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Would someone give me a job developing ideas for the future. Here's another one I prepared earlier:

It seems that the transmission loss problem is a little less daunting using High Voltage Direct Current - I work out that southern Morocco to London would involve about a 7% transmission loss in a more or less straight line over land. Sounds like it has potential to me.

If the world is a more dangerous place, it's as much because of people like Richard Armitage: US threatened to bomb Pakistan as it is because of people like Bin Laden.

I hope personally that we will choose to stand shoulder to shoulder with our Commonwealth brothers and sisters who have provided us with many of our residents and not a few friends and colleagues than a regime that even remotely thinks it's acceptable to make such threats.

Interestingly though, this is a similar phrase to one that was alleged to have been used as an ultimatum to the Taliban themselves, BEFORE 9/11, two months before, when they were stalling in talks over a Unocal pipeline from the central asian republics to the Arabian Sea coast.

If you threaten what to most of us seemed like a basket case state and their friends respond with a 9/11, would you really want to threaten a more sophisticated populous and relatively much more influential military one with nukes, even small ones, like Pakistan?

I used to take it more or less as an article of faith that the EU is good for us. Somehow. And that the Liberal Democrat position of being avowedly critical of some of the ways it operates was a good one - we were the first, I believe, in calling for CAP reform way back just after we joined, for example.

Like so many lofty political projects it has or perhaps could have beneficial aims. I was even rather enthusiastic about the idea of a "United States of Europe", if only it could be constructed as a genuinely liberal federation in which sovereignty rests as much as possible with the individual. I'd even like to have seen it replacing national governments, mainly because I can't think of anything that national governments are good for in a world where the individual is sovereign that would not be better done perhaps with a "light touch" overarching supra-national body.

The current line indeed is that there are some things we just can't handle on our own - issues that naturally do not respect national borders - pollution, global warming, terrorism. Some, I noted during the campaign for the European parliamentary candidates, take a more controversial line (for me at least) that the "fight" against "excesses" by transnational corporations can only be handled at a supranational level. And that the EU is such a model supranational body capable of meeting all these challenges.

All the time of course there have been nay-sayers - on the left by people who see it as a free market capitalist conspiracy (actually I think they mean protectionist but I don't think they understand that any longer on the left) and on the right that it is meddlesome, protectionist (and they mean it correctly) and no longer, if it ever was, centered on freeing trade to make individuals better off. And there is evidence that both have a point - in fact the same point - especially about protectionism.

But for me the reason I'd quite like it to slow down is that we have lost control of our own, national politics - even without Europe interfering, though it certainly helps when they claim things are out of their hands. And, despite the chimera of representation that is the European Parliament if we have no control over our national politicians we have no control over what they do in our name in the other courts of the European project.

So, can anyone sell the whole idea to me again; explain to me how we can possibly make it work for the sovereign individual if we have a great barrier at our national government level not interested in that sovereign individual even in their own countries? It probably goes without saying, as I've done so before, but all the brilliant arguments in the world will do nothing for me if Blair ends up as president. I have not left this sceptered isle now for nearly twenty years, and even then it was just to go to the emerald one, but I will seriously have to consider emigrating to Norway if that happens.

Guardian Unlimited Money | News_ | Study reveals financial crisis of the 18-40s:

Patrick Collinson
Tuesday March 28, 2006
The Guardian

An official government study into Britain's personal finances reveals a lost generation of 18- to 40-year-olds unable to cope with debts and soaring house prices, with alarmingly low levels of savings and little hope of building a decent pension.

The study, by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and Bristol University, published today, is the biggest of its kind undertaken in Britain. It paints a picture of a generational divide fuelled by higher education costs and the collapse of company pension schemes - with 42% of adults now with no pension and 70% with no meaningful savings.

The FSA will call today for a new national strategy to improve Britain's financial capability, including workplace-based financial seminars targeted at 4 million employees; making personal finance more prominent in the national curriculum from 2008; and "money doctor" packs which will be sent to 1.5 million new and prospective parents each year.

What a typical and completely ineffectual response. A few leaflets and seminars to tell people to do better. Whilst it is still important to ensure that those who have worked all their lives now have a decent quality of life in retirement, we need to radically rethink our economic and fiscal policies to address this looming generation of have-nots, including me!

All of this bullshit about us being better off than we ever have been and so on is worth nothing if that better off means that we slave longer and harder for it. The monetary system has created a similar problem to the feudal systems that preceded mass home ownership, only this time there is little way out because people just do not have the capability to build up that same asset backing as previous generations had.

Forbes reported recently that:

Making a billion just isn't what it used to be. In our inaugural ranking of the world’s richest people 20 years ago, we uncovered some 140 billionaires. Just three years ago we found 476. This year the list is a record 793. They’re worth a combined $2.6 trillion, up 18% since last March. Their average net worth: $3.3 billion.

