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If, as the media and certain politicians seem to want us to believe, we have a "broken society " (whatever on earth that might actually mean), surely it is just reflecting how "broken" its leadership, government, has become. And I don't mean just the current Labour government. I mean government as an institution, even our democracy itself, if you will.

The state and its agents and those who act with its protection have routinely perpetrated force, violence and coercion, against their own citizens, against other countries, for aeons. The whole model is based on us surrendering some of our personal sovereignty. Some would no doubt rather say "pool" than "surrender" but look around you; "pooling" implies much more of a consensual relationship than reality attests to.

From cradle to grave, as they once promised, the state imposes itself on our lives and choices by more or less coercion. From compulsion in education, via criminalizing consensual or victimless behaviour (even thoughts and opinions) and right through to prosecuting wars "in our name", commanding our young men and women to kill or be killed. And most of all perhaps through taxation - it never hurts as hard as on the pocket!

In turns the state seems to infantilise and nanny us, to absolve us of personal responsibilities, and then, moralizing, blame us for all our own ills. Those who would rule us cynically play on our fears and talk up our aspirations according to their need to gain and retain power. And a tiny minority of us in our broken system can make or break that power for them, so have disproportionate influence over our fellow citizens.

That this has always gone on need hardly be stated. The biggest mystery, as Milton Friedman said, is why human-kind seems collectively to submit to authority - especially remarkable really when you consider that every step of human advance has actually arisen from someone stepping beyond the current conventions, bending the rules, exceeding the norm.

Supposedly benign regimes create instruments to comfort us, to fool us into thinking they are prepared to limit their own authority, whether we call them Geneva Conventions, Human Rights Acts or Data Protection, and then seem to break their own principles when it suits them, call it Guantanamo, pre-charge detention and control orders or ID cards and state databases.

It is often said that ("successful") politicians display many characteristics of psychopathy. How much more "broken" can we get than to submit ourselves to being ruled and represented by smooth talking, self centered, pathological liars? How much more scary than that such people have their hands on both our wallets and on the nuclear triggers? Is it any wonder that life on some of our streets can be vicious?

The chap who drew me to joining the Institute of Economic Affairs (yes, me!) Fred Harrison, publicising his new book "Ricardo's Law: House Prices and the Great Tax Clawback Scam", has a piece in the Yorkshire Post today detailing how it ain't so:

LONDON Mayor Ken Livingstone claims that the capital subsidises the rest of the country.

Taxpayers in London and the South-East, we are told, pay such heavy taxes that the Treasury transfers about £13bn to regions like Yorkshire.

This is one of the appalling myths that cripples public policy and prevents people in the regions from enjoying a square deal from the public purse.

In reality, people in the South-East are subsidised by the regions. And the housing market is the vehicle for delivering this shameful result. For the tax policies of the Treasury, which are supposed to transfer income from the rich to help the poor, are biased to achieve the opposite effect.

It seems slightly odd to me that I have only ever written once about Higher Education policy, given that I am a governor of my university, and hear about it all the time in meetings. But it has become a big issue at the moment in the Lib Dems, and seems to have been one of the major discussion areas at the Liberal Youth conference over the weekend, so I thought it might be time for me to jot down a few thoughts.

One thing that seems clear, and I believe this is common currency in university board-rooms across the country, is that the current muddled system cannot go on. 98% I believe it is of courses are charging the full top-up fees, and even they do not make up for the real terms fall of over 60% in funding per student over the past decade and a half or so.

On top of that, it fails to create any kind of price mechanism where people might be able to see what value a university or rather its applicants put on a particular course at a particular institution. It is a nonsense to think that three grand at The New University of Bloggshire is as good value as three grand at one of our world leading institutions like Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial. Instead we rely on very subjective analyses of the National Student Satisfaction Survey and even that is difficult as the organizers may put a good course in a subject area in which an institution is not so excellent and devalue that one course.

What also seems clear is that the value of a first degree is, shall we say, not as high as perhaps it was when all those who say "I got university free, so I'm damned if I'm going to see the next generation up to their necks in debt" went to university. It is a very generous sentiment, and, whilst I didn't in fact go to university I do recognize the hypocrisy - had I taken my school teachers' advice I would have had free higher education and a living grant too. That may not of course be the fault of the Higher Education Institutions so much as primary and secondary education - I don't suppose many students in my day would have had to be taught remedial English and maths at university as we are told some are today in order to get the most out of the Higher Education experience. Additionally, many more students than previously feel the pressure to do second and subsequent degrees in order to stand out in the job market as perhaps a first degree would have done for them in previous generations.

