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A friend, and former council colleague then defector, some of you will know who I mean but I won't name him, got the news early this week that his mother, in Glasgow, had been taken into hospital having been lain at home for the best part of a month not feeling well but doing little about it. Anyway, without going into too many details said friend is not really working full time at the moment and not claiming benefit - because of the irregular work he does for the local TA and ACF. THis is about enough to keep him in bed and board but without anything left over for "shocks" like having to travel to Glasgow from Oxford in a hurry.

Last night I booked him a train ticket for next Wednesday after his next ACF session, paid for with my debit card, and to be collected at Oxford station. At that far off it was £95 return. But this morning he got a call to say she might not last the weekend so we had to try and make some rearrangements for today. So first, trying to cancel the original ticket I found it wasn't possible online because it was an overnight service and had a reservation automatically applied. The cancellation has cost me a tenner as well. Then looking for a new ticket for today we concluded the only deal was to take a standard single, which was itself £85 (because he did not know precisely now when he was going to come back and so an open return was going to be pretty expensive.

Still, again, since I was the one booking it, I had to accompany him to the station to collect the ticket so that I could insert my debit card. And we had to wait for two hours to be able to collect it after the booking was made. So, getting to the station too early to be out before the time limit on the short stay car park I had to park in the long stay. The fee is £4.50 if you use something called "RingGo" and £6.00 if you only have cash. The process of paying via RingGo was quite stressfulm even for a techie like me, requiring some code off the platform (so I was lucky the man let me, the non-passenger, onto the platform to get the code which changes every hour. The instructions on how to pay seemed only to be back at the car park so having collected that code number I had to return to find out how to do it and then go through a most complicated automated system which has now, with no specific authority from me, got my mobile number linked to my car registration number. There was nobody at the car park checking, and no ticket either for the car window or the exit from the car park, so I presume it is monitored by ANPR.

So, it seems that if you are not very well off, don't have a credit or debit card, and need to travel quite quickly, you must be faced with a ticket that would be about 50% higher than even the extortionate "supasava" online and 50% extra on the car park. And this is supposed to be encouraging use of public transport? What a joke!

He texted me after about ten minutes on the train to say that it was like sardines in a tin.

And all that for ninety quid and it would take eight hours if everything went smoothly. I know all about the fixed, annual costs of driving, like my tax and so on, and actually I don't do much mileage a year anyway, so driving up there would have been cheaper at the point of use (I would have got there on two tanks at the most and with two of us in the car that would have been less than half the train price) and helped me justify my annual fixed costs in any case. And when I went looking for a plane ticket for him yesteray I gave up because I could not find a single ticket under £93.

Bonkers. Bonkers and discriminatory. Oh, and why on earth do two type of first class ticket vary by as much as £200 quid for the same (single!) journey - one was £250 or something and another £450. Just what is that about?

The Independent today reports criticism of Lib Dems' ideas for switching some of the burden of taxation off incomes, especially lower incomes and onto wealth accumulation, predominantly by the already well off and well paid, in the form of capping the tax relief on pensions contributions to the basic rate. I seem to recall the story will probably disappear from view for non-subscribers but you can still read it at the moment.

Of course regular readers will know that I'd prefer to tax only real property - the occupancy and ownership of scarce natural resources that we all depend on such as land, and not capital, but the criticism is unwarranted. You see, they complain that:

they would cut incentives for people to save for their retirement at a time when it was important to boost saving to help avert a long-term pensions crisis

and New Labour's John McFall, chairman of the Commons Treasury Select Committee, said:

"This comes at a very odd time. When the Government is trying to give every encouragement for people to save for pensions in later life, this cuts across those proposals. It goes against recommendations by Lord Turner and others to encourage savings. Instead, this will do the reverse. It is well-intentioned but naive."

Well-intentioned but naive is better suited to McFall's criticism though. There is no greater disincentive to saving for pensions than not having enough money left to put anything aside in the first place. And people in that situation are going to benefit from the transfer of part of the tax burden off of lower incomes and onto the ability to salt away ones excess income.

Already New Labour, friend of the working classes, has removed the cap imposed by the Tories in their heyday in 1989 on the proportion of one's salary one can put away in a pension fund. The effect? People with high incomes can choose to keep as income only what they need to survive and salt all the rest away in an ever wider range of pensionable assets, such as homes that other people might aspire to own instead of rent from the rentier pension fund, safe from the tax man.

As I blogged before, fully 50% of the population share just 7% of the accumulated marketable wealth of the UK. With a median household income - 50% of people live in households whose total income is below it and 50% above it - of just over £23,000 you have to be in the top 14% of households to fall into the Lib Dems' proposed higher rate (40%) income tax band of incomes above £50,000 and therefore be affected by this change - presumably even fewer individuals since this study is about household incomes (source: Institute for Fiscal Studies, Poverty and Inequality in Britain 2005 - this year's study shows no doubt similar figures, though I haven't looked at them yet).

Everyone else will have more (albeit slightly) left in their pockets and so increased capacity to save for a pension or anything else. Just who do New Labour, friend of the poor, want to help these days?

Me - I don't particularly like the tax proposal, and nor do I believe that it is feasible in the long term to rely for our pensions on being able to put away now some of what is already inadequate often to fund a decent lifestyle in the present, and hope that it will miraculously keep us in relative comfort in our dying days. But this criticism is, as they say, well-intentioned, perhaps, but naive, definitely.

Technorati Tags: lib dems, pensions, wealth distribution, tax

The Observer reports that Lib Dems' leader to visit Guantanamo:

Ned Temko, chief political correspondent
Sunday June 11, 2006

Sir Menzies Campbell plans to become the first British politician to visit Guantanamo Bay.

Nice one!...

