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I had hoped to have the Liberal Democrat blogosphere to myself these next few days (well, not really, but while everyone else is away discussion new things I was going to put the boot into existing policy...:)

But, I have I believe fallen victim to a really nasty piece of software by a large and normally respected manufacturer of graphics and designs software. It's put a nasty file in some unicode file name format that has caused my Mac hard disk severe corruption and it looks like I am going to have to wipe and reinstall OS X from scratch. So every spare moment is likely to be spent getting my machine back to where it was as of last night.

Thank goodness I took the precaution some months ago of getting some synchronising software so all my stuff is backed up till Friday night.

But what a load of poo. Which is about as close as I dare to get to naming the software vendor concerned.

Today's Guardian carries a nice enough piece by Simon Jenkins in praise of devolution and localizing taxation, in particular through "ability to pay" local income tax. Clearly Daahling has yesterday set the scene for another big spat about Council Tax as it seems that the local government settlement is going to leave little option but for local authorities to raise the hated tax by more than they otherwise would.

Of course I think Jenkins, and the Lib Dems, are wrong on LIT - and are certainly wrong on removing all forms of property tax - but we in ALTER are prepared to accept LIT I think now on the proviso that we replace some other tax with a land tax at a national level (preferably a whopper like income tax for me!). Anyway - here's a taste of the Jenkins article (of course he's also wrong that it was a Tory script Daahling was cribbing from but don't let that get in the way of an otherwise good article!):

It was a Tory tax proposal that rewrote Darling's script:

The way forward can only be the European way, to devolve a major slice of spending on public services back to where it was before the mid-1980s, to local authorities. There it must be covered by some element of ability to pay - as bravely proposed by the Liberal Democrats. Darling cannot go on financing central programmes with above-inflation rises in a partly regressive property tax. There is no alternative, one day, to some form of local income tax. Council tax could be cut by a quarter with roughly one pence on income tax. Scotland is even now contemplating such a proposal. Yet ask Brown or Cameron for a view on such fiscal devolution, and they will look as if you wanted to murder their cat.

Giving taxpayers some scope to determine the level and quality of their public services is the only way to sustain future rises in public expenditure. That scope can come only through the local ballot, over health, police, education or whatever. Local income-related taxes exist in almost every country in Europe. They are intelligent taxation. Only in Britain do they scare party leaders witless.

I got an email late today from an LVT supporter saying that Nick Clegg had spoken about the role of LVT/SVR in enabling more affordable housing in a BBC panel discussion after the Queen's Speech today.

I've not been able to find it via the BBC website (it doesn't help not actually knowing what the program might have been - I'm guessing it was Daily Politics). So did anyone happen to see it and either point me to a "watch again" URL or explain what he said, specifically about LVT and housing. Because it would be quite significant since even LVT supporters in the higher echelons of the party have so far not been keen to discuss it as anything other than a taxation base and this could be the first time that someone has shown they understand it's got a whole greater relevance than that.

"Your typical loyal Conservative wife" has long been a synonym in some circles for what the rest of us shirt-lifters affectionately call "fag-hags". Actually - it's a bit more than that - she is a byword for heterosexual "cover" for gay men wanting to make their way in supposedly homophobic conservative politics. Ffion Jenkins got the same when she married Willie Hague. If truth be told, the same was said of Sarah Gurling, now Mrs Charles Kennedy, and of Sarah Macaulay, now Mrs Gordon Brown.

So, it's terribly tragic for everyone concerned when you hear of a real case of shall we say "sexual confusion" and there is speculation as to whether someone was really hiding his light under a bush, so to speak, all along. Doubly, trebly in this case, tragic when there are children involved. But no more so than if he was running off with another woman. So all credit to David Cameron if he holds to his word and refuses to judge Greg Barker's political ability and future on what is a bit of a personal mess. This is, after all, the twenty-first century, and not the nineteen-eighties when his party would be condemning his new "pretend family relationship" with legislation.

Since Greg is 40, and I am approaching the same, I can identify with him in a way - certainly my feelings have changed, becoming more open to finding love in people of either gender. It's not terribly trendy to say so in the entrenched "gay community" just as much as the "heterosexist community", but we need to appreciate that sexual identity is more fluid than the last two or three hundred years' of predominantly British macho-masculine history has led us to believe.

Has he always identified in secret as "gay" but been living a double life? He's sired three children, after all. People change in all sorts of ways. Loves change. He seems no better, or worse, than anyone who, after some years of marriage, has lost the fire that was once there and fallen for someone else. The gender of his new love should make no difference to the rest of us. It likely will to his kids - just because other children can be the cruelest.

But...he did work for one of those Russian kleptocrats we grace with the term "oligarch". That's the real skeleton in Mr Barker's newly redecorated closet. And if he ends up getting fired for anything, it should be the hug-a-huskie stunt he led his boss on a few months back!

But if there are young, gay, Tories out there (I can never quite understand why) Cameron's support for Barker will I hope make them think twice about taking on a fag hag till death do they part for the sake of a selection meeting.