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In today's Daily Telegraph Frank Field writes about Why Labour is losing the working class: Amongst other things he places much emphasis on social housing allocation practices:

Housing remains a flash point. The working-class sense of fairness is mocked by allocation policies that put at the top of the list groups who, in the local community's eye, have less claim than other groups. A policy of housing the homeless is noble. It is the way it is carried out which is so objectionable

Certainly I am sure anyone who has ever stood on a doorstep canvassing for votes or carrying out street surveys could say that they have found people complaining about how those "asylum seekers" get the recently vacated house while they know of a friend or family member that has been on the housing list for as long as anyone can remember. Of course they're not asylum seekers - who are not allowed to be given council housing unless, and it is rare, and almost never in the south of England, there is a surplus, but he goes on...

I have never heard a constituent - even one who has waited in the housing queue for decades - argue against a policy that looks after the homeless. What so many of my constituents object to, as I do, is the way the homeless jump to the top of the queue and are able to choose the best homes. This policy strikes at the very sense of fairness that working people hold. Fairness demands that those who have striven longest should rise to the top of the queue and take the best housing. The accommodation they vacate should then be offered to the homeless

We have also had this argument in Oxford. Indeed the District Auditor and ODPM have got involved in the past in persuading the City Council to give very high levels of nominations (including up to 100% at one point if I remember correctly) to the homeless list in order the better to meet targets for reducing homlessness, of which we do have a great deal in Oxford by comparison with most other places.

But I think Frank's solutions...

Three moves would show that the Government is intent on radical reform. Move one would be to instruct all housing authorities that length of service as good tenants should be the crucial determinant of housing allocation. Other groups would be afforded the accommodation thus released by those tenants with a track record of good citizenship.

Move two would be a partial freeze on the benefit levels for single people until the rate for a couple equalled twice that of the single person. The welfare system would then be seen to cease discriminating financially against those who lived together, particularly so if they have children.

The third reform would be to impose a contributory period before welfare can be drawn. The debate should centre on how long the period should be. Linked to this should be the roll-out of ID cards so that NHS treatment was strictly linked to people's residency in this country.

...fall woefully short, at least for Oxford. I was out canvassing the other day on one of Oxford's least well off council estates. I hate canvassing at the best of times - the very idea of knocking on a stranger's door to ask them what I consider largely to be a personal question about how they are going to vote, never quite sure what the welcome might be like, strikes fear into me. The fact that I do it ought to be enough on its own to get me elected - if I feel so strongly about what I can offer to this fair city that I will put myself through that torture (Okay - once I get going it's not often torture as most people are usually very nice, but getting going is like my first day at a new school all over again, every time!)!

Anyway - I was out canvassing on one of Oxford's poorest estates and a depression set in. Here is a part of town that could be very beautiful. It sits on one side of a valley with tiers of houses facing out to beautiful countryside. But what houses they are! Much of the estate was itself built as part of the relocation estates for the slum clearances of St Ebbe's in the city centre. My impression was that the same needs to happen again somehow.

Much of the estate is made up of prefabricated post-war housing. Some of them have corrugated metal round the upper storey and look for all the world like a couple of static caravans stacked on top of each other. They are all pretty well past their sell-by date. The few brick built streets look a lot better of course and will probably last a good while, but I was astounded to hear that much of "tin town" and the prefabricated concrete housing actually already meets the "Decent Homes" standard which just goes to show how sub- that standard is.

I say we need massive investment in places like that, so that Frank's long suffering tenants with a "track record of good citizenship" which are, after all, the very great majority actually feel like they are getting value. We are building so few social rented houses in Oxford at the moment, and the rate, even if we were to fulfill Labour's ambition of building on large swathes of Green Belt, is unlikely in the foreseeable future even to meet the backlog of need for affordable housing let alone give people already in social rented housing the chance to move into better or more suitable homes.

I reckon that Oxford City Council's housing stock sits on land worth perhaps a billion pounds. Yet nobody is allowed to do what the private sector does all the time - use the value of the land to finance building projects. At least not while the council is owner of the housing stock and bound by Treasury borrowing rules. I feel very sorry for any tenants of these houses who have exercised their right to buy - they have been landed with a lemon (contrast with those who bought a Barbican flat under right to buy and what they might be fetching today).

So what's the answer. We know that Oxford City Council's tenants voted overwhelmingly last year to stick with the council as their landlord in the stock options appraisal. But what alternatives were they offered...

