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I suppose it's probably a very long time since The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was required reading for a Labour minister. And maybe my initial calculations are wrong on the "budget"...

But am I right in thinking that those of us who labour all our lives but can't afford to buy a home are now going to be paying more in tax than the rack landlord on his buy to let investment he's fleecing us to occupy? In another era even the most liberal of economists would have recognized this as robbery of the returns to labour.

Nice one Dahling! New Labour, New Rentier.

Did I see correctly the other night in a news report that there are approximately $61,000,000,000,000 of these "Credit Default Swap" instruments out there?

At the end of September the market capitalization of every listed company on the planet amounted to just two thirds of that, and in total, including all state and corporate bonds and other loan instruments the total of financial instruments in issue comes to less than the $61 trillion in swaps out there.

Isn't that bonkers? Doesn't that suggest that every loan, equity issued company or bond issue is completely, fully insured and then some? How does that work then? It seems that there's been a bit of mutual self-gratification going on in these heady dealing rooms. If our money is going to help unwind such ridiculous positions it's frankly outrageous.

When are we going to see the City of London police entering offices in Canary Wharf and carting off senior traders then instead of Brown and Blair fawning over the wreckage trying to rescue something from this deep pile of crap whilst hoping we won't notice that this year's Christmas bonuses are being taken out of our money?

Having been a bit behind the mood on Charles Kennedy's resignation, I quickly made up for it getting ahead of the game by encouraging others to urge Chris Huhne, MP for Eastleigh to think about putting his name forward...

What a sad weekend of intrigue and at times farce it's been. Anyway, as no doubt people are going to be trying to move quickly I thought I'd drop you a note to encourage you to contact anyone you can in the first instance to ensure that there should be a leadership election. If our parliamentarians were annoyed on Thursday night that CK was going over their heads as the news suggests, their position will be no more tenable in the view of many members if they engineer a stitch up for one candidate. So please, tell anyone you can that we need an election!

And there will be one. I've been in contact all weekend and emailing privately one or two MPs and one for sure is intending to stand to make a contest of it if nobody else comes forward (I would actually like John Hemming to win and I've offered to work on John's campaign assuming someone else doesn't stand).

That someone else, I'd like to lobby you to encourage, is our own former MEP, Chris Huhne. He's either only just back from holiday yesterday or today so I have not heard from him but have written to him encouraging him to think about it. Here's why:

1. Europe. With Blair having failed to make much of his EU presidency and Brown more anti- due to succeed him, and with Cameron anti- and likely to take the Tories that way, there is room for us to be the party of Europe and internationalism as we should be, I may not agree 100% with Chris about the Euro (I prefer James Robertson's idea of a "Common Currency" to a single currency at the moment), but it would be a first to have a former MEP as a party leader at Westminster. Both he and Nick Clegg, who I think has ruled himself out and is supporting Ming, have a full term at Strasbourg/Brussels under their belts and we should be prepared, as a pro-European party, to count that for what it is - parliamentary experience. It might even make a refreshing change to have someone who has cut his parliamentary teeth on something other than the yah-boo of Westminster (though watching the European parliament does not look all that different at times!). Let's get him in there now while he has more MEP experience than MP experience. He is in the ideal position, having done it himself, to explain and develop how we scrutinise and criticise Europe positively compared with the other positions seen to be either plain anti-Europe, or, on the other side, the "Europe can do no wrong" type pro-Europeans.

2. PR. I am disappointed that we quietly dropped PR as "unattainable", and didn't get terribly involved in the campaign after the general Election last year led by the Independent. Chris is not only committed to PR but of course is one of our two parliamentarians who has actually been elected under a PR system, of sorts. He was a director of Electoral Reform Ballot Services. We should be pushing PR right now in view of the probability that Labour will be waning in the run up to the next election and the dissatisfaction with the present situation.

