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Yes, I'm still meant to be on internet silence, but Linux and various bits of software have me stumped for a while until I get some help from the mailing lists, so I thought I'd cast my mind over the implications of the court case this week that resulted in a jury deciding that it was okay to commit a crime in order to prevent what the perpetrators believed would be a greater harm in the future. The case in point was that they had committed (and admitted) criminal damage by climbing a chimney at a Kent power station with the intent of scrawling graffiti on it in protest at its pollution record and plans to expand the facility, which, their oh so clever advocate declared would cause more and more widespread damage to people and property through the global warming it would contribute to.

Now, some of the more unthinking environmentalists might see this as a great victory. A court recognized that global warming was such an imminent threat to life and property that it was justifiable to commit brazen thuggery leading to criminal damage on anything that allegedly contributed to that global warming. Yay!?

Nay! I have two problems with this.

First is the acceptance, apparently by both judge and jury (and so, you may think, all "reasonable people"), not just that anthropogenic climate change is a fact but also such a grave threat that it justifies individuals taking the law into their own hands. To my mind this is still a matter in the political arena. Not only are there still, and perhaps growing, voices of dissent on the very premise of the debate; that mankind is responsible for such a change that it is a threat to the planet's very future. But also about what to do about it and when. A power station after all merely supplies a demand. Is the power generator guilty or the consumer making those demands? It is more dangerous to disrupt existing dwindling supplies before we have worked out how to replace them with cleaner affordable technologies? If the threat from global warming is real, so presumably is the threat of harm through disrupted power supplies.

Second is how this operates as a precedent in other, possibly more serious cases - although I heard someone saying that this decision will not be treated as forming a precedent, I'm not clear how that can be prevented. It is okay to murder an abortionist in order to stop the immediate harm to others he or she will cause? That threat, after all, is far more immediate and traceable to an individual than the effects of a single coal power station amongst all the coal fired power stations and other "climate vandals". We're starting to get not only into the realms of Philip K Dick's pre-crime but vigilante prevention of what individuals claim may be a pre-crime. This is hardly the basis for the rule of law.

Oh, you can say that no court is going to acquit a murderer because they thought they were preventing a bigger crime, but actually we already do. The "reasonable force" defense can be used to justify a death in the process of preventing an immediate threat to others' life. This decision seems to extend the boundaries of "immediate threat" let alone accurate identification of the person causing that immediate threat.  One could, and many do, fight abortion on the basis that the most immediate threat t future generations of humanity is eradicating them before they are born.  If we're going to adopt a principle (and I do) that we have a responsibility of stewardship not to harm future generations' survival on the planet then it would be legitimate for others to argue more forcefully that we have a responsibility to see those future generations actually survive as far as birth!

Anyway, two odd sounding sources provide what I believe are better alternative "precedents" to work from. First, there is a Catholic maxim that it is not legitimate to cause one moral bad, or an act that could foreseeably lead to morally bad consequences in order to prevent another, even near certain, specific bad. It is used mostly about abortion again. It is used to argue that it is not even permissible to abort a new life in order to prevent the death of the mother - often in the circumstances of an ectopic pregnancy for example.

Of course the world's aggressors, including the US and UK, routinely ignore this. They argue that foreseeable "collateral damage" is permissable to remove a dictator, for example. It is not. Terrorising and killing the people of Bagdad in "Shock and Awe", even as "collateral", was morally repugnant, notwithstanding our general agreement that the regime they were trying to punish or remove was also morally repugnant. The results of ignoring of this basic principle are there for us all to see - there can be little doubt now that more people in Iraq have suffered for longer under the oversight of the western occupying forces than it is likely would have happened at the hands of the previous repugnant regime. At least there could have been alternatives that held less potential for further suffering.

But on the environment, the libertarians' respect for the rule of law provides a better alternative to various bearded crusties climbing a chimney and committing vigilante criminal damage. Locke's proviso can be used, for example, to tackle pollution. If you, a power generator or anyone else - a pig farm even, pollute the atmosphere we both have to share, we have the right to legal remedy. Just as much as if you came along and started digging a hole in my prize rose border. Indeed this ought to work better than any political "solution". Protectionism is a political strategy, and even Green politicians will forcibly protect their favourite, in this case, power generation mechanism against legitimate complaint of harm. If planning permission were truly privatised, those affected most would almost certainly do better out of it than they will once the government has removed most of their rights in order to force their political idea of strategic energy infrastructure through.

Yes, we all need power, but left to ourselves we would probably not choose to have a nuclear reactor at the bottom of our garden. But, as they say, everyone has their price. If, collectively, my neighbourhood decided that the compensation on offer was enough when weighed against the costs of electricity or the convenience of not having a long transmission route or any potential danger they'd accept that nuclear reactor. If nobody accepts any price for nuclear, they have to weigh that decision against the potential alternatives. If nobody wants a giant power station, then we perhaps have to accept that we will have to help our neighbours fund micro-generation.

The Competition Commission has suggested, perhaps commanded (I no longer know what sort of power the CC has given that most competition issues are meant to be dealt with on a Europe-wide basis) that BAA ought to sell some of its airports, and in particular two of the three main London ones. I am uneasy about this for two main reasons...

First off I am deeply suspicious about the timing of the Competition Commission's investigation which seemed to be a (possibly coincidental) reaction to those foreigners (Ferrovial) taking over a British company which had owned those airports for a significant time. If there was a problem with monopoly, surely it should have been taken into account when BAA was first privatised.

And second it is a big step to try and force someone to divest themselves of their own property, especially when it's not as if they are "absentee landlords" but working, and presumably working quite successfully (other than the debt burden) the property.