• Large Scale Voluntary Transfer - where a Housing Association takes over the ownership and management of the stock and can borrow against it to invest. What's wrong with that? Well these days many housing associations are becoming more and more remote from their tenants. Our largest in Oxford, Ealing, has become part of a huge housing conglomerate run far from Oxford with little direct accountability through any kind of democratic structure to the people that occupy their homes. Even the city council, where if you don't like what your landlord is doing you have an opportunity, every few years, to try to vote them out of office in local elections, is better than that prospect.
• Transfer to something called an "Arms Length Management Organisation" which traditionally has effectively been a specially created housing association. It can invest and can attract government funding, but your council landlord has to be of a certain standard - providing at least a "two star service" - before it can be trusted to construct such a scheme. And guess what - you won't perhaps be surprised to learn that Oxford has not achieved two stars, and doesn't really look terribly likely to do so.
• And then there's a Private Finance Initiative - well, the least said about that the better - as we have seen from hospitals, schools, roads, almost all the capital investment this Labour government has made, the PFI is a profiteer's charter. And why should big companies rake in huge profits from our social housing stock? I'll blog later about why I think the new "new build" PFIs are an outrageous waste of government resource - transferring yet more tax-payers' money to the already asset rich through profitable schemes that end up with the provider owning the asset and the land on which it was built by them.

So, between a rock, a hard place, the devil and the deep blue sea, the tenants unsurprisingly elected to stay with the devil, for it had the single advantage of being known to them.

But what if, hypothetically for the moment, there was a mechanism that could:

• Ensure or even enhance democratic control and accountability of the management of the housing stock. Putting control of the stock into the hand of the people that use it - the residents themselves. After all, there are only 20% of the votes that elect the City Council living in council houses - they can be outvoted by all the others and not be able to boot out a badly performing political party controlling their housing - so the current system is far from an ideal democratic accountability.
• Release the sort of levels of equity in the valuable land to carry out vast improvements - even to the extent of rebuilding whole swathes of the estate with top notch modern homes, enabling the least able to afford the forthcoming huge increases in things like energy costs to benefit properly from the modern technologies that make new homes potentially more sustainable and cheaper to run.
• Provide a mechanism where those who wanted to could invest more than their rent in their home, just as in right to buy, but without going into mortgage debt and without taking those homes permanently out of the affordable housing market and handing them to profiteering landlords, for example.
• Include those who have bought their homes under right to buy, enabling them to keep the equity they already have whilst getting new housing for old and an investment in something that is going to stand up longer than they are.

...would it fare any better either in the court of the tenants' opinion or in the council chamber? Maybe not. But the simple fact is that they weren't offered it. Yet this marvelous animal does indeed exist. It's an extension of the work I've been involved with at Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts, and is called the "Community Gateway Model".

So, if we are at all ambitious for the least well off in Oxford, and as I say in the introduction to my personal manifesto if as a city we are to reach our full potential we have to help enable every last citizen to reach theirs, we owe it to them to explore and if it proves viable to offer such an exciting option to them. Let's use the riches we have, in land, in people, in vision, and give long suffering tenants the opportunities they deserve for not just a decent home, but a dream home.

You may be right on housing Frank, but don't try to persuade us that an ID card is part of beating the BNP and their nationalist ideology. ID cards and national registration databases are part of that ideology. What's wrong with your multi-billion pound NHS records system to ensure that the right people get the treatment they are entitled to?

The BBC reports that in the US an ex-defence adviser attacks Bush:

[Richard] Perle says in hindsight he would not have backed invasion

It seems to me that this was one of those neo-cons specially brought in to sell the war against all the evidence. Three days before elections too! That's gratitude for you.

I don't get to go to conference. It's always freshers week here at university and I get to give my one speech of the year to a crowd of a couple of hundred steadily drinking freshers who don't want to hear what I have to say and this year were crushed to hear that the arrivals meeting took up the first half hour of the Arsenal-Man United game.

But lame as I am, after a weekend working and with next weekend on duty, I decided my brain felt already a bit like I imagine an egg feels when it realises its next role is as an ommlette and I belatedly took today off work (leave, not sick). And so I was able to see at least part of the Lib Dem conference debate on the Tax Commission proposals on quarter of a TV screen on my set top box.

They say every journey starts with a single step, and it will be no surprise to people who know me as a Georgist "Single Taxer" nowadays to hear that personally I think that the Tax Commission's work has been just that first step. And what a debate. I am glad to be in a party in which such steps are taken democratically, with full and frank debate, with opposing views heard and applauded. But party is only part of the story.

Whether or not Ming's leadership was on the line, however, were they to have voted for Evan Harris's 50% amendment, I very much doubt. Other people do not seem to understand liberal leadership and make everything a test of strength (and let's face it, the Tax Commission was not Ming's vehicle but the party's, triggered by Charles Kennedy after the last election and well on its way to a final report before Ming became leader). I do think my own membership would have been on the line, though, because whilst we might have taken that first step, for me we would have instantly withdrawn our foot and it would have become an uncertain shuffle.

Gareth Epps mentioned in his speech that he was in the party to win elections, and that was what the party also needed to do more than anything, and that "economic purists" were unlikely to achieve that because "economic purism" is difficult to sell to people. Far more difficult, to him and many others, than by maintaining an easily understood totem indicating where our hearts are - that we can and would take from the best off to help the worst off. But it was a totem that, had it been retained, would have been at 180 degree opposition to the economic theory of the rest of the paper, of shifting the burden of taxation off people and onto resource use and depletion. The beginning of the end of the peonage of taxing the results of our efforts and enterprise.

