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Funny thing, looking through my blog stats, we are all just a bunch of big gossips aren't we. Forget all my screeds of writing on my pet subjects like drugs laws, land value tax, whacko economics and community planning and development. The top posts, every time, are ones that have a whiff of scandal about them, or at least someone's name in the title. Yesterday I got the most hits for a while and the most popular of those was my post about Greg Barker. I notice it also made it to top outgoing post on the Lib Dem aggregator.

Sad lot you are! But it gave me an opportunity to test out a new (to me at least) free blog posting client, Qumana.

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The Telegraph today highlights a poll claiming that up to 68% of the population want an English parliament. At least I think that's what the various, slightly confusing, figures say. It might mean that 68% of Scots want an English parliament for all I can work out.

No worries. Suffice it to say that I find myself, once again, in the minority. But not, I hasten to add, because of any particular devotion to Westminster, far from it. I loathe the place and all that it stands for personally. But because I do believe that supporting an English parliament is a substitute for real devolutionary democratic change. Yes, it may well be unfair that Scotland has one and that we are ruled by people who have their own parliament and whose decisions at Westminster do not affect what happens in some areas of life to their own constituents.

But think of this. I live in Oxford. I like to think, though I don't have one to call my own, that it is my home. I believe that Oxford has in its little valley setting, everything we need to be able to run our lives the way we want to.

Why would I want someone elected by the people of Leicester West deciding what to do with our hospitals? Is that any better than, say, someone elected by the people of Airdrie and Shotts, telling our Thames Valley police force what to do? Is it going to be any better that someone put there by the people of Bolton ties our councils up in knots than someone for Dunfermline holds the purse-strings?

Leviathan may have been a necessary evil in building up a strong post-war state in an era of relative scarcity and in negotiating economies of scale in order to get a social safety net functioning in the first place. But neither it, nor its little sibling, an English parliament is necessary now to get our cities, regions and services competing and growing in ways that the people who depend on them want.

I simply refuse to believe that the people who happen to have conned or cajoled the poor citizens of Sedgefield, or even of Witney into sending them to the High Trough of Parliament are any better, with ideas or managerial competence, than those the folk of Headington, Wolvercote, or even Hinksey Park have decided should run their home town. And the former, for all their globe trotting, power broking and international adventuring are making the world a more dangerous place to boot.

If we have to have an English parliament, let it be in a form David Hume would have suggested, which, with modern communications and travel is self-evidently more practical in the 21st century than ever it was in the 18th.

It's not because I am a liberal I find one particular aspect of this abhorrent:

• Convicted criminals to serve the full sentence given to them by the judge.

...but because I am a Christian, and I believe in expiation, repentance and the ability of people to change their lives for the better, and in ways a judge at the time of a trial could not anticipate.

There's plenty of other stuff to get worried about as a liberal of course, but I would urge Christians not to fall for this particular piece of knee-jerk populist authoritarianism.