elections

I nodded off quite early last night so it seems all the hoopla was only just beginning. I was evidently not so unconscious as I thought, for I had had a nightmare about everyone rushing outside to see this Davis chap ride past on his high, ever so high, horse (a strange beast, for it had white bits where you would normally expect black and black bits where you would normally expect white) whilst waving their 28th day release papers and union flag bunting, and hailing him as potentially the greatest liberal Home Secretary the country's never had.

And then, half through my snoozing state, I sort of heard a bloke called McKenzie muttering something about Rupert Murdoch paying for him to stand against the arch-liberal Ricky Dickie Davey Davis in a by-election. Mr "28 days is enough" Davis might well be wondering what he's let himself in for - perhaps a real Conservative candidate who supports that party's membership's opinion that "14 days or fewer" was plenty when he himself voted against the Magna Carta a couple of years back.

And looking around, I see more praise heaped on. I see the Libertarian Alliance backing him unconditionally . I see the Libertarian Party inviting him to join them . I hear neo-con Conservatives saying they never, ever, ever, no really never for a second, supported 42 days, ever. That 42 was just a placeholder they had used to try to work out what question the government were trying to answer at the time.

Of course, the Libertarian Party is also playing a bit of politics here (and I think they should - to get some publicity if nothing else). They could of course do with a high profile "liberal" like Davis like a hole in the head right now. The Libertarian Alliance makes it clear they take a very different position on almost everything else Dicky D has ever said on crime and punishment. You can't adopt someone like that who would undoubtedly be seen as a flag-carrier with his wildly illiberal views on all sorts of personal and social liberal issues where the state should, to any half-decent liberal or libertarian, just butt out.

Furthermore, Davis's resignation may be an extraordinary event, but frankly it is a stunt. There's nothing him being re-elected in his own constituency can do to give him a different mandate on this particular issue. Indeed it only has downsides from what I can see. He will not be steering the Tory revolt against the bill in the House of Lords, and he could end up not very convincingly re-elected (either because there is no contest and nobody bothers to vote or, if there is a contest, someone makes gains against him).

If I were a party strategist, personally, I would stand the best candidate one can find against him. The most liberal or libertarian we can find, and make this an issue of what sort of freedom do you want - his, the freedom of 28 days is okay even if that too breaches all the ancient rights he is now trying to defend and no other personal freedoms on issues like drugs and sexuality, or real freedom where the government gets out of as many aspects of our lives as possible.

The man is a politician for God's sake. He's been in that place for two decades now. Politicians, especially entrenched ones like Davis, are the problem, not part of the solution, If he is the nation's new champion of liberty, the day I look for another homeland has just drawn closer.

There was a way more important by-election today in Oxford for a seat on Oxford City Council vacated by our own Richard Huzzey who is going off to the "Land of the Free" and the alma mater of the simian one.

Congratulations therefore, to Councillor Mark Mills. I see he will be twenty tomorrow, Friday 13th. So happy birthday as well! Do we have any younger principal authority councillors at the moment?

Particularly pleasing was to see Labour, who put in a whole load of work to try to gain the one seat that would have handed them a Town Hall majority beaten into third, and most especially, the Tories' turncoat left unceremoniously back in fourth again in Oxford city! Well done all round everyone!

Except for the miserable bugger porter wanting to sort the students' mail in New College this morning - I've never been spoken to so rudely by a servant of either university, from Chancellors down to porters, as I got from him this morning!

UPDATE:  My glee is somewhat tempered this morning by the news that the City Council had got the votes wrong on the original notice on their web page and in fact the Tories came second and the Greens fourth.  Oh well, you have a Labour run council and that's what you can excpect...:-)

This posting has been a very long time in the making. In fact, as is usual, I've been more than normally ponderous about our political system since the local elections and it has prevented me doing anything else. I wanted to be careful about what I say, lest I be seen simply as having sour grapes at having lost - but I hope you will see that far from it, I am hopeful of achieving more, and for others moreover, outside the formal government structure than inside it.

