social enterprise

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's been an awful lot of terminologically inexact harrumphing going on all week, in no small part I hope egged on by my contributions to the "debate" within the party. The "debate" that is, about neo-Thatcherite Tory entryist libertanarchist corporate shills who are either a. trying to capture the soul of the party for their wicked ends or b. seriously deluding themselves that it is possible to persuade the Lib Dems to be a truly liberal party.

What I have learned this week is that:

• My unknown father must have been a Tory, perhaps even one of those grandee types who gets to tup one of the milk-maids for his fourteenth birthday just to make sure he's not one of those left-footers that needs to be put away in a military school.
• I must have, unbeknownst to me, been a closet Con all my life until waking up one morning and thinking "hey, I know, the best place to promote my arch-conservative ideas would be in the liberal party, I think I'll join them and make my life difficult."
• Either that, or I have come under the evil influence of such closet Tories since I joined the party, possibly closet Tories with names like Smith, Ricardo, Paine, Spencer, Mill or Henry George, and "double agents" such as Fred "Why I am not a conservative, no wait, I really am...or maybe not" Hayek. Or ideas from such evil closet Tories speaking from beyond their graves.
• I shouldn't be in the party, because I believe in a world "in which no-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity".
• I should be in the party, because, erm, I believe in a world "in which no-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity".
• I want to have carnal relations with an octogenerian former Prime Minister and a dead former US President in tribute to the fact that they are the true leaders of my global conspiracy theorist ideology. Possibly some kind of spit-roast arrangement. Perhaps filmed by Ann Coulter.
• I am the willing, small dicked, narrow minded, socially inadequate gnarled goblin herald of the twin devils of inequality and wealth and their four horsemen; monopoly, capitalism, markets and MacDonalds.
• When I grow up, I'll find myself under a bed, or out of a tree, or off a trolley.

Still, this might seem to have little to do with the "five wars" and "four battles" of my title. I just wanted you to be able to read what I'm about to say knowing what some others think of me and my type.

Liberalism cannot win the five wars without fighting the four battles. In other words you cannot be a "social liberal" truly without fighting those battles the "classical liberals" first promoted.

The five wars, of course, are from the Revelations of St William, first Baron Bill of Beveridge. More precisely his "war on the five giant evils" that stalked the entire fabric of a society emerging from a devastating world war - Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. The cult of St William is observed by many in the party who use his Revelations to stake the claim that the "welfare state" in Britain was a "Liberal" invention that defines the essence of British Liberalism of the entire 20th century. So dominant is this cult at times that they may even claim that some time in that century, perhaps early on, say in 1911 or something, there was a "Year Zero" for British Liberals before which it is somehow no longer permissible to look for answers to modern problems.

The thing is, that many of the intractable problems that the Venerable Leonard and St William worked on appear to remain quite intractable. A hundred years later. When we realize this, we find this warning from the pre-year zero Liberal Anti-christ Herbert de Spencer prescient:

"To mitigate distress appearing needful for the production of the “greatest happiness,” the English people have sanctioned upwards of one hundred acts in Parliament having this end in view, each of them arising out of the failure or incompleteness of previous legislation. Men are nevertheless still discontented with the Poor Laws, and we are seemingly as far as ever from their satisfactory settlement."

...how many thousands now more acts in Parliament do we need to have, tinkering with this, toying with that, before we listen to him? The real difference between what some have called "classical liberals"† and "social liberals" seems to me to be the sort of questions they were asking in their exploration of political economy.

The classical liberals seem to have been more interested in preventing causes; the social liberals in treating symptoms. The classical liberals on the systemic problems that contribute to inequity; the social liberals in how to mitigate that inequity after it's arisen. The classical liberals say that by changing the core system, by reducing government interference, government protection, corporate welfare, and specifically by focussing on what Individualist Anarchist Benjamin Tucker and Mutualist Clarence Swartz called the "four monopolies" - the monopolies of money, of land, of tariffs and of patents we can create a far fairer economy; social liberals that the system was not simply unfair but fundamentally somehow unalterable and that we had to deal with its consequences through increased government action.

It seems to me that just at the point our Liberal party forebears were coming to understand these systemic monopolies of the classical liberals and beginning to want to do something about them, there was also a collective feeling that "these can't help quickly enough" and that the argument that won out was the one that said "we can only deal with the effects". This perhaps especially after the Land Tax was derailed by the privileged interests in the House of Lords and in spite of two general elections returning a government mandate to implement it.

And it is true that the basic principles of the two positions are, apparently, irreconcilable. On the face of it the one insists that the solution to poverty and inequity is to reduce government; the other to increase it. The one says reducing government results in greater liberty; the other that increasing government results in greater liberty. How can both be right? Well, of course, they cannot. They cannot both be the "end game".

