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It seems according to Sunday's Independent that his Priory clinics have been treating 800 British troops who served in Iraq and are suffering from psychiatric illnesses.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think our treatment of British "vets" is scandalous compared with the value some other nations put on looking after those who have put their lives on the line for their country and I am sure that many more probably deserve Priory type standards of assistance. But if this was Haliburton and America we'd be screaming blue murder about contracts for favoured insiders.

Of course the alternative, properly funding public sector mental health services, is just unthinkable these days, isn't it. And a far cry from W H R Rivers at Craiglockhart.

I cannot claim to speak for the Oxfordshire Community Partnerships’ Key Worker Housing Ambition Group, but I am personally disappointed by Bob Langton’s resignation (“Expert quits housing group”, page 2, 9th September). I think he has chosen the wrong group to dump.

There are indeed several groups working on affordable housing issues. There also does seem to be overlap, especially in the groups of local authorities’ housing and planning officers, sometimes augmented by other social housing providers. But this is the only one where employers wanting to help essential workers are the main drivers. We also appear to be the only group encouraging broader thinking on wider affordability issues and innovative mechanisms to provide more affordable housing for a wider group of households in need.

I haven’t seen Bob at a meeting of the group this year, and we could have done with him to help drive forward the outcomes from the excellent developer event he organised for us in December. But just as one example of many if he had come along on 8th Sept he would have heard of an event that will launch a new mechanism for developing affordable housing. One which empowers local communities to control their own development to meet their needs, and, it has to be said, not just the wants of those who would trade in nature’s gift to us all – the land itself - primarily for private profit.

Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts would probably not exist without a workshop in June 2003 the KWHAG held at which some of us decided to take up their challenge and be innovative instead of waiting for the powers that be to do more of the same old hand-me-down grant funded social housing, which simply isn’t happening in anything like sufficient quantity.

And OCP, through the KWHAG, has been the only body to have supported us all this time. We hope that Oxfordshire’s county and district councillors will give us added impetus next month following our launch.

Still, as your regular coverage of landowners around Oxford clamouring to persuade the authorities to let them make huge profits shows, people can be impatient when their living turns on it. Nevertheless, none of this can flourish without landowners, authorities and those in need of housing co-operating. The KWHAG is unique in bringing all those together.

There's a chap I stumbled across I think when he left a comment on my blog about my little trouble with Labour leaflets during the local elections. Philip Thomas is a Conservative councillor in Pontefract, but really a libertarian who happens to have joined the Tories from what I can gather (not all libertarians claim infallibility!)

A week or so ago he blogged about the moral panic going on about knife crime, much the same as I did I guess - that it's not the knife that kills or injures but the person holding it for that purpose. Like my "Drugs laws are pointless" faux pas, Philip made the comment that he had bought two massive machetes and a meat cleaver as much because he "thought they were cool" as for any other reason. Of course he goes on to say that never had he imagined using them, nor would he, and moreover is actually a bit more authoritarian than I would be on sentencing for real knife crime. But that didn't stop The Mirror from focussing on the "knives are cool" misquote and now it's been picked up by the local press and other political parties are commenting and demanding resignations and so on.

The flame of liberty flickers all too low already in the Conservatives; if you are libertarian first, party-political second, go support Philip somehow - positive comments on his blog maybe or approving links!

UPDATE: and now local radio it seems too.