I have fallen out of love with democracy; at least the corrupt, broken, power-hungry, centralizing, suffocating, nanny state, infantilizing political game we seem to have wandered into at some point.

Whether it's Labour's desperation to beat me that made them put out a leaflet that can only have been intended to damage my personal standing and reputation negligible though it may be already, the various tit-for-tat accusations that ran right through the Crewe by-election and the London mayoral elections, Westminster's divorce from the rest of the country as regards how much they get to spend of our money feathering their personal nests and how much we should know about it, it stinks.

I was watching again the "Open Minds" interview with Milton Friedman the other day and when it was put to him, as in J S Mill's formulation, that democratic government is the way in which we put good, ungreedy and unselfish people in charge to prevent bad, greedy and selfish people from taking over his response was simple: "government is an institution whereby the people with the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men get into the position of controlling them".

And who can argue, in the system we now have. The prize is enormous. Whoever lies his or her way to number 10 has the prospect of controlling nearly half of our entire national income. The mechanism of getting the top jobs is a sham - none of them in my opinion are competent to claim more wisdom than sixty million others of us that makes them able to take such a responsibility and they're only ever elected by a few thousand of those sixty million. Even in local government, tied up as it may be in red tape and Whitehall edicts, still the unscrupulous seem to make it to the top - look at Oxford Labour's own little lotacracy.

Tony Blair seemed to think he was virtually messianic, and now he believes apparently that he can solve all the world's problems now that he is no longer encumbered with such a small salary as the UK Prime Minister and the petty problems of Britain. But it doesn't matter who it is, Blair may have brought it to a head but neither Brown, Cameron, Clegg, Blair or whoever else may come next, has the capacity or competence to decide so much for so many.

And I don't think that I can suffer under this system much longer. If I was a young Muslim I'd probably be rounded up and accused of being "radicalised". Well I am radicalised. Radicalised and angry. It's a good job they've imposed a ban on unauthorized demonstrations outside of parliament, else I would hire a bunch of JCBs and lead a crowd to dismantle the Palace of Westminster stone by stone and cast its occupants into the river and hope they all wash up somewhere halfway up the Amazon where they would not be found for half a millennium - well actually I probably wouldn't, because I don't have that sort of courage, but I curse Guy Fawkes for having failed his opportunity!

In the local elections, nearly 70% of people did not vote. Even in generals, nearly 40% didn't vote last time. The Libertarian Party believes that this is a vast pool of voters who would readily switch to their, and my, image of a new Britain, with renewed freedoms and less state intervention. But I'm a Liberal, if not especially a Democrat, and my party is one of the three larger parties the LPUK blames for the lack of imagination in political discourse that has created this situation. And indeed, our regular flirtations with vaguely socialist redistribution policies rather than liberal level playing field policies, do seem to make us bed-pals with the two conservative parties trying to maintain their duopoly. Do I have to make that leap into the unknown of the Libertarian Party in order to have some hope for change? Or can I pursue change, with a reasonable hope of getting it, through a party so deeply embedded in the political "game" as the Lib Dems?

In 1745 David Hume suggested that one day we may come to the conclusion that our current system of government needs complete overhaul. I for one have reached that point. And David Hume's prescription in the "Idea of the Perfect Commonwealth" seems to me to be vastly superior to the decrepit institutions and structures we currently have to endure. I'm not sure any of the current setup is salvageable. That current setup is coercive, corrupt and centralized. It is now clear, more than ever before, as Rousseau said, "The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament."

ID cards, the surveillance state, the lost war on drugs, the uneven playing field allowing monopolization and exploitation, drinking on the tube, detention without charge, foreign wars in support of oil hungry allies, petty bureaucrats spying on our every move, raiding our bins, taxing us through the nose. Is this what J S Mill was suggesting? Our parliamentary system was created in times when communications were difficult. Yet even then they took less power to themselves than now, when we are all a phone call or internet connection away from forging links with millions of other individuals on this planet.

The time has come for mutualism instead of representative government. People getting together either locally or in geographically dispersed interest groups focussing on particular problems in those communities. Refusing to accept that all the answers can come from a clunking fist in London or his puppets in the Town Hall.