Now, surely, if we are at all liberal, we would all agree that other things being equal, we would prefer to have less government interference in our lives and property than more interference. Furthermore, I am sure we would agree (or we would not be liberal at all but just enamoured of power over others like other ideologies) that of two solutions on offer, one which increases the freedoms of all without harming the freedoms of any would be preferable to one where the improvement for one group can only be delivered by decreasing the liberty of another group. Indeed there's even a "second place" in between those positions, one that's less bad than interfering by force in someone's freedoms in order to make something more equitable for someone else; that it is be better if the "interference" were voluntarily accepted than state enforced. The state action is always the least good of these three, because however democratically we dress it up, government is still always interference by someone else and by force. Like an S&M party we can accept that force on us of course, and some may even enjoy it, but far better not to have to inflict it in the first place if at all possible.

Classical liberalism's advocates claim we can have the former solution if we fight the big battles, the four great monopolies. Social liberals would say that at the very least, we need to be prepared to use the latter solution, the interventionist solution; most, I fear, would go further and say that a priori there are some things that only state intervention can deliver at a certain cost, in a certain timeframe and most equitably. Here the two can co-exist, to an extent. Whilst classical liberals' policies tend towards a longer term large scale systemic change, perhaps taking a generation or more to feed through, in the mean time the ongoing problems of inequity continue and their adverse consequences need to be addressed in the shorter term. But if we don't make our "end game" a more classical liberal vision of a level playing field rather than giving the uphill facing team a lighter ball, we will be doomed to continue the state of welfare we appear to have become and not the safety net St William and the Venerable Leonard envisaged. And that state of welfare is likely to get more costly, and require more interventions into other peoples' freedoms to achieve as a. our expectations rise and b. as we take more of the market's production away to pay for earlier liabilities and failings.

Whenever we see a mismatch between demand and supply, which seems to be what people mean when they talk about "market failure" to deliver something generally regarded as important to everybody's welfare, we must first check to see whether that mismatch may be caused by something actively preventing the market addressing the demand - which is, after all, how enterprise functions, by attempting to meet a demand at the right price at which the buyer and seller will mutually agree to trade.

Perhaps affording a home is an unrealizable dream for some not because they have too little money to afford one in a truly free market, but because our system subsidizes landlords at our expense making land also more expensive for everyone else in a largely unfree market. You don't want to increase government interference and bureaucracy by adding to the subsidy, but reduce the cost by removing the subsidy. Smaller government, more level playing field, social justice. Perhaps people could afford private GPs if we didn't (deliberately) create an economic rent in GPs' remuneration in a publicly owned monopoly which in turn keeps the average cost of choosing private provision up.

We must, moreover, seek evidence to prove that a given interference would be better than non-interference and private provision. We cannot rest assured that Hobhouse a hundred years ago said it was a good thing to provide a universal education actually means via a monopolistic state provider and purchaser as opposed to a private mechanism. And if the answer is that we "cannot prove or disprove it" we should assume the thing to try first is private provision. And even if we don't have private providers capable of meeting the task in the market at the moment, we should seek to create private providers (most probably as mutual or social enterprises), perhaps through seed capital if the barriers to entry in a particular market are high (or by removing the barriers would be even better), rather than create a structure that requires constant input of tax money to continue delivering.

So, it is quite wrong to say that there's no room for classical liberals, in the broadest sense, in what has become a social liberal party. Social liberalism's aims simply cannot be met unless we address the concerns of the classical liberals and their libertarian friends. And both are needed to prod the other into proving that the interventionist case is the necessary one in the likely few cases that turns out to be true.

† - in which I include, probably, what people think of as "anarchists", "minarchists", "libertarians", "mutualists" and no doubt other -ists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is something I've been meaning to write for months, but was particularly prompted to do so by a program on BBC last week about surviving the house price downturn. One guy had built himself a property portfolio worth about £8m (about £5m of which was debt) from a standing start renting a single room in a three bedroom house share five years ago.

He stated, correctly of course, that any numptie can make a killing while everything's rising, but it takes skill to do so in the uncertainty we are now in. His current ploy is to drop leaflets on people in areas where negative equity may be about to bite offering stretched home owners the chance to sell out quickly to him, at a deep discount, but continue renting the same home and with a guaranteed option to buy back again at a pre-agreed premium when things look better.

This sort of thing has long gone on, particularly in the "right to buy" market - albeit with some differences - unscrupulous bucket shop lenders go round offering to lend those who would not get a mortgage enough to buy their council home who then have trouble with their mortgage payments, they offer them a "rent-back" deal which is only just less than the mortgage payments so what they were paying £70 a week for as a council house in which they had no equity was now costing them double that still with no equity.