3. International Development. Chris's economic interests have focussed on International Development. If we are to believe Cameron and Brown and their "save Africa" type rhetoric, Geldof Groups and so on, this is to be the foreign policy and humanitarian agenda for the next few years. Chris is a real economist who has made real studies of different mechanisms for International Development. Gordon Brown's naive sounding "drop the debt" type measures will not be sufficient in the longer run and we need someone who really understands these issues to promote better solutions.

4. Radical economics. Chris is President of Lib Dems ALTER (Action for Land Tax and Economic Reform). Personally I have not met him yet in that context, having only been Secretary of ALTER for less than a year and not having attended any of the conference events yet. So I don't know if he is a passionate proponent of LVT or simply someone who recognises the benefits of being open to unconventional economic and fiscal ideas. But either way, we do need to be open to radical economic solutions and need someone to promote that openness. If memory serves he was also supportive of our earlier attempts to set up an Association of Lib Dem Co-operators and supports mutual solutions to delivering public goods where appropriate.

5. Meedja. Chris is of course a former journalist. I do think we need someone whom the media can feel is "one of their own". But he also has strong credibility in the city - writing for the Economists and at times the FT as well as the economics pages of the Guardian and Independent.

Yes, he's likely to be an outsider. But that didn't stop some of us previously supporting David Rendel (who I would nominate again if we hadn't lost Newbury). But he's "different", "fresh" in all sorts of ways. He may feel that he's too new in Westminster but that's not been too great a barrier to Cameron for example (who would have recognised him this time last year if we weren't Oxfordshire activists?). I feel it is time to make use of the great strides we have made at Westminster over the past five years and skip the generation that seems lining up to arrange a succession (Simon/Ming/Mark etc). However he is being spoken of very positively as someone who would make a very good leader, so there is some momentum behind him.

During the "Internet Governance Forum" last month I wrote that we need to leave the internet alone if we want to foster human rights, instead of governments trying to regulate it and using it as yet another stick with which to beat non-compliant governments with bad records on human rights. I said that the internet was a tool of democracy and human rights because clever public spirited people like the folk behind "anon@penet.fi" many years ago would invent things that allowed people to express themselves and get information without censorship.

And so, only a few weeks later, it's nice to hear about...

BBC NEWS | Technology | Web censorship 'bypass' unveiled:

There is growing concern about web censorship

A tool has been created capable of circumventing government censorship of the web, according to researchers.

The free program has been constructed to let citizens of countries with restricted web access retrieve and display web pages from anywhere.

Interestingly, if there had been strong regulation of goings on out here in the internet, the sort of peer-to-peer sharing techniques that are being used in this little censorship getaround would probably have never been invented. They are the techniques that were once created to allow sharing of copyrighted material or even computer malware. A case, if ever there was one, I'd say, of two wrongs combining to make a right after all.

In other news today comes the idea that bloggers need some kind of "voluntary code" of conduct...

BBC NEWS | Politics | Voluntary code for blogs 'needed':

The flow of content "should not be regulated by any government"

Blogs and other internet sites should be covered by a voluntary code of practice similar to that for newspapers in the UK, a conference has been told.

Press Complaints Commission director Tim Toulmin said he opposed government regulation of the internet, saying it should a place "in which views bloom".

But unless there was a voluntary code of conduct there would be no form of redress for people angered at content.

Nonsense. The article goes on to say that Technorati estimate that every day 10,000 new blogs are created and 1.3 million articles produced. Which means that in total I keep an eye on just about two per cent of just one day's increase in the number of blogs. There's your code of conduct right there - I will read those that interest me or make sense and discard the rest, even if I ever find them. I find them by recommendation from others or through searching for specific things and then assessing on the basis of recent postings how useful they will be to me.

Besides, for years, complainants have actually had the upper hand - it's relatively easy to get a website taken down even now because ISPs are scared of action against them that they will happily censor whole sites rather than investigate the veracity of complaints against them. The fact that we now have these social sites and large blogging platforms that will probably have more backbone and stand up to such complaints is evening that out a little.