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at 18:15
I pledge that, if stopped and questioned for no reason by an officer of the law without having invited him or her into a conversation with me, I will make it my business to make the whole business as long-winded and bogged down in paperwork and police time as possible.
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at 12:10
Apropos of nothing in particular, this little snippet of news...
The government of Singapore has built up a 3 per cent stake in British
Land, the FTSE 100 property group that has seen its market value dive
with the rest of the UK property sector.
...prompted me to mention something that many might not know and that I discovered while researching the history of things that could loosely be linked to community land trusts or mutual housing schemes that I am working on elsewhere.
British Land plc is the successor of something called the National Freehold Land Society, which was founded by nineteenth century liberals, foremost amongst them Richard Cobden and John Bright, as a way of subverting the restriction that only those with freehold property had the vote. They would club together, buy up swathes of land around inner cities and parcel it off to households at a minimum nominal value of the £50 you had to be worth in land to vote.
Much of the familiar nineteenth century townscape of Britain was developed by this and other temporary building societies and similar vehicles, including a less successful one established by the Tories that I think also has a successor plc today (Slough Estates maybe?).
Quite often, if you see streets where every other house is of a slightly different nineteenth century design you will find that many of these were built by these mutuals. Members would get allocated their land and then the whole mutual would save money until they could afford to build a house, then the whole process would start again until all the members were housed.
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at 10:02
I hate the G8, there's no doubt. I find the whole idea a nauseating display of mankind's folly that a few people with power can do more or less anything, from manipulating the world's climate to holding in their grasp the lives of billions whose lot in life those leaders of the industrialised nations can barely comprehend, let alone decree how to change.
It epitomizes to me why nation states are vile, unnatural divisions of humanity and the planet which, frankly, seem to have more to do with protecting the wealth of the few and patronizing the poverty of the many on this earth. Their leaders pose, Atlas-like, for photo-calls after their vacuous pronouncements, like some cabal of gallactic princelings in some dystopian Sci-Fi vision of a future inter-stellar imperial court.
Yet I'm no crusty protester you'll find scaling fences at Gleneagles or taking a bullet in Genoa complaining that these neo-cons and neo-liberals want to sell our world to the most hated capitalist profiteer. Oh no. Business, amongst other examples of voluntary human co-operation, has a huge part to play in addressing the needs of everyone on the planet. If only it could all be carried out on a billiard-table-level playing field.
And this is the greatest power these eight chattering onanists have - they could, if they chose, level that playing field tomorrow, or at least leave Japan this week having agreed to do so. But they don't want that, do they. because they also represent the businesses already raping the planet and its people by dint of playing on a skewed field.
They make me puke when I think of them, quite literally. I am nauseous writing this to be honest. I do not believe there are eight people on the planet, in fact not 2008 nor yet even 200,000,008 endowed with the wisdom of gods and strength of titans who could do any better at securing the future of this planet than the possibility oif billions of us being able to communicate and co-operate directly among ourselves.
At the top of my front page you will find what must be one of my favourite quotes from any politician, in this case the truly radical, Richard Cobden:
"Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less." 150 years later, like infants only learning to crawl, we still rely on those protectionist, egotistical, smugly self-important governments despite the evidence that they cannot and will not deliver on their promises.
Whilst I certainly do not agree with all their policies, I find the idea of SimPol, in which we use modern communications technology to get ordinary people throughout the world, in diverse and distant countries, to voice together our aspirations and make those same sort of global changes on a consensual and co-operative basis.
Y I H8 G8.
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at 12:15
If "secret rescue" isn't the very definition of "moral hazard" that everyone was talking about a few months ago, I don't know what is. Not to mention protectionism and special privilege.
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at 18:12
Funnily enough when I joined Oxford East Lib Dems it was almost completely run by sexual deviants. When I hesitated to answer "I am gay" on my vetting question for city councillors "Is there anything else you want to tell us that, if it became public, might bring embarrassment to the party" I was reassured to find that not only were my two vetters also a little light in their loafers, but so were most of my fellow candidates and at least half of the constituency executive.
So, don't get me wrong, I think gay rights, and more generally the right of people to live their lives how they want pretty much, are crucial parts of a liberal ideology, and yes, it's an international battle. But for someone like Peter Tatchell who has pledged his troth to fight Oxford East for the Green Party on local issues, I would suggest that means doing your bit for the international cause of human rights by making sure we ditch the government that now promises us "Suss Laws" not unlike those under which one might suspect Mr Tatchell has been vexatiously held in Moscow this weekend.
Oxford East has problems a-plenty for someone seriously wanting to represent us at Westminster to get to grips with, and full time too. They may not always get you onto national television, but we are looking for an MP at the next election, not a C list celebrity media whore.
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