Anyway - many of you will know that I "run" a group called Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts , which is a mechanism for delivering more affordable housing for the "intermediate market" - those stuck above the income levels that would justify the deep subsidy of social rented housing but below a level that they can afford to get on the ownership ladder. Basically it works by the CLT owning the land and not crystalizing out the gain in land value on every transaction. People pay what they are judged to be able to afford rather than related to the home they need - I would pay nearly full market rates for a one bed flat whilst a family on half my income would get their three bed needs met on half my payments. But I would get twice as much equity as they do. Effectively we are all subsidizing each other through the Mutual Home Ownership Society that takes on the long term debt for the development and which all the residents join.

And earlier in the year we were asked whether this was still an attractive option in a falling market. Obviously it changes the landscape somewhat. Now perhaps more of a problem is that people who could afford to buy outright are unable to get mortgages through no fault of their own. Indeed this could be a boon to the CLT market, because we could find ourselves with more better off residents who would therefore be able to subsidize even lower income houses (it all works on averaging out the total payments you see).

But also by tweaking the model, from a development model to an acquisition model, I believe we could help out those over-stretched households currently prey to the man I mentioned above and with a long term benefit to the success of future CLT projects. In this scenario, the CLT would buy up houses and convert them into mutual ownership. The occupant instead of having to rent from the profiteering speculator landlord would get to keep whatever equity their current circumstances allow them to commit to with the CLT effectively holding the balance. As circumstances change, the household could buy back extra equity (without themselves actually having to borrow anything - Mutual Home Ownership looks more like rent from the occupants' perspective).

What we need to make this happen is access to funds - not necessarily large funds - just a revolving facility that allows us to step in quickly when a household is in distress and lenders start to take action against them - we get them the money to pay off all or most of their distressed borrowing and then the Mutual Home Ownership Society borrows against its commercial facility to take on the house itself with the household's new calculated affordable commitment.

Who has such funds? Well, local authorities have a duty nowadays to try to prevent homelessness, not just deal with it after the fact. Such a scheme has got to be a more efficient use of public money than say, Vince Cable's idea of getting councils to reward previous speculative build by buying direct from builders and converting them to social rented housing (I don't think it's a bad idea - just that mine is better!). Even existing lenders might find it more attractive to convert the loan to a MHOS than to repossess.  In the longer run the CLT ends up with more freehold land that would eventually, when the housing on it has reached its planned end of life be theirs to redevelop in the interests of the local community at that time and in the meantime the distressed owners get to keep their existing home, albeit with lower equity levels and lower debt levels.

Dare I even suggest that this might be a better way to spend $700bn than rewarding the bankers who helped cause the problem in the first place?  Julia Goldsworthy , get in touch if you want to know more!

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

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

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

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

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

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

It comes as little surprise to me personally that businesses in Oxford City Centre have voted not to pay an extra one per cent on their rates to create a "Business Improvement District":

And who can blame them when the basic standard of cleanliness in the city centre is currently appalling. Here's a photo I took on Saturday of an overflowing and hanging off bin attached to one of their £30,000 benches. Every other bin I saw in the city was full and many were overflowing, but that was the worst. This was early afternoon on a Saturday, the main shopping day, in a city that attracts millions of visitors a year and the place is heaving on a Saturday.

But when I was on the council, and was involved in economic development when the OX1 City Centre Management Company was established, I wanted it to be more wide-ranging than just the "corporateization" of the city centre. I wanted to create a multi-membership co-operative type organization that would involve the users of the city centre as well as the businesses and other stakeholders such as landowners.

Something does need to be done about the city centre, especially the area that will be economically depressed when the new Westgate Centre opens up attracting more and more people to the western end of the city. Although the city council are also landowners of the Westgate Centre, or most of it at least, they also own a significant number of business premises, including the Covered Market and shops in both the High and the Broad, in this eastern end of the city centre. They need to get together with the other landowners in that end of town and ensure that it remains an economically attractive place to do business.

But in the meantime I shall be writing to Mr O'Dell about my idea presently.

I feel I've been tagged in a strange sort of a meme for my thoughts on Oxford's recent local election results by Antonia [From Oxford elections round-up]:

We await with bated breath the thoughts of Stephen Tall, no longer Lib Dem councillor for Headington, his colleague David Rundle, and the third-placed Lib Dem candidate for Headington Hill and prolific blogger, Jock Coats.

