessness, social mobility, personal indebtedness, wealth imbalances or whatever; in which civil liberties have been eroded and our lives catalogued and pried into more than ever; and now, at the end of which it seems like few if any in public positions could see what some of us said was staring us in the face - the financial tsunami, and even now don't acknowledge their own part in the creation of it is it any wonder one might turn more than a little cynical about the ability of government actually to do anything about all of this?

So, all else aside, I rather hope that this "testimony" of my political journey might prompt a few people to think about their own expectations of the state and how it might have fulfilled them or not or whether the supposed benefits of the state are worth the "collateral damage" state action often leaves in its wake (as the decade's most repugnant euphemism for state perpetrated destruction would put it). And I want them to ask themselves whether, if they ever had a good policy idea for some much needed commodity or service, they really feel that the probability of them seeing that idea to fruition would be enhanced by being done by government and so called democratic decision-making or diminished through red tape and the best intentions of "planners."

But even if it leaves you unmoved, you can yet play an important part in the "Mutualist revolution". For this is where I feel that working within our local political networks can achieve change faster than trying to influence an entire party's policy all at once. When we have a good idea, and especially when it is up and running, we need to be publicising such things through those networks, hoping that they in turn will spread the message "upwards" to others in their parties and "outwards" to their colleagues elsewhere.  Regularly the single most common question when one proposes something new to councillors seems to be "where has it been done previously?  They may want to innovate but appear scared to do so.  Also, spreading the news upward can reach policy makers quite quickly.  For example in the Lib Dems it always seems like there is a bit of a scramble for good, worthwhile policy motions to go to regional conferences. All these get reported up to Federal Policy Committee, and so a small successful local initiative could soon get the attention of people in a position to make policy nationwide.

Perhaps we could call it "viral-anarchism".

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.

Let me make no bones about this: I am now of the opinion, and have been for some while, that the only true way to Liberty for all is by abolishing government entirely: traditionally termed "anarchism". I'm also not much good at gradualism: someone once said to me that gradualism is a recipe for ultimate failure, and I agree. Give me a revolutionary change; get it over and done with and let us enjoy our new way of life as quickly as possible.

This is because I am, in Hayek's terms as explained in his "Why I am not a conservative", a genuine liberal - one who is willing to take a leap forward into the unknown without first having to know absolutely the outcome; that I have an unshakeable optimism that humanity is so damned clever that it will find, co-operatively rather than coercively, ways of dealing with any problems such change throws up; that if the cause is important enough we will find along the way solutions to issues as they arise.

More importantly (and not merely because I am a recent convert to voluntarism) I feel that the best time for such revolutionary change for many generations is now. Not only that but if we do miss this present opportunity we could actually find ourselves being carried away from the direction of liberty, both nationally and globally and for a considerable time - a dark age. The way governments have been able to finance themselves and their bribes of "safety nets"- both in terms of welfare and physical security - thus far, through control and taxation of their citizens, is being challenged and undermined in ever more popularly accessible ways - whether through travel, virtualization or communication - which happen also to be the best tools for helping to spread the revolution.

For the state to maintain this control in the face of these ever widening vistas of freedom open to its citizens will require ever firmer crackdowns and monitoring of things like travel and communications, if only to try and "follow the money" to ensure that people are taxed "properly". When most international trade had to be done through intermediary companies it was relatively simple to have someone at Custom House Quay signing things in and out of the country, but when we can buy and sell things individual to individual around the globe that all arrive here in millions of small packages addressed direct to the individual involved in the trade it requires a great deal more effort to monitor. Just because electronic communications leave traces that make it possible to track them automatically does not mean we should do so. If the Royal Mail steamed open every letter or package we would be appalled - but of course if it did the whole thing would grind to a halt. In an era where we can potentially work online for anyone in the world and be paid in a location and currency of our choice, where do our taxes go?

But, where the printing press heralded the death-knell of clericalism and the steam engine of agrarian feudalism so mass communication and transport heralds the end of the need for representative government. And just as, even if the first stages of the reformation ushered in by the end of clericalism and industrial capitalism taking over from agrarian feudalism were painful for some they have both been beneficial for most in the longer term, so the wrench from a deeply entrenched statism will also likely affect some more positively than others, the pace of contemporary change and innovation is such that this could be one epochal change in which we are able to fix those problems in "real time" and spread them rapidly around the globe.