So maybe a political party is not the place for me at all. I don't want to win elections (and I have a fair amount of practice at not doing so to prove it...:) - I only want to change the world. And I don't really believe that politicians change the world. Winning elections may give them the opportunity to do so, but rarely does it actually seem to happen. It's ideas that change the world. And watching today's conference debate made me realise that selling even the most modest ideas to a democratic body is an almost superhuman task. And one left to far better salesmen, demagogues and the occasional spiv than I will ever be.

As I wrote back in spring, Anthony Fisher, Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon became my unlikeliest of political heros when I discovered the history of their part in selling an idea, probably the last idea to revolutionize western politics, to the politicians that actually began to understand and appreciate it and try to implement it. Of course, I could be cynical and suggest that that idea, monetarism, morphed into nothing more than another opportunity for one party to gain an electoral edge. One wonders whether, if Conservative policy in the seventies had been set the way Liberal Democrat policy was today through such open and democratic means, a room full of people would have understood John Hoskyns's Stepping Stones plan (was that its name?) let alone approved of it, or whether it was more a case of strong leadership and a conjunction of celestial bodies taking control behind the scenes.

Anyway, back to the debate today. There were many comments, from both sides of the debate, about being proud of Lloyd-George a century ago and of his peoples' budget. So am I. But I remind everyone that a large and probably the most radical part of that budget was never implemented. A radical idea that many of us, including several members of the Tax Commission itself, are still fighting for while many others who invoke L-G have probably forgotten or never even knew he stood for! Land Value Tax.

It was good to hear Mike Williams who chaired the Tax Commission highlight it as an area we wanted to do more work and produce new policy for as soon as possible. I was sad to hear him say that there are no silver bullets, because those of us who are convinced by the "Single Tax" do believe it is just such a killer application. In the debate over whether to tax incomes or asset wealth it would be worth some of those in favour of the 50 pence rate to consider why L-G was never able to implement it; the implacable opposition of the wealthiest and most advantaged in the land and "their representatives" in the House of Lords and what they gave away - no less than the right to govern - in order to ensure it wasn't implemented.

Today the party took a small step. It wrapped it up in cuddly, saleable, spinnable terms like "Green Tax Switch" which will serve it well. But it has yet truly to grasp the fairness, simplicity and philosophical superiority of the Single Tax idea, shifting away from the envy and arbitrariness of taxing personal success completely and onto externalities and economic rent. Shifting the whole rationale for the state's interference in what we do with what we make into the stewardship of the resources we share and take and use.

In the process, Land Value Tax would, almost incidentally, achieve more environmentally sustainable patterns of living and working, a better distribution of the wealth generating capacity around the country and create a system that puts more responsibility and freedom to choose back to the individual and community and away from the monolithic state apparatus. The next steps may be harder. They could and should go way beyond the 5% of the total tax burden that this paper switches - the more the more effective. But they head where Liberals should not fear to tread.

In this Vatican announcement of a new "Seven Deadly Sins" for the twenty first century, the Catholic Church has included the "taking of and dealing in drugs". Rarely can Rome be accused of political correctness, but on this occasion Archbishop Girotti has been spouting the most ungodly bollocks.

In the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 7 verse 15 Christ says: "There is nothing from without a man that entering into him can defile him. But the things which come from a man, those are they that defile a man."

In the very first chapter of the bible, Genesis 1, verse 29 God said to Adam: "Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed upon the earth, and all trees that have in themselves seed of their own kind, to be your meat."

Most of the substances that humanity has used as recreational drugs for thousands of years have been completely natural in origin. Created, they would acknowledge, by God. Nothing in that creation is inherently bad. Each has its own place in our "diet", with some providing sustenance, some healing, and some oiling social interactions.

The great twentieth century monk Thomas Merton said that it made a difference what the purpose of using any of these gifts of nature was, whether the taking of them became sinful. In his case he looked at alcohol, and suggested that alcohol was good when it was used for companionship and for helping social situations on their way, but bad when it was used as an indulgence merely to get drunk, to lose one's faculties of judgement.

One can argue I suppose that many drugs can do the latter better than the former. Try talking to someone who has just shot up some heroin! On the other hand, cannabis can induce much loquacious companionship and even cocaine or ecstasy can cut the ice at parties - especially for those of us who are naturally quite timid (terror inducingly so) in such situations. I suppose addiction is a form of gluttony in some cases that has gone to extremes. But the mere act of taking drugs cannot be described as a "deadly sin" just because of the substance being used.

Because of the "war on drugs" we have a terrible situation in which some places, indeed some entire countries are in the midst of a battle with the organized crime that supplies the underworld global market in drugs, and supporting such organized crime is compounding the misery for many. But it is that "war on drugs" that creates and exacerbates that misery.

The Vatican should be denouncing instead the "war on drugs" as a biblically indefensible attack on some of the uses human ingenuity has found for some of God's entirely good creation.

The "taking of drugs" will certainly not be on this Catholic's confessional list any time soon. And I reckon the current crop of Vatican apparatchiks falls woefully short of the wisdom of St Gregory the Great!