anarchist

Last week I had the dubious pleasure of attending a meeting in Portcullis House. Perhaps it is indicative of the almost non-existent esteem in which I hold our political institutions that I felt physically nauseous being in a building so full of meddling, superfluous, smugly self-important functionaries and flunkies.

Having a day off today, and finding myself watching the Queen's Speech shenanigans, I have to say I admire her very much more today that I have for a long time. How she can stomach what must be a three hour preparation and get out, all those flunkies in tights doing silly sixteenth century things, Jack boot Straw in his gold braided robes of office as "Lord" Chancellor which would probably pay for a penny off income tax itself farting around arse backwards and me wishing ever so sincerely he'd fall over and cement for the nation the image of Fool he appeared.

All for what, a five minute speech, telling us all how much more interference in our lives we can expect.

What would really bring Her Maj up in my estimation next year is if she finally decides she's had enough of doing all this for fifty-five years and that it's time she sacked the whole lot of the psychotic, useless megalomaniac and sycophantic twats because she knows full well they never achieve what they tell her they're going to and make a liar of her for forcing her to read such legislative drivel.

"My government has become such a sack of manure that Philip and I have decided this year to have them fertilize the roses at Balmoral and not interfere with the management of my once beautiful and powerful country, which they have signally failed to do properly all the time we've been doing this flummery and ceremony. May God bless you all in your efforts in our stables, potting sheds and rose beds."

Eugh. Vomit inducing stuff indeed. If I were Guy Fawkes, I would ensure Liz and Phil got out and then take advantage of the new proposed legislation of causing a nuclear explosion on the rest of 'em.

Over at "Letters from a Tory", the question has been posed, how would libertarians have protected BabyP. It is something I thought about quite a lot when the story first broke and I've written a long response to LFAT in the comments there. But I thought it was worth posting in its own right:

I go further, in theory at least, than even LFAT's definition of libertarianism (as one who believes the state should enforce the law). I am more of an anarchist. Though people often misunderstand that as meaning absolutely no controls on what people do and no institutions to enforce them. That is wrong; anarchists would say that in doing away with government other structures, such as a “private law society ”, would emerge that are more consenual and explicitly contract and economic incentive driven. Also anarchism rests on the core belief in self-ownership and that everyone has the right to do as they please insofar as it does not affect another’s ability to do the same.

I did think quite long and hard about how the BabyP case ought to affect that perspective. The first thing I found is that there are at least another couple of dozen incidents of the death of a child (half under one and most by parents themselves) in “child cruelty” type incidents (rather than accident or bizarre whole family suicide type incidents I assume) every year in Britain. In other words, BabyP is not the unique case that the (quite justified) moral outrage it has generated seems to suggest. Maybe it’s mostly because Haringay is seen as having “form” on this issue after Climbie. It's a "good story" that "social services gets it wrong again". Not such a good story that at least another two dozen are going on every year around the country and nobody seems to care!

But the message is that whatever various social services and child protection agencies do know they “fail” a lot more than they’re telling us. My suspicion is that this is down to most other cases being completely under the radar of the state protection apparatus until it’s too late (and if so - what use are those state agencies if they are unable to prevent the most egregious abuse because they cannot see it coming?). Determined sadists are often quite good at covering their tracks. Just look at both Fritzl in Austria and our own version in Sheffield the other week. We can be shocked and say someone must have noticed that level of abuse even with the most determined concealing by the perps, but no. It happens and nobody managed to stop it or even recognize it.

Also, even in an anarchist worldview, the care of a child is something that is a joint trust between parents and the rest of society - society would have ended up paying for the effects of his tortured life, as Martin Narey (deliberately) controversially said, if he had grown up to become a “feral yob”. Indeed, as Guido says in the comments on LAFT's post, our welfare and benefits systems include some level of perverse incentive for people to have children who probably shouldn’t; or at least shouldn’t at a point in their lives when they can barely support themselves.