Now I am of course familiar with many arguments that most of you might want to throw at me about "positive liberty", and how collective action is essential for giving people opportunities the "market" could not give everyone: after all, I used to make such arguments as well. Let me start with what ought to be an obvious statement: there is nothing a state can do that individuals, sometimes acting together in some way other than through government, could not do, by way of creating these "positive liberty" opportunities.

Leave aside for a moment the obviously crucial issue of whether they would create such "positive liberty" opportunities in the absence of a government forcing them to do so; can you honestly think of any positive function the state currently provides that only a state could provide? Leave aside also, which is a part of the previous question, whether non-state non-coercive mechanisms could deliver such "positive liberties" as "efficiently" or "cost effectively" as the state alternative. I am merely trying to get your agreement at least that yes, we could have private education, we could have private health care, we could have private charitable welfare safety nets, we could have non-state constructed and owned transport systems and infrastructure, we could have non-state security guards, investigative services and arbitration services.

Assuming that you are with me so far then, that the state is not the only conceivable mechanism that could deliver such positive liberty opportunities we ought to look at what price we pay for having a state provide all these things. I don't mean the direct cost of these "positives" but any "negatives" having a state provide them brings; the "collateral damage" if you like.

And what an appropriate statist phrase that is, for we should start with the area in which that phrase resonates the most. It has been estimated that somewhere between 175 MILLION and 230 MILLION people have lost their lives over the past century in wars between and within states and in politically motivated atrocities, human rights abuses and recklessness about the consequences of political policy - things like the often forgotten million or two Germans that died having been ejected from Eastern European countries after WWII not caring where they were to go or how they were to get there alive. And that doesn't include all those killed, for example, through law enforcement where the "crimes" being enforced against do not or should not breach the "harm" principle beloved of liberals.

Then there is the direct cost of governments providing these "positive liberty" opportunities; the welfare state, redistribution and so on paid for largely out of taxes. Here in the UK we are approaching a point at which tax will take 50% of our national income. Despite decades of many governments trying to create a system that is fair and redistributive (what they like to call "progressive"), it is still the case that the least well off taxpayers tend to be paying a greater share of their income in taxes than anyone else. So whatever the benefits various political parties may have tried to bribe the electorate with, assuming that when liberals express concern about lack of these positive liberty opportunities they are mostly concerned about the least well off, we find that for much of the time the poor (especially the working poor) are paying the most, proportionately, for providing these services to their fellow less well off citizens. As it has been said when you rob Peter to pay Paul, you are sure of the support of Paul.

Indirect costs are just as important, though. When the state provides all these things it usually does so as an actual or a de facto monopoly. Yes, we have a small private education system, a small private health care market and so on (and even in both of them they are heavily regulated by government so don't offer an open choice), but essentially most of what the state provides is done by way of monopoly. Even if the state only finances and hires corporations actually to provide the service, as it does with much infrastructure, including all the so-called privatized utilities in the UK, the state either controls who gets the contracts or heavily regulates those who provide quasi-private services.

There is little incentive to do all this efficiently, except that at some point, and the tax-paying public are remarkably tolerant about this, we might vote them out if we think they are spending too much or not efficiently enough. There are few price mechanisms even to indicate if they are doing things efficiently and they end up inventing measures and league tables to approximate for some market mechanism. And they are frequently done on a massive scale, so that initiative is difficult and best practice spreads slowly and with deliberate politically controlled pace. The tax paying public are of course very tolerant because so long as they perceive that more people are paying more than them as individuals then they must be getting as good a deal as it is possible to get.

And finally, but crucially for me, there is the play-off, for liberals at least, with "negative liberty" that all this, and the rest of the state's interference in our lives, creates. Monopolistic services reduce choice. Regulatory burdens reduce entrepreneurialism both in the areas dominated by public provision but also throughout the economy - 80% of the sample of 25,000 small businesses surveyed recently in Oxfordshire said that their biggest headaches were regulatory burdens, especially keeping pace with what often seem like arbitrary change in regulation.

Tax, whichever way you cut it is an imposition on peoples' earnings and wealth. Even for those who feel that the democratic process means that the citizen is effectively agreeing to this as a price of their involvement in that society, in reality we always know that there are people who will not agree with the particular mix of taxes, the particular uses the money is put to and so on. For them, and this could be 49% of the voters, never mind the electorate, it remains an imposition.

