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I'm very busy at the moment trying to get a web database up for my old school former pupils' society, but I noticed today a lot of discussion about Tesco and its market dominance.

Personally, I patronize the Co-op and local shops as much as possible and am in some ways fortunate to be able to do so, and I abhor monopoly and monopsony, and it is clear that Tesco, ASDA and others are getting pretty close to such a position if they haven't already. But there's a simple little step that could at a stroke force Tesco and others to account properly for some of the externalities of out of town shopping...

They currently don't pay uniform business rates on their massive free parking areas at out of town developments - a massive subsidy from town centre retailers to the big sheds. With Site Value Rating (Land Value Tax levied at a local level), with which the Lib Dems propose to replace the Uniform Business Rate, such land would be properly valued and taxed.

News that the German and British governments have been paying for information almost certainly illegally obtained in order to chase people who try to stash their money overseas should worry us all. Obviously in this case the amounts of money potentially liable for tax are quite large numerically, although small in proportion to the total tax take - though the fact that it is merely around one fifth of one per cent of the total UK tax take we're talking about should alter our opinion about people who try to beat the system when everyone else has to pay. But it is the means employed that are of concern - paying what amounts to a criminal who has liberated customer personal information from the Liechtenstein bank at which he or she worked.

In a world in which it is ever easier for us to trade with overseas companies and individuals, to live in one place and earn in another and to invest in overseas assets, all of which are a good thing, I have warned previously that governments could try to get more authoritarian about chasing money allegedly stashed away or earned elsewhere:

This means ever more intrusive government, clinging desperately to current understandings of money, income and taxing that income as the only progressive way. We are already seeing huge bites taken out of our civil liberties because of immigration fears, terrorism and taxes.

And of course there is an alternative; that we switch to taxing only things that are impossible to hide - like land, which happens to have the added advantage of being value that the occupier does not create, rather than capital wealth or income which the worker or investor has created.

You might think this is just a bunch of rich people getting what they deserve from HMRC, but their willingness to engage is what amounts to industrial espionage to do so is disturbing and is a message to us all, whether we just trade with Americans on Ebay who then send us "gifts" tax-free or decide to retire to Spain, or further afield, whilst keeping a retirement job working online for a UK employer.

I haven't been on a plane for the best part of twenty years now. Thanks to the new weapon in the snooping state's arsenal, it looks like I never will again.

The virtual strip search is here folks. I dare say one day they will have them in Debenhams too.

I'm just sitting listening to the Any Questions Lib Dem leadership contest special and I just heard Chris Huhne, in response to a question about whether they were more afraid of Gordon Brown or David Cameron, say that one thing that scares people about Gordon Brown is that he cannot keep his hands out of other departments' business.

How timely an answer, because it has just been announced today that Kate Barker, she of the housing market report that was commissioned a couple of years ago (and who said herself that she didn't know much about housing economics at the time!) has now been asked to do a review of the Land Use Planning system...by...The Treasury:

The terms of reference of the review are:

To consider how, in the context of globalisation, and building on the reforms already put in place in England, planning policy and procedures can better deliver economic growth and prosperity alongside other sustainable development goals.

In particular to assess:

• ways of further improving the efficiency and speed of the system;
• ways of increasing the flexibility, transparency and predictability that enterprise requires;
• the relationship between planning and productivity, and how the outcomes of the planning system can better deliver its sustainable economic objectives; and
• the relationship between economic and other sustainable development goals in the delivery of sustainable communities.

I wonder how much Ms Barker knows about planning. She's turning into the economist's version of Louise Casey methinks.