Well thanks, she just had to rub it in by mentioning that third place. I am embarrassed and humiliated to have come third. There are of course official post mortems to come yet on the campaign, but whatever their verdict, one simple fact is that I am a "bad candidate". Whatever fresh ideas I may have brought to the council (and I doubt my Labour victor will be doing much of that, sad to say), I cannot escape the fact that I hate knocking on strangers to talk politics with them. So for me, the literature and word of mouth amongst people who have met me outside that context is more crucial than for most. Such glad-handing ought to have happened long before the campaign proper started with voter ID canvassing in late March. And been followed up with a leaflet introducing me properly and extolling my virtues before the cross city campaign started with its more party led focus on whole city issues.

Then there was "that leaflet." On the last weekend of the campaign I had the dubious honour of having a Labour leaflet, apparently partly delivered by Mrs Dromey (I rather hope, Antonia, that you were unaware of that leaflet's existence when we exchanged pleasantries on the Friday evening), using quotes from this blog about drugs policy obviously intended to give the impression that if I won I would probably be found standing outside the primary school handing out various narcotics to the year sevens, or perhaps to their parents! Several opponents have commented that they thought it was one of the worst personal attack leaflets they had seen. I suppose I ought to feel flattered that Labour were sufficiently alarmed by my candidacy to feel the need to drag the contest into the gutter.

You can read it for yourself here. By my reckoning, it at least breaches copyright law (my moral right not to have my copyrighted work treated in a derogatory fashion or in a way designed to be prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author or director), if not possibly electoral law. Enquiries are ongoing. I am not a sore loser, but I was upset by it. I know it cost me both votes and reputation, even amongst my deliverers.

Anyway, enough of the campaign itself. Will I ever try again? I don't know. For many years, since in fact I was last on the council in 2002, I have wondered whether the present system of local government is fit for purpose. As an ideological descendent of the individualist-anarchists and a mutualist, I find the state, in all its guises, terribly coercive. I believe sovereignty should lie with the individual and he or she should only cede power upwards to representatives over things that they cannot arrange for themselves or in small groups or local communities. Local government is so tied down by Whitehall and Westminster that the current arrangements simply cannot be responsive enough to local peoples' needs.

The main reason I wanted to be on the council was to continue to promote, from the inside as it were, my mutualist agenda of hiving local authority functions off onto social, community led partnerships. The more things compete for the crumbs of council budgets within the tight control of Whitehall oversight the less satisfactory the outcome. Leisure services for example cannot hope to compete in quality at least with private providers while it is within the constraints of council budgeting. Similarly, whilst more difficult, I think the solutions to our housing problems are community led, rather than council, landowner and planning led.

Every time I've lost so far I've come out of the contest wanting to do other things that will make a difference one day outside the council structure. Almost as if to prove we can cope without the psychopaths who are so good at saying the right thing at the right time to get themselves elected. This time it is to continue to promote the social enterprise "alternative" for producing social and public goods and to work on promoting local community e-democracy.

• It will be interesting to watch Labour finally explain where they think there is a "£5m cash crisis" at the city council - reading the latest annual accounts I cannot see it myself. But there's another argument for local government reform - despite us being the tax payer/employers their finances are even more opaque than any company's I've ever seen.

• It will be fun to see Maureen Christian defend the Northway Playing fields from something or other she seems to think threatens them (certainly the only "threat" i heard was my own idea to see if we could fit a cricket square on there by budging up the two football pitches and see if we could get a local cricket team going).

• I think it will be a retrograde step if Labour succeed in removing planning decisions from area committees. They were not perfect there, but I have always maintained that was as a result of the bad legal advice that both sides in any disputed application had the right only to speak for five minutes each - where they have open discussion at area committees they manage to get better decisions and more fruitful interplay between applicant and objectors and a better outcome for both.

• It will also be interesting to see whether the Tories, who, despite not winning a single seat managed to come in second in many wards, and at least the ones in which they tried to put up a full campaign, will be able to keep up that level of work, for example, next year, when their declining reputation in control of the county is up for defending.

• And it will be interesting to see whether this marks the high water point for the IWCA, who lost two of their councillors.

• But I also don't really expect the city council, under any party, to set Oxford on fire with bright new ideas that will markedly change the quality of life for its citizens.

Finally, if anyone has any ideas about what little thank you gifts I can get for two teenaged Muslim boys who managed throughout to deliver most of the half of the ward for which we did not have regular deliverers - not a happy situation to be in at the start of a campaign and one of the first things I hope to put right for next time - I'd be very grateful to hear them! Their father has resisted all my requests for his advice so far!

I seem to collect these. Why can't I find a few that pay though! I have just been elected a director of the SE² Partnership Limited (Social Enterprise South East) which takes over from a SEEDA funded project supporting and promoting social enterprise in the South East region.