But there is another problem. The monopoly is not really about the airports themselves - and indeed making them compete directly by being owned by separate owners wanting to maximise their income from each individual airport is likely I would have thought to result in heavier use of all of them, increasing the discomfort for the folk who have to live as neighbours of these smelly, filthy, noisy facilities.

It is exacerbated by the fact that what they really control is access to the airlanes that supply those airports. Airlanes that are, in the economic sense, "land" - part of "unimproved" natural resources with finite space - and in this case also time - (though of course safety technologies can increase the capacity a little) for all the potential users. This is part of the commons, and Ferrovial/BAA and the longer established airlines profit directly from the monopolistic enclosure of those airlanes.

Like the Electromagnetic Spectrum they are part of the "commons" and should be leased at their full economic rent from the state for our collective benefit. They are most commonly called "landing slots" and are worth a huge amount of money - Deloittes reckons that peak day time slots at Heathrow are worth up to £30 million per pair in summer, and there are 9,562 (4,781 pairs - one to land and one to take off on) per week in high season, with an overall limit of 480,000 per year at the moment.

The slot situation is currently, by common consent, pretty chaotic. The government has capped the amount BAA can charge and capped the amount by which it can increase the charge, but 97% of all slots at Heathrow for example are not open to effective competition as they are sold at this capped cost to airlines who have been there the longest, so called "grandfather rights". Heathrow is the only airport in Europe at which there is a significant amount of secondary trading in a "grey" market which is where the £30 million per pair arises. All this profit, the economic rent, goes to the airlines and Deloittes goes on to calculate that BA's slot portfolio may be worth up to £2bn if it were included in its balance sheet as an asset compared with its market capitalisation of around £2.7bn!

The CAA should be auctioning airspace rights to all airports at whatever the market will pay, whilst airports themselves should be responsible for charging the airlines for the use of the "improvements" - the terminal access, ground facilities and so on.

This would force traffic that doesn't actually need to use these massively oversubscribed London airports out to existing regional airports first, often reducing travel times - why travel from Lancaster to London to get a plane if the destination you want is available more cheaply from Manchester - as well as bringing increased economic activity to the areas around those regional airports - airports are a huge draw for international businesses. And unless the overall capacity of slots convenient for travelers' points of origin and destination is actually more than required, would generate a goodly sum for the government in a more market efficient way than say fuel taxes.

I hope we will be having a debate at South Central regional conference on Heathrow's third runway proposals. I believe the rigorous eradicating of this money for nothing monopoly on the part of the airports and airlines through nationwide slot auctions would actually obviate the need for the extra imposition this third runway would cause on teh surrounding areas without affecting overall the competitiveness of Heathrow for flights that really need to use it.

The Telegraph today highlights a poll claiming that up to 68% of the population want an English parliament. At least I think that's what the various, slightly confusing, figures say. It might mean that 68% of Scots want an English parliament for all I can work out.

No worries. Suffice it to say that I find myself, once again, in the minority. But not, I hasten to add, because of any particular devotion to Westminster, far from it. I loathe the place and all that it stands for personally. But because I do believe that supporting an English parliament is a substitute for real devolutionary democratic change. Yes, it may well be unfair that Scotland has one and that we are ruled by people who have their own parliament and whose decisions at Westminster do not affect what happens in some areas of life to their own constituents.

But think of this. I live in Oxford. I like to think, though I don't have one to call my own, that it is my home. I believe that Oxford has in its little valley setting, everything we need to be able to run our lives the way we want to.

Why would I want someone elected by the people of Leicester West deciding what to do with our hospitals? Is that any better than, say, someone elected by the people of Airdrie and Shotts, telling our Thames Valley police force what to do? Is it going to be any better that someone put there by the people of Bolton ties our councils up in knots than someone for Dunfermline holds the purse-strings?

Leviathan may have been a necessary evil in building up a strong post-war state in an era of relative scarcity and in negotiating economies of scale in order to get a social safety net functioning in the first place. But neither it, nor its little sibling, an English parliament is necessary now to get our cities, regions and services competing and growing in ways that the people who depend on them want.

I simply refuse to believe that the people who happen to have conned or cajoled the poor citizens of Sedgefield, or even of Witney into sending them to the High Trough of Parliament are any better, with ideas or managerial competence, than those the folk of Headington, Wolvercote, or even Hinksey Park have decided should run their home town. And the former, for all their globe trotting, power broking and international adventuring are making the world a more dangerous place to boot.

If we have to have an English parliament, let it be in a form David Hume would have suggested, which, with modern communications and travel is self-evidently more practical in the 21st century than ever it was in the 18th.

If you ask me, smoking was an integral part of the First World War. As John Reid alluded to when he was in charge of the nation's health, a "one small pleasure" people who were about to die got.

Songs - "While you've a lucifer to light you fag...", sayings - "unlucky third light" (never light three cigarettes with one match - the sniper spots you on one, aims on two and kills the "third light"), show how important smoking was. We can't just eradicate its place even if we want to eradicate the habit.

So it seems pretty silly that English Heritage would want to remove all smoking from re-enactment scenes:

All smoke-free on the western front from Guardian Unlimited: News blog:

After yesterday's reports that broadcasters are cutting scenes from Tom and Jerry cartoons for crimes against clean air, we can reveal that English Heritage has been similarly censorious in releasing images of first world war soldiers, the famous Tommies in the trenches, having a cigarette.

In her defense of the surveillance state (sorry if I've misunderstood but that's what it sounds like!) at CCTV conspiracy mania is a very middle-class disorder there's one little sentence that gives it all away. She says:

There is a sad lack of voices to praise the benign state these days.

Maybe that's because there is no such thing as "the benign state", now or at any point in history that immediately comes to mind.