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There's been a little talk about what is expected to be the next quasi-policy announcement from the Conservatives on education - that parents should be allowed to set up their own schools with state funding. Liberal Leslie worries that this is vouchers by the back door, complete with top-ups and selection, whilst Jonathan Calder suggests that as liberals we should embrace such diversity of provision. Little surprise that I should tend to agree more with Jonathan than with Leslie.

And it just so happened that I was already writing a tome on education in response to a couple of stories last week - about the poor performance in GCSE English and Maths that's causing employers to have to train new 16 year old employees the very basics just to be able to operate in the workforce, and stories about a uniform maker thinking about putting transmitters in school uniforms so parents and teachers can better monitor their charges.

Education is important to me. It provides me with my day job. I'm also a governor of the university and a former primary and secondary school governor as well. But it is also important because I need to have an image of how, in my ideal geo-libertarian world where the "state" is restricted pretty much to collecting land value tax and distributing the whole lot of it to everyone as a citizen's income, education would be funded and function without a monolithic state provider.

One even has to ask whether it is legitimate in such a libertarian world to make parents get their children educated. I think we can answer that one pretty easily - it is legitimate because the child can not do so for themselves, and can only really attain adult responsibilities and the opportunities that go with them if they have at least the basic education to participate in those opportunities. But that doesn't mean that the state should provide it or even dictate what sort of education a parent should choose for their child. Indeed, although the vast majority of children in the UK are educated at state controlled schools, it is in fact just the "default" option. A parent's obligation is to ensure their child is educated, and the state provides such a default in case they don't choose home schooling or private provision.

But in a world where most all of the tax money currently collected and spent on state provision of services like health and education would instead just be handed out as a citizen's income equally, to everyone and where people as a result were expected to make their own provision for those services, would people put enough of a priority on educating their children to put enough back into schooling to make private provision work? Well, whilst I estimate that there is enough residential land value to yield about £250bn a year in a "100% land value tax", not far off what taxes paid by individuals (except VAT) actually raise at the moment, and enough to provide a Citizen's Income of around £100 per week for adults declining to say £40 per week for toddlers, on its own that is obviously not enough for someone totally reliant on their Citizen's Income to pay thousands of pounds a year for schooling.

But of course one of the perceived benefits of a Citizen's Income system, at least if combined with the abolition of the minimum wage (which is not even beyond the realms of possibility for some Labour commentators), is that because the CI is not withdrawn as people go out to work even for relatively low wages unlike with the current benefits system there would be far fewer households totally reliant only on the CI. A two parent household with one parent bringing home what would now be minimum wage and another bringing home half as much, and with two teen aged children could expect to have a gross household income including their CI of around £36,000 per year - not huge, but significantly more than people suffering benefits withdrawal at the moment. So one would expect them to contribute some of their earned income to their children's education as well.

Private and charitable education provision could be allowed to means test parents with lower and upper proportions of household income they would be able to charge. But the idea would be that everyone would pay something, even if it were only a proportion of the children's portion of the Citizen's Income in a few cases. Schools would have an incentive to provide an environment that attracts pupils and parents from diverse socio-economic backgrounds to pull in more than the bare minimum of means tested fees. Just as the LVT in the first place would encourage more mixed income communities as tax-savvy middle classes might choose to live in lower land value areas to reduce their tax bill.

As is observed widely in the developing world, even paying small amounts for education focusses both parents' and children's minds on the benefit they are getting from that education. Truancy would be a direct waste of that household's money. Pupils performing below what's expected of them for their ability levels would concentrate minds on whether the choice of education method employed by a school was the right one - was "worth the money" - and help promote diversity in educational methods. Parents would also see that playing their full part in assisting the education of their children by taking an interest and providing out of school stimuli would both save them money and improve outcomes for their children.

My best guess would be that we could improve educational outcomes, reduce costs, enhance diversity both in types of education offered and in pupil mix within schools and increase the involvement even of the currently least interested households in their children's education and really ingrain the value of education in everyone. Unthinkable? Maybe, with education currently eating up nearly £80 billion a year and us not having terribly much choice about what we get for that money, the unthinkable is what we need.

"An established government has an infinite advantage, by that very circumstance of its being established; the bulk of mankind being governed by authority, not reason, and never attributing authority to any thing that has not the recommendation of antiquity."

So wrote David Hume, one Scot few would begrudge a place in a United Kingdom government. Unfortunately that was 1754.

