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"Your typical loyal Conservative wife" has long been a synonym in some circles for what the rest of us shirt-lifters affectionately call "fag-hags". Actually - it's a bit more than that - she is a byword for heterosexual "cover" for gay men wanting to make their way in supposedly homophobic conservative politics. Ffion Jenkins got the same when she married Willie Hague. If truth be told, the same was said of Sarah Gurling, now Mrs Charles Kennedy, and of Sarah Macaulay, now Mrs Gordon Brown.

So, it's terribly tragic for everyone concerned when you hear of a real case of shall we say "sexual confusion" and there is speculation as to whether someone was really hiding his light under a bush, so to speak, all along. Doubly, trebly in this case, tragic when there are children involved. But no more so than if he was running off with another woman. So all credit to David Cameron if he holds to his word and refuses to judge Greg Barker's political ability and future on what is a bit of a personal mess. This is, after all, the twenty-first century, and not the nineteen-eighties when his party would be condemning his new "pretend family relationship" with legislation.

Since Greg is 40, and I am approaching the same, I can identify with him in a way - certainly my feelings have changed, becoming more open to finding love in people of either gender. It's not terribly trendy to say so in the entrenched "gay community" just as much as the "heterosexist community", but we need to appreciate that sexual identity is more fluid than the last two or three hundred years' of predominantly British macho-masculine history has led us to believe.

Has he always identified in secret as "gay" but been living a double life? He's sired three children, after all. People change in all sorts of ways. Loves change. He seems no better, or worse, than anyone who, after some years of marriage, has lost the fire that was once there and fallen for someone else. The gender of his new love should make no difference to the rest of us. It likely will to his kids - just because other children can be the cruelest.

But...he did work for one of those Russian kleptocrats we grace with the term "oligarch". That's the real skeleton in Mr Barker's newly redecorated closet. And if he ends up getting fired for anything, it should be the hug-a-huskie stunt he led his boss on a few months back!

But if there are young, gay, Tories out there (I can never quite understand why) Cameron's support for Barker will I hope make them think twice about taking on a fag hag till death do they part for the sake of a selection meeting.

We're none of us getting any younger. In four months I reach my big four-Oh. I left school almost as long ago as I have working years left under the current rules at least. Yes, I like to think I'm still young, but I think I'd be right to object to being called "boy such-and-such". David Milliband is a full year and a half older than me and David Cameron is some months older. George Osborne is a little younger, but would have been in the fourth form when I was in my sixth, so not a lot.

Respectively they are referred to disparagingly as the "Boy Emperor" (apparently within his department anyway), "the Boy David", and "Boy George". On the other night's Question Time there was an audience member who looked to be in his early twenties complaining that nobody in politics really represented his generation (pace Mr Tall of course, who, so far as I am aware is not referred to as "the Boy Stephen").

Clearly referring to people nearing or past their milestone fortieth as "boy" does nothing to make them any the more representative of younger people.

Anyway - it's just a rant. Maybe we could find some better epithets to give these people. Dislike their politics, make them out to be naive, yes, but really, can we not be more imaginative than calling them "boy" (and yes, I know I've done it too). Alexander was younger than George Osborne when he had finished conquering the known world, and that nice Mr Pitt had been Prime Minister and given up by the time he got to our age.

Okay - maybe I am a little envious - my English/Latin A level teacher referred to me to some parents he was showing round school one day twenty two years ago as "looks like fifty but really is one of our sixth formers"...:)

Cllr. Gavin Ayling from Adur publishes what one presumes is the Tory "line" on Lib Dem tax plans. Whilst I'm not clear from his comment:

Just a direct quote from CCHQ today, it’s all pretty obviously wrong… And yet the LibDems steal votes from the Tories in the country and from Labour in the cities… They’re lies, people, let’s hear that before wasting our votes!

...whether he's saying that the message put out by CCHQ is "all pretty obviously wrong" and "lies" but that aside, let's have a look at some of their criticisms:

Among the Liberal Democrats’ plans for over 40 new taxes are:
• VAT on new homes. Liberal Democrats would make homes less affordable by slapping VAT on new housing – inflicting a stealth tax on homeowners, especially first time buyers. New homes currently do not pay VAT. They advocate ‘new homes paying VAT at our new harmonised lower VAT rate’ (Liberal Democrats, Affordable Homes in Safer, Greener Communities, Policy Paper 69, November 2004, p.20). VAT at 7 per cent would add £12,000 to the cost of an average new home in the UK.

