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Last weekend my mother was down visiting me in Oxford. On Sunday, for lunch, we wandered into town and went to the Castle/Prison site. Apart from anything else I haven't been up the castle mound to see what the view is like. These days, I thought there was a promise to make publicly funded museums free to access. I was surprised therefore to find that the little museum at St George's Tower was apparently charging to get in, and that you had to pay to get up the castle mound itself.

This whole development, resulting in a posh hotel that few in the city can afford to stay in, some apartments that few in the city can afford to buy, a bunch of brand name eateries and some open space, cost the tax payer some £6 million in the form of a SEEDA grant and the lottery player some £3.8 million - getting on therefore for nearly £10 million of "public" money.

I'd like to see the books on this development. I was on the planning committee when it got permission. Nno thanks to me - I thought the Jeremy Dixon building jutting out in front of the castle mound was hideous on plan, and it has turned out mediocre at best in my opinion - but the then doyen of planning committee had fallen in love with Dixon's work and couldn't be persuaded otherwise. We were told the SEEDA money for the commercial development itself, some £4.5 million, was part of a scheme intended to help make developments viable in "failed land markets". Indeed those of us against it were bullied with threats that the grant money would be withdrawn if we delayed even a few weks to try to get a better design. The threat was quite real though because the whole "failed markets" scheme had already proven so contentious that it was abruptly ended.

To suggest that a site adjacent to what will become a £200 million plus redevelopment of Oxford's main shopping centre, right next to County Hall, really slap bang in the centre of one of the hottest property spots in the country, was a "failed land market" was, frankly, laughable, even at the time. Indeed, on the SEEDA web page for the project it describes it as a "Prime City Centre Location"! "Prime" has specific connotations in describing commercial land.

Yes, it had taken several years to find someone to take it on. Since the prison had closed in 1996 (the last prisoner if I recall correctly was, at the time quite infamous, Jamie Blandford) and the whole site was handed to the County Council they had tried several schemes until Trevor Osborne's Osborne Group and SEEDA got involved and the rest is now history. But four years to get a plan for such a site was not out of the ordinary. Capital Shopping Centres next door has been trying to put together an acceptable plan for well over six years now - at their own financial risk of course.

And we can't even climb the castle mound for free. Oxford Preservation Trust is a great organisation and does have to make ends meet. But really, could not a scheme have been organised to make these spaces, in public hands for a thousand years, free to access? Perhaps by charging sufficient rent to the other tenants who would surely benefit from drawing crowds into the prison and castle site. "Brunch" at the "Living Room" restaurant alone was expensive enough to have included a contribution to my access to the castle.

How much did the County Council receive for the 200 year lease granted Mr Osborne? Presumably nothing - it was, after all a "failed land market", or so they persuaded SEEDA, and all the county appears to have wanted out of it was to remove all risk from the council tax payer, which in itself was laudable, but not necessarily the best they could have got for it. Would the development, now that it's complete, tenancies let and apartments sold, have been profitable without that grant? I know a few land agents locally. Not one of them believes that public subsidy was necessary (at least for the commercial part of the development).

So, was it necessary? And if not, who is going to apologise for wasting all that public money? Or is Osborne Group going to pay it back?

And I still, therefore, have not been up my castle mound - okay, that bit's only a quid, but I'm buggered if as a citizen of this fine city I am going to pay to access what has been public land for a millennium.

Would someone give me a job developing ideas for the future. Here's another one I prepared earlier:

It seems that the transmission loss problem is a little less daunting using High Voltage Direct Current - I work out that southern Morocco to London would involve about a 7% transmission loss in a more or less straight line over land. Sounds like it has potential to me.

Spot the odd one out in the image below. All four species coexist in large numbers. They all work together to defend the collective against predators and to provide for their mutual needs. They all look and behave as if they are being controlled by some mastermind at the top of a hierarchy.

But in fact it is only the humans (top right!), the one with the largest and most complex brains, the only one, so far as we know, to have developed some kind of moral sense, the only one to have created sophisticated communications technologies between each other, the better, one would have thought, to co-ordinate our actions when required, the one with free will, and the one that has devised fantastic markets that transmit information and resources around the world at blistering speeds. Only humanity seems to have collectively decided that they need some self-centred egoists at the top of an wholly artificial hierarchy to take instructions from.

