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On Thursday "The Insider" (a laughable conceit of sniping from behind anonymity mostly at people trying their best to do some good in local politics) in the Oxford Mail complained that a Green councillor had not updated his blog for a few months, describing a blog as a "self important forum to tell people what you have been up to".

Until I got into this I was extremely skeptical myself about it. And I did think blogging was a bit of onanistic self-promotion that probably nobody would ever read. Of course the Insiders gives the lie to that suggestion - since he, or she, obviously does follow them sometimes. We've seen how instant news from ordinary people on the scene - long before the news crews could get there - gave us insights into the July bombings, the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the war in Iraq direct from a chap in Baghdad. How the BBC and other news networks are paying people for their camera phone eye-witness reports and images and so on.

All one can reasonably conclude is that it is in fact the media running scared. Blogging offers an opportunity for people to air their opinions for others to find and read. It threatens the monopoly of the "Fleet Street" scribblers in holding our attention for a few precious minutes every day. And of course they do it for money - whether the journalist or commentator getting paid, to the media giant continuing to attract advertising - if we all got our opinions from each other (and they're no less valid - often it seems more honest and truthful than opinion journalists in my experience) instead of from the self-important scribbler in a newspaper or television office, they have little else of worth to us.

Finally running scared of the power of the web are we, "Insider"?

It's scary to think that twenty years have flown by since Big Bang. When I was doing my A levels a couple of years before I had ignored all the advice of my tutors and applied for the wrong Oxford college (New) in the wrong year (their first year taking women) to do the wrong subject (English) and didn't get past the entrance exam (in the last year people a whole year older than me were allowed to take it after their A levels).

I got offered a place at Durham in the New Year, however, but not satisfied with the idea of living on a student grant (remember them?) I tried to get what used to be called "industrial sponsorship". Doing English, the only people who would entertain the idea were Marks & Spencer's graduate recruitment program, and then only to be a Human Remains officer, so I gave up on that idea.

It was the year of a young copper trader who made the headlines on the London commodities exchanges having become a multi-millionaire at 21 and I spent the whole of my summer term not reading the Aeneid, not caring about the Paston letters and not revising W B Yeats, but writing to any firm in the city I could find an address for asking for a job. I so wanted a wardrobe of chalk-stripe suits and red braces!

I wrote to money brokers, futures trading firms, lots of commodities brokers of course, and one Stock Exchange firm (already the Stock Exchange seemed quite an old fusty nineteenth century institution and not really the place for a young turk to be dealing in sad old imperial age companies' stock). The money brokers liked me, but they wouldn't give me a job because, they said, if we put a non-graduate onto the phones to American bankers with their liberal arts HNDs they would laugh at them.

The one stock exchange firm I had written to, a stock-jobbing firm called Pinchin Denny & Co, did have a scheme for taking on post A-level youngsters, and so in September 1985 I headed down to the big smoke with nowhere to live and a salary of £3,500 per year.

I was utterly miserable. It has clouded my image of London ever since. I used to get drunk for hours in the Bishop of Norwich, or the Long Room or some such, because all the people I knew in London were my co-workers and to go home and then go out to meet them later meant a 90 minute trip "home" to Wembley, and then probably another 90 minute trip out to Wimbledon or somewhere they lived. So it was far easier to get blotto before going home.

I remember, well, I don't actually, getting so drunk one night that I rode the Northern Line up and down all night until it dropped me off at High Barnet (I was trying to get to Balham where I had moved to share the most god-awful flea pit with two or three other young "blue-buttons" after my Wembley landlord had got pissed off with me abusing his hospitality) and I got sat next to some weirdo with a knife on the night bus back into town - apparently one of our settlement clerks had seen me on the tube about half eight somewhere near Tooting and had tried to wake me up to no avail!