The purpose of this change is made explicit in the document cited (I was on that policy working group). The fact that VAT is not charged on new homes but is on renovation and repair of existing homes is a disincentive to better use of our existing housing stock. We cannot unilaterally abolish VAT on such renovations and improvements so the only way to negate this disincentive is to rate both at the same, lowest possible, level. Currently most renovation VAT is at the higher rate I believe - so this would reduce that by as much as we are able to whilst levelling the playing field.

For a party that tends to fight against new build, I would have thought that the Tories ought to support something that encourages better use of current housing stock in preference to giving in to pressures for new build sprawl.

• Tax to park at work or to shop. They would ‘establish private non-residential parking levies (including out-of-town retail and workplace parking)’ (Liberal Democrats, Policies for Transport, Policy Briefing 24, March 2003).

Yet it's okay in Tory controlled Oxfordshire to charge us to park at home? Or on-street parking up by 170% explicitly to discourage driving into town at certain times?

• Pensions tax. Liberal Democrats stated yesterday that they would raise £3 billion by scrapping tax relief on private pensions for higher rate tax-payers (The Daily Telegraph, 9 June 2006). This would further weaken pension saving.

If they were worried about the effect on investment I would agree. However to imply that this is going to jeopardise the savings of those who already don't save enough or at all for their pensions is just naive. Salting excess income away in the form of additional pensions contribution, whilst good for investment, is also one of the biggest and most exploited income tax avoidance measures in use in this country by the already very wealthy usually with very good pensions provision already. Together with the proposed removal of the plan for a 50% tax rate on incomes this is likely to be neutral at least on everyone but the very wealthiest. Most people who have only average pensions savings or none at all would be a million miles away from being affected by this change.

But the point is taken - the Tories do now have to fight for their core constituency haven't they...:)

• Second homes tax. Liberal Democrats have already called for 200 per cent council tax on second homes (Policy motion passed at Liberal Democrat Party Conference, September 2003). Under local income tax, this would be replaced by punishing business rates on second homes (Liberal Democrats, Scrap Council Tax: Liberal Democrat plans to replace council tax with a local income tax, January 2004).

Actually since policy is also to change Uniform Business Rate into a locally set and collected Land Value Tax (called Site Value Rating) second homes would fall under this regime and not UBR. And rightly so. The monopoly of holding land out of its best permitted use ought to be taxed as it has a social cost in the form of availability of affordable housing for the resident population of any area. If they want to publicise our policies, they could at least get them right!

Technorati Tags: conservatives, lib dems, property tax, taxation, tories

Depending on what side of a fractious political divide in Oxfordshire you sit, news that the South East Regional Plan as amended by Whitehall will next week recommend a review of Oxford's Green Belt and the development of 20% more new housing over the next twenty years than proposed at Oxfordshire Structure Plan level will be seen as victory or worst case scenario.

Whilst some, such as City Council leader John Goddard quoted in the linked Oxford Mail article, point out that we are looking at developing just 1% of Oxford's Green Belt, the true story is that the total number of new housing units demanded of the county in the next twenty years is more than an entire new city the size of Oxford. The fact that it appears that most of the additional units recommended by Whitehall planners seem to be destined for edge of city development, the grandiosely termed "Central Oxfordshire Sub-region", suggests that the city itself will be required to grow by at least 20% in twenty years. A handful of land owners will each trouser nine figure windfalls for their land currently worth about one hundredth of that.

The existing Green Belt, the nation's second oldest only after London, took forty years to agree - talks began in the late 1950s and the boundaries were only finally fixed in the Oxford Local Plan 1997. So, unless the process of redrawing the Green Belt boundaries is going to be railroaded through with all the attendant risks of riding roughshod over dissenting opinion, it seems highly unlikely that development would be able to start on any of these major sites inside a decade at the very least.

Now, I'm no great fan of the protectionist Green Belt policy in the first place - it has just as often worked as a "choker" than a belt. In Oxford's case, its main raison d'être was to preserve the historic character of Oxford. And I have often observed that the real, human historic character of Oxford, of "poor scholars and clerks" here to study and the attendant infrastructure that makes the city's very purpose in the world possible, is itself compromised by making housing unaffordable to those very people. I have also consistently pointed out that fulfilling even the government's latest plans for three million new homes over twenty odd years would require just over half of one per cent of England's non-urban land so this is not a NIMBY or "BANANA" anti-development rant.

Mistaken interpretation of needs data.