At the moment then we “contract out” to effectively disinterested parties (the state - who get paid in reality whatever the outcome and only get into any bother at all in the most egregious and publicly visible cases of failure) to carry out a function more properly suited to much more local, neighbourhood, and more importantly family, scrutiny. Where, in a “market anarchist” worldview, ought such oversight to lie? Can we imagine on whom there would be an economic incentive to ensure as far as is possible the safety of someone else’s child?

As others have mentioned, institutions such as the RSPCA (though I think they have been ceded too much power often) and the RNLI, already carry out an effective job in their respective fields. Something like the NSPCC would emerge as the champion of the most vulnerable in the last resort and would in a private law society be likely to take action to defend the “self-ownership” and freedom from aggression and coercion of a child, even against its parents (if it became apparent). Should a hospital say even allow a child born to someone who has not the means or willingness to make proper provision for bringing up a child (which could probably be evidenced from their pre-natal attitude or lack of attempt to make provision) to be taken home in the first place without much more scrutiny as to how good care they’re going to get?

Remember too, that we believe that in the absence of state-capitalism and the grossly distorted playing field that creates through privilege and patronage to the detriment of the poorest, even those poorest would be better equipped economically to make provision through friendly societies and such like for health care and so on. So I’m not suggesting that the poor should not be allowed to take their babies home. Just that in such an environment it would probably be more noticeable, not less, as to which parents had even made an honest attempt to make provision or establish a support network of family first, community second and paid for assistance third, and perhaps the economic incentive might fall on the delivering hospital at least to ensure that such prima facie support was available. They could then even at that early stage alert an organization such as NSPCC or find themselves on the receiving end of a negligence claim if anything bad happened.

Finally (I think), in such a more human scale society, I suggest it would be easier, not harder, for friends and neighbours to intervene earlier. It is in most of their economic interests often too not to be supporting or fostering in their midst the sort of home circumstances in which these sort of psychotic evil doers can function with impunity. Would the mother’s partner’s sadistic friend really only have been a problem for the child? Would not neighbours and other family members have an interest in ensuring they were driven from their midst? At the moment everyone is too tied up in making ends meet in an unfair world perhaps to care too much what happens next door until it spills over more obviously into their lives.

In summary, I’m not sure I can see how in an anarchist, private law type society, it could be any worse than relying on the economically disincentivised civil servants to whom we contract out our social and neighbourly awareness “duties”. And the altogether more humane, less oppressed society that ought to result from such freedoms may well be able to intervene earlier and more consensually in order to protect their own interests as well as those of the child.

The End is Nigh
Originally uploaded by Martin~

Or, why I am really a "geo-mutualist" and why I think you should be too!

The revolution has begun. In fact it's been building for at least twenty years. When history looks back it will not probably be able to identify a particular date, but it could do worse than choose Christmas Day 1990, the day a humble academic computing geek communicated with his server in something nobody had really heard of called "hyper text". Finally there was something useful to do with the "internet" that would eventually draw in users from well outside of the ivory towers and military research facilities that developed it. Users in every corner of the world; users of every age and race; users of every background.

And what will history say about this revolution? Will it be seen as a great leap in human freedoms, capable of finally fulfilling Cobden's vision that "peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less"? Or perhaps that it heralded an era of unprecedented interference in our lives by governments?

Actually, I think it is a one way bet; that eventually it will be a revolution in human freedoms, in co-operation and in innovation. Such are the players in this brave new world; hackers working to bust the Great Firewall of China and liberate a fifth of the world's population for example; Kenyans being the first to be able to make payments quickly and simply by mobile phone; privacy technologists working to keep us one level of information security ahead of the law; game players investing ever more realistic virtual worlds; their individuality and very lack of co-ordination in many cases makes it inevitable.

