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If you ask me, smoking was an integral part of the First World War. As John Reid alluded to when he was in charge of the nation's health, a "one small pleasure" people who were about to die got.

Songs - "While you've a lucifer to light you fag...", sayings - "unlucky third light" (never light three cigarettes with one match - the sniper spots you on one, aims on two and kills the "third light"), show how important smoking was. We can't just eradicate its place even if we want to eradicate the habit.

So it seems pretty silly that English Heritage would want to remove all smoking from re-enactment scenes:

All smoke-free on the western front from Guardian Unlimited: News blog:

After yesterday's reports that broadcasters are cutting scenes from Tom and Jerry cartoons for crimes against clean air, we can reveal that English Heritage has been similarly censorious in releasing images of first world war soldiers, the famous Tommies in the trenches, having a cigarette.

One of the good things about this medium I've found is that nothing is ever permanent (well I suppose it might be on an MI5 backup somewhere but I doubt it!). Blog entries get amended all the time, and sometimes readers do see the amendments in their RSS software. So, following comments it seems I have been a bit harsh on Chris Huhne's criticism of David Milliband's idea for personal carbon bank accounts.

The BBC and others reported in "Labour under fire on 'green' bid" that Chris criticises David Milliband for blue sky thinking on personal carbon allowances. I agree with Chris that such longer term floating of ideas is no substitute for getting things done now - like the LIb Dems' ideas for Tax Shifting - taxing the use and abuse of our common natural birthright such as land, clean air (through taxing pollution and the like) and fossil fuel use. But the idea is an important one, and if, as some suggest, it would take a long time to implement, it is surely good that a government minister is floating what to some might seem a barking mad idea now.

But Chris is also President of the ultimate Lib Dem blue-sky thinking lobby group of which I am secretary, ALTER (Action for Land-value Taxation and Economic reform), so he is only too well aware of the sort of long-term thinking that has to go on to achieve big systemic change.

Whilst I noticed also a Greenpeace (I think) activist on one of the news programs today saying that "it is a good idea, but one whose time has not yet come", both Chris and Greenpeace will know that there have been many groups, including my own and others I participate in, actively promoting the idea of alternative currencies as a way to create an "energy commons" that everyone can participate in.

I have to admit that my interest has been mostly in the other side of the coin - that microgeneration of electricity could be monetised in some form to create an "energy currency". But carbon, on the pollution, is just as good an idea. A carbon allowance would enable us to monetise the "commons", in this case clean air if you like, and pass responsibility to individuals, and tax them when they breach "Locke's Proviso" - a key argument for Land Value Tax.

Indeed in economic terms Carbon Allowances and currency would enable this important part of the commons to be subject to a Land Value Tax, for that is what it is.

And it need not be years away either. As they proved in Argentina it's easy to promote a new "currency" - you just announce that people can pay their taxes in that currency. In Argentina's case, local government decided when they were in the midst of their currency crisis and effectively had no money with which to trade amongst themselves that they would accept "time bank" style credits from companies wanting to pay their local rates.

Exploring different ways of accounting for our "commons" is a good thing. It will become more and more important to make people realise the real costs of living and trading in ever less obvious natural resources. A good example is the licensing of the electromagnetic spectrum - there's only so much of it out there for different technologies and how it is fairly shared out will affect who can participate in future wireless technologies. What we risk by solely concentrating on corporate carbon quotas and licensing of other natural resources is a new wave of eclosure of the commons - in this case the air itself by big business.

I would love to hear what that other Lib Dem radical currency reformer - David Boyle - thinks.

Technorati Tags: climate change, land value tax, politics, tax shifting, taxation

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.

...and just hope that it's not one of those which has some kind of direct link to landfill.

I've voted. Huhne, Campbell, Hughes in that order. And I'll tell you why.

When Charles resigned, I felt I wanted to have a say not just in the outcome of any election, but in trying to make sure the person or people I really wanted for leader put him or herself forward. Especially as, at the time, there were stories that everyone was going to rally around Ming and not even hold a contest.

So I had a choice of 61 MPs and I chose to write to one, Chris Huhne. And thankfully he took my advice...:) Ignored any deals he had done. Saw that he had the right qualities to give it a good go, and stood. So I've been there for him all along. Had it not been Chris, I would have supported John Hemming, or written to try to get someone like Nick Clegg to stand instead.

You see, I think there is a malaise in British parliamentary politics which, regardless of how well intentioned they may be, people who have been stuck in that Westminster place for some time have become inured to somehow. They may be fiery campaigners with great records in opposition and so on but it's always on someone else's terms.

A couple of years ago I saw that nice Mr Oborne on a Newsnight being agreed with by some Labour and Tory MPs that British politics had lost its sense of ideological battle. That because of the total and utter victory of monetarism and free marketeering in the seventies and eighties that nobody any longer dared to challenge as the pre-eminent economic order parties were reduced to competing for the national equivalent of the PFI contract for deckchair management aboard the Titanic and that nobody was up on the bridge debating whether to steer away from the ice-bergs.

These ice-bergs are ever present, and none of the existing parties really has an answer for most of them - the pensions crisis, the rise of China and India, global poverty, systemic debt, how to pay for public services fairly, how to put the planet first without screwing up our economic prosperity. And so for me it's a case of "Out with the old and in with Chris Huhne". For Chris, as an economist who at least sponsors plurality of economic debate, is prepared to listen to counter-intuitive possibilities, is the only person of the three I believe who stands a chance of promoting this real underpinning radical shake-up this whole country needs and to help people understand a possible different system.

And so, despite my abiding admiration for Simon, perhaps especially after what he's been put or put himself through these past weeks, my instinctive sympathy with the message he spreads about looking after the poorest and keeping hold of the mechanisms that allow us to do that - NHS, state education and the like, my second and third preferences are really based on the fact that I don't really want either Ming or Simon as leader, and I'm guessing that with Ming, if Chris doesn't win, we will get another chance to select a newer face in a few years time, long before we would if it were Simon that beats Chris.

So no positive messages for either Ming or Simon there. I just think there is a gaping opportunity to break free from the poverty of contemporary British political discourse and carve out a brand new politics, in a brand new economic landscape, that stands a chance of beating these pressing problems which, if we carry on as now will consume all our resources and not move us ahead. That opportunity is particularly open in the immediate future, but no doubt by the time we are a year or so beyond another general election, they will still be pressing and there will be still an opportunity to repent our folly and choose a new broom.