Many will no doubt say that "our leaders" put themselves up for public approval, scrutiny and not infrequently ridicule in the name of "public service". But for me, whatever their supposed good intentions I cannot think of an example, at least in national politics, of someone who does not seem to want to accrete power to themselves, or, and this is even worse, to an amorphous blob called "their party".

Only "their party" (presumably with them in charge) can solve the nation's problems. Is it logical, for example, to say that only the Tories, if only they had power, can deliver "small government"? Isn't that an oxymoron? Only the people, reinventing power structures for themselves as required, can create "small government". A party in power trying to deliver "small government" is, well, a party in power, by whom we, the citizens who put them there, or not as the case may be, are ruled as absolutely as any ancient tyrant, or so it seems, between elections.

So, when Nick Clegg calls on the other party leaders at Westminster to join him in promoting a Constitutional Convention to look into the future of the British political landscape he risks the political equivalent of asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. He looks with some approval at the previous process in Scotland, yet that did not even look, it appears, at the question of whether government was even needed or not.

A friend of mine has a theory of the evolution of markets through human history:

• Market 1.0 - was decentralised but disconnected, and 'market presence' required the physical presence of buyer and seller, typically in local and regional exchanges.
• Market 2.0, which has now reached its zenith, is centralised but connected, with market presence through intermediaries such as Exchanges or proprietary Alternative Trading Systems (ATSs).
• Market 3.0 represents the final evolution of markets: decentralised but connected, with market presence being through a 'network presence' on a dedicated market network.

And, if this analysis is right, since the power dynamics of human society are closely related to the development of markets - with for example wars, metaphorical as well as actual, to corner markets or access to resources, still going on in "our name" - so politics, over and above any consideration of public disengagement with the current system, needs fundamental change to cope with Market 3.0. Indeed, one could argue that Market 3.0 is a state in which coercive political intervention is not only unnecessary, but counter-productive to the common good.

As ever, there are many vested interests in all this. Market 2.0 required the creation of huge, often now global, corporate behemoths and their political protectors, at first mercantilist and now corporatist. Market 3.0 offers the potential for real mass democratization of markets, the trading equivalent of devolution, and with it wealth creation and distribution. Where government once tried to ensure access to markets for their national corporate behemoths, it will in future have to try to ensure access for all of us. And in doing so, undermine its more familiar role of making decisions for us. Protecting our ability to participate rather than wielding power over us by them deciding who can participate.

There is certainly a core of liberalism in Clegg's invitation, but if we're going to have a "Constitutional Convention" - something for which the opportunity will come once in a generation at best - then it has to start with as close to a blank sheet as possible in respect of the future role and accountability of government. I'm afraid I for one don't have confidence that that insular political establishment can be open enough (even if you do add to the mix a few churchmen or "community leaders" - all self selecting beneficiaries of the current system to my mind). The political establishment exists currently in order to gain and hold power. They don't represent us, so much as persuade us with clever marketing that we agree with what they want to do. And if any such convention turns out not to produce the radical reform required now, it could go either way - popular rejection of government and politics and a vacuum in which real tyrants could wield power or ever more illiberal government trying to fight a rear-guard action in order to maintain their own relevancy. Neither are particularly appetising outcomes.

Why am I a member of a political party then if I hate them all so much? Well, for all my loathing of the power of government and its wielders, I hold out hope that there is one party whose history and core ideology can break that mold. Personally, I think Liberal Democrats would be better setting out our own stall - we have the closest to a blank sheet in terms of recent power wielding at least - of radical reform, and let the people decide. Asking the cosy consensus themselves to join in will, well, perpetuate that cosy consensus and risks persuading the rest of us that what comes out the other end is in our interests, or, again worse, the "best that can be agreed on". It won't be, if it is stitched up within the political establishment itself and its extended family of hangers on. A plague on both their houses - let us get on with it and set out to persuade the British public that our way is best for the future, to give us the power to implement such a radical shift of power away from politicians and back to the sovereign individual.