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Over at The 1909 Group website - I argue that the past few days have seen the final repeal of all that was good about the People's Budget of 1909. Liberals everywhere should be outraged.

So I figured I would restart blogging with some feedback on what turned out to be an excellent South Central Regional Liberal Democrats' conference on Saturday here at Oxford Brookes University. Given that I see the place every day my motivation to get there in time for nine-thirty speeches on a Saturday morning was not great, and I actually arrived a few minutes into the first keynote speech by Evan Harris.

Some in the party and elsewhere give Evan a hard time I hear, but I have a lot of time for him. I get the impression he works his proverbials off in his constituency and has a penchant for minority interests which suits me. But listening to him on Saturday and then later hearing Vince Cable they between them seem to epitomize what one might call the "old" Lib Dems - leftist, statist, more interventionist - and the "emerging" Lib Dems - more liberal in every sense.

Evan restated his support for the fifty pence tax rate and bemoaned the federal conference at which it was removed from party policy, Vince emphasized that the new tax policy, trying to focus, as Churchill said, on not just "how much have you got" but also on "how did you get it", was in fact the most redistributive set of tax policies on the table from any party.

Harris's main point, as I understand it, was that the fifty pence tax rate sent a signal, even if it did not in fact promise to raise terribly much, that we were prepared to take more from the highest earners if need be to lift the poorest out poverty. It is a simple message to be sure, and easier to communicate than the "new" idea that we should be more carefully targeting tax on externalities and unearned privilege, but not one that adds to the progressiveness of the overall tax system one iota.

But Evan is exactly the sort of person we want to attract to our book the ALTER executive are putting together to launch centenary celebrations of the 1909 People's Budget. We want to show him how rigourously applying what we have been calling the "liberal economic tradition" will in fact raise the lot of the poorest by increasing the returns to labour, by rooting out corporate welfare, and by allowing genuine competition to bring down the cost and increase the quality of all sorts of goods and services some take for granted are best delivered by the state. In short that there need be no dichotomy between "social" and "economic" liberalism.

The consultation on housing in the county was a sham, as the whole process of local, strategic and regional planning for housing has been right the way through.

Good alternative ideas have been unwelcome for two years now! The option to put thousands of homes on the edge of the city is based on seriously flawed interpretations of the City Council’s own research. The others are an unacceptable, usually undemocratic imposition on smaller towns.

What the city council’s Labour group is proposing is in fact an overall increase in Oxford’s population of a nearly a fifth. Because the only way they can see of providing affordable housing is to allow lots of private market development.

What we need is a mechanism for sustainable use and reuse of what we already have – making the market match the need. Most people in the city’s housing needs survey are already based in the city – we just have severe problems affording what they are in. The absolute shortage of housing is only around a quarter of what the city’s planners have extrapolated from their research as a result.

We can expect more villages to become havens for the wealthy and their public services like schools, local shops and buses to wither and die. And acres of soulless developer boxes spreading out into South Oxfordshire no doubt pretending to be “communities”.

...who cares what Senator makes the arduous journey all the way to DC from Virginia. They all deserve to hang their heads in shame. Whoever wins will have been elected with a substantial number of votes that also voted for this bigotted bullshit - even Webb will have to stomach the fact that he has a hundred thousand bigot ballots. In the words of that ancient Arab curse: "May all their children dishonour them with their low slung pants".