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Iain Dale (how does he get hold of Liberator before I do as a subscriber?) detects some disharmony in Lib Demmery over the "Tax Shift" policy and the fact that it might leave people paying more in income tax because of Local Income Tax.

Anyway, it's nothing that we at ALTER haven't been saying for ever really. Through Tony Vickers, one of the authors of the Liberator article and a member of the Tax Commission, we fought to ensure that, whilst we supported the great potential of switching from income/production based taxes to resource use the balance was not yet there to make a convincing Tax Shift when one included Local Income Tax. But we were happy at Conference that the party voted to investigate a bigger switch by looking at land taxes at the next stage.

The Liberator article really bemoans the fact that at this next stage the Tax Commission have failed to get to grips with that part of Conference's mandate. Though it should also be noted that it was written a few weeks ago and since then TPTB are rumoured to have conjured up an additional chunk of national income tax cuts.

If Iain wants a real story on this, he could perhaps highlight that the Lib Dem Youth and Students group also comprehensively bunked Local Income Tax in favour of Land Value Tax, by a huge majority, at their recent conference. It would have been more newsworthy than his "Land Tax campaigners in campaign for Land Tax shock" story.

I note also that the first comment to Iain Dale's story is something about the Lib Dems will never be able to reconcile the socialist and libertarian tendencies within our ranks...which is precisely why we have set up The 1909 Group, because we believe that a return to the distinctively liberal economics of Lloyd-George, Churchill, MacKenzie King, Henry George and others that got lost in the great battle between capitalism and protection and socialism of the twentieth century can unite these two tendencies.

Of course our first lesson could be taken from Keynes: "when the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?" Local Income Tax as a policy came two years before the Tax Commission and the desire to make the switch from incomes onto resource use and unearned wealth. To hold LIT now as sacred in that context is a millstone that we ought to dump. LVT would still fulfill the aim of ditching a ridiculously unfair and usually regressive Council Tax whilst enabling us to continue a real switch away from taxes on income and productivity.

In today's Lib Dem news releases Nick Clegg, our new man with the Home Office Briefs asks, in Met Chief must come up with a very good explanation for his behaviour:

"Sir Ian will have to come up with a very good explanation for this extraordinary behaviour."

Well - picture this: you're going to have a conversation with a man who allegedly changed his mind and legal opinion so many times before the country headed to war and now can't remember what he said when and to whom. Wouldn't you want at least a tape recorder?

All this brouhaha about the Olympics, torches, boycotts and so on has not passed me by. I hear all sorts of stuff from the "athletes' side" about how the Olympics is not political, about how people have trained all their lives to get to this supreme test of their skills and abilities against others from every nation on earth. I have some sympathy with that. I was once quite a competitive fencer. I used to love the competitions (second in the West Midlands under 16s foil if you're interested and can believe it!) and I can only imagine the excitement and satisfaction of having made it to the very top on the planet in your discipline.

But saying that the Olympics is not political seems to me nowadays like saying it's non-commercial and strictly amateur - at least the latter has been the case within my life time. But, as we all saw on 7th July 2005 (when there wasn't other news on that day), the choice of venue is intensely political, certainly in the sense that politicians are deeply involved in it. It can (and has already in the case of London) make people fortunes, that others pay for.

I admit to having had misgivings when Beijing was awarded the games - I don't like the fact that Formula One has a race there, though in a sense that's less of an issue because F1 is an unashamedly commercial, big money, oligarchic event that pays but lip service to the troubles of "little people" and with no loftier ideals such as the Olympic movement professes. But I, along with many others it seems, did hope that having such a high profile international event, together with their growing commercial and economic presence in the world, would focus minds in China on reform. Until I think it was last year sometime that someone high up in the Chinese government said something to the effect that China would never be a liberal democracy ("over my dead body" by implication). I accept that moving such a huge population to full democracy would take time, but this was a "never, never, never" type of statement.

Ever since I have thought that "we" should somehow object to the whole shebang and the credence it gives to the veneer of acceptability. I know that in 1980 the Moscow regime was pretty similar to Beijing's and that the boycott then was a specific protest about the invasion of Afghanistan (oh how we can now ruefully laugh about that!) and it did no good whatever so far as I can remember - though even then, China joined the boycott. So as an organized thing, I'm not sure a "national" boycott will do any good this time either. However, as in 1980, there are other symbolic objections we in the democratic world can make. Athletes could attend and take part under the flag of the Olympic movement rather than their national flags and anthems for example.

But it is pure fantasy to say that the Olympics are non-political - they never have been in reality, even long before they became a festival for junk food vendors and sweat shop employers to tout their tawdry wares and part of a professional athlete's career progression. The Soviet Union - and other countries within their sphere of influence - didn't take part from 1928 till 1952. African nations withdrew in protest at South Africa and Rhodesia being allowed to take part in the seventies. If it really were apolitical, why does the torch even go anywhere near Downing Street - surely if it's all above politics it should be a royal occasion.

Personally, if any athlete choses voluntarily, having gained a place in the team, not to attend, putting lives in Darfur, Tibet or, so far little mentioned despite last year's riots and crackdown, Burma before their personal attainment, they'll have my full support and they ought not to be punished or denigrated for making that sacrifice.

The BBC and Times at least have picked up on this from "Hurricane" Gordon:

Brown in pledge to devolve power:

Mr Brown will seek to devolve power away from Whitehall

Gordon Brown will seek to devolve power away from central government if he becomes prime minister, he has told the BBC in an interview.

The "Bank of England independence" model, devolving policy from ministers, would let those "better able to manage, just get on with it", he said.

Earlier, it was revealed Mr Brown would consider giving day-to-day control of the NHS to an independent board.

Burning Our Money picks up on the differences between interest rate setting and the NHS.

I want to concentrate on semantics. Is an "independent board" not just another gigantic quango? One for the NHS would truly eclipse anything we've seen before, dwarfing even the Learning and Skills Council. But it's not "devolution" under any stretch of the imagination.

I can't imagine he'd get his party to believe that an "independent board" was anything other than a shadow board of directors getting ready to sell the rest of it off. And he won't get many others to believe that it's really devolution of power.