In order to enforce this agreement of the bare majority (or the first past the post here in the UK of course - so it is most of the time not even a majority) the state must have the power to threaten people who do not wish to comply. This monopoly of the use of force must always be a challenge for the lover of Liberty. This monopoly is what gives the state the ability to impact on so many other arbitrary areas of our lives. Like any other monopoly it in inherently inefficient. As a monopoly wielded by one group of citizens over another and for which fierce political competition to control it exists, there is always a temptation to bid for that power by offering new restrictions on others, until you end up with the sort of bloated over-legislated state we see in the UK today, which, even with a willing government and citizenry will take many decades to dismantle.

So, for me, given all these costs of having a state monopolistic form of government, against the possibility that there are many other mechanisms for delivering the "positive liberty" type functions social liberals say makes that state essential, even if some of them are prepared to admit it might be a "necessary evil" it is they who must prove the negatives are worth those positives. Circular arguments, or arguments solely from previous authority, are not enough - "the state provides education because people look to the state to provide education, or because the state has 'always' provided education". If you want to be considered in the least bit liberal, for me, you need to have a robust cost-benefit narrative about the state that it is the most efficient, most equitable and, given those other negatives, least impacting on other aspects of life way of delivering these goods.

Is there anyone willing to give such a thing a go. I personally believe it is an impossible case to argue.

So, we've got another cunning plan from the Balls-up that is our government led education system. This being the government that, twelve years ago, came to power on the mantra "Education, education, education". The sad fact is that for all their central interference 40% of kids born at the beginning of this era of "Education, education, education" cannot read satisfactorily, despite the literacy hour, the special measures and all the money (for I don't begrudge them the fact that they have spent money, just that they seem incapable of spending it wisely) spent on academies and such like.

It seems that change in state provided services can not be incremental change, but complete u-turns. Yet turning around a system of this size and bureaucracy is like turning the proverbial super-tanker around - a long slow process which is, unless you know precisely your destination is behind you a waste of time and money that could have been used to deliver actual teaching to actual children. And all too often we see that once one public sector super-tanker has managed to turn round, another politician has another cunning plan and the process begins again. Well, you can see where that will get you in the long run - nowhere.

This, I am afraid, is the fate of all centrally planned public services. The government has to be seen to be being fair to everyone because it is the main provider. In fact of course it is usually fairer to those constituencies that elect members of the governing party as their representative, or ones they wish to win over next time. So it has to roll out massive change, perhaps even ignoring those who have managed to make good headway despite the dog's dinner of central policy because everyone's got to do things the same way otherwise it's a "lottery" provision or whatever.

There can be no meaningfully functioning market in ideas, pedagogic technique, innovative governance or anything else, because all must be seen to be delivering the same sort of product everywhere. Well this is nonsense. To those who claim that "only the state can deliver essential services like education" I ask looking at yesterday's announcement, and the many other tumultuous changes of direction over the past sixty years, how do you believe such a system can possibly ever be efficient and good at producing its end product - an educated citizenry?

Or, as Prime Minister Hacker said once to Sir Humphrey "do you mean to say that the state of schooling in Britain today is what the education department planned?"

We need change now, "change we can believe in", and the only change I can believe in is to remove schooling from state hands completely and encourage competition, both the quicker to spread the best teaching and learning practices and the better to create efficiencies in the system as a whole that will allow for more specialization and meaningful differences between schools and other training providers so that people can choose for their children the style, environment and outcomes that they, not the government, feel is appropriate.

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.

Several centuries ago, momentous change swept Europe. Whether you date it from as far back as 1439 and Gutenberg's printing press, Luther's 95 Theses in 1517 or perhaps Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy in 1534 or Elizabeth I's in 1559, the Reformation changed the world forever. A central theological theme of protestant reformers was that we did not need corrupt, money grabbing, clerics who made up their own hocus pocus rules to control the minds and actions of the rest of the people and to intercede for us with God; that we could all be masters of our own spiritual destiny through our personal relationship with God.

It was called the "Priesthood of all Believers". It was largely made possible by the rising availability of printed books, rather than publishing controlled by those corrupt clerics and their hangers on, and in particular, by the availability of the main faith texts in the local languages everyone could understand instead of the deliberately obfuscating Latin used by the clerics.