But, whilst there's been much talk of "constitutional reform" playing a big part in Gordon Brown's early premiership, and all the main parties have been lining up in recent days and weeks with encouragement for Brown to go further and be more "radical" or with proposals of their own for devolving power, all have, I fear, taken Hume's accompanying warning too much to heart:

"To tamper, therefore, in this affair, or try experiments merely upon the credit of supposed argument and philosophy, can never be the part of a wise magistrate, who will bear a reverence to what carries the marks of age; and though he may attempt some improvements for the public good, yet will he adjust his innovations, as much as possible, to the ancient fabric, and preserve entire the chief pillars and supports of the constitution."

Regular readers, both of you, will know that I have a passion for tearing up the UK's tax code, but I also have a passion for tearing up our unwritten constitution. And Hume also foresaw that there might come a time when the arrangements so imbued with the recommendation of antiquity would prove inappropriate for a new type of world. I believe that time is now and anyone worth the name of a constitutional reformer must be way more radical than anyone has so far postulated.

Our "constitution" and in particular our representative democracy was developed in and for a time where travel and communications ware difficult and took a long time. There were no other more reliable mechanisms for getting messages from one end of the land to the other than to appear in person at court or parliament. A time when the Berkeley family hunted across lands it owned all the way from Gloucester to London to spend a few months of the "season" at court and then hunt all the way back to their Welsh marches fastness for the remainder of the year.

And even until very recently in political evolution this situation obtained. It's only thirty years since more than half the UK's households had a telephone for example. Similarly, in 1972 only 52% of households had access to a car (I am a bit taken aback to realise that I was in the top 9% of households at the time that had access to two cars, even if one of them was a Ford Anglia). Think about that - about the limits it puts on one's movement and choices.

It must have still been something of an event even for leading political figures to make a "progress" around the country in the elections of the fifties and sixties. Compare that with the breakfast in Tooting, lunch in Truro and after-dinner speech in Thurso (if not Tennessee) style of modern political travel.

Even just twenty years or so ago news reports from Afghanistan took several weeks to compile and get back to us, broadcast almost as historical documentaries in big slots in the middle of news programs. Now we can have our news programs presented by the regular anchors live from Kabul one day and the same anchor in Kansas the following evening. And in between we can have been fed thousands of articles about what's been going on with "in depth" analysis from any perspective one could possibly imagine.

Last week I was struck by something in a TV article I nearly missed. There was the opening of some artistic or anthropological exhibition somewhere, in Britain I think, and people were surprised that someone like the Iranian Foreign Minister or First Vice-President turned up and was saying that such cultural events were a good reminder that "our two peoples both want peace whatever their governments say and do". Well, quite.

Ground up government

So I always come back to Hume, and his "Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth". Localism is the key. True "ground up" government. Yes, it's time to grind up the current arrangements and go local. Last week I was at an area planning committee meeting of the North East Area Committee of Oxford City Council. The room was packed. People say that it's the "usual suspects" that turn up to such things, but even if that were the case scaled up to national proportions it's the equivalent of a Westminster select committee sitting in front of a full Wembley stadium of interested people all pretty much able to have their say on the particular issues that they care about.

Hume's idea seems to me a good place to start. You elect a hundred representatives to each of a hundred county assemblies. Those counties each send a representative to a national forum (and the second choice gets to go to a national sort of opposition/scrutiny forum). Most government functions are exercised by the counties themselves in their own areas. But other initiatives can filter up from the counties or through counties working together. If they affect other counties or the whole commonwealth they can be called into the national forum. Sometimes the national forum comes up with its own ideas but they have to be passed by a majority of the counties before they can become law.

Most issues requiring taxation are dealt with at a county level, with a precepting arrangement for things like national defense when the counties of course agree that as a priority. Tax competition between counties (that could be similar to the tax competition between US states) democratises the shape of where economic activity waxes and wanes across the country.

And before you say that this is pie in the sky nonsense for a small island country, a similar system does seem to serve at least one modern, economically successful, and most importantly relatively peaceful western nation quite well. I commend to you all a two and a half century old prescription for modern ground up government. Go read it, and then tell me it's not the beginnings of a sensible way of governing for the third millennium. A global millennium. With connectivity between peoples and, more importantly, individuals, that the world has never before seen. We don't need a bunch of powerful individuals who dare to dream that they can uniquely represent sixty million of us and our different priorities and opinions.

