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Many words have been written about John Biffen and Bill Deedes, Tim Garden and Tony Wilson in recent days. I suspect somewhat fewer will be written about Brian Hodgson, chair of the Labour Land Campaign and former Labour group leader on Oxfordshire County Council who sadly died following a heart attack and short illness from which he had been expected to recover on Saturday 18th August. But that belies the affection with which he will be remembered by anyone who had the good fortune to know or work with him in Oxfordshire or Georgist politics.

I first came across Brian when, as a City Councillor in 2001, we formed a joint group with the County Council where he was Labour opposition leader to explore ways in which we could better collaborate in support and provision for asylum seekers in Oxford. But soon learned he was a kindred spirit in Land Value Tax and in the "spirit of 1909". When I say he was unashamedly "Old Labour" I do not mean the bad old days of Militant Tendency, but of Diggers, Levellers and the spirit of the early days of Labour politics. UPDATE: Thanks Gareth for reminding me of Brian's own description as "Vintage Labour".

I have to say slightly unkindly that he always made me smile. For any familiar with the paintings in Oxford Town Hall, he always reminded me of one of the "Old Gaffers" watching proceedings in the Old Library with his somewhat 19th century style beard. But he was as kindly a man as one could wish to meet.

It was his motion to Oxfordshire County Council in 2001 that led to the council establishing a pilot project to investigate the potential effects of replacing the Council Tax with Land Value Tax and he was able to steer a coalition of Lib Dems and Greens in developing the study which has become a highly regarded contribution to the evidence in favour of LVT.

Having not been re-elected in 2005 to Oxfordshire County Council in the rout of Labour in his home area in David Cameron's Witney constituency, he put a lot of effort into the causes he had long supported - Land Value Tax and, more recently, Community Land Trusts. I last saw Brian when to my pleasant surprise he turned up to support a mutual colleague giving a talk to Woodstock Town Council in July where we are trying to build some interest in a Community Land Trust project to develop affordable local housing. He had been active already in such mechanisms as a trustee of the Stonesfield Village Trust, which in twenty or so years has provided fourteen affordable homes for local people with no subsidy - proving it can be don. We had a good long chat, with him still wondering when I was going to join the real progressive party that he had supported all his life!

I suspect Oxfordshire politics will be a more tribal arena without his conciliatory style and "elder statesmanship". Rest in peace Brian.

...who makes it quite impossible for me to even think about joining or voting for the Tory party. Paul Walter today quotes from Ben Bradshaw on Davis:

Liberal Burblings: Davis: "Libertarianism" that is extremely narrow

Today, Ben Bradshaw points out Davis' far from libertarian approach to equal rights:

The notion that David Davis is a libertarian will provoke hollow laughter from Britain's gays and lesbians. Davis has opposed every freedom extended to gay and lesbian people, from the freedom to register one's partnership to the freedom to serve one's country. He has one of the worst voting records in the Commons on such matters. Like most Conservatives, Davis is very selective about whose liberties are worthy of support.

However well they might be doing, however their policies on other issues may be right, when they finally develop them, I would rather cut off my right arm or emigrate than countenance the election of reactionaries who, frankly, do not recognize me, as a gay man, as equal in rights and dignity as any other person.

Now, I know gay people in the Tory party who seem to be quite happy. I know stories, even of David Davis himself about how "some of their best friends are gay" and they are supportive of them. But there seem to be still an awful lot of them whose public policy agenda appears to want to diminish a bit of my humanity, and I can't hack that.

I think I understand the Libertarian Alliance position as explained a bit more by Sean Gabb over the weekend. But for me, there's no way I could vote for Davis or his party regardless of whether the entire election is somehow run solely on the basis of his stand on 42 days and the like. It may sound selfish but it's really not. I care less that his social conservatism focuses on gay people than I do about the fact in my mind that this means he chooses for himself what people are entitled to equality and who aren't - and nobody has that right as far as I am concerned.

Indeed, the Human Rights Act, whilst I personally don't like the way it works and would like to see most of it enshrined in a constitution and bill of rights instead, seems to me to be our sole bastion against such antediluvian attitudes amongst our "rulers".

If I still lived in the constituency of my birth I think I am being told by both Lib Dem and Libertarian leaderships that I should be grateful this man is standing up for some of my rights and they have no better candidate to offer.

I caught in my logs the other day someone visiting my blog from Tristan's piece way back in October about his "Essential reads". He was very flattering about my blog, but I do remember now reading it first time and wanting to defend myself against his suggestion that I was possibly the "LibDem version of a gold bug, seeing LVT as a solution to many problems as a gold bug sees a gold standard".