Fast forward to the turn of the twenty-first century. Another clever man had invented a new means of personal communication that would reach billions in a few years, enabling more than ever previously people from all corners of the world and all shades of opinion to communicate, collaborate and co-operate on all sorts of projects previously imagined to be bigger than could be managed by individuals and small groups of locally connected people.

A few years later we have been given an insight into the corruption and money grabbing antics of the people who have persuaded us that they are capable of ruling us, making decisions for us, relieving us of so much of our property for the "common(s) good".

It is time for a new Reformation. A secular Reformation. A civil Reformation. Founded on the core principle of the "Sovereignty of all Citizens". Who will be brave enough to cast out the modern day clerics, to instigate the Dissolution of the Bureaucracy?

What the Beeb could not do for Gaza, John Redwood does today as he boldly launches an appeal on behalf of struggling "public sector fat cats":

Today I would like you to spare a thought and a few billion for the public sector fat cats. They have been going through a miserable time lately.

Fred Goodwin has been pilloried for his noble action in creating the largest loss making bank in UK financial history and for delivering it safely into the public sector.

Chief Executives the length and breadth of local government and quango land have been subject to abusive intrusions in to the privacy of their rewards by the Taxpayers Alliance, the Redwood website and others.

They should be supported for increasing the costs of public services year after year, for keeping productivity down, and for tirelessly recruiting so many extra administrators, spin doctors, regulators and management consultants to help them. We need all the jobs we can get in a recession. One man’s productivity gain can be another man’s job loss.

Read the rest at The Sunday appeal. I thought it was quite funny anyway.

The past couple of days have seen parents and children around England at least waiting to hear whether they have got into their chosen schools in the annual ritual of place allocations by LEAs. Many will have been disappointed. There are the usual accusations that others get in by paying their way through buying property in the right catchment area. Others, in places such as Brighton, may have thought that was a way to get into their chosen school only to find places allocated by lottery.

This weekend also sees the Lib Dem spring conference in Harrogate discussing its education proposals. So I've been meaning to write about selection in education because I firmly believe that neither the current system nor the Lib Dem proposals go nearly far enough in that regard and I think that it is key to ensuring we have a good education system into the future.

While the state is the effective monopoly supplier as well as the ultimate judge of success or failure by one of its subsidiaries, the schools, and while it effectively measures that success or failure by results of examinations that are set nationwide based on a nationwide curriculum, one has to wonder what the big fuss is. It is interesting perhaps to note also this week that it has been announced that one of the best schools in the country by results is dropping the national GCSE examination.

When the comprehensive system started, its aim was to produce a uniformly good standard of education in every locality; pupils would attend their local school knowing it was as good as any other; LEAs would have reasonably good "market" intelligence on numbers of prospective pupils in a catchment area well ahead of time so that capacity could be planned in advance. That so many will be disappointed this week is ample proof that this aim has not been realized.

And whilst "selection" in the sense of the system or the school deciding who can go where on the basis of ability is largely still anathema to most proponents of state education, the answer to the failure of uniform excellence has been a creeping introduction of selection by parents, by a false "market" in superficially specialist schools neither of which do any more than create an illusion of choice. And sure, if you were simply herded to either a grammar or a comp/sec modern on the basis of an exam result disappointment and resentment may follow.

But by selection I mean a system in which yes, schools may select on a whole host of criteria depending on their individual specialization or unique selling point, but also in which parents and pupils have a wider selection and are enabled to apply to the most appropriate school for their child, with assistance and advice from professionals perhaps. Expectations are managed better. Everyone knows not every child is a genius. Everyone knows not every child is going to be Oxbridge material and may better find their talents in some more hands-on facility like the German Hauptschule.

Every child is different, and the idea that each one's talents can be fully explored and developed in a conglomerate school of 1500 pupils or more focussing on the same curriculum and being judged by the same league tables and examination measures just seems wrong. If opting out of the single public examination system is good enough for the top performing schools, why not for ones that address very different needs?

The Lib Dem paper to be discussed today starts from reasonable principles; that everyone should have a fair start in life and that that means a quality education; that control should not be exercised so centrally from Westminster (I was quite shocked to see on a program about Margaret Thatcher the other day that her favourite Keith Joseph insisted on vetting every course in the National Curriculum personally so the Tories have proven just as bad in the past for centralization for all their talk about more diverse schools); that there should be more freedom in establishing schools.