But how do we do that, without turning spin into revolution?

Dan Paskins takes me to task for moaning about Labour's tactics against me when they put out that "scurrilous" leaflet while others, including he says the Lib Dems, are doing just as negative things in their leaflets. I should treat it, he says, as an opportunity to debate those issues if I feel so strongly about them and accept that, in such a debate, I might win over some people, or at least their respect for making the case rather than whining.

He provides an example that, in our East Oxford wide tabloid, we ran an article asking whether Andrew Smith, Oxford East's constituency's New Labour MP, was the biggest hypocrite in town for his duplicitous stance on post office closures. He says that as an issue, that too was beyond the remit of the City Council and therefore, by one of my "rules" of discourse not something that should be mentioned in the context of those elections.

Set aside for the moment a leaflet I saw for Hinksey Park ward with a priceless (literally!) picture of Andrew, the Labour council candidate and A N Other hugging a pillar box pledging to keep Grandpont Post Office open. Even if they hadn't made it a campaign issue of their own, economic well-being is, according to their own government, part of the remit of any local authority. The other four districts in Oxfordshire have pledged to fight the closures and to support communities that are affected if they fail in that fight. Already considerable time and effort had gone in, not, it has to be said, much on the part of the city council, as much as by the various bodies that help social enterprises in the county, to keeping Iffley Village Shop and Post Office going after previous owners decided to stop running it. But clearly the campaign issue for Grandpont and Mr Smith's own actions in supporting the closures in parliament are at odds. They made it a campaign issue even if it wasn't. The person in the photos objecting to the closures voted in favour of them when he had the chance. That seems materially different from my case.

Then there's the question as to whether one should simply debate what is thrown at you to debate, or object to it. Well, I don't for one minute believe that putting out a leaflet on the last weekend of the campaign, distorting my views by selective quoting, is an invitation to a debate. After all, I know some Labour lackey had collected the quotes some weeks previously - I saw them trawling through my drug posts in the week commencing 7th April - if they wanted a debate, there would have been time. It was also notable that they did not put out the said leaflet in the part of the ward that might have been expected to be most interested in such a debate, in the halls of residence (though they didn't put anything round the halls of residence to be fair, in their apparent attempt to disenfranchise a quarter of their electorate by not engaging with them).  Yes, let's have such a debate. It is all too rare in this country to be able to have a reasoned debate about drugs policy. And stunts like this leaflet prove why.

Dan thinks my position is significantly different from that of my party. It is not. The party concluded that the current system of criminal enforcement was often if not always ineffectual and counter productive, failing to minimize harm and continuing to put users and others into the realms of the brutal organized crime networks supplying these substances. The main difference really between my position and the party position is the action I would take to remedy that - legalize, regulate and tax - whereas the party still feels that legalizing would not be an option even if it wanted to promote that as policy because of international obligations. As their leaflet nearly managed to get right, whilst not strictly legalizing, policy is that people whose only crime is possession of small amounts of any drugs for personal use will not be impriisoned, usually leading them to further addiction and contact with drugs.  Honest reporting of my opinion would of course also have said that I believe legalize, regulate and tax is the way to stop drugs getting into the hands of children, for example, which was obviously not even explained to former councillor Standingford when asking for her opinion who went off on one about protecting and educating children about drugs.

No, let's face it, I have a moral right in law to object to my work (this blog) being chopped up into sentences and rearranged out of context to create a derivative work whose sole intention, the evidence suggests, was to bring into question my character or reputation. I will argue that doing so (creating a derivative work against copyright rules) amounts to making a false statement of fact about an opponent (the same cannot be said of claiming, correctly, that Andrew Smith is "supporting post offices" in Labour leaflets, but voting for their closures in Hansard, or indeed in Dan's case that a vote for the Labour Party is support for the party that has recently taken us into several illegal wars). I say again, it is this sort of stunt that puts people off indulging in meaningful progressive debate about what is a significant issue in our world, even if not one that I have any power to do anything about whether elected to the city council or not.