I remember one night I was guardian of the company mobile phone. We were so sophisticated in those days there were these dodgy geezers who sought to put one over on us jobbers who dealt in stocks that had dual listings in London and New York (my "pitch" was chemicals so we had lots of them - ICI, Glaxo, Beechams - remember them?) by "arbitraging". They traded shares from us out of hours when we couldn't see what prices were being made inn New York and what the exchange rates were doing - and flogging them again as "ADRs" in New York - this was even before those Reuters pagers that would give you stock tickers and forex prices. Some Ozzie guys from Smith Brothers saw me with the phone and decided to have some fun with me. They wanted to borrow the phone to make a quick call. The phone bill for three minutes to Australia was more than my pitch's entire book profit for the day and left the four kilo battery with about ten minutes talk time left on it!

Anyway, in April 2006, Morgan Grenfell (remember them?) took over Pinchin Denny in preparation for full deregulation in the October, and gave us blue buttons a thousand pounds raise to go with our yello buttons. I was still utterly depressed, so now was a good time I thought to move back home. At least I could live with mum for free in Glasgow and there were some good brokers there I could join, and I got a job with Laing & Cruickshank's Glasgow office.

If memory serves, the day of Big Bang happened to coincide with the closing date for applications for the British Gas privatisation issue and Laing & Cruickshank flew me down to London with a huge bag of application forms to get them into the Midland Bank (remember them?) in time for the close. And I decided to go and see my old Pinchin Denny colleagues on the Stock Exchange floor (they remained on the floor for a while which was bizarre - all the brokers had gone home to their offices and Chinese walls while most of the jobbers tried to do screen trading on the floor itself - well it did work in Glasgow!).

Several had moved firms. It was a year of lots of moves. Staff, whole teams, were poached as the new corproate owners of Stock Exchange member firms tried to build up their presence, and of course salaries had taken off. The guys I left six months earlier on £4,500 were now on £20,000 plus (at nineteen years old remember). Several had got flash company cars as golden hellos and so on (though nobody, but nobody ever drove to work in the city that I can remmeber!). And I had taken a small cut to go and live at home and was still on £4,000.

Oh well. I could have retired by now I guess. As it is, it was 1998, I think, when I finally got up to twenty grand a year. Maybe my philanthropy would be easier if I had made myself a million by the time I was twenty. Maybe I would just be one of those rather arrogant loadsa money ("I could buy and sell you before breakfast") types. Maybe I could be Tory shadow chancellor by now...:) (One of my colleagues from that 1985 Pinchin Denny intake, a chap called Tom Harris, did stand against Jenny Tonge I think in 2001, having been a Wandsworth Tory councillor for a while already I think)

The worst decision of my life? I don't think so. But it would probably have been nice to have an Oxford degree and a few million quid stashed away somewhere.

The Office of Fair Trading today announced that it was to conduct a review of the UK's house-building sector. One of the aspects of the market it will be looking at is:

how land that is suitable for development is brought through the
planning process...and...how land with planning approval is
converted into new homes.

In the TV interview this evening with John Fingleton, the OFT's Chief Executive, he expanded on this a little, explaining that they will be looking at evidence as to whether, and if so why, the development industry "banks" land with permissions and whether incentives can be created for them developing such land more quickly once permission is given.

The OFT is an ideal body to investigate this, as it deals with matters of competition and monopoly, and, as we all understand, land, or at least location in this case, is a monopoly and developers holding land with permission out of the market for any period is an abuse of their position as monopoly owners of a commodity that the rest of the community need merely to subsist.

Long standing Liberal Democrat policy on the National Non-Domestic Rate (Business Rates) provides the only fair answer to this issue. We would charge Site Value Rating on all land not currently occupied as housing or zoned as agricultural. So owners of sites or potential sites with permission for housing would be taxed on the value of such land for that planning use whether they develop them or not, giving them a huge incentive to get on and build the homes and transfer that tax liability to the new occupiers.

The review will accept unsolicited comments, suggestions and evidence until 17th August, 2007 (see the PDF for more details)

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