But from there I'm afraid it is all down hill for me. Why aspire to give per pupil funding in the poorest areas to match the average private school fees? Why not encourage those private schools to compete for the same pool of pupils with vouchers or other incentives to establish branches in less well off areas? The policy paper assumes that the "state" at some level or other, rather than the "customer", is still the only body that can make education work for all. In Oxford, between the state and the private sector secondary level, we have about 9000 places. I realize the private sector takes pupils from outside the city of course but if we were looking, say, at schools averaging 300-ish pupils we could have over thirty to choose from, each with their unique selling points, each competing for a niche in the market to be successful in.

Moreover, whilst education is an important factor in social and economic mobility and therefore in the social liberal aims of opportunity for all, far more important still, even today, are the embedded inequities of land monopoly and corporate welfare. We need to cut education free from the state, but do it on the basis that we have also wiped away those state protected monopolies of land and money that keep people "in their place" more surely than any deficiency of education. For that would also encourage more mixed neighbourhoods - as middle class tax savvy households are more prepared to bring their relative wealth into less well off areas to take advantage of lower taxes - leaving them more money to spend on things like education and further encouraging those with a good reputation for running schools that add value to open up branches in an area that would then be available also to the less well off local households.

We want to ban selection completely so far as I can see. In the future, with our national economy's reliance on financial services likely to be severely reduced in the foreseeable future and our manufacturing still in decline, we need to push our most high achieving children so they invent the things that will give us a production base for the national wealth into the future. If we are to nurture diversity in our children we need to be able to select both ways - just as we do with higher education.

I shall find it very difficult to continue to support a party with such a one-size-fits all education policy. A policy which is apparently not prepared to question whether or not the state is the best provider but just assume there is something unique about the education "market" that means private provision could not be better and more efficient. If only 7% of schools are currently private, and can still produce education with an average cost not far above what the state currently budgets, how much more competitive would they be with the other 93% of the market opened up to them? Such assumptions about the state's ability versus the private sector's ability to deliver are, quite frankly, contrary to our own constitution.

Earlier I spent a very pleasant, if slightly nerve-wracking, evening "chairing" the final "Meet the Author" session of my employer, Oxford Brookes University's, "Love and Justice Month". Our guest author, and an honorary graduate from the 2008 round of graduations, was Teresa Hayter, author of "Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls".

Teresa is a long time campaigner against immigration controls and the asylum machismo that tabloid editors and leading politicians promulgate and revel in. She was a founder member of the Campaign to Close Campsfield (with which Lib Dem MP Evan Harris is often involved) way back in 1993 when I barely knew the place existed. Campsfield is one of the several Immigration Reception/Detention/Removal (whatever the phrase is this year) centers with which our government pursues its racist, authoritarian, violent and at times lethal "war on the foreign poor".

Towards the end of the discussion session after Teresa's inspiring talk one person asked what the practical political and social implications would be of a completely open borders policy. And it struck me; just what is a state without borders? After all, one view of the state is that it is the territorial monopoly of arbitration. And if you don't demarcate that territory somehow, beat the bounds, spray like a wandering dog-fox the limits of that monopoly, in what way are you a state at all?

Now, the free movement of people is one thing (and I agree, absolutely, with it), but it seems to me that it is just a visible and, to an extent, preventable - in the sense that you can turn people around; treat them like shit and send them home to God knows what - symptom of the new global world we live in.

As I have written many times before, the communication networks that now span the globe make our less visible borders much more porous. Whether it is forming alliances with like minded people in other countries (for good or ill), moving capital around the globe to take advantage of favourable tax regimes, trading with ever smaller units of production, gradually sidelining the mighty intermediary trans-national corporations in favour of dealing with individuals and smaller and medium sized enterprises in other countries.

And you know, it may sound obvious, but we need to remember, recognize for the first time for some, that the genie of globalization (whilst the definition of what that means might be in dispute) is well and truly out of the bottle. We no longer live in a world in which China is "over there somewhere" - a blob on a map that was never pink but about which we knew little - or in which someone in a shanty town in Mumbai cannot see live images of the once "mother country" and aspire to some different life. Or in which we can be oblivious to goings on in the "dark continent" between Dr Livingstone's occasional letters home. In which football competitions are between small towns and cities in one country or the players all from the local community.