What politicians can do, however, is either to make the transition long and painful, or to smooth its passage for the "good of mankind" so to speak. We can choose to stick by the state and try and keep it working just as its citizens are less and less tied to it, which will inevitably lead to more and more monitoring and restrictions; or we can choose to look at how to build alternative civic institutions and mechanisms to fulfill our needs in an era when the state has much less power to intervene at least without the force that is endemic in state action becoming more and more obvious to the point of rebellion against it.

So what is the great weapon of mass destruction that is going to bring low the state as we know it? Why, tax, of course. I'll let you into a little secret: in order to function a state needs to be able to tax: in order to tax it needs to have the ability to track transactions or peoples' wealth and changes therein. And from the taxpayer's point of view, there is every incentive to try to minimize their tax liability. Up until now, or very recently, it has been only the global super-rich who have had the means and sufficient incentive to take advantage of loopholes and allowances that enable them to choose the lowest tax jurisdiction in which to crystalize out their tax liability.

But thanks to the global and interpersonal nature of this most recent communications revolution we are on the cusp of mechanisms being easily available to the big majority of people that will enable us to minimize our "financial footsteps". When most of us only ever relate to the majority of our money through pixels on a screen or numbers on a bank statement - a small minority of trade now relies on real metal or crinkly coloured paper currency - what does it matter what those pixels are called; pounds, dollars, euro, yen? What about a completely new, essentially fictitious currency perhaps, like the "Linden Dollars" of "Second Life"?

Add e-Bay and Tesco to Second Life for example and one could imagine a world in which most of your financial transactions are conducted entirely in cyberspace, in virtual worlds that know no territorial boundaries or tax regimes (or at least that could be relocated into a sympathetic tax jurisdiction quickly if necessary), but with delivery of goods and services in the physical world. That's not to say giants like Tesco and e-Bay would necessarily be best, or would necessarily even survive the upheaval.

Those widespread international (and local) interpersonal (and business-to-business) mechanisms for sophisticated modern-day barter are now within reach and threaten the very raison d'etre of many of our longest standing institutions - banking and currency, transnational corporations built in an era when intermediaries were necessary to trade with far off lands, and ultimately the basis on which the state is founded - its monopoly of taxation. At the same time we can form non-geographic communities of genuinely voluntary co-operation in which we can build trust relationships, quasi-legal ways of dealing with disputes and so on that make trade possible with people a few short years ago we would have never had a hope of even communicating with.

So, which side are you going to be on - freedom and co-operation or ever more intrusion, regulation and restriction? And how long have we got?

Some of these technologies fall into the category of "overestimated penetration at 2 years, underestimated at 10 years." I think the state will be lucky if it has another decade of relatively easily collected taxes based on productivity, sales and incomes. If people want the state to be able to function beyond that, without increasingly authoritarian intrusion into our economic lives, we need to be looking now at how to make it pay its way through user fees for any value for money services we want it to provide. And as soon as it does of course it must also open itself to competition - else it's a monopoly again whose only rationale is to use its discretionary power to rip off the very people who both fund and use its services.

Unsurprisingly any of the various forms of land value tax will do to start with and would be especially beneficial implemented soon, near the bottom of the crash in land values currently underway. The present situation in financial markets offers an ideal opportunity for new means of trading without the sort of money so invidiously inflated and deflated by the banking cartels. Again, these alternatives could operate either on a local scale or in an international, or non-geographic trading community. Land has the singular benefit of being immoveable. You can't virtualize land as easily as you can income - for we all still need to have a base somewhere.

There's another major reason for helping this process away from the power of and dependency on nation states rather than fighting it - the state is expensive. The sort of redistributive measures required to ensure that everyone gets a fair crack at opportunity - the level playing field - are getting more and more expensive. Our interventions into the affordable housing market for example, in the form of subsidy, will continue to rise when land values rise, subsidizing the already-haves in the name of assisting the have-nots. Far better to try to ensure the fairest of level playing fields for all than trying to play uphill on a steepening playing field.

