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A number of others have kindly blogged about the interesting discussion at the ALTER conference fringe event last Saturday night. From the point of view of being on the platform for the first time it was all the more interesting for me. I wanted to pick up on some of the issues that were raised, not so much by the audience, though many were very insightful questions and observations, but the issues raised by both Tony Vickers in his introduction and especially by Vince Cable in his speech.

First, Tony Vickers introduced the whole event by saying that ALTER wanted to spend some time focussing on the second half of our acronym, Economic Reform more generally, rather than Land Tax which we have fixated on thus far. I'm afraid I rather brushed that aside with my little speech about our book, which will now focus more on land than anything else.

I have always taken the view personally that there is indeed more to the essential economic reforms we need to see in an equitable economic system that will benefit the greatest number of ordinary people than just land. I look to the great individualist anarchists and mutualists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fore-runners of the libertarian movement, who all held that there were four great monopolistic systems we needed to eradicate to level the playing field for all - land, banking, intellectual property and the state itself, or most especially the tariffs they use in pursuit of protectionist policy. Indeed my journey to understanding the land problem began with reading books about the debt-money system.

Colleagues involved in the editorial team for the book, whose economics education is far superior to mine, however, are more convinced that the land monopoly underpins all of these others, and whilst I am yet to understand their arguments fully I do I think see roughly where they are coming from. Essentially their argument is that by creating "free land" the power of the worker is increased by enough to offset the coercive power of debt money, that the ability of governments to manipulate a tax system based on market set values of land to effect protectionist policies is reduced and intellectual property becomes much more a negotiable part of an inventor's portfolio rather than something easily "enclosed" by big business as a result of the relative increase of the power of labour versus capital. At least I think that's how it goes.

But anyway, the upshot of all this is that the book will be more about land than about any of the other areas I have been interested in and which Tony suggested we would be looking at in the future. Though no doubt the chapters on each area of policy will show how "free land" feeds through into greater empowerment of the individual and worker.

Second, (we weren't ganging up on Tony, I promise!) Vince again turned the discussion around onto land tax. He said, I think, that we had largely won the theoretical argument on land taxes - that the party acknowledged its potential importance. But that there was much work to be done he said to produce "SMART" (my corporate bingo word, not Vince's) policies that can actually be sold to people (ie voters) and implemented. And on that theme I want to post a few separate thoughts of my own in separate posts in the near future.

James Graham rejoined that actually we need to make the "moral case" for LVT, what I would call, and agree with, the TINA (there is no alternative) argument - though my powers of persuasion in the housing debate on that position were clearly not very good! I could put it a slightly different way - "can we afford not to". And that, I think, is also shaping up to be the real message of the "Liberal Alternative" book.

I will end this introduction to a series of posts on "can we afford not to" with a thought on what seems to be a trait in Liberal Democrat policy making. Do we need to have such detailed plans for exactly how we would proceed from day one of a Lib Dem administration, or should we focus more on getting the "big messages" across. It seems to me that the last time we had a big ideological shift in British government, in 1979, that the Tories had a clear "direction of travel" but were not obsessed with landing in Number 10 with a full set of detailed measures to implement that. They may have had behind the scenes, ready to wheel out when the time was right, but the message to the public in the election was of the broad direction of travel.

This is not something we are alone in. Nowadays every party seems to have to have these details all thrashed out in order to give them credibility amongst the electorate that they would be competent to run the country. But I'm not entirely sure that that is what the voter actually wants - perhaps they want the big ideas rather than the detailed minutiae. I suspect this minute detail is a symptom of our modern managerial one-upmanship and the absence of ideological politics. But surely as a party we actually want to return to ideological politics that we think voters will engage with and be excited by.

I don't think I would be accused of disloyalty if I said that we are not going to be the party of government after the next election! So we spend a lot of time selling detailed policies that we will not get to implement before circumstances, most likely, change again. We have had most success with our "big themes" - we are known for PR, for opposition to war in Iraq, and for the idea, expressed through our previous tax pledges (though I hate to admit it in oh so many ways - not least that it will give succour to the likes of Evan Harris!) that we want "fair" taxation. We can sell LVT as "fair taxation" without minute details as to how it would be implemented, perhaps at most a broad timescale for a tax shift, as the Tories did with reducing income taxes in 1979 - something that actually took them three terms to really implement as far as the average voter would feel in their pocket.

Our detailed policy making produces a couple of not always welcome effects - that we are hostages to fortune - what we promise in one election might one day come back to haunt us several elections later when we make it to Downing Street, and it saves other parties a deal of work thinking for themselves when we create policies that they like to nick. We can of course take some pride in others wanting to use our policies, but people soon forget where they originated, and we risk being forever a glorified "think tank" rather than a party with the big ideas that will win us power. LVT is such an idea. We should not be afraid to tout it without trying to explain to people exactly how it would be implemented except in broad outline until we are closer to being in a position to do so. That will not stop the likes of us in ALTER, however, trying to show the party internally how it might work, but in the end, the detail is what the Treasury is for when we have control of the Great Court!

We’ve heard recently how political parties are trying to grapple with the problem of inheritance tax affecting middle class families “affected” by property price rises rather than the “super rich” it was supposedly intended for.

Might I float a possible solution? Instead of a cash tax payable on inheritance of an asset, estates could split the property, passing a 99 year leasehold onto the beneficiaries of the estate and the freehold into a community land trust so that eventually the value and control of that land will pass back to that community.

This is after all how the “super rich” have mitigated their inheritance tax, through that august body the National Trust, for many years.

Most land price change has nothing to do with the current occupiers of that land, and everything to do with public policy and spending such as planning consent or the building of local infrastructure at public expense.

More crucially, land value is a “zero sum” game. Rising land values directly exclude whole swathes of a new “landless” class as a result. It is surely right that such inequity be redressed periodically. When better than at inheritance time? This method will at least not immediately harm the beneficiaries or force them to sell the family home.

Over a few generations such a mechanism could properly redistribute unearned wealth better than inheritance tax ever could.

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.

ALTER (the Lib Dems' Land Value Tax and Economic Reform group) have spent the time over the holidays preparing arguments for the "Tax Commission II" which will focus, amongst other things on that bit of tax policy that was left hanging at Conference - the details of how to implement Land Value Tax.

One thing I noticed just before Christmas which didn't seem to be picked up anywhere else was some research from "Inside Housing" magazine, also reported in the Telegraph, that in some places up to 50% of new build housing is standing empty, bought up, often "off-plan", by speculators who just want to hold it and hope to make a turn on it selling it on after a year or two, but not even putting tenants into them because they don't want to have to carry out any remediation work before they sell and don't want any "vacant possession" issues to affect their choice of timing.

It particularly affects apartments, and so disproportionately also those trying to get onto the housing ladder.

The Lib Dems already have policy to shift the Uniform Business Rate to a Site Value Rating basis, and at conference as part of the tax paper it was agreed that this should also apply to vacant brownfield sites to encourage development.

Anyway, as one way of beginning a shift to LVT more generally as the main, or hopefully only, property based tax, we are suggesting that once land is in the SVR system it should stay there. So new homes would attract SVR even after purchase rather than Council Tax or anything else. This would provide a huge disincentive for people to "abuse" the new housing market in this way. At the moment, and even under Local Income Tax, most of these buyers would pay little or nothing while the properties lie empty, but if they attracted SVR from the moment they got planning permission, such buyers would have to factor in a tax bill when deciding to leave them empty.

Problem solved?