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So, I made my first federal conference speech this morning. And what a one to choose! Called immediately after former housing spokesperson Andrew Stunell's opening speech I was asking conference to reject his paper with a wide range of what are probably pretty popular measures in it because it lacked one measure - LVT. And boy did the assembled throng let me know how wrong they thought I was - I reckon I counted half a dozen votes at most to reject the motion . Maybe that's some kind of a record or something for a maiden speech?

But it had to be said. There is no getting round the truth - you cannot create affordable housing through the sort of policies that are regularly bandied about, including in this motion, without subsidizing landowners. Your taxes and mine are being committed to buying back the land for the needs of the community. How arse about face is that? As the quote from proto-liberal John Locke said in the quote at the top of my blog:

'It is very clear that God, as King David says, "has given the earth to
the children of men"; given it to mankind in common'. (John Locke, Essay
on Civil Government, 1690)

Why do we not instinctively know this nowadays? And why is it so difficult to explain to fellow liberals who, as Andrew said at the beginning of his speech, should be really angry about the effects of homelessness and overcrowding on the rising generation and prepared to countenance bold, perhaps even unpopular, poicies to address this fundamental inequity.

Interestingly, I was told yesterday that there is a move by the International Georgist Union to lobby to have "access to land" added as a funamental human right. And there can be no greater right in my opinion - we are all born here. There is no other planet we can go to just because someone already 'owns' every part of our existing planet. Of course it is a fundamental human right to have equitable access to what nature has made available to all of us - it is the basis, frankly, even of the "right to life".

Some day, maybe, even the Lib Dems will understand the importance of it. Most everyone I speak to, just as Lembit did at the summation to the debate and Vince did last night in the ALTER fringe, acknowledges that we are onside in principle with land reform, but we must adopt practical policies to implement it if it is to be any more than howling in the wind.

We are living through a period which is seeing some of the most momentous changes in human relations in the shortest time in history. Thirty odd years ago when we lived in Kenya and I was seven it was a big thing living abroad. Just the travel arrangements I remember seem like climbing Everest compared to today's era of mass international travel. Three stops, visas to everywhere, currency controls all over the place, expensive flights. Nowadays my father and stepmother seem to have few qualms about travelling to Durban for long weekends or shopping trips. We hear of people resident in Monaco and working three days a week in London, or people with a regular getaway home in Thailand.

Jon Snow, our university Chancellor, told us in one of his annual lectures once about when Sandy Gall, remember him, was out with the Mujihadeen in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet occupation, he would be given a camera, a notebook, a reel of film and told to come back in three weeks with an interesting story for the evening news. Nowadays we are in instant touch right around the world and news is relayed as it happens. I remember hearing that during Live Aid in 1986 stadia in South Africa and India had their first live international incoming broadcast from the concerts in London and the US and people remarking that it was really the first time they knew there were other people out there thinking about them.

When I worked in a Glasgow based Stock Exchange firm in the mid eighties we still had to book international telephone calls in advance to the US. Now the fight is about roaming charges because so many of us take our phones abroad with us - unimaginable back then!

But more than that, more significant than even that has been the internet. Coupled with urbanization which has seen us reach the point where more than fifty per cent of the world's population lives in cities, it means that given the right equipment that already exists and is enjoyed by many particularly in the more wealthy world, fifty per cent of the world's 6+ billion people could be in personal individual contact with any other anywhere around the world live. It's truly like waking up one morning in human history to find a whole new dimension - imagine living in a two dimensional world and suddenly discovering the third.

This has huge implications, epochal implications for the way we live, work, form alliances, invent, learn, trade, develop our common future and view the institutions that have served us till now. Governments and trans-national corporations have developed as intermediaries, as the contact point between whole nations of people who did not have direct access to each other in other countries as individuals. Even money, national currencies, are intermediaries, temporary stores of value that allow us to separate transactions by time and guarantee the creditworthiness of our counterparties in commerce.

I have a friend who has developed a pet theory of markets:

Market 1.0 - decentralised but disconnected - past - the local market with occasional trips to other local markets

Market 2.0 - centralised but connected - ending now - bigger, say national markets with intermediaries, governments and corporations, trading between these national markets

Market 3.0 - decentralised but connected - future beginning now - consumers and producers are ever more in direct contact with each other, the markets can be global and everyone can participate on the right network.

And this third, facilitated not by governments but by technology, and even sometimes in spite of governments, poses huge challenges. Challenges that can only go two ways - one way lies a massive increase in the power of the individual as opposed to the intermediary, whether governmental or commercial, the other sees those two huge vested interests try to prevent their loss of power or compensate for it with ever more draconian measures to place limits on this super-connectivity. Of course other, new intermediaries will emerge. Instead of being dependent on government to guarantee our ability to trade we may become dependent on a small number of global communications superpowers for granting us access to their networks. But the speed with which new ideas and inventions traverse and emerge from the ether will enable the individual to keep one step ahead of absolute dependency on a single supplier or a single technology.