So, when you find me criticizing the state and its acolytes, it's less about what has gone on in times past - I would say times of missed opportunity for sure - but more on how we will be able to live in future, a future I think is pretty inevitable, in which the very idea of a state with the power to tax fairly will be severely compromised. The elephant in the room needs to be dealt with, and dealt with soon. Will it be freedom, or more desperate attempts to maintain the ailing state structures? You choose!

If there were a few comments after dinner on Saturday night at the NLC with new acquaintances, maybe even friends, about how little of the days' talks actually helped some of them understand Libertarianism as an idea (after all, the links between aging and nano-technology and Libertarianism could have been obscure without a primer in Libertarian philosophy first) Sunday began with something that more people would recognize as a Libertarian issue...

Session 5: Ban the Ban: The Human Cost of Prohibition by Dr John Meadowcroft
Session 6: The Idea of a Private Law Society by Prof Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Session 7: The Modern Panopticon State v Freedom: Why State ID Cards are Bad by Guy Herbert of NO2ID
Session 8: Post-modernity and Liberty by Marc-Henri Glendinning

Session 5: Ban the Ban: The Human Cost of Prohibition by Dr John Meadowcroft

Meadowcroft lectures on Public Policy at King's College London and has recently edited a book called "Prohibitions" for the Institute of Economic Affairs examining the effects of the outlawing in various parts of the world of a variety of what may be regarded as "victimless" or "consensual" goods, services and activities such as recreational drugs, boxing, firearms, pornography, prostitution, alcohol and others.

He showed how in every case the outcome for the users, consumers or participants as well as the wider community is almost always worse than the effects of that which is outlawed. These arguments should be familiar to most of my readers, for I have rehearsed them, at least in respect of recreational drugs, often enough. The handing of lucrative markets to organized crime, the lack of knowledge, information and harm minimization facilities to users, the side effects of this crime on others in the community, the corruption of public officials and so on.

It was interesting in particular to see how murder rates seem, possibly coincidentally of course, to have risen and show consistent continuing rises after the banning of guns in most countries including the UK, since this is an area I know even some Libertarians (including myself until recently) find quite difficult to argue.

Consequently, he argues, prohibition is bad public policy. Rather than assisting in preventing harm it always increases harm from things that are essentially, in the classical Liberal sense, none of the state's business - what you do with your own bodies and lives which by and large do not affect others, except with consent.

I notice that, as they apparently do with all their publications, the IEA has sent a copy of "Prohibitions" to every Member of Parliament. I am sure their mailbags are full of this somewhat higher quality of "junk mail" as no doubt some of them see it and one wonders how many of them have read it, or even passed it onto their staff to read it and brief them on it. I shall be asking Lib Dem MP Tom Brake in particular, currently embroiled in an illiberal attempt to further curtail the availability of cannabis seeds against party policy, what he thought of the book and how it affected his decision to press ahead with his ill-advised private member's bill or whatever device he used.

Over the summer, in the run up to party conference in September, a number of us noted that, for a supposedly liberal party in which one might expect prohibitions to be roundly condemned as a matter of course, that we do not have a party group, association, "ginger group" whatever you want to call it, dedicated to fighting the seeming increasing tendency by our own policy makers to join in with orgies of "bansturbation". One thing I am hoping to do is to start a group "Lib Dems Against Prohibition" and perhaps try and get a motion into Harrogate conference on the issue. Watch this space. Maybe we can get Meadowcroft up to speak at a launch event.

Following Meadoowcroft came an eagerly anticipated session by someone regarded by many, it seemed, as something of a high priest of Libertarianism, and judging by the little informal gatherings in coffee afterwards, he certainly had some new acolytes in the room...

Session 6: The Idea of a Private Law Society by Prof Hans-Hermann Hoppe

I had long understood that there was a school of thought, anarchist to the core, that you don't even need to have "law enforcement" handled by the state - for many, particularly the Classical Liberals, the idea of a "minimal state" includes, more or less, only law and order and perhaps national defence as legitimate functions of that state.