I say supporters of prohibition are accessories to the gangland and drug related deaths that happen at home and abroad as a result of the criminal underworld in which the drugs trade operates with justification. Such moral turpitude on the part of those that would shirk that debate or use the difference of opinion for a little electoral gain is shameful, frankly. It's uncomfortable I'm sure, but call a spade a spade - Labour traded those deaths, past and future, for a few extra votes.

...no, good! An opportunity has arisen. Friend and Lib Dem colleague Richard Huzzey, councillor for Holywell ward, has had to step down owing to a fantastic work opportunity he couldn't turn down, so there will be a bye-election in the ward on 12th June. This is a ward which we won last Thursday and the bye-election is two days before the end of the university term so we can get it in with the same electorate.

I'm sure there will be others who want to throw their hat in the ring for it, and there are some fantastic candidates around who either missed out last Thursday or have been hoping for a seat like this to come up and any one of them would make a great councillor for the area. Anyway, it has been pointed out to me that it would be inappropriate, in the event of a contested candidacy, for me to set out my stall so publicly before the internal discussion has been had. And I concur. Whether I go for it or not remains to be seen, but I thought I'd just leave you with thath nice photograph of the nearly not a university fresher Jock from twenty three years ago!

So, should I throw my own selection of snazzy hats in the ring do you reckon? I know one of the other candidates not to get a seat last week previously represented Holywell and may want to go for it himself and others who may be far better suited to it than me may be tempted.  I am sure whoever wins the selection will make a very good candidate and a fine colleague for Nathan Pyle who won the ward on Thursday for us.

In other news, I heard this morning that my Labour opponent last week also complained to my bosses about me working the halls where I live and whether I was getting any special treatment. Maureen, if you (and the Tories) had actually given two hoots about the quarter of your electorate in halls you could have tried weeks ago to start glad-handing and door knocking and certainly delivering, and you would have found no resistance to your presence whatsoever. No point moaning on the day or day before that you've not delivered anything to such a big chunk of your ward!

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!

Anyone who's read any of my blog will know of the work I do on affordable housing through Oxfordshire Community Land Trust in my spare time. After five years of work, persuasion, lobbying, all for nothing, we have the opportunity, thanks to a very generous elderly lady who has settled all she wants to on her children is willing to swap us her house and its plot in return for about half its value and a smaller home carved out of half her existing cottage so we can at last get a site on which to develop a few affordable houses and prove the concept to the communities of Oxfordshire who would like to be able to do similar.

The trouble is that to be viable we have had to buy about half each of the two neighbouring gardens and are likely to try and get another adjacent one. And so, with the efforts of a very energetic fellow board member's contacts in the Society of Friends we have raised a decent chunk of this. Nevertheless we still have to fund the borrowing on about £170,000 worth of loans starting from the end of May when we are due to complete on the first two slices of adjoining land.

Anyway, it works out that in the worst case we probably need to fund interest payments of around £1000 per month until we either get planning consent and can realistically borrow against the land to develop or till we can raise the remainder as gifts and pay off the loan that way, whichever is the sooner.

So we have a variety of ideas about how to scrape together this sum, one of which is a commitment by me that, if in May I were to find myself in receipt of a small additional income, say from a councillor's allowance, the 90% of that I am not already committed to giving to the party to help me pay for Focus leaflets and campaigning in the ward will go to the charitable associate of OCLT, the Stonesfield Community Trust that is fronting our land purchase, to help pay that interest bill.

So, not only do I now have to win for Headington Hill and Northway, its residents, this and next year's new students, freedom and the Liberal Democrats, but also for OCLT and affordable housing in Oxfordshire!

Mad eh? We'll, we've got to pay for it somehow to prove the whole idea to skeptical councillors, the media and bureaucrats? What better a way if it works out right? I am standing in this election at least partly to promote my ideas for innovative financing of things like affordable housing. I'm sure there's not a household in the ward doesn't feel or understand the effects of the gross deficiency we have in Oxford and Oxfordshire of that.