And it's all eminently affordable. For half of what we spend as a single nation on our NHS each year, every single household in Africa could have a "One Laptop Per Child" type device and the infrastructure to connect to the outside world with it. Skype them altogether and they could be providing secretarial services to the rest of the world or selling their best quality coffee for full price to the small boutique blender who charges premium prices to his increasingly affluent western consumers. Think of the possibilities of four hundred million kids bursting with a will to learn suddenly enjoying all of the knowledge the internet can provide.

So, we have the potential to learn from each other without intervention, to trade with each other and to learn to make decisions about who to trust in trade without paying Nestle or whoever the middleman's cut for doing so. We don't even really need money - everything on eBay could be priced in Paypal Pounds for example and we could trade away without having to convert back into real 'currency' unless we had to buy something in an old fashioned retailer - and even then they'd soon learn to accept Paypals or Tescos or whatever.

Now, you may think this is all a bit far fetched, but I predicted, even if I didn't have the skills to capitalize on it, not only the Amazon business model (I tried to sell something similar to Blackwells in return for a job developing it in 1994) but also the Amazon marketplace that manages fantastically to match sellers of second hand books and so on!

Anyways, the point is, we always talk in Libertarian circles about being pragmatic to get our policies enacted, and that's all well and good, but we must not lose sight of the bigger picture. The world is changing, changing fast. The era in which big government and big corporations thrived because we needed them to be intermediaries for us is ending in the superconnected world that makes us, truly, a global village. And it will affect every policy area. We can either sleepwalk into a totalitarianism of governments and corporations who want to stop this progress in their own interests or we can help it along by showing people that a free world need not be a chaotic and dangerous place, that on the contrary, the more we know the other individuals in our global village the more we trust and care about them.

...and the powers that be may be talking.

But bugger that, the IDF needs something to do so they are practicing on anything that moves in Beit Hanoun, Gaza:

The town of Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip has been under siege since early Wednesday.

The Israeli army says it is trying to root out Palestinian rocket squads, who fire from Gaza into Israel.

Ibrahim al-Za'anin, a 55-year-old Palestinian Authority employee, describes conditions for him and his family in his hometown.

Lest we forget why the world sometimes seems out to get us. I cannot imagine what it must be like to live anywhere within Israel's sphere of influence when they decide to project their power.

Okay, I may give the impression that I dislike US politics. But I never cease to be amazed at local government in particular. Relations of mine have been mayors of Decatur (pop c 55,000) and of Double Springs (pop c 1000) in Alabama. But with the controversy raging in Virginia today I was looking at precinct returns there and local ballot measures.

Take Arlington. Population 200,000. The county board of five people from what I can work out run the county with a budget of $900m. They have five elected officials - Sheriff, Revenues Commissioner, Treasurer, Attorney and Clerk of the Circuit Court. Fully half of their budget is raised in local property taxation, and only a tiny fraction - 10% or so comes from state or federal coffers, with the rest apparently raised from local fees and other little taxes like taxes on restaurant bills.

Those five people are technically part time just like British local councillors, but all draw a salary of between about £12,000 and £15,000 a year. Lots of other people get involved on a voluntary basis on advisory boards and consultative bodies (for example the 13 person housing board). The schools budget accounts for about $330m and that, whilst set by the county board, is run by the schools board, again of five people.

43% of the population are minority ethnic and sixty languages are spoken by kids in the county's schools.

This tight little ship maintains property taxes at less than 1% of assessed value and its bonds (for it has the power to contract debt as it put to the electorate yesterday for five major projects totaling just over $200m dollars to spend on capital projects over the next five years, including schools buildings, transport systems, public spaces and so on) are Moody's AAA rated.

Remind me, why do we need 48 city and 16 county councillors to represent Oxford with a budget of about the same sort of figure, plus hundreds of directly employed staff, none of whom are ever accountable to the citizens? Why is getting people to participate in helping those councillors to make decisions (as if they ever listen when they do consult!) like pulling teeth? What is wrong with us in the UK? Why do we seem to need vast numbers of people to do things on our behalf?

And these structures are many and varied across the US. So why the hell is Ms Kelly, who would no doubt be proud of Virginia for other reasons today, deigning to offer English local councils just a few tightly regulated options as to how to run the place. Don't try telling me that on a small island we need more homogeneity. We don't, we need local innovation and public entrepreneurship. We need to tell our Whitehall and Westminster overlords to sod off and leave us to decide for ourselves, locally, how we pool our citizens' skills (and boy, do we have them by the truck load in Oxford) to make local communities work.

I just picked this up on a BBC news piece. There's a new website by a group called Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA) which has what it calls a pretty comprehensive database of power stations and power companies from across the world showing CO2 outputs right down to individual power station levels.

It's worth a play with. I was astonished to see Australia has the worst record in terms of CO2 output per capita from power generation. Interesting too to note that France is way down the list with the greenest output of industrialized nations because of its preponderance of nuclear generation, and Brazil is way down because of its heavy use of hydro power.

More locally - Drax is rated as the 23rd most CO2 producing power station on the planet, but Didcot is about as clean as they come powered by fossil fuels: