Randomly Selected Article or Link

Since everyone else is having fun watching the US midterms and blogging about them, I thought I'd add my tuppence worth.

I am supporting Bernie Sanders for the Senate for Vermont.

Bernie pretty well started the Community Land Trust movement in the US many years ago when he was the socialist mayor of Burlington. Since then he's been the state's only congressman for fourteen years (it's so small - only the population of Oxfordshire - that they only get one). So he's a pretty sure fire bet. No Dems run against him and the Republican's a sure fire loser.

His brother, Larry, is a Green party county councillor in Oxfordshire and a member of our board at Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts.

It's the safest money you can put on tonight I'm sure...:)

Just a little tangential information for Mr George "Heres my comeback on the road again" Osborne who's biggin it up in Japan at the moment.

If the UK were at the same population density as Japan, we'd have space for some 22 million additional inhabitants to come and work our economy!

Oh, and I reckon we'll have the wrong kind of leaves for Mag-lev.

One of the reasons I am so enthusiastic about Chris Huhne in his bid for the Lib Dem leadership is precisely because he is something new. Obviously there is the fact that he's only been in the hothouse of the Westminster "bubble" for such a short time, and that he would be the first party leader to have served in a parliament we, as Lib Dem, put a lot of store by in the form of the European Parliament, but if you have read my ramblings much you will also know I am keen on what some might call "unorthodox" economics.

Little has been made of the fact that Chris is, currently, President of Lib Dems ALTER (Action for Land-value Tax and Economic Reform). Personally I cannot categorically say that this means he supports Land Value Taxation with the same enthusiasm as most of us in ALTER do, or whether it is just that he is prepared to sponsor pluralism in economic debate, but that pluralism is, in my opinion, key to our producing a new political and economic "narrative" for the twenty-first century that will enable us better to face the challenges of globalisation, international development, the ageing population and pensions crisis, growing wealth disparities and all the rest. Certainly his rhetoric of shifting the tax burden away from incomes and onto resource use is redolent of ALTER's own "Tax Shift Now!" campaign slogan.

Since the "victory" of the monetarists, especially through the likes of Milton Friedman's influence in Reaganomics and Thatcherite neo-liberalism, there has been an apparent unwritten rule in British, and world, politics that the base economic assumptions of monetarism may not under any circumstances be challenged, despite the obvious inequalities that continue to afflict the world that neo-liberalism was purported to have the ability to resolve. We are in many ways in deeper economic crises than we ever have been. Despite a proliferation of the trappings of wealth, the least advantaged are stuck often below the lowest rung - those who question the very notion of "relative poverty" need to get out into communities that are struggling to pay their way and bearing a disproportionate share of the burden of the debt we create in order to keep economies functioning.

This has led to a real poverty in political discourse, where our main parties, including the Lib Dems, spend most of their time trying to persuade us that they are the best deck-chair attendants for the Titanic as it approaches the ice-bergs of climate change, the resurgence of China and India as global economic forces, the ageing populations in the west and the appalling disparities that mark out the rich world from the poor world - where one quarter of one percent of the world's population control as much of the planet's wealth as the other 99.75% put together.

So, "out with the old" is not a reflection on other candidates' ages - after all, one of the issues that affects the pensions problem is that people now of Ming's age can expect to live another thirty years, certainly plenty of time to see us into government! But what we do need is a new approach, to create for us a distinct political-economic narrative to put us in the vanguard for fighting these challenges unencumbered by the history of ideological vacuum that has marked out British politics the last twenty or thirty years.

For this, Chris is clearly the man for the job. His interest in radical alternatives and his ability to comprehend and present them is unquestioned. Let's forget this argument about where we want to "slot in" to British politics - the overcrowded "centre", the economic "right" or the statist "left" - and take this opportunity to promote a radical vision of "sustainable abundance" and equity that a fair and liberal world should have created decades ago and is still abjectly failing to do.