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...on the other hand, the one good thing about the smoking ban is that it brings starkly into the open the fact that the "state" acting in the "best interests" of its citizens can decide and enforce with legislation and criminal penalties what you can and cannot do with your own property. Of course it always has in all sorts of different ways, but at least it's out in the open now.

So we can proceed to Land Value Tax unopposed by those who think it is not right for the state to take some of "your" property wealth yet okay to tell a landlord what he can and cannot allow in his own property...:)

Technorati Tags: land value tax, smoking ban

Hat tip to a wonderful post from South Africa about Britain's surveillance culture in which Chris Rodrigues reminds us that it was Nicolae Ceausescu who often pushed the surveillance state in totalitarian Romania with the now much overused saying that "if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to worry about".

We hear it all the time in Britain whenever someone starts complaining about the "surveillance state", as if just not being a criminal makes it okay to have your movements tracked, your DNA held on file or your telephone tapped. And yet again, in the wake of the two high profile convictions last week of Steve Wright and Mark Dixie, people have been calling for a full national DNA database.

Whilst it's not a terribly palatable subject, one wonders just how many DNA samples one might collect from a prostitute. Their work gets pretty intimate. One of these two fiends was on the existing database yet that doesn't seem to have been enough for the police - they want us all on the database, so they can trawl through every little sample they find at a crime scene, presumably using more computer power than Los Alamos to match up then round up casual crime scene visitors who will have nothing to do with the crime yet inevitably some will end up having to explain their innocent presence there.

No, it's time to call a halt to this expansion of the creepy, big brother state. My DNA is part of me. I may unwittingly leave bits of it lying around all over the place but to take some off me for cataloguing and storage is it seems to me a breach of habeas corpus. You're asking to hold a little bit of me in perpetuity, like a miniature electronic tag so you can reel me in whenever my DNA appears anywhere near a crime.

The fact is that Steve Wright and Mark Dixie were caught and were convicted. The existence or not of their DNA on a super-duper database doesn't seem to have prevented justice being done eventually. Good old police work was what did for them. That's where it should stop.

"We are the only party willing to come into office committed to controlling our own power." These were the words of Alan Beith, now our Deputy Leader, speaking at the Party Conference of 1991. They are the very heart of what Liberalism is all about. They would be recognised, not just by British Liberals, not just by twentieth-century Liberals, but by Liberals in all countries and in all times as what Oliver Cromwell used to call 'the root of the matter'.

One of the reasons why it is so hard for parties to understand each other is that they have their philosophies about different things. Traditional Conservatism was largely about property. Traditional Socialism was largely about class. Liberalism is and remains largely about power.

Chapter 2 - Controlling Power, from "An Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism", Conrad Russell, 1999

Looking back on Conrad's words after a further eight years' Labour government and at the personalities that have bubbled to the surface of the modern Conservative party in an attempt to counter Labour's hegemony, I think we would want to change his characterization of those two parties. They have both become about power too.

Not just one Ming, but a whole team of them!

But Conrad means that Liberals are about the careful control of executive power, ensuring that it never oversteps the mark into authoritarianism, that as much as possible it respects the negative liberty of individuals to do as they please in their lives short of harming others. Both the Conservative and Labour parties are now largely obsessed with how to attain power, consolidate it, hold onto it, and wield it. The leaderships of both parties have become presidential and autocratic. Policy formation appears to pay only lip service to ordinary members and has to be vetted, then vetoed or announced personally by the leadership as part of their great guiding "vision".

Nothing makes me more nauseous, frankly, about contemporary British politics than this cult of the "dear leader" - and I'm afraid that the sight of all the blue stockings clapping and singing along to Jimmy Cliff last week was a supreme example! Nothing makes me more worried about the future of our basic freedoms to live as we choose as far as possible than the sight of these great visionaries with a plan for the country, and by extension its people, us, and their adoring crowds of followers. The Nuremberg Rally meets Top of the Pops!

It would be fair to say, of course, that we have always had big personalities in Number 10. But just as growing wealth, technology, travel and so on have given people more freedoms and more choices, it is easy to forget just how difficult communication was only a generation ago compared with today. Mobile phones were barely around during Mrs Thatcher's rule, the internet merely a military-academic project, indeed computers themselves a millionth fraction of what they are today. Yet the more connected we are, the greater our choices of with whom we might associate, learn and collaborate, the more our political leaders are there, in our face, every day, announcing what they think is good for us. And somehow we are all the more apathetic, all the more dependent on them for it. This cannot be progress.

And so I for one do not want a Liberal leadership to be a facsimile of these statist behemoths. Sure, we need an individual whom people can identify as the person most likely to be taking the taxi to the palace in the event of a Lib Dem election victory, but he or she should be no more than a primus inter pares, chairman of the cabinet rather than president for life (even if that life has been short in Tory circles lately), and should be the embodiment of what we would want a Liberal leader to be, which to my mind is quite the opposite of the sort of Labour and Tory leaders we have seen in the last decade. And we have to sell that idea, not try to make our leader pretend to be otherwise just to compete with what we don't want him or her to be!

We should have a publicly visible leadership team. And I don't just mean Ming and his chosen team, such as Ed Davey and Chris Rennard or whoever. But I mean a team put in place by and accountable to different constituencies in the party. One from the parliamentary group, one from our councillors or our LGA group to reflect that we are about localism and devolution, one from each of our devolved assembly groups (though not necessarily the relevant assembly group leader), and one or more put there directly by the membership, or by different groups from the membership even - one GLD, one LDYS, one WLD, one EMLD and so on and one, preferably no more than that, from the party administration. And we should strive to give them all pretty well equal public exposure on the notion that they will be the core of a Lib Dem executive in government dedicated to dispersing power and not centralizing it.

If this sounds an awful lot like the existing Federal Executive, you'd be wrong. The latter would retain responsibility for running the party machinery which would in turn still be responsible for the management of policy formulation and so on. What I am talking about is a group of spokespeople, not necessarily in or from parliament, who represent the core areas of our "narrative" and who would be expected to take on significant jobs in that first Liberal government. This would be more like the Swiss Federal Executive, with everyone having their own brief, and with one of their number elected as chair and prospective head of the government periodically.

Gordon Brown has no real idea what a "government of all the talents" is whilst he himself remains, Shelob like, controlling everything from the centre. Let's show him what it could look like, from a Liberal perspective.