I think the majority feeling in those university board-rooms is that they would prefer to see the fees cap lifted completely when the opportunity arises sometime after 2010, even though by that time many may not want to charge too much so as to be in competition for a smaller number of students when the 18 year old cohort dips significantly in around 2012. We are also on tenter-hooks waiting to see how economic troubles in the wider world will affect student numbers - in previous recessions there has been a boost to Higher Education as people out of work re-train, but faced with fees and debts and an even more uncertain economic outlook, we wonder whether this will be the same this time round.

So, regardless of how our policy affects students themselves, the universities are in an ever more uncertain position. Whatever option we choose, we must see to it also that universities get sufficient funding. There will be no merit in having free Higher Education if the universities themselves cannot deliver that within the budgets allowed.

Anyway, I wanted to suggest an idea with this post. It's somewhat half formulated, and I certainly have not tried to run any figures on it yet, but I hope you might get the idea and maybe be willing to help develop it in the comments.

I have always regarded universities as social enterprises, mutual institutions of a sort. Indeed I once tried to persuade Brookes to adopt a more overt mutualism in its management structure. During the Great Depression in North America, when students were still having to pay fees but had very little money left for anything else, many embraced mutualism as a way to get through. This was the era in which the co-op meal plan, the co-op houses and halls of residence, and the university credit unions burgeoned. Partly as a result of this they have a much stronger alumni culture than we have here.

A credit union type system could be used to enable universities to charge a full market rate for their courses whilst financing all students "needs blind" so that they do not have to pay anything until they are earning. These credit unions would enable alumni (and possibly applicants before they are at university) to save, with interest, in less toxic investments than they have been in the banking system of late while funding current students through university and who would then be expected, as part of their "pay back", to join and save, investing in the next cohort of students, when they graduate.

On top of this we need a package of measures perhaps to encourage the development of low cost co-operative halls of residence and mutual housing societies to prevent the basic accommodation needs of students becoming the £5-7,000 per year drain that the big corporate halls providers expect to charge and the private rented sector delivering second class housing for students.

Last weekend my mother was down visiting me in Oxford. On Sunday, for lunch, we wandered into town and went to the Castle/Prison site. Apart from anything else I haven't been up the castle mound to see what the view is like. These days, I thought there was a promise to make publicly funded museums free to access. I was surprised therefore to find that the little museum at St George's Tower was apparently charging to get in, and that you had to pay to get up the castle mound itself.

This whole development, resulting in a posh hotel that few in the city can afford to stay in, some apartments that few in the city can afford to buy, a bunch of brand name eateries and some open space, cost the tax payer some £6 million in the form of a SEEDA grant and the lottery player some £3.8 million - getting on therefore for nearly £10 million of "public" money.

I'd like to see the books on this development. I was on the planning committee when it got permission. Nno thanks to me - I thought the Jeremy Dixon building jutting out in front of the castle mound was hideous on plan, and it has turned out mediocre at best in my opinion - but the then doyen of planning committee had fallen in love with Dixon's work and couldn't be persuaded otherwise. We were told the SEEDA money for the commercial development itself, some £4.5 million, was part of a scheme intended to help make developments viable in "failed land markets". Indeed those of us against it were bullied with threats that the grant money would be withdrawn if we delayed even a few weks to try to get a better design. The threat was quite real though because the whole "failed markets" scheme had already proven so contentious that it was abruptly ended.

To suggest that a site adjacent to what will become a £200 million plus redevelopment of Oxford's main shopping centre, right next to County Hall, really slap bang in the centre of one of the hottest property spots in the country, was a "failed land market" was, frankly, laughable, even at the time. Indeed, on the SEEDA web page for the project it describes it as a "Prime City Centre Location"! "Prime" has specific connotations in describing commercial land.

Yes, it had taken several years to find someone to take it on. Since the prison had closed in 1996 (the last prisoner if I recall correctly was, at the time quite infamous, Jamie Blandford) and the whole site was handed to the County Council they had tried several schemes until Trevor Osborne's Osborne Group and SEEDA got involved and the rest is now history. But four years to get a plan for such a site was not out of the ordinary. Capital Shopping Centres next door has been trying to put together an acceptable plan for well over six years now - at their own financial risk of course.

And we can't even climb the castle mound for free. Oxford Preservation Trust is a great organisation and does have to make ends meet. But really, could not a scheme have been organised to make these spaces, in public hands for a thousand years, free to access? Perhaps by charging sufficient rent to the other tenants who