Randomly Selected Article or Link

...and meant to be settled down somewhere in a nest with wife and kids when you see "The perfect gift for Father's Day...Level 42 - The Definitive Collection".

Oh well.

Okay, so it's time to give a little plug to my other little venture - "The 1909 Group".

At Harrogate conference in Spring, several of us put our heads together and wondered how we might bring "left" and "right" in the Lib Dems together. In ALTER, our Land Value Tax and Economic Reform campaign group, we just knew we had the answers, or at least the seeds of the answers, to providing both the likes of the Beveridge Group with funds for their high spending ambitions and the "Orange Bookers" with the means to encourage lively and profitable free markets.

The answer was given us nearly a hundred years ago by Lloyd George drawing on a long history of liberal economics. Economics that we have by and large forgotten, subsumed in the argument for an against capital pursued for the last century by Conservative and Labour alternately.

The Free Trade, anti-monopoly, anti-protectionism but pro-individual economic success ethos that pervaded the political scene for the best part of half a century straddling 1900 was the elusive "Third Way", derailed by warfare, national and class-based for most of the succeeding century. And we reckon that if we can rekindle that spirit, we can give the Lib Dems a distinctive, radical liberal "narrative" to use the current buzzword that both respects opportunity and hard work and protects the vulnerable and the public services people have become accustomed to.

So, check out our site - part group blog, part campaigning site - we're hoping to have an inaurgural meeting in Oxford over the weekend of 9th-10th June during the Green Lib Dems conference and possibly a more visible launch at Brighton if we are organized in time.

You know who you are. Those liberals (in particular) who always claim that "libertarian free markets" will result in a corporate plutocracy, or that the current turmoil in world financial markets (yes, it's still going on you know!) is a result of "libertarian free markets". Here, especially for you (but of interest to others I hope too), is a brilliant explanation of how this mutualist understands that free markets benefit people, not corporations.

CORPORATIONS VERSUS THE MARKET; OR, WHIP CONFLATION NOW

by RODERICK LONG - LEAD ESSAY - November 10th, 2008

Defenders of the free market are often accused of being apologists for big business and shills for the corporate elite. Is this a fair charge? No and yes. Emphatically no—because corporate power and the free market are actually antithetical; genuine competition is big business’s worst nightmare. But also, in all too many cases, yes —because although liberty and plutocracy cannot coexist, simultaneous advocacy of both is all too possible.

Read the rest...

Thanks to James Robertson for pointing me to this site in response to a call for fresh thinking on how to fund the EU after 2008. I'll no doubt return to this in the future but for now just have a look. How we can finance the EU and get a dividend back.

Technorati Tags: EU, monetary reform

Having succumbed to this fad for petitioning Tony Blair over anything from the size of underpants available in Marks & Spencer to whether we renew our nuclear strike capability, I got the news that my petition had been accepted - so please - read it, at the address below, and if you like it, sign it. Let's see how far it can get. It's not as sexy as not banning fox hunting obviously, but many times as important though I do say so myself.

Your petition has been approved by the Number 10 web team, and is now available on the Number 10 website at the following address:

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/AbolishDCLG/

Your petition reads:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Abolish the
Department of Communities and Local Government and allow local
people to decide in consultation with the local representatives
they elect to do the job how best to run their localities

Local government has been subject to far too much tinkering,
target setting and control by central government for decades.
If government is by the consent of the governed then surely
that consent, for local affairs, is given in elections to local
councillors. Instead of handing down a menu from on high of
how local government will be permitted to operate, allow real
innovation and local consultation to decide how to run and fund
their local communities.

Thanks for submitting your petition.

-- the ePetitions team