Hoppe disagrees. And disagrees compellingly with answers to what might seem the most convincingly argued objections. I will definitely want to blog further about this, so I'll keep it quite brief here. Basically he argues that this Classical Liberal vision of a minimal state is a logical impossibility. Since by its very definition the state has the "territorial monopoly on arbitration" it has no incentive to minimize itself. Since it is enforcement, judge, jury and executioner all rolled into one, it has every incentive to increase the number of things it criminalizes to justify its own existence.

Instead, he posits the idea of a "Private Law" society in which individuals insure themselves against the aggression of others (in the widest possible sense - from breaches of contract to physical violence) in a free market of insurance providers (remember that we will have, effectively, abolished the state and certainly its ability to grant monopoly and protection to such providers). In the purest free market they will always have the incentive to pursue violators of the core maxim of non-aggression on behalf of their clients. And when disputes arise between insurers, counter-claims and the like, competing providers of arbitration (appeal) services also have an incentive to produce objectively fair outcomes. Their clients also have the greatest incentives to be themselves non-aggressors - to abuse a familiar phrase you would lose your no claims bonus if you biffed someone!

It probably needs more explanation than can be given here and as I say I want to blog about this more, because he certainly convinced me. I do, of course, have a certain disagreement with him about rights in landed property in particular that I need to think on and try and reconcile, but it a compelling vision of how a truly free society unencumbered by a monopolistic state could be considerably fairer and lead to much less rather than more confrontation and aggression simply because of the financial incentives involved.

I think it probably leaves me with one area of policy to explore further and understand better before I can call myself an individualist-anarchist - welfare, but this one is a significant step towards that! If I remember this conference for just one thing, it will have been Hoppe's contribution, I am sure. And inspired choice of speaker whom we were extremely lucky to get hold of who explained what will for many be one of the far outer reaches of Libertarianism that even many "hard core" Libertarians will have been challenged by I suspect.

And so, from the most theoretical talk of the weekend to what must be one of the most pressing issues for anyone concerned about our liberty in a very practical sense here in the UK...

Session 7: The Modern Panopticon State v Freedom: Why State ID Cards are Bad by Guy Herbert of NO2ID

Again, this session deserves a blog post of its own, and so I will keep this brief. Most of us in the room were I am sure already pretty united in our opposition to the National ID card program being prosecuted by the Labour government. But for me, however strong that opposition, it has largely been from the heart - the "I am a Liberal and I am against this sort of thing" of Clarence Henry Wilcock in 1950 quoted by Nick Clegg in his leadership campaign and since.

Guy Herbert provided the intellectual ammunition for me argue from the head and not just the heart, to understand the sinister machinations in government, and especially the bureaucracy that have attempted to foist this controlling policy on us for most of the last century. Indeed, I came away with the distinct impression that the Leviathan has been trying this for decades and all that is new is that they have finally found a government stupid or naive enough to swallow its arguments and agree to it!

At its heart, the National Identity Register (the database) is the most important issue (this much I knew, but perhaps not why). The state seeks to create the "single source of truth about the citizen", to fundamentally revolutionize the very definition of personhood, from independent individual, who is known through the various connections and activities they do to one in which it is only possible legitimately to exist with the permission of the state and the possession of its membership card.

The superficially beneficial arguments for having ID cards; that they will make your dealings with the state from which you benefit - welfare, health and so on, more efficient; that you will be better able to prove who you are in a whole range of circumstances; and, the worst, that it will help in the "War on Terror" - we've all heard them, and they do give the idea of a policy intended to help us - are not only superficial, but that the real agenda is not actually understood by most of the politicians charged with selling the idea to us.

That real agenda is about control and knowledge, the most intricate web of knowledge about every one of us. It seems likely, for example, that we will need to present our ID to rent hotel rooms, to buy mobile phones, to get bank accounts, insurance, perhaps even to rent your home, and that every time your ID is checked in one of these situations that will be logged against your entry in the National Identity Register. It will so fundamentally alter the balance between the state and the individual that it can be properly termed totalitarian. And even if implemented y people with benign motives is hugely open to abuse, both now in the sense of incompetence as the government has shown in data loss scandals over the past year and in the future in the hands of who knows what flavour of government with more sinister agendas.