Technorati Tags: Constitutional reform, Perfect commonwealth, ming campbell, gordon brown, David Hume

If like me you experience a little frisson of excitement on seeing this headline in the BBC newsfeed:

Tomorrow's World to return to BBC

you'll probably also have been as disappointed as I was to read that they don't really mean it...

The BBC is bringing back the Tomorrow's World brand to help audiences understand new technologies.

Presenter Maggie Philbin will be offering in-depth analysis on technology stories on TV, radio and the web under the Tomorrow's World banner.

Although the programme - which ran from 1965 to 2003 - will not return, elements such as the logo and title sequence will be revived.

So, not the programme itself, but a "brand" for the odd five minute package halfway through the news! Such a pity, because personally I reckon the BBC have a big share of the responsibility for the shortage of people taking science subjects at school and university in recent years.

I remember the arguments when it was withdrawn - that a magazine type programme didn't do science justice and formats more like invention competitions would be better. It's true in my opinion that for a good while before it finished it had somehow been more trivial than it had been when I was young and eagerly awaited Raymond Baxter's explanation of how we would all be wearing Barbarella style jump suits and eating only pills on a rotating space centre by the year 2000.

Still - I'm rather glad none of those particular predictions came true, but I am sure that the seeing a load of different types of technology on one programme prevented any one of them being too boring for television and put forward quite a good balance of the exciting things that science and technology people can get up to. It glamourized geeks and nerds.

Time for a proper resurrection, I'd say. I am sure there is many times the amount of exciting stuff going on that isn't getting even that half hour of mainstream prime time exposure.

Tomorrow is the Lib Dems' South Central Regional Conference at Newbury. Since there is now a leadership election, and both candidates (I still hope for more but it's looking increasingly a remote possibility) will be there and will effectively make a first "hustings" in the campaign the other bbusiness of the conference may well get curtailed. I was hoping to have the floor in the Affordable Housing debate, so in case I do not get to speak after all I thought it worth while putting my three minutes' worth online. So here it is:

"Make no mistake, colleagues, I do not believe it is ultimately possible to have sustainable, equitable and affordable housing without radical land reform, by which I usually mean Land Value Tax. There is no shortage of land - if all of us in this region lived at the same density as the population of Singapore or New York City we'd all fit easily onto the Isle of Wight. And, by and large, there is also no real shortage of housing; the vast majority of households in housing need are in fact housed somewhere, just it is often either beyond their means, hopelessly cramped, or both. And yet up to 45% of our housing stock is UNDER-occupied while 2-3% is over crowded. Only LVT can solve this kind of mismatch. And trying to build ourselves out of the problem in popular areas is going to do nothing longer term for regional equilibrium as it increases the capacity in, for example, the south east, to absorb yet more of the rest of the country's economic activity.

But there's another, more localized, land reform that could help. It's party policy, though hasn't received much promotion or support, and our local councils do not seem to be encouraging it terribly enthusiastically. Community Land Trusts are a practical and immediate measure that party members can take home from here today and get their members and councils working on. A Community Land Trust is a vehicle established to hold land on behalf of a defined community - it could be a city, an individual neighbourhood, a rural parish or a countty-wide umbrella organization. The idea is that we acquire land, either through the planning process, by outright purchase or donation by philanthropic land owners (there actually are such creatures!) and lock it up in a trust. This way we do not need to pass the cost or developed value of the land onto the buyers of the housing we build on it, built, always, with community buy in and if possible self-management of the specification and design process.

We then bundle the whole development up and turn it over to a "Mutual Home Ownership Society" which the occupiers join by paying a share of the borrowing used to develop the properties. The share they pay is based on what they earn, not the housing they need and they don't pay any extra rent as with shared ownership schemes. If the development is itself large enough, we hope the incomes across all the households involved will between them cover the repayments, and each gets a share they can sell when they want to move on based on the proportion of the borrowing they have committed to, plus (or minus I suppose these days) an adjustment based on an agreed local property index. When they want to sell up, they need to find a buyer for their share. If the incoming household has not as high an income, they can place the balance of their share with other member households whose incomes have risen since they joined - and who by the terms of their lease are bound to buy additional shares when required up to a commitment of around 30% of their household incomes.

The model can be tweaked for use in many different scenarios - a small scale rural exception site where there is as yet no subsidy for developing social rented housing, an urban development where we want 100% affordable - as in sub-market - housing instead of 50:50 posh:poor for the same land cost, or even an existing mature suburban neighborhood willing to club together, pool the new found wealth of their existing housing equity and take charge themselves of the regeneration of their neighbourrhood, instead of leaving it to the buy-to-let absentee landlord or the local developer of flats crammed into the corner plot.