But I do rail against inappropriate development wherever it surfaces. And I completely believe that this "Central Oxfordshire Sub-regional Growth Zone" is inappropriate. And unnecessary. For a start the housing need data on which it was largely based are just plain wrong - well, more wrongly interpreted I suppose. In 2004 Fordham Research produced a Housing Needs Assessment for Oxford City Council that concluded that 750 units of additional affordable housing were required every year for the next decade just to stand still. Delivering such a requirement with the current maximum affordable-market priced housing quota of 50:50 would imply development of 15,000 new homes in a decade, which is clearly not even in the thinking either of the City Council's planners nor of the South East Regional Plan, even as amended by Whitehall.

However, that figure of 750 affordable units is naively misleading at best, utterly mistaken at worst. For 75% of all the people represented by that annual need are currently housed in the city. And whilst some of them are in unsuitable or overcrowded housing and by definition all of them in unaffordable housing for their incomes, it equates to an overcrowding rate of around 2% of households. Whilst anything up to about 40% of housing if it follows the national pattern is underoccupied. The naive extrapolation from these figures, which is what has been pushed as the "growth zone" option, is that most of that 750 a year requirement can only be met by creating net additional housing units as near as possible to that 750 figure. But, since 75% of them are already housed in the city, such a solution in reality means not merely housing those in housing need in the city, but growth of the "greater Oxford" population to the tune of 20% in twenty years.

No consensus on large scale city growth.

And the one thing we have not had is a debate about whether such overall growth is justified or necessary. In fact, the whole debate, driven as it has been by high housing costs for people already in the city mainly (and quite rightly in many ways - for that is the pressing problem) has not really discussed growth so much as an imperative to get housing costs down for existing residents. For a start, such a rapid rate of growth is likely to cause all sorts of demographic and other social problems that cannot be planned for through mere spatial planning policies. Oxford does have a shortfall of resident working age population compared with the number of jobs in the city, but in the context of a county town in a predominantly rural county that is actually a good thing. If we suddenly meet the employment requirement within the city or on its near borders we risk the economy of the rest of the county insofar as it relies on people earning money in Oxford itself and thence able to support the smaller county towns and villages.

The cost of urban extensions.

Further, concentration on developing virgin edge of town land and new additional housing abandons existing housing to its inexorable decline. One of the most naive, I feel, enthusiasts for the Whitehall changes to the South East Plan, Labour City Councillor Antonia Bance, who positively whooped with joy in her blog the other day when the news broke, represents a ward, Rose Hill, that illustrates quite nicely both the pitfalls of the growth plan and the better solution to the housing need. Tagging new estates onto the edge of the city is no great answer. As Rose Hill shows, such marginal land housing tends to be taken up by the least well off, people who actually could do with being closer, not further, from centers of employment and social interaction.

One can only imagine the potential effects of plonking another 3,500 homes on the edge of the most deprived wards in the city. Optimists will say that it will drag up the fortunes of its neighbours, making it more likely that that whole swathe of post-war development on the edge of the city will attract the infrastructure is still needs to become prosperous and desirable. But the history of such developments tends to prove the pessimist more likely to be right. Indeed, the same was said of what is now Northfield Brook ward - that the new mixed tenure housing of the eighties and nineties in Greater Leys would pull the whole area of the Leys up out of the doldrums, yet just a few years on and Northfield Brook has made its mark as being the newest most deprived area of the city. At the very least, it proves just how long it takes to create new, vibrant communities - a generation and more.

Redeveloping existing urban areas the better alternative.

So, if we are likely to take a decade to get started on these new developments if everything goes well in the Green Belt review, and in the process negate the very ethos of Green Belt - that it should be as permanent as possible and not seen as a stock of land on which the city can call every few years, we should also make attempts to look at other mechanisms for delivering more affordable and more appropriate living spaces for the current needs of the city first and foremost before we plan for topsy growth.

And here, Antonia's ward also proves that it can be done. The Rose Hill redevelopment program proves that where there were 138 housing units of very low, almost derelict, standard you can provide 238 brand spanking new homes better matched to today's household composition and importantly energy needs. Of course I believe it's been badly handled - handing over nearly half of them all to private sale is the equivalent of enclosing half of what up till now has been land held in trust by the council for the people off Oxford, and the resulting housing will not be what it could have been in terms of 21st century energy efficiency. But the principle is correct - and all over Oxford we have lots of twentieth century housing that is not now, or will soon not be, appropriate or efficient in an era of high energy costs.

What Fordham showed was that we need to make around 600 existing units of housing more affordable each year, plus plan for more modest demand of about 180 units a year for people who aspire to move into the city. We can achieve this without wholesale estate building, by redeveloping existing estates (including the private inter-war housing estates in the inner suburbs), But to do that we need to transfer our property tax from taxing both land and buildings to taxing just land. This will relatively penalize underoccupancy and encourage redevelopment of areas that are below the optimal density. In the process more of our existing housing land will be equipped for that low energy 21st century living. And the additional units that can be incorporated by increasing densities will mean that newcomers slot into existing mature communities.