Yet, for all our former national adventurous spirit, colonizing an empire on which the sun never set, here we sit, cowering on our rock off the edge of Europe besieged by the idea that everyone wants to come here and destroy our way of life or that our tax revenues are steadily going down the drain in some tax haven somewhere. Migration is a two way thing. For all that people do want to come here, we should be matching that with still pioneering people going out into the wider world. But our world seems to want to enforce some kind of permanence through its nation states - you belong to one or another, very occasionally a couple at the same time, which crystalizes both the desires and fears of migration.

Rather than people choosing to come here for a job for a few years and then heading off somewhere else, or even just "back home", our immigration controls make people choose between staying permanently or going permanently (unless, that is, you happen to come from a most favoured rich country). If we are truly in a globalized world we should be feeling a lot freer than, say, we were thirty years ago when my parents as ex-pats dragged me around various African countries, to do just that: a job here, a job there, a holiday somewhere else, some time back home; all the time maximizing the return from each of our skills.

And if we don't pick up that challenge, if we choose to turn our backs and pretend that old world of bi-monthly dispatches from the colonies is still how it is "out there", like a child hiding our eyes and believing that because we can't see others they can't see us, the alternative is very grim indeed; a war of all against all. And, like that child, it is a scary world out there - we don't know quite what would happen if we open up here, open up there.

I happened to be reading Hayek's postscript to the "Constitution of Liberty" too the other day in which he explains "Why I am not a conservative" and I probably for the first time realized the essential difference between liberal and conservative. Liberty demands a leap into the unknown. Authority, conservative or socialist, on the other hand demands a plan. Without that plan they cannot feel in control; without being damn sure, or as sure as they can be, about the outcome, they dare not proceed; true "progress" is stopped in its tracks. And it seems innate in our collective psyche - how many times have I been explaining what I think is a bright new idea to find the first question on everyone's lips is "where have they done this before" - and that's just amongst my "liberal" friends!

At an individual level, there is a vast industry in "life coaching"; trying to teach us to push our boundaries, leave our comfort zone, to trust that we can overcome whatever obstacles may fall into our path when we branch off into new experiences and journeys. We are told that's what makes us grow, to succeed; that without pain there is no gain, or that discomfort is what makes us stronger through dealing with it. But at the level of the state, of government, we do not heed that same advice.

Some, usually on what they call the "left", bleat on that libertarian policies would mean a "return" to a vicious, beggar everyone else "Victorian laissez-faire" world (which I keep reminding them in vain was precisely the system which prompted the early anarchists and libertarians to work against the state entrenched systemic inequity and monopolies they saw skewed the outcome of that laissez-faire) in which there would be no support for the poor and hapless. They need to learn to trust in humanity. We have been "schooled" for over a century now into a more or less consensus that we do need to help support some others who cannot help themselves. The authoritarian will say only the "state" can ensure that mutual assistance can be assured fairly. That if we take that state away, there would be no hospitals, no schools, or that they would be only exclusive, unavailable to many or even most of the population. But in doing so, that state is necessarily coercive, illiberal, and suffocating.

We need to free people up to care, not to subcontract caring to some state entity that at best has only a partial mandate. And we will choose, at times, not to care - or at least to prioritize caring for ourselves over others when we barely have enough for ourselves. We can only guess that, on balance, there will always be enough people choosing to care such that those who are less fortunate through no fault of their own are not left defenseless or destitute. It's not a plan and it's inherently difficult to manage, predict or measure but it is what liberty is about.

But the world is getting smaller all the time. If we do not free ourselves from that micro-managed planned outcome authority on our own, it may become inevitable anyway simply because the Cnut-like alternative is too horrible for even the statists to contemplate or when we peasants realize how horrible what they contemplate for us looks like. We may as well choose to trust in a positive vision of humanity rather than get more and more worked up about defending the status-quo until something gives, suddenly and explosively.

No wonder the Big Brother state is getting worried about all these pressures on it. Lots of powerful and wannabe powerful, or just self-important, people are threatened with being cut down to size; people who think they know better than the rest of us and want the opportunity to force their vision on the rest of us. Let us hope us serfs begin to get agitated!