Schemes can be financed by conventional borrowing backed by the freehold land value, or, we hope, by a new vehicle christened an "Open Capital Partnership" which would allow ordinary investors to yield an index linked return for investing in their local communities. As a side-bar at that point to finish with, we might want to look at Building Society legislation: being a mutual ownership system many of us CLT promoters would like to work with mutual financing organizations, but your local Newbury Building Society tells me they are prohibited by law from investing in something that is not an individual taking out a mortgage for a single house, despite the movement's origins as mutual savings clubs building local neighbourhood housing."

Some of what makes Oxford a fantastic place also puts intense pressures on those who live in and use the city. We are rightly precious of both our built and natural environment and heritage. The City Council's current local plan, the document that sets out policies about how they expect Oxford to develop in land use terms, neatly encapsulates some of these pressures:

• We have about 145,000 residents, of which nearly 30,000 are students - and therefore not always "permanent" residents, and usually not paying council taxes, though of course of crucial importance to the local economy and cultural vibrancy of the city.
• Of the approximately 100,000 jobs in the city, around half are filled by people commuting from outside the city, putting intense pressures on our transport infrastructure, which are extremely difficult to accommodate given the historic urban design nature of the city centre.
• We have about 5 million tourist visitors a year, also adding to pressures on transport and accommodation.
• We are an attractive area of more affluent workers deciding to live outside of London and commute.

It is also clear that living in the city is disadvantageous to health, educational and economic achievement (of the long term resident population - often masked by the fact that we have the highest level of degree level qualifications in the South East), and wealth:

• Health - Oxford has several areas in the lowest twenty per cent of England and Wales for "good health"
• Educational achievement - again we have several areas, predominantly in the east of the city, in the lowest twenty per cent of pupils achieving 5 A* to C grades at GCSE
• Crime - again predominantly in the centre and east of the city we have several areas with crime rates in the highest twenty per cent of the country and nearly all of the city has higher than average crime for the whole country.
• Housing - the lack of affordable housing in Oxford means that we are amongst the worst places in the country for people to be able to get the housing they need at a price they can afford. On this map you need to look at the equivalent urban areas - blue means access to housing is most difficult and it's no surprise that in rural areas where few houses are developed or already exist there are more problems affording them, but look at Oxford compared with Banbury, Bicester, Witney and so on. Oxford is nearly all blue (unaffordable).

Putting all these together, this map shows that Oxford has some significant pockets of deprivation amongst the worst in the country. These areas can become a focus for anti-social behaviour on the part of the few that disproportionately affects the quality of life for the many.

These pressures feed through into pressures on city governance and directly affect all of us through our taxes and quality of life. For example:

• The cost of homelessness amounts to around £4.5 million to the council and double that to all public revenue sources such as central government funded Housing Benefit. That's fully half of the council tax collected.
• The need for people to commute, many of whom can only afford housing in the expanding towns beyond the green belt, causes traffic difficulties in our historic city centre and the radial feeder roads through our suburban centres.
• The city has an ageing housing stock, increasingly environmentally inefficient, in both the private sector and the council owned housing, its inner suburbs were built before the prevalence of private motor vehicles and the infrastructure of its outer suburbs is crumbling, and much of the inner suburbs local populations are displaced when family homes are converted to student lets.
• We have a cornucopia of facilities, for sport, leisure and the arts, but they are often in the control of and designed for the universities' and their students use. Whilst the city council owns and operates several major sporting and leisure facilities, lack of investment means they cannot compete with more modern private facilities and do not maintain the cross section of users to pay for them properly - the leisure centres run at a £3million loss on a turnover of just over £7million.
• In business, local businesses are often squeezed out by high and increasing commercial rents, especially in the city and district centres, whilst because of the housing pressures others find it difficult to recruit and retain employees.
• In governance, whilst the city is asset rich, amongst the highest in the country, it is cash poor, and what cash is generated will, if things carry on as at present, be required just to bring council houses up to the minimum "Decent Home" standards.

We need to find innovative ways around central government restrictions to free up assets to be used for the benefit of all the people of Oxford. I hope to set out in the remainder of this manifesto some of these ideas to see us into the twenty-first century as a city in which all get an equitable share of the many benefits of being part of this vibrant, diverse, innovative and world leading city.