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I don't blog about work much, but this is exciting news you all ought to share! Last year, here at Oxford Brookes University we got terribly excited about being only the 17th UK Higher Education Institution to have appointed a female Chief Executive , in the form of Vice-Chancellor Janet Beer, who's now had her feet under the desk for nine months or so.

Shami Chakrabarti, new Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University

Originally uploaded at Flickr by martinstabe

In the interim we've been looking for a chair designate of the Board of Governors (I am one of the two elected staff governors), and have selected Joanna Simons, the chief executive of Oxfordshire Councty Council, and of course, another woman.

Today, we are very pleased to have announced that our new Chancellor, a position currently held by Jon Snow, is to be another woman very much in the ascendancy and particularly in the news in the past couple of weeks leading up to last night's vote to abolish Habeas Corpus for people the Home Secretary doesn't like the look of, Shami Chakrabarti, the Director of Liberty (whose "new members pack" I received yesterday by chance!).

We were doing quite well actually with gender balance amongst the top echelon of staff here, but I thought it was important to mark that the top three offices are now all held by women right at the top of their respective careers.

So, once again Sir Ian Blair, Metropolitan police commissioner, is targeting the Hampstead dinner party set and its use of cocaine. Apparently he's going to have "smartly dressed" officers posing as dealers in the sort of bars and clubs where posh people get their coke. He wants to stop it replacing wine at smart middle class dinner parties.

Now, fair's fair, his officers have long made life hell for poor users of cocaine and its sister freebase-cocaine, or "crack", so it's probably about time this law officer enforced the law more equally for all. But the lines he's using (sorry! I couldn't resist that) are that middle class coke use is not a victimless crime, that people in north London estates die to perpetuate the supply of coke and that the cocaine plantations of Columbia are now the land mine capital of the world.

So, do we finally have the appalling admission that the law itself, rather than cocaine use, is causing this killing? Why doesn't he do something about that, speak out on that? After all, he has shown himself and his organisation very capable and willing in the past not merely of enforcing existing laws, but in lobbying for changes in the law relating to terrorist activities that threaten all our civil liberties.

Cocaine has been used in a variety of forms, safely for the most part, for thousands of years. The peoples of its native growing area, the Andean mountains of South America, have chewed leaves as a pick me up since they arrived there. It helps them to cope with high altitude living by increasing circulation and therefore take-up of oxygen. It was used in tonic wines, toothpastes and popular drinks were named after it.

It was only scheduled as a proscribed drug a little under a hundred years ago, and the history of that is tainted with the sort of legal institutional racism Blair keeps saying he is against in all its forms - that it made "negroes" frenzied sex fiends.

The history of heavy addiction, and the dangers to health of tainted and constrained supplies all stem from its prohibition as a useful stimulant, not so much from any inherent danger in the drug itself. It is time a liberal world addressed these issues. If we're not going to prohibit absolutely everything that could possibly ever have any kind of effect on peoples' bodies or minds why should we choose these few substances? Cocaine use has been around for far longer than chocolate or coffee.

A week or so ago Mike Killingworth challenged us on Liberal Conspiracy to show what "Lovable Banking" might look like in response to the daily emerging news that we've been shafted regularly by the banking system since, oh, at least 1695. Some of you will know that I have long taken an interest in things like local currencies and mutual finance and perhaps also that I've been looking into the use of the Limited Liability Partnership structure as a way of building multi-stakeholder less toxic alternatives to purist shareholder capitalism.

Well a couple of weeks ago I was contacted out of the blue by a chap, Frank Churchill, also in Oxfordshire, who has been looking at similar structures. In his case originally I think as a less toxic alternative to developing world microcredit systems (did you know that the effective interest rate including all charges and so on on Grameen or Kiva micro loans can get as high as 80%!) and as a way of monetizing voluntary work - mainly involving carers. We've both been steadily battling along on our own on this, trying to understand the structures and build solutions to common issues around them - in my case, mostly things like affordable housing and supporting local businesses.

And so we've got together and are, hopefully, on the verge of setting up a "think and do tank" (to coin a strap line from another - less popular amongst liberal economics followers - organization, the New Economics Foundation; but don't let that put you off - some of the issues are the same but we believe the responses are more mutual and liberals than theirs) in the form of a "Community Finance Partnership".

The Limited Liability Partnership structure was created, ironically perhaps, to get the professional firms such as accountants and lawyers out of being personally liable for the debts of their partnerships - the vast accountancy partnerships in particular were worried about the sort of "Enron scenario" of being held liable for multi-million pound lawsuits and were threatening to move their registered offices away from the UK if we didn't give them limited liability. But inadvertently they have created a beautifully simple mechanism for bringing all the parties to an enterprise - the providers of capital, landlords, customers, workers and suppliers and so on - in, if they wish, to share in the risks and the rewards of pooling their contributions to the success of that business as partners.

A partnership agreement can involve different classes of partner receiving different shares of the profits depending on the worth of their input to it - just as a co-operative structure does. Companies may be partners, or even other LLPs as well as individuals. And the partnership itself is tax transparent so each partner is responsible for accounting for the profit or loss in their own tax affairs. Some of you will be aware that I think limited liability in general is a Bad Thing that takes the personal responsibility away from business owners, but in this case it matters very little since every connection with the business could become a partner and share that responsibility explicitly.

The Community Finance Partnership can we believe fulfill a great number of roles, offering a portfolio of products for consumers and a steady return based on those to investors - the aim is to produce an index-linked rate of return in the form of a "rent payment" for the use of the capital partners' (investors) funds. "Customer partner" products might include interest free mortgages - called Property Investment Partnerships, personal loans such as with Credit Unions and business finance "repaid" through a portion of the successful businesses' turnover.

One "flagship" product we are hoping to develop is the idea of a local complementary currency, probably in the form of a Nectar-like loyalty card system that businesses with a base in the geographical area can buy into and which would be able to monetize currently unpaid work like volunteer carers whose value to the local community and especially health services is enormous. The possibilities are almost limitless. For example another idea would be to finance the equivalent of PFI schemes - for example if Oxfordshire County Council wants to rebuild some schools, but with local investors sharing in the reward. And such a structure could be used to provide the mutual finance system for universities I mentioned earlier today.

Think a cross between a loyalty card system, a credit union (more on the US or Irish style than the British), a mutual building society but with the ability to lend to business and not just on homes, and possibly a friendly society offering local mutual insurance and pension products. It's early days yet, and we're still working up what each product would look like in financial terms and the sort of prospectus we'd be able to offer investors, but I'm very excited about it! We think the time is ripe for a return to more human scale financial institutions that people can become a part of on a local more human scale.

...as an enduring political hot potato. From Hezza, to Mandy, to Prezza, it has been, if nothing else, the best investment in screwing politicians of the millennium so far!

Nonetheless, it was *our* investment. And should never have been passed on to rent seekers for nothing. Whoever made that decision and survived deserves hanging from its fancy roof structure.

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