Nick Clegg

I know the Lib Dems are always on about how terrible it is that other parties plagiarise our own policies and take the credit, and I thoroughly approve of today's "Making it Happen" announcement and policy document at least as to direction. But might I humbly suggest that when our people are scrambling around in the bowels of government looking for these savings that seem to have been promised by every aspiring government since Nebuchadnezzar they could do a lot worse than to shamelessly borrow these fellow travellers' ideas on demolishing the QUANGOcracy.

There. £64bn savings. Done!

Many of us will have been alerted by a nice email from that Chris Rennard chap about the fact that Nick Clegg has been making a speech about "decentralization" to the Local Government Association. That's nice. There's a section, as you would expect, on financing local government and, unusually over recent months it explicitly speaks of "local income tax" rather than just "on the ability to pay".

However it's the last sentence of this section I would like to see us explore more:

If we want local people really to decide on their local taxes and how to finance their local government, why don't we let them. Why don't we say, as in America, that authorities can legislate for themselves as to what they want their tax base to be - incomes, land values, restaurant tables, weighing bins, whatever. Already in a sense councils have some power over where they get some revenue. If they are lucky enough to be asset rich they can choose to invest that in whatever assets they like, within reason, and in some lucky cases, as with West Oxfordshire, that could fund as much as half their current council tax requirement.

Tax competition between municipalities seems to me to be something desirable. Each has different characteristics that might make the mix of things they decide to tax more or less useful. The choice of tax regime can do just as much for local economic competitiveness as any other aspect of public administration like planning policy, say.

Here in Oxford City I suspect, though I've not tried to do the sums, that Local Income Tax will mean people lower down the income scale in Oxford will have to pay more Local Income Tax than our "national typical" suggested outcomes because our median household income is depressed by the presence of so many students. Coupled with being an area of such high housing costs, this will be a double whammy for Oxford residents - their properties, now with no tax on them at all, will cost more and they will also have the income tax taken away from them at source.

But altogether, it would be far better than replacing one centrally determined system with another leaving all there to be discussed at local election times the rate of the local income tax. I could see it being much more interesting if councils and residents started talking about what tax mechanism rather than just what rate they wanted to use.

So Nick, there's that comfort zone barrier again - take us beyond it please, give localities a real dose of power and accountability, not circumscribe how they must do it.

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?

One last post on this, not because I care, but because I report "news" in this instance...

It was to be expected I suppose that the events of the past few days would be mentioned in Vince Cable's talk at the Oxford East constituency dinner this evening, and he didn't disappoint.

So for all of those out that are talking of splits in the party and and bad feeling, his message was quite clear.

There are no splits. We are (except perhaps for me) the most united party on the whole issue of Europe. There were differences of opinion over tactics; whether abstaining was going back on a manifesto promise, or rather whether abstaining specifically on the treaty rather than the constitution was going back on such a promise. Some people took that position. Those who resigned the front bench before voting did so with good grace and no rancour towards Nick or anyone else.

He did seem to me to suggest, but I'm sure not say explicitly, that the regrets are over the events of the last couple of weeks as a whole. The profile that by implication Nick has given to this one issue. For me of course, I think that's just the new boy not quite realizing in time he was being set up by the Tory Euro-shambles to take the fall for their own irresponsibility on the issue. And perhaps a regret that Nick was backed into a position in which he felt it was right to make it a three line whip issue.

Cameron has not faced such a media backlash for his massive rebellion because although it was a front bench position to abstain from Bill Cash's amendment, he had not insisted on whipping it - but the rebellion was larger than ours and shows up the Tory incoherence on Europe.

The parliamentary party are only too aware that they have caused headlines for the wrong reasons and are apologetic for that. But todays newspapers...

I know sometimes there are things that make one doubt whether one is in the right party. My last occasion was, I think, the stabbing of Charles Kennedy and before that his sacking of Jenny Tonge (though her reaction to his alcoholism proved to me I made the right decision remaining in the party despite my misgivings about his treatment of her).

But, for all the bleating and moaning appearing around the Lib Dem blogs and for all that the other parties are trying to put all the "blame" on the Lib Dems for on not having a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty-not-Constitution, I can't say I give a flying foxbat about the events of today.

There has been plenty of opportunity for those with a differing opinion since Ming first suggested an in or out referendum instead of a Treaty referendum back in summer. We had a leadership election in which both candidates took this same point of view. Members who were so against it now, especially ones with 300+ Technorati ratings perhaps who get way more coverage than most of us, could have argued their position then and got concessions from one or other candidate.  At the very least they could have made it a bigger issue in that campaign either to understand the proposed policy better or to be able to support it with good grace rather than this after the fact bleating.

Let's face it, the Tories have little consistency on Europe. They needed to make us the scapegoats over Lisbon. They would not have wanted an in/out referendum in any event as that would have exposed them for the bi-facial opportunists they have been on Europe since at least the days of Wee Willie Hague's 2001 election campaign.

"In Europe but not Run By Europe" is vacuous tripe trying to have it both ways. They started the move towards being run by Europe before Maggie's volte face "no, no, no" speech. Had they had to face an in/out referendum they would not have known what to do - campaign for "out" as many of their supporters probably believe they stand for, or let those all down and campaign for the protectionist superstate they helped to create and they still support as a political cadre.  Even the true left have had a more credible and long standing consistency on the matter.

