ConservativeHome today covers the latest vapourware announcement in the Tories' slow progress towards finding a policy. This time it's the "Green Tories" (who, you would have thought, might have given up when their tree was repainted - presumably with lead based paint to boot - the other week) and their ideas for Green taxes.

Now of course, many of the tax proposals would have been easy to lift from our Tax Commission work a whole year ago, but I guess what with imitation and flattery and so on we ought to be pleased. But there's a couple of opportunities hinted at in it that I think they, and we, have both missed a trick on...

The list of proposals on air travel issues according to the Evening Standard/Daily Mail includes:

• "A moratorium on all airport expansion, including Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted;
• The imposition of VAT on fuel for domestic flights;
• A "single flight tax" to shift tax burden from passengers to airlines;
• Domestic flight slots to be handed to long-haul trips instead."

The Mail also suggests that the BAA London airports 'monopoly' will be broken up and 4x4 cars will face higher duties.

It looks like a lot of "tinkering" legislation might be on the way, interfering by government diktat in the market. When actually what's happening is that the market is already skewed and not operating efficiently compared with other forms of transport.

You don't need to put a moratorium on airport expansion, you just need to make sure that all the externalities of airport use are properly compensated for. Airports are vast spaces with huge footfall. Their current land value in enormous. LVT on existing airports and any land converted to airport use would concentrate minds. That would also effectively break the "BAA monopoly"

You don't need to create some confiscatory mechanism to rip domestic slots away from domestic flights and "hand them" to international long haul flights - a form of protectionism of course; air space is ours. Technology can, as it has done over the years, mean that aircraft can use airspace and landing slots more efficiently, but it is essentially finite - as people looking up and the sky over London will realise. LVT can apply to landing slots/airspace use. It would be conducted usually by auctioning slots with the proceeds going to the public purse. It would become less efficient for airlines to pay for slots for domestic flights compared with the overall costs of other forms of domestic transport.

Airports are huge magnets for economic activity. Most of the high-tech industry to the west of London out as far as Oxford is, one way or the other, there because of Heathrow. These businesses do not compete against, say, Devon & Cornwall, but against Silicon Valley or the Rhine Valley areas of Germany so they need good international connections. Auctioning landing slots would encourage airlines to think about where they want to land in the UK and bring into use spare capacity at other, regional airports. This could have a massive potential effect of encouraging those businesses that need international connections to release valuable land in the "Western Arc" around Heathrow and move their economic productivity to, I don't know, near Teeside airport, or Humberside or wherever the landing slot auctions made most feasible for the airlines.

I thought the Tories liked to position themselves as a party of minimal interference. These policies seems to show that protectionism is alive and well and that they do not have a grasp of perfectly natural mechanisms that would encourage the results they want to see without low level market manipulation by governments.