India's quota, 23 people worth between them $99bn compares with per capita GDP of just $3,400. Lakshmi Mittal's fortune increased in one year by the equivalent of SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND UK median incomes. Now don't get me wrong, I do not believe in a zero sum wealth game. I'm not some rabid trot that thinks they only get rich because others are poor. They get rich because money attracts money, because of the system that they are so good at playing. Because assets are transferred from poor to rich through landlordism (check out how many of Britain's rich list as rich because they own large tracts of our common wealth, the land of the UK itself that the rest of us need to pay them to occupy) and debt money.

This is not a call for some kind of punitive taxation - what's the point if, like Philip and Cynthia Green you can go through a year paying something of the order of five figures only in tax anyway, but for a new predistributive system that allows us all to share in our birthright, this planet, equitably and gives people a chance.

"Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions - rearranges itself, and the people born then cannot even imagine a world in which their grandparents lived and into which their parents were born, We are currently living through such a transformation"

Peter Drucker, "The Post-Capitalist Society" Chapter 1, 1993

In "The Future of Money" former Belgian central banker Bernard Lietaer suggests two examples of Drucker's "sharp transformation".

First the invention of printing, and the unimaginable change it brought about in the literacy and therefore intellectual and political influence of a large part of the population from whom books were previously too remote. The ramifications of such a change included the Reformation and its huge upheavals as nations moved away from Rome, gave primacy to their own languages, and permitted scientific scholarship previously zealously suppressed by the Vatican.

Second, the invention of the steam engine which accelerated the process of urbanization, global trade in manufactures, created a working class steeped first in poverty, oppression and misery, and then rising up with revolutionary fervour.

Lietaer, following Drucker's suggestion, suggests that the next epochal change is on us. This time he paints a picture of four great movements that he describes as huge pistons pushing towards the same centre point, and that our reaction to these movements could push us to ever greater social inequity and environmental degradation to the disadvantage of future generations or to what he calls "sustainable abundance". His four great pistons are all too evident already: climate change, an ageing population, monetary instability and the advent of the super-connected information age.

So, you'll have spotted that this actually has nothing to do with the recent book from which I've shamelessly pinched the title. I haven't read it, and it appears now to be on reprint or something as Amazon can only offer 4-6 weeks delivery, but I will no doubt find it interesting once it arrives. But the point is that this epochal change will necessitate a reinvention of the state, the nation state, and probably every nation state on the planet.

Many of the institutions, commercial and governmental at least, that we have today were forged precisely because communication and information flow between disconnected markets was difficult. They are vehicles in which we put our trust when dealing with people and businesses we could not know personally. Even money itself is a construct that enables us to trust dealings with one another, a mechanism by which someone who sells us something can give us credit without knowing too much about us.

The information age changes all of this. The synopsis of David Cameron's Google speech yesterday at ConservativeHome does pinpoint the sort of changes we have seen in information flow and how they have been reflected in changes in the mode of government or, to use their word, bureaucracy. But it goes so much further than they seem to conceive (or maybe they're just trying not to scare the Tory horses too much).

The internet and other communication technologies enable us vastly to expand the networks of people whom we know well enough to form an opinion about whether we trust them or not. Look at things like e-Bay, where many participants rely on recommendations from others when making decisions about whom to trade with. An operation like e-Bay could just as well work in fact with a new, corporate, common currency into and out of which people trade other currencies as they need to. In a different vein, bringing new participants into the global economy, look at things like Kiva, the internet based microfinance scheme where people from all over the developing world can pitch for micro-loans from investors the world over to help them set up or develop their businesses.

On a more day-to-day level we have seen the internet make trade "arbitrage" available to the individual consumer - we can now search the web for the best prices in many goods and in different currencies. There is simply less of a need for national currencies. When, as we are frequently promised, we no longer need cash even for small transactions, it will not matter what currency our bank account is denominated in, so long as timely information allows us to convert it at the till into something the seller wants - which may even not have to be "money" in the conventional sense at all.

The internet is also radically changing the way we could choose to work, even if not many of us have so far done so. We could choose to live on a desert island with an internet connection and still work for our tech firm in Britain, or vice versa, we could retreat to our village virtual workplace and carry out open heart surgery on a patient in Tonga. Where do we get paid for these different patterns of working, and in what - Tesco vouchers anyone, after all you can pretty much buy anything you'd need there if you want to? How would a government know, except through every more intrusive surveillance of our affairs, what our incomes are, where they ought to be taxed and so on?

What does a state have left, if it no longer has control of information about its citizens' earnings and trading patterns? And when we can trade with smaller and smaller businesses around the world because of our widened networks of trust, what does the global corporation have left to keep us buying from them? This was the great hope of the nineteenth century anarchists, libertarians and mutualists who hoped for an end to the money monopoly held by states and bankers, and to government protectionism, which would drive down the returns to capital and drive up the returns to labour.

In the light of these huge potential changes in the ways we work, socialise, trade and trust we have the opportunity to look again at the argument, that once seemed so settled in the early part of the twentieth century, the great Liberal reform era, for truly free trade over protectionism. Individual choice over state intervention. If there is a role for the state in all of this, it is in trying to ensure that we all have fair access to the media of such a new economy - communications and delivery networks.