Randomly Selected Article or Link

I thought I would write about something quite close to me tonight because it has angered me. Rather than the ethereal world of politics which can sometimes feel quite abstract.

I have a friend currently buying a house, with several acres of field adjacent, in a village in the Green Belt just outside Oxford. The vendors are the Church Commissioners. Apparently hurt after being stung over several years or decades by having sold off properties on which the buyers have then got planning consent and made a fortune they are trying their best to tie down buyers.

This is nothing new. The landed have often put restrictive covenants on land that say that if the buyer subsequently gets permission to do some profitable development they will get some profit. I personally think this is an outrage in itself - since I don't really believe in the right to trade in land, our only real common wealth, for profit.

But get this - the Commissioners think they have it all sewn up. They would like to sell my friend only the freehold of the surface of the land itself. A 'flying freehold" where they retain the freehold of the airspace - yes, the air - above three meters above the ground, and the subsoil more than a meter below the surface.

My friend is not buying an option, he's buying a home. If circumstances change twenty years down the line and this piece of green belt becomes developable, yes, he might make a killing, but that's not why he's buying it. If the Church Commissioners want to retain this, they should not be selling the property at all. If they were to sell a bunch of shares they hold to someone, would they expect to be able to keep the dividend, or to stipulate that if the company is taken over after twenty years and the buyer rakes in a small fortune they should have some of it? No, that's what's called investment risk - the risk that they sell something that's still got further to go upwards for whatever reason.

All this just goes to show that what people generally think of as "theirs" - the land on which their homes stands and so on - is frequently not. It's bonkers. Large areas of North Oxford still have restrictive covenants granting some nobleman not so far away the right to prevent development on land long ago sold by his forebears.

Why on earth do people therefore complain about the idea of a Land Value Tax. At least that tax is going to the common treasury to be spent on others usually less fortunate...rather than to vast institutions and ancient landlords wanting to maintain a finger in a pie they disposed of, presumably for good investment decision reasons, ages ago.

You didn't have me down as some happy clappy evangelical did you? No, you'd be quite right. So this is just a little celebration of "Tax Freedom Day".

"Hallelujah" was the cry of the Hebrews' slaves when, in the year of the Jubilee, those who had had to sell themselves into servitude or give away their lands to keep themselves afloat were freed and their lands returned to the common wealth for redistribution.

Of course "Tax Freedom Day" is a bit of nonsense. It helps perhaps to see just how much we have taken from us but in reality, if we make a little more in the second half of the year, they'll take a little more all the same. And what the Adam Smith Institute, who organize this little wheeze, won't tell you is that their eponymous hero himself was one of ours, a supporter of Land Value Tax.

Taxes on our labour make us peons to the state. How wrong James Thomson was!

I simply do not understand the government's position on the forty-two day proposal for the time a suspect can be held without charge. I saw a blog post recently, but for the life of me can't remember where, that listed the equivalent period in other western democracies. I seem to remember seeing that the next highest limit in any country is fourteen days, and that most don't have any extension beyond their normal two day period for all suspects.

Correct me if all that is crap, but assuming it's not, what is it about the UK that means that we need to allow three times the number of days anywhere else on the planet - at least anywhere that could be called a "liberal democracy"? Why should it take our police and/or intelligence services three times as long as anywhere else's to stitch enough evidence together to charge someone?

I hear all sorts of excuses - the favourite seems to be that accessing electronic information forensically takes a long time. And sometimes these sound plausible. But one has to return to the question about why should it take our people three times as long? Or is there something the raw statistics, the legal position as opposed to the way it operates in practice, do not reveal. Do other countries have fewer rights enshrined elsewhere that somehow lets them cheat and hold people for longer than their laws appear to permit?

Obviously the US has Guantanamo Bay and other "black holes" elsewhere into which people could be "disappeared". And maybe I watch too much "Spooks" but I rather assume, conspiratious that I am, that we also have extra-judicial ways of "hiding" someone if the state wants it so. Or is that just not so, and this forty-two day detention idea is really an attempt to be "above board" where other countries aren't?