...or maybe he's hoping to get a bit of work.

Technorati Tags: lib dems

Hit tip to Jonathan Calder for his heads up about Mark Oaten's article in The Times publicizing his new book, Coalition, which suggests that we must not be afraid to contemplate a coalition with whoever gets the most seats in a hung parliament, even if that means doing a deal with the Tories. He expands on the Times article over at Lib Dem Voice .

I'm afraid I don't share Mark's own suggestion that because the Tories have joined us in the lobbies against many of Tony Blair's civil liberties erosions it necessarily gives us common ground to work on. What with some of Cameron and Davis's pronouncements since the Rhys Jones murder and the Learco deportation debacle in particular, but over a much longer period in the background, over things like repealing the Human Rights Act, I don't believe personally that their commitment to civil liberties is anything other than opportunistic parliamentary oppositionalism. I don't believe the Tory core vote is any less authoritarian on civil liberties than this Labour government' and recent murmerings suggest that a shift to the right, whether that be called a lurch, which it isn't, yet, or a gentle drift to try to please their core vote, would be popular within the party come election time.

However, we are also Democrats. And we support proportional representation. And whilst we will not have the latter formally any time soon still it seems, we can stick to our democratic principles and try to gauge what signs might come out of any General Election as to the intention of the British electorate. I don't believe we can simplistically say that we would try to deal with whoever had the greatest number of seats. I think we can be more sophisticated than that and I think we could lay down certain guidelines that the public can understand when they vote for us:

We will not, out of "centre left loyalty" automatically gravitate toward shoring up a minority Labour administration whose vote is on the wane. If the people cannot give Labour the mandate they have had for the past decade we should recognize that they are drifting away from the public's affection, even if not by enough to give any other party the lead, and to perpetuate such a government automatically would be wrong.

That we should look at votes cast as more important than seats won. If either of the two behemoths could form a government with our support it ought to be the one for whom more of the population have voted, rather than the one who has benefitted the most from our broken electoral system. We have too long now suffered from government by a minority of the popular vote.

That we should use the "West Lothian Question" and not shore up a Labour government that's going to have to rely on votes from MPs from devolved administrative areas on matters that don't affect them. That doesn't mean discounting completely Scottish and Welsh MPs and the popular vote in those areas, but "weighting" our decision to try to negate any decisive influence they might have on votes on English only parliamentary decisions.

Policy is as important as the size of each party's parliamentary cohort. We should look to a period of no overall majority government to achieve more devolution from Westminster and a greater restriction on the power of the Westminster-Whitehall leviathan. So that next time there is an overall majority, especially if still with our broken electoral system, they can affect less of our lives than they do now.

And finally, that we do not automatically assume that we have to form a coalition government with either party. In this era of "ideology-free" politics, at least as far as the two bigger parties are concerned, we should not relegate ourselves to playing piggy in the middle. We have long said that both Labour and the Tories are increasingly occupying a grey area of vying for administrative and managerial competence rather than true political ideology-driven vision. I do not see why, therefore, a coalition combination shouldn't ought to be Tory-Labour, rather than Lib-Tory or Lib-Lab.

If we want to be the third force in British politics we should certainly aspire to be one of the players, not merely the ball, possession of which gives one or other of the bigger parties the advantage. Even if this is an unlikely proposition because of the inbuilt yah-boo politics between the bigger parties, seen as they are, albeit wrongly, as somehow polar opposites, we ought to make the case that if Labour and Tories have more in common with each other than either Labour and us or the Tories and us, it ought to be that combination of grey suits that should step up to the plate and take responsibility, with us offering a real opposition. We should go into the election promoting both Cameron and Brown as increasingly similar heirs to Blair and Thatcher and us as the genuinely liberal alternative.

It's 47 minutes long, but one of the most important lessons you will ever learn, IMHO (NB - some good quotes in this from our Liberal forebears Reginald McKenna, Josiah Stamp, McKenzie King - all feature in our "pantheon" of Liberal economists):

And, lest you believe all this to be the province of eco-socialists, this one from the Mises Institute, in tribute to Murray Rothbard's work on money, attributing the same causes to inflation but advocating a completely different solution:

And now read how the modern central banker does it...he doesn't even bother to turn the printing presses, he makes us pay for his monetary expansion policies:

Ex-Governor George says Bank deliberately fuelled consumer boom

By Jane Padgham

Published: 21 March 2007

The Bank of England deliberately stoked the consumer boom that has led to record house prices and personal debt in order to avert a recession, the former Bank Governor Eddie George admitted yesterday.

Lord George said he and his colleagues on the Monetary Policy Committee "did not have much of a choice" as they battled to prevent the UK being dragged into a worldwide economic slump by slashing interest rates. And he said his legacy to the current MPC was to "sort out" the problems he had caused.

Lord George, who headed the Bank for a decade from 1993, revealed to MPs on the Treasury Select Committee that he knew the approach was not sustainable. "In the environment of global economic weakness at the beginning of this decade... external demand was declining and related to that, business investment was declining," he said. "We only had two alternative ways of sustaining demand and keeping the economy moving forward - one was public spending and the other was consumption.

"We knew that we were having to stimulate consumer spending. We knew we had pushed it up to levels which couldn't possibly be sustained into the medium and long term. But for the time being, if we had not done that, the UK economy would have gone into recession just as the United States did."

He said he was "very conscious" that stimulating consumer demand could give rise to problems in the future. "My legacy to the MPC, if you like, has been 'sort that out'," he said. Under Lord George's governorship, rates were slashed from 6 per cent in 2001 to 3.5 per cent in 2003, pushing house price inflation above 25 per cent and high street spending growth to its highest since the late-Eighties boom.

Technorati Tags: debt money, fiat money, monetary reform, Rothbard