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Whilst I am sure that petty threats from a minor blogger well beyond the outskirts of the Westminster village who only leaves Headington Hill once a month to buy toiletries in Crabtree and Evelyn will cut little ice with Lib Dem party apparatchiks either in Cowley Street or the West Midlands region, I hereby pledge my support for Cllr Gavin Webb, the "Stoke One". Gavin has been suspended from the party pending a full hearing for, ostensibly at least, voicing personal opinions on liberal and libertarian issues which we both largely share.

If he is out of the party for that, then it is likely that I would be too if it weren't for the fact that I get on seemingly much better with my local party.

I am aware that Gavin has taken the decision not to be in the official Lib Dem council group at Stoke for some time, and that to some he has been a bit of a thorn in the side, but that in itself is no good reason to expel him from the party, nor, he says, has he actually been given details yet (six weeks or so after the event now) of the "charges" against him, so we can only really assume it is for the temerity of holding an opinion.

A number of fellow party members with libertarian leanings have started up a web site to support Gavin at "Save the Stoke One". Having spent my best years at school very near Stoke, I never thought I'd find anything amongst the former smoke stacks and bottle kilns to want to save! Though I distinctly remember some older school friends raving on about seeing The Clash at Victoria Hall in the early eighties!

The creation of the Serious Organised Crime Squad. Orwell's vision comes true. New Labour give up hope for positive change and resort only to throwing up the fortress walls. Whilst they gad about giving privilege to business and capital flows to operate in a globalized world, when it comes down to real people, enforce, enforce, enforce is the message.

What a bleak authoritarian future.

ConservativeHome today covers the latest vapourware announcement in the Tories' slow progress towards finding a policy. This time it's the "Green Tories" (who, you would have thought, might have given up when their tree was repainted - presumably with lead based paint to boot - the other week) and their ideas for Green taxes.

Now of course, many of the tax proposals would have been easy to lift from our Tax Commission work a whole year ago, but I guess what with imitation and flattery and so on we ought to be pleased. But there's a couple of opportunities hinted at in it that I think they, and we, have both missed a trick on...

The list of proposals on air travel issues according to the Evening Standard/Daily Mail includes:

• "A moratorium on all airport expansion, including Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted;
• The imposition of VAT on fuel for domestic flights;
• A "single flight tax" to shift tax burden from passengers to airlines;
• Domestic flight slots to be handed to long-haul trips instead."

The Mail also suggests that the BAA London airports 'monopoly' will be broken up and 4x4 cars will face higher duties.

It looks like a lot of "tinkering" legislation might be on the way, interfering by government diktat in the market. When actually what's happening is that the market is already skewed and not operating efficiently compared with other forms of transport.

You don't need to put a moratorium on airport expansion, you just need to make sure that all the externalities of airport use are properly compensated for. Airports are vast spaces with huge footfall. Their current land value in enormous. LVT on existing airports and any land converted to airport use would concentrate minds. That would also effectively break the "BAA monopoly"

You don't need to create some confiscatory mechanism to rip domestic slots away from domestic flights and "hand them" to international long haul flights - a form of protectionism of course; air space is ours. Technology can, as it has done over the years, mean that aircraft can use airspace and landing slots more efficiently, but it is essentially finite - as people looking up and the sky over London will realise. LVT can apply to landing slots/airspace use. It would be conducted usually by auctioning slots with the proceeds going to the public purse. It would become less efficient for airlines to pay for slots for domestic flights compared with the overall costs of other forms of domestic transport.

Airports are huge magnets for economic activity. Most of the high-tech industry to the west of London out as far as Oxford is, one way or the other, there because of Heathrow. These businesses do not compete against, say, Devon & Cornwall, but against Silicon Valley or the Rhine Valley areas of Germany so they need good international connections. Auctioning landing slots would encourage airlines to think about where they want to land in the UK and bring into use spare capacity at other, regional airports. This could have a massive potential effect of encouraging those businesses that need international connections to release valuable land in the "Western Arc" around Heathrow and move their economic productivity to, I don't know, near Teeside airport, or Humberside or wherever the landing slot auctions made most feasible for the airlines.

I thought the Tories liked to position themselves as a party of minimal interference. These policies seems to show that protectionism is alive and well and that they do not have a grasp of perfectly natural mechanisms that would encourage the results they want to see without low level market manipulation by governments.

Sometimes it only takes the back of an envelope to verify rough tax calculations. Clearly e-Tory Iain Dale doesn't keep real envelopes any longer when he says that in his interview with Andrew Marr this morning Ming Came Clean on Tax Hikes:

Well if you're a lobby journalist scratching your head about what to write tomorrow, Ming Campbell's just given you your story. On the Andrew Marr programme he readily admitted that the cost of his so-called "Tax Cuts" would see "the rich" (which he couldn't define) paying £40-£50,000 a year more EACH in tax, as a result of his reform proposals. Let me spell that out again...

£40-£50,000 MORE in tax per year! Each!

Feel those pips squeak! This will apparently enable him to fill the £12 billion hole in the LibDem tax calculations. I suspect that although they might be able to fill the hole in the first year, the would reoccur in the second. Why? Because every so-called "rich" person will have left the country. Perhaps someone should remind Ming of what Abraham Lincoln once said...

You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer.

Aside from the fact that Ming did no such thing as anyone who watched it could see he was reacting guardedly to a set of figures thrown out by Marr himself making assumptions about who would be targetted by tax increases. Marr's researchers had suggested we were talking about, I think he said, the top 250,000 wealthiest households. So just who are they and what difference would it make?

Well 250,000 households are about one per cent of households. Most statistics seem to show that the wealthiest one per cent in the UK own between about 20% and 23% of all the wealth in the UK. By contrast, fully half of the UK adult population shares 7% of wealth including housing wealth between them, or just 1% without housing wealth.

Now the wealth of this 250,000 wealthiest households is growing, at average returns (and in fact they tend to grow faster than the average), at about £50,000,000,000 a year, of which we may or may not want to capture about £12,000,000,000, or around a 25% tax rate, in order to bring my and other average earner's tax rates fall to about 34%.

Seems like a good deal to me for the vast, vast majority of the British public. Scaremongering Tories beware - when people realise who is affected one way or another, I think they will be pleasantly surprised.

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