The Home Office's own figures show that 1165 people have been arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 (admittedly that probably includes Walter Wolfgang and similar instances of overenthusiastic enforcement), more than half of them released without charge and only forty one convictions so far on Terrorism Act charges. The majority of the rest have been charged with something, presumably without breaching the existing, already too long, twenty eight days.

Just someone explain the rationale of forty two days, please!

I meant to pick up on this from Sunday's Observer - The Chancellor's got his eye on a new best friend

Jasper Gerard says that:

David Cameron should place a bug on BA's shuttle to Edinburgh. For with the filthy Chilean sauvignon, dry roasted peanuts and sundried delights from the All Day Deli Counter, Gordon Brown and Sir Menzies Campbell, returning to their constituencies for the weekend, could be making a light snack of the Conservative party.

Half-decent sources tell me that Brown has, at the least, made tentative overtures to the Liberal Democrat leader about what might happen in a hung parliament. And an inconclusive result is what bookmakers predict. Brown is desperate to break from Blair. Upon entering Number 10, he wants fireworks with announcements even more dramatic than his first act as Chancellor, granting independence to the Bank of England. Many of his prize rockets hoarded in the Treasury have already been set off by that twisted fire starter next door, Blair. So Brown needs a spectacular. And what sparkler would light up the political landscape more brightly than electoral reform?

Now, forgive me if I'm overly skeptical, but I reckon we've "been there, done that" and had the tee-shirt stuffed right down our throats. I know that there are a lot of Labour electoral reformers that somehow blame the Lib Dems for allowing the PR issue to go off the boil and thereby, as they see it, jeopardizing the chance of PR happening before now. And don't get me wrong, I firmly believe that it is one of the most important issues in politics in the UK at the moment. And I know that sounds real wonkish compared with terrorism or crime or whatever else there is to worry about but I cannot accept that we live in a democracy when 22% of the electorate decided more than half the seats in parliament and all of the government.

But...as the article goes on, Gordon may believe that "It could produce centre-left government for yonks, securing what [he] calls 'the progressive consensus'". I don't regard PR as a way of keeping someone in power for ever. As the argument against PR is frequently trotting out - it is about "weak government", about limiting the power of the executive - to reduce its ability to interfere with our lives unopposed as the last ten years have seen. And so we need to persuade the Tories too of the idea. If they really mean that they want small government, let them put their money where their mouth is.

Holding the balance of power, if that's what it comes to, means just that - being able to decide after the votes are in whether the people have rejected a failing, lying and corrupt Labour government and by how much, and which side's policies, mixed with our own of course, are likely more in favour with that electorate. Ming knows that, and made great play of it during his election campaign for leader.

No deals Gordon, get ready to beg. We're not going to have spent ten years attacking nearly your every move, on liberties, on constitutional reform, on illegal warmongering, on centralizing, and a whole load of others only to be seduced by a mere bagatelle of half-baked PR in the hope of creating a long lasting hegemony in which we may play some part.

It's spawned a whole industry playing on fear of drink spiking, school children creating tamper-proof bottle tops (they shouldn't be drinking anyway), knee-jerk Blunkett raising GHB to Class A and so on but new evidence suggests that most "victims" of date rape drugs are, in fact, merely bladdered, mullahed, out of their trees on....alcohol, that most dangerous, but paradoxically legal and socially celebrated, drug:

Date-rape drugs 'not widespread'

Use of Rohypnol is not "widespread", said report

Research suggests date-rape drugs may not be as prevalent as first thought.

A study commissioned by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), suggests many victims of sexual assault may have just been extremely drunk.

Quelle surprise.

Incidentally I noticed the other day polling evidence on attitudes to alcohol that suggested that up to 5.7 million people in the UK I think it was "drink to get drunk" - so let's have none of this bleating about it more often being about good taste and social oiling. People who "drink to get drunk" are no better than the heroin junkie wanting to get out of it. By contrast, the casual dope smoker having a spliff to unwind is more like a dinner party wine drinker - right down to the connoisseur style of critique of the subtlety of different "brands".