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When you get a number of friends emailing to find out if you're okay because you haven't blogged for a couple of weeks it's maybe time to start paying the old thing some attention again. Although I do have a subscription to one of these blog stats packages and I keep an eye on it, I never seem to be getting as many hits as many younger blogs report in their early days. So I do often wonder if it's worth it all sometimes.

But yesterday I was on the platform for a debate/discussion on the subject of "Planning to win?" at the Lib Dems' South Central Regional Conference held here at Oxford Brookes University and the chair of the session had clearly got most of her information about me from this blog, so I guess it does get noticed once in a while.

But you know how it goes, it's not that I've not had any opinions over the past couple of weeks; far from it, I seem to have unfinished blog posts on a dozen different topics. But with being the only one in at work for much of last week and having had evening meetings on every night I wasn't on duty (and one on one that I was on duty for!) everything else gets behind a little. And soon my RSS feed reader is showing upwards of four thousand unread items and it all gets a bit much.

Some other projects must come ahead in my priorities over blogging; projects that promise in more practical ways to get across my core ideals:

• Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts where I've had two meetings in the past week explaining how to create community led affordable housing in two rural communities
• the "Liberal ALTERnative" book project aiming to get a book on radical liberal economics out before the autumn conference season
• the Oxfordshire Social Enterprise Forum's replacement website which we hope will better support and help grow the social enterprise sector in Oxfordshire
• and most of all, the run up to election campaigning for a seat on Oxford City Council again in May - where I think our agent would get upset if I blogged all my spare time while telling him I didn't have much of that precious commodity for campaigning!

Add to that obligations such as being the staff side elected governor here at Brookes, and we've had a few board and committee meetings in the past couple of weeks and you'll maybe see why I haven't got round to blogging much. I'm also still not really happy with the design, not happy that it actually has the effect I want of being simple but of steering readers to related posts and links and getting them to stick around a bit more to read the "back issues". But I'll live with the design while I cannot carve out any more time to work on it!

So, it might still be "blogging lite" for a while, but I will try and better choose my subjects so I don't end up writing nothing as a result of having too much to write about!

The chap who drew me to joining the Institute of Economic Affairs (yes, me!) Fred Harrison, publicising his new book "Ricardo's Law: House Prices and the Great Tax Clawback Scam", has a piece in the Yorkshire Post today detailing how it ain't so:

LONDON Mayor Ken Livingstone claims that the capital subsidises the rest of the country.

Taxpayers in London and the South-East, we are told, pay such heavy taxes that the Treasury transfers about £13bn to regions like Yorkshire.

This is one of the appalling myths that cripples public policy and prevents people in the regions from enjoying a square deal from the public purse.

In reality, people in the South-East are subsidised by the regions. And the housing market is the vehicle for delivering this shameful result. For the tax policies of the Treasury, which are supposed to transfer income from the rich to help the poor, are biased to achieve the opposite effect.

I simply do not understand the government's position on the forty-two day proposal for the time a suspect can be held without charge. I saw a blog post recently, but for the life of me can't remember where, that listed the equivalent period in other western democracies. I seem to remember seeing that the next highest limit in any country is fourteen days, and that most don't have any extension beyond their normal two day period for all suspects.

Correct me if all that is crap, but assuming it's not, what is it about the UK that means that we need to allow three times the number of days anywhere else on the planet - at least anywhere that could be called a "liberal democracy"? Why should it take our police and/or intelligence services three times as long as anywhere else's to stitch enough evidence together to charge someone?

I hear all sorts of excuses - the favourite seems to be that accessing electronic information forensically takes a long time. And sometimes these sound plausible. But one has to return to the question about why should it take our people three times as long? Or is there something the raw statistics, the legal position as opposed to the way it operates in practice, do not reveal. Do other countries have fewer rights enshrined elsewhere that somehow lets them cheat and hold people for longer than their laws appear to permit?

Obviously the US has Guantanamo Bay and other "black holes" elsewhere into which people could be "disappeared". And maybe I watch too much "Spooks" but I rather assume, conspiratious that I am, that we also have extra-judicial ways of "hiding" someone if the state wants it so. Or is that just not so, and this forty-two day detention idea is really an attempt to be "above board" where other countries aren't?

The Home Office's own figures show that 1165 people have been arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 (admittedly that probably includes Walter Wolfgang and similar instances of overenthusiastic enforcement), more than half of them released without charge and only forty one convictions so far on Terrorism Act charges. The majority of the rest have been charged with something, presumably without breaching the existing, already too long, twenty eight days.

Just someone explain the rationale of forty two days, please!