I admit, occasionally (well maybe more than occasionally for some) LVT seems like a religious belief, and as such one can be very zealous about it and make claims that others feel unwarranted. I know that a much more vocal LVT campaigner (yes, there are some!), Labour Land Campaign's Dave Wetzel, managed to put off a member of their NEC who works in my office because she could not believe that something for which so many beneficial claims were made had not been properly tried before now. And it is also true that for many years, the Lib Dem's own campaign group on such subjects, ALTER (Action for Land Taxation and Economic Reform), of which I am secretary, has focussed more or less exclusively on LVT to the exclusion of other "Economic Reforms" - indeed it has been suggested that "Economic Reform" was only included in the name to make a better acronym!

I hope we will see in 2008 ALTER and with it hopefully the Lib Dems more generally, taking a bigger interest in other economic matters. Already there are suggestions about a book of essays, similar to the Orange Book or Reinventing the State, covering all sorts of aspects of what I like to call the "Liberal Economic Tradition" (I use such a phrase because "economic liberalism" or "neo-liberalism" have all but been hijacked as pejoratives for "beggar thy neighbour" economics which is an utter travesty of the rationale of economic liberalism). We are circulating a motion on seignorage reform in the light of the Northern Rock bailout for Spring conference. And so on.

Indeed my own journey to Georgism was sparked not by an interest in LVT originally, but by reading about the debt-based privatized credit system (I could just as easily be a real "gold bug" or at least a "hard money bug"), with forays into Social Credit and similar ideas. I have said and written many times that economic liberalism is about rooting out and preventing unearned privilege. If anything is key to this it is not land per se, but an aversion to monopoly, especially monopoly conferred by government which benefits one group but disadvantages others.

But as with the late nineteenth century libertarians, anarchists and mutualists, land, in the economic sense of everything in the natural world that's just there, existing without having to join one's labour or capital to it, often finite in extent and needed for survival by most creatures on the planet, is one of the four big monopolies that underpin entrenched privilege. And whilst the others, money and the cartel that creates (and limits) credit, tariffs on trade imposed usually by governments and intellectual property are also crucially important, a better understanding of the proper relationship between humanity and its one planet and its resources is a key way to break some of these others.

It's not necessarily an a priori solution - that LVT must go before reform of these other three - but it enables, especially, the breaking of the tariff and protectionist monopoly by providing a more healthy way of government raising money that has a smaller (and mostly positive) effect on trade and economic activity than taxes on incomes or sales. It also enables a wider discussion on money - if you take away, through LVT, the capital value of land against which so much of our broad money supply is secured you also need to think about how to replace that money supply via a fairer credit supply system. If one takes the Georgist paradigm to its fullest extent, as I do, it enables a new sort of social safety net in the form of the citizens dividend - the distribution of the value of land rents to all as a Citizen's Income as of right.

So, if I focus more on LVT than these others, it's partly because I believe LVT is more saleable at the moment than, say, a wholesale change in the way we allow money to be created, and partly because I understand it better than some of these other issues. But I regard all four as ultimately necessary to build a properly liberal economy and if I have one personal wish for 2008 it would be to more fully develop some ideas for solutions to the other three.

Can anyone help me find this quote and who said or wrote it. It's to do with when a government does something or other nasty that may affect the citizens they have lost their legitemacy and the citizen is no longer obliged to follow their decree. My hunch is that it was perhaps Locke but I can't find what I'm looking for anywhere. Anyone help?

There was a way more important by-election today in Oxford for a seat on Oxford City Council vacated by our own Richard Huzzey who is going off to the "Land of the Free" and the alma mater of the simian one.

Congratulations therefore, to Councillor Mark Mills. I see he will be twenty tomorrow, Friday 13th. So happy birthday as well! Do we have any younger principal authority councillors at the moment?

Particularly pleasing was to see Labour, who put in a whole load of work to try to gain the one seat that would have handed them a Town Hall majority beaten into third, and most especially, the Tories' turncoat left unceremoniously back in fourth again in Oxford city! Well done all round everyone!

Except for the miserable bugger porter wanting to sort the students' mail in New College this morning - I've never been spoken to so rudely by a servant of either university, from Chancellors down to porters, as I got from him this morning!

UPDATE:  My glee is somewhat tempered this morning by the news that the City Council had got the votes wrong on the original notice on their web page and in fact the Tories came second and the Greens fourth.  Oh well, you have a Labour run council and that's what you can excpect...:-)