Me, I can't see the difference frankly between trying to decide whether to put the brakes on pre-Lisbon or post-Lisbon. Personally at the moment, whatever my party affiliation I would probably fight hard for an "out" vote in a proper referendum on membership. Nick's policy would have given me that chance. A vote on Lisbon wouldn't - it would just let me say "a little bit more or a little bit less" of the same illiberal project of the same power hungry political elitist structure.

Ultimately the one thing that Nick Clegg was probably wrong on was to make it a three-line-whip on an issue on which policy had changed without a positive resolution of the party in conference since his MPs had last put it to their electorates. But the principle of holding out for an in/out vote was to my mind correct, and I know which way I would have voted in that, but not in a silly vote about Europe plus or minus Lisbon, but above all Europe still.  Bu people falling for the Tory and IWAR attempts to lay the blame on Nick are I think mistaken.

Paul Walter reminds me of the fuss created by this supposed request for the new-ish mosque in Oxford to broadcast an amplified call to prayer. Paul has some links in his post, but to recap, it has now managed to engulf two bishops, Rochester ("no-go areas") and Oxford ("my area, shut up, Rochester"), Peter Hichens ("I really don't mind Muslims so long as they only help me rail against modern decadence and don't wake me up") and, I understand, our own dear leader ("the sound of the divine, aagh, beautiful"). And many acres of newsprint, many billion pixels and several trees have been employed in railing against or jumping to the support of Oxford's beleaguered no go areas.

Well, I heard what I believe is closer to the true story today. Apparently, no such "request" has been made. What happened is that a well known local figure in "inter-faith relations" a retired Christian minister who did things like organize an interfaith cricket match after 9/11 and similar things, thought one day what a jolly good thing it would be to have the call to prayer sung out from our new city mosque. He went to the Imam and suggested it and they agreed to present a petition to the council. A petition, get this, apparently of two, yes, more than one, less than three, signatures - that of the interfaith dialogue chappy and the Imam himself.

The Imam had not consulted or particularly mentioned it to anyone else, and speaking to a couple of Muslim city councillors seems to confirm that there's been no popular movement, nor do they feel they want one, to get them the call to prayer - the responses seemed to be along the lines of - "do you think we're stupid, we know when we're supposed to pray and don't need reminding".

So, whilst it has stirred up an interesting debate, which however has occasionally turned into naked bigotry, it's all apparently based on virtually nothing at all. I can't help wondering whether the local story of a bunch of primary school parents getting upset about Halal meat is related to the anti-muslim hype that's been dredged up in some quarters by the non-story of the call to prayer.

There's been lots of discussion about whether Lib Dems should support state funded schooling via institutions that have a religious guiding philosophy, let's put it that way, since Nick Clegg, self-proclaimed atheist, seemed to offer such schooling support recently (see the links at the bottom for the discussion elsewhere).

Some caveats here. I was brought up in quite a religious family. All my grandparents were "Gospel Hall Brethren"; a small Scottish anti-clerical sect. My family were frequently ex-patriates in Africa. The first school I really remember was in Nairobi. I don't remember it being "faith based" but looking at its website now I see it was scarily so - they even quote "spare the rod and spoil the child" and so on! Though I don't remember having chapel or any other kind of worship.

When we returned to the UK I got a scholarship to a Woodard prep school and thence to a Woodard public school. Nathaniel Woodard was a nineteenth century Church of England clergyman who established a network of relatively low cost boarding schools aimed at educating the sons (and daughters to his credit) of other clergy and professional middle classes. They both had a strong religious tradition. I was in the choir at both. Listen to Carols from Kings and I've done every treble and tenor solo on the entire disc (and I was better at it!).

About the time of my O levels I eschewed religion and became an atheist.  read more »

Spot the odd one out in the image below. All four species coexist in large numbers. They all work together to defend the collective against predators and to provide for their mutual needs. They all look and behave as if they are being controlled by some mastermind at the top of a hierarchy.

But in fact it is only the humans (top right!), the one with the largest and most complex brains, the only one, so far as we know, to have developed some kind of moral sense, the only one to have created sophisticated communications technologies between each other, the better, one would have thought, to co-ordinate our actions when required, the one with free will, and the one that has devised fantastic markets that transmit information and resources around the world at blistering speeds. Only humanity seems to have collectively decided that they need some self-centred egoists at the top of an wholly artificial hierarchy to take instructions from.  read more »

Well, I was getting a bit worried. Royal Mail never seem to deliver to my door, and despite a great big notice to the contrary continue to deliver my mail to the adjoining student flat to which I have no access. So only last night, when the students next door decided presumably to have a bit of a clear out, did I get my leadership ballot paper, together with a final demand to have my flu jab on 15th November, two months of Prospect magazine, my Co-op dividend vouchers (too late I think now to have my divvie turned over to the Community Fund), and the calling notice for the Headington and Marston Lib Dem branch AGM on 28th November (so my apologies are too late, but rest assured as candidate for Headington Hill and Northway next year I'm not completely disinterested in the local branch!). Grrr!  read more »