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Do they still have "army surplus stores"? All the ones in Oxford were priced out of the retail property market years ago. Or maybe their stock was raided to send to our boys in Iraq.

Anyway, the reason I ask is that there's this assumption going about that Bliar will this week get his commission to go sort out the middle east, and, whilst the Guardian is here talking about "popular anger" in the middle east itself, I'm afraid that to my mind such is the inappropriateness of sending the man who has colluded shoulder to shoulder with George Bush in the continuing murder of so many in the Arab world that maybe now is the time to get prepared for WWIII.

I despair for the world when the global old-boys clubs of ex-leaders think Bliar is a suitable envoy to piss on the fire he helped stoke. Actually, it makes me feel physically sick. I was only just warming to the idea of some time without his smarmy spin-wracked cynical grin peering out at me from newspapers or television screens. If Bliar wants to do some community service I'd suggest limiting him to working with President Carter and Habitat for Humanity. Though the state he's left the UK affordable housing scene in probably means he'd have to start right here anyway.

Mind you, I'd hope the new Attorney General would see sense to appeal such a light sentence. Maybe a stint as an "internally displaced person" will instill some humility in him?

Technorati Tags: tony blair, iraq, middle east envoy

Much discussion on the TV and in the press overnight about will-he won't-he George Osborne endorsing John Redwood's idea of abolishing inheritance tax. There has been a protracted discussion about this in Lib Dem circles over the last year or so as well.

The irony is though that many of those that want it abolished do so because it is usually the "family home" that pushes an estate into IHT liability. Ironic because of all the possible assets one might have accumulated in one's life, the value of one's property is the most likely to have been "unearned". Many proponents of abolition reckon that because they paid tax on the earnings they used to purchase their house, so any rise in the value of that property ought to be untaxed - that anything else is "double taxation".

The trouble is, you don't earn the rise in your property value. It happens because other people need what you have - a site in an increasingly popular location. A popularity most often created by expenditure on things like infrastructure that make that location better connected. It is monopoly profit.

Most of the other assets you might leave to your descendants - shares and so on - are productive assets that themselves help create wealth. Land values move wealth from those who don't own land, or own low value locations, to those who own better land, more popular sites, in a zero sum market.

So yes, abolish inheritance tax, but replace it with Land Value Tax, paid throughout the time you own that location, reflecting the value that others create at your location. Read about it: "Ricardo's Law: House Prices and the Great Tax Clawback Scam" (Fred Harrison)

We’ve heard recently how political parties are trying to grapple with the problem of inheritance tax affecting middle class families “affected” by property price rises rather than the “super rich” it was supposedly intended for.

Might I float a possible solution? Instead of a cash tax payable on inheritance of an asset, estates could split the property, passing a 99 year leasehold onto the beneficiaries of the estate and the freehold into a community land trust so that eventually the value and control of that land will pass back to that community.

This is after all how the “super rich” have mitigated their inheritance tax, through that august body the National Trust, for many years.

Most land price change has nothing to do with the current occupiers of that land, and everything to do with public policy and spending such as planning consent or the building of local infrastructure at public expense.

More crucially, land value is a “zero sum” game. Rising land values directly exclude whole swathes of a new “landless” class as a result. It is surely right that such inequity be redressed periodically. When better than at inheritance time? This method will at least not immediately harm the beneficiaries or force them to sell the family home.

Over a few generations such a mechanism could properly redistribute unearned wealth better than inheritance tax ever could.

Having set out some of the fantastic potential of Oxford and some of the challenges we face in realising that potential, before I come on to specific policy commitments I wanted to outline some of the principles by which I live and which form my thinking and that will shape many of those policies.

Individualism, mutualism, democracy

Individualism - I am inherently anti-government. I think we have too much of it, we rely too much on it and are consequently disappointed and angry when it fails to deliver what we thought it would. I think people feel better about themselves when they have a choice and can do things for themselves.

Nonetheless, there is a place for a community getting together to achieve things that individuals would find it difficult to do or do economically for themselves or because of being excluded in some way, or to prevent any individual or group monopolising some important shared resource or gaining unfair advantage over others through monopoly or cartel behaviour.

Mutualism - I believe that mutual enterprise is the best way to meet many of these needs. Firstly it is voluntary: an individual becomes a member because they share common goals with the other members of that particular enterprise. And they hold the control between them. The aims can't be hijacked by other parts of a conglomerate style organisation, like a local authority for example, when unrelated priorities change or the allocation of resources changes. They are democratic: nobody can take control for their own ends as all the members have an equal say and a right to expect an equitable return, whether that return is in the form of profit, or more likely in the services that enterprise is established to deliver for its members.

Mutual enterprise is a particularly good way of delivering services where competition exists but in which someone alone is unable to compete without the help of others. Of course government has a role in fostering this kind of business in helping like-minded people with similar aims and wants to get together and achieve it for themselves. But it is not constrained by some of the common problems of government - interference from above, sudden reallocation of resources to respond to others' priorities and so on.

Democracy - In the end, and I do think it ought to be regarded as a "last resort", there may be some things that are near impossible for individuals or small groups to do for themselves or as single issues and that would be unlikely to be profitable in the monetary terms needed by a corporation. This is where we communally "agree" to surrender some of our self-sovereignty to some form of representative management for the common good.

I believe the future of democracy, in an increasingly aware and connected world, is for individuals and small communities genuinely to explore what they can do for themselves and carefully to choose what needs to be done in common and when they need to collaborate in bigger groups - neighbourhood, local, regional, national, international. At the moment we have too much top down government, implemented through broad brush targets and with little local discretion to innovate or incentive to do better.

But also, as representatives of a whole host of interests at a city level, local government can be a body that helps get things done that don't strictly fall within its own remit. If you like as a lobby group for the people of Oxford, taking a strategic view to promote new facilities and protect existing sometimes vulnerable ones.

So these three, I hope, are at the root of my personal political philosophy, and I hope anything I suggest in these pages will be seen as part of that overall model. Next, I will want to look at how these principles might be applied to some of Oxford's pressing problems.