Forget the politicians' assurances that safeguards will be implemented. Even since it was announced the functions the database will fulfill have ballooned more than most of us appreciate, can be extended without reference to parliament and are almost entirely in the hands of bureaucrats who do want to know every last thing about you in their area of responsibility. It is truly scary, sinister stuff, and as I say I will return to it again no doubt. And the worst part of it of course is that many, even most people accept the platitudes of politicians that this will be good for us.

I believe it is no longer acceptable for those political parties and individuals who say they oppose ID Cards and the ID Register to have little blog buttons or mere "oppositional" press releases, or "stunts" like saying we will go to jail rather than register for one, we have to up our arguments and explain more precisely the menacing revolution that the whole project threatens. If you only watch one video from the conference, I urge you to watch this one and like me, hopefully learn about the real agenda in more depth, and be appalled!

And so to the final session....

Session 8: Post-modernity and Liberty by Marc-Henri Glendinning

No disrespect to Marc-Henri Glendinning but I confess after all the excitement of Hoppe and the surge of anger generated by Herbert, it seemed a little surreal to end the day with post-modernist philosophy and, whilst I certainly wasn't switched off by this stage I will need to watch this session again to understand it and be able to comment on it more fully!

I did pick up on the general idea that (at least the vanguard and leadership of) the statist left have metamorphosized from what was at least an intellectually honest and fundamentally well-meaning promotion of socialist redistribution with an image of a fairer society, to one which is superficially much more "cuddly", that seems to provide succour and answers to everyone in a supposedly more free mixed economy and society but which masks a more insidious creeping totalitarianism that is anything but benign, putting the state at the centre and subjugate the individual. Beyond that, though, I will need to revisit the session to tell you any more.

And so ended one of the most intellectually stimulating and varied weekends I have ever had I think. I will need, as I said, one of David Friedman's nano-bot enhanced brains I think to be able to really thoroughly cogitate on the many ideas, some new to me, some just newly explained, I got out of the whole event. And I have material enough to keep my blogging controversial enough till next year's conference!

Everyone who helped arrange the weekend and all the speakers are to be commended, and the rest of the audience helped make it a convivial weekend in all sorts of ways in the formal sessions and in the more informal breaks and dinner. The "broad church" of Libertarianism was there for all to see, and I only wish that we could have had more Lib Dems there, perhaps ones skeptical about Libertarianism, for I am sure they would have had many of their misconceptions - in particular that Libertarianism is some selfish right wing "beggar thy neighbour" creed dispelled.

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

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

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

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

Explanatory Note

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

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

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

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

You tell us.

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

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

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

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

...to think that, in a few short weeks , it looks possible that party activists of all political colours will be expected to trudge the streets once again asking people to believe a lot of spin, unachievable promises and heartfelt apologies and vote for for a "change", or maybe that should just be "vote, for a change".

Actually, I tell a lie, it doesn't completely overwhelm me. Sometimes there is a little frisson of excitement at the possibility that the people of Britain might just once collectively call time on this comfy carousel of political clap-trap. Just say no! as the song went...

No, Gordon! No, Dave! No, Jack, Hillary, Harriet or whoever! No, not even you Nick!

We've had quite enough for these past decades, nay centuries, of being shunted up the gary glitter by folk who think they know better than us but whose ambitions so clearly exceed their abilities.

What would happen if we all got up one "Good Morning" Polling Day and simply voted "no"? At what point would the Westminster clique conclude they had completely lost our confidence and call a halt to their corruption and crookery? Or at what point can we refuse, with impunity, to submit to their authority?

And then, how do we create a new, bottom up, rather than up its own arse, democracy? This has much to commend it.