LVT the 21st century radical key to urban regeneration/redevelopment.

Much of Oxford's development in the nineteenth century was the work of Liberals and Radicals through vehicles such as the National Freehold Land Company which, amongst other things, was a mechanism for enfranchisement of the working classes before universal suffrage was enacted. It was a model for social change built, if you pardon the pun, on the idea that land ownership was what made a person free and give them full citizenship. What we need now (and what more fitting a tribute to the recently late Brian Hodgson who a few years ago got the county to investigate LVT's effects on a part of the city) is for that Liberal-Progressive coalition at the Town Hall to demand the right to try out this approach which has recently been making such a vision as I have given here possible in cities across the United States, such as Philadelphia and Harrisburgh, before the bulldoizers move into South and West Oxfordshire and land owners pocket several hundred millions of pounds at our expense.

Finally, if none of that works, I will consider supporting some edge of town new development if we find a way of using the land owners' unearned increment from their rent seeking to create a light rail service from Shipton right round to the Cowley works, taking in all the proposed new estates and employment growth areas such as the Oxford Science Park and the Oxford Business Park. Only with such a piece of infrastructure will these potential new estates be anything other than marginal. At the moment it takes over an hour to get by bus from Kidlington round to Headington for example. Such travel times are unacceptable for estates that would be intended to supply housing for workers in the main employment areas of the city.

For a couple of years now the mainstream media and international institutions have been off and on highlighting the plight of white farmers and the 700,000 suburban Harrare citizens evicted from their homes by the nasty dictator Robert Mugabe. Amnesty International even penned a polite letter to President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria as chair of the African Union asking the Union to speak out against these gross breaches of human and civil rights in Zimbabwe. Prince Charles caused an outrage at Pope John Paul's funeral last year when he shook hands, inadvertently it was reported, with this man who has become a pariah in Europe over the past few years (poor Charles - his mind was probably on other looming events where he would be shut out of a church as well).

Last month Gordon Brown and Bill Gates made merry with Obasanjo over the announcement that Gates was giving $600m from his foundation to help fight Tuberculosis in Africa. Nigeria has become Africa's policeman. We have been supporting their efforts in helping to restore order in Liberia, Senegal, Chad and the Darfur area of Sudan most recently.

But in Nigeria, this "friend" of the west has been quietly getting on with evictions on a scale not even imagined by puny Zimbabwe. In the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, one of those vanity projects like Brasilia more motivated by racial and ethnic power play in the eighties, late last year the capital's authorities began the eviction and demolition of the homes of some 4,000,000 inhabitants. Yes, that's FOUR MILLION, out of a territory population of 7,000,000!

All this ostensibly on the basis that the equivalent of the "Unitary Development Plan" for the Federal Capital Territory when plans were originally laid, envisaged a city of 3,000,000 inhabitants only. Yup, this was merely a planning enforcement issue. And so, it seems, the west and the mainstream media, accept it as a bit of administravia along the lines of your local council ordering next door's too large conservatory to be removed.

FOUR MILLION people, forcibly removed from their homes and communities. And that's only the latest in a long history in Nigeria of heavy handed "enforcement" action against all sorts of rule breakers.

I remember when my father lived there when i was in my teens, in the eighties, we lived a couple of hundred yards down the creek from the "Thousand and four" (I think that was the number anyway) a block of government employees' flats on Victoria Island. In an era of coups and counter-coups, when corrupt ministers like Umaru Dikko were hosting parties in New York to celebrate their first billion dollars, these flats were regularly flushed clean of civil servants who had stopped paying rent, because government had stopped paying them.

And when our housekeeper didn't turn up for work one morning we dicovered that he, along with around a hundred thousand other "illegal" Ghanaian immigrants who did the sorts of jobs that Nigerians didn't want to do (like working for nasty white expatriate households clearly!) were rounded up and marched to the Benin border and deported.

And we continue to fete Obasanjo as some kind of west African hero, a one man UN peace-keeping force, the first remotely democratic leader of Africa's most populous nation for as long as anyone can remember really. With friends like these, who needs enemies like Mugabe? I suppose perhaps it could be said that wealth distribution (and there is HUGE natural wealth in Nigeria) is better in Nigeria - far more ministers and presidents and officials have become millionaires, even billionnaires in Nigeria than in quasi-Marxist Zimbabwe.

If Africa really is to be the focus for the next decades of international development, we've got to get our actions and their countries into some sort of perspective. Four million Nigerians are homeless and landless and we have said nothing.