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...is that it always seems that the first steps towards it, the first things to be cut away from the protectionism ridden form of capitalism we have now, hurt the small person more than the big person. If the "average Joe" (and no, it's just a phrase, not meant for you Joe O or Joe T!) cannot see the benefits to them of peeling away layers of protectionism and bureaucracy why would they support removing the state's comfort blanket?

Much of what we remember about Thatcher era attempts to roll back the economic power of the state, for example, centers around mining and industrial communities with their "hearts ripped out" and of the "haves" becoming the "have mores" through privatisation whilst those often for whom the state industry had been the economic lifeline were cut off. Or of the rise of the oligarchs in Russia, leeching off the common property of the people of that country in the form of its natural wealth.

Which is why economic liberals must strive to show that the root cause of the grossest inequalities we see in the world around us is that the rich and powerful are, as often as not, made so and maintained by protectionism and monopoly. Then when we act, unlike in the Thatcher era, we must be clear that each step we take strikes directly at that privilege and produces a perceptible incremental and preferably material rather than hypothetical benefit to those whom the existence of that privilege has hitherto harmed.

Our Liberal forebears knew this, hence the urgency with which they attempted to go about radical change, attacking monopoly and protectionist created wealth, in the People's Budget. It must be equally obvious with hindsight that the failure to drive through the most radical of those proposals left the way open for the Labour party to sneak in and push socialist, statist, coercive rather than liberal means to what they claimed were the same ends. Those means we now know have failed and continue to fail wherever they are tried. And not only that but they do not have the saving grace of freeing people from that other gross dependency on the state and the political establishment.

This is the main task for our shared liberal future - and it looks like 70% of us might just agree.

Just so people remember, it was the Lib Dem Tax Commission that put forward the idea of a two grand tax on gas guzzlers and a tax to reflect the effects on climate change of air transport and travel.

According to the Observer the environmental audit committee of MPs agrees and will set out on Monday a range of ways of achieving both. But we must also be plugging the fact that the Lib Dem proposals would not increase the tax burden overall but take many low paid people out of income tax altogether and reduce everyone's basic rate to twenty per cent.

As a side note, if you read this before it goes pay-per-view I am slightly annoyed to know that my Ford Ka is relatively speaking the most regressively taxed of a range the Independent reviewed. Oh well, I guess that means I stand to gain relatively when they put it right. But I'd rather be driving the Bentley any day!

So, now that everyone appears to agree with our current eco-tax proposals, I hope we will get on and develop our Land Value Tax strategy to balance things out for people unable to afford to live close enough to work to avoid the longer climate changing commutes. If eco-taxation's time has come, it won't be long before people begin to understand that location values are part of that whole eco-package.

I asked this question a few weeks ago when I heard Chris Huhne talking about carbon trading being a better incentive than carbon taxing for businesses to make cuts in their pollution output, but nobody responded with an argument either way. Now, in Obscenity of carbon trading:

The Stern Review's emphasis on carbon trading is wrong, Kevin Smith argues; only cutting emissions at source will curb climate change.

So I'll ask again, since Kevin Smith doesn't actually put forward any mechanism by which people and businesses should be encouraged to cut their emissions.

You see, the air is mine, and yours, and yours, and yours. It belongs to us all collectively. We need it to survive, and there is, sort of, a finite supply of it. So why would we want governments or some other trans-national body, to hand out permits to businesses to pollute a certain portion of it, allowing them to sell some of that portion on if they don't use it all themselves? It is enclosure of the air, just as surely as the enclosure of land sent millions off to rot in the hell of the satanic mills. If it has value at all, and there doesn't overall seem to be much argument about that, it is value that we, the people, own collectively and should be used for our benefit and not for the benefit of corporations.

Smith reports that companies collectively have made windfall gains of £940bn across Europe after persuading governments to allocate bigger chunks which they have then been able to sell on - under any definition that is what is known as "rent seeking".

The polluting widget manufacturer is in the business of making widgets, not trading air (I have a similar problem with UK Coal deciding it is now a property company rather than a coal miner). If it can't break even by making widgets it needs to change its way of working or close. That's the market.

So, why not tax every process and business on its total carbon consumption. Of course, you would want to use that tax to reduce tax on good economic processes. If you can make the same widgets in a less polluting way why should you also pay corporation tax or the consumer sales tax on them. It is consistent with our "Green Tax Shift". It is consistent with Georgists' "Tax Shift" onto economic land and externalities. And it doesn't give away our air to someone to make money out of.

You could get tax credits if you invent a process that actually takes more pollution out of the atmosphere than it puts in, which is fair enough - a sort of "negative carbon tax". The same calculations need to go on anyway whether you use the trading or the taxing mechanism - each process, or end product, needs to have a carbon assessment somehow. And that must already be underway for companies to be able to participate in the various trading schemes that have sprung up around the world.

Keep it simple. There would be no need for a separate aviation pollution tax - it's a process just like any other (though there are other externalities in aviation that ought to be taxed - like use of physical airspace through landing slot auctions), no need for a separate vehicle pollution tax system - the vehicle must have a carbon rating on which any of the suggested emissions based vehicle tax systems will be based.

I don't think you would even need to make it personal, on individuals. They would be paying for the pollution their lifestyles may cost in the price they pay for goods - no need for a complex "personal carbon allowance" as has been suggested.

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.

My slightly different take on Thursday's elections, now that I have had a bit of time to separate my own defeat and local party's odd targeting strategy from cold hard results, is that the second biggest winners were....nobody. Of the councils up for election, 66 have returned councils with no overall control - where no party group is large enough to take control of the council; six more than previously.

So probably up to about a third of us live in an area that has minority or coalition government. This sort of result is usually one of the main arguments against Proportional Representation - that it leads to "weak" government. But, you know, I believe "weak" government is exactly what we want and need. Government is too big, too strong, too interfering as it is, and under the winner takes all voting system we have this leads to absolute power in the hands of a minority of voters.

Next year, Scotland will have "all up" council elections, using the Single Transferable Vote system to return multi-member wards (which local government is already used to anyway). So if Scotland can cope with it, why can't the rest of us?

Take Oxford for a minute again. Apart from one lady who disappeared without a word half way through her term of office, the Tories have now not had a single councillor for ten years. Yet with a "paper" candidate in my ward they still achieved 350 or so votes (17.5% of the vote and in the process kept Labour's candidate safe from my attack!). Across the city they have 12% of the vote, pretty well without trying at all (I reckon they only targeted, and not very enthusiastically at that, four wards out of twenty four). The Greens, through judicious targeting in their core areas, achieve 20% of the vote and get some 17% of the seats and Labour, the Lib Dems and the Independent Working Class Association are over-represented for their vote.

If Oxford wants to be a unitary authority (and on its present performance I agree with the Conservative leader of the county council that that would be a bad thing unless the city can prove it can run what services it has already efficiently) then it is only fair that all political opinion amongst its citizens be represented proportionately. Yes, there is a "democratic deficit" in the two tier situation at present where a political party completely unrepresented in the city (at borough or county council level) has complete control over some very big aspects of local government for Oxford's citizens - such as schools, roads and social services, but let's not replace that with another democratic deficit. If we want to have change, start with creating something closer to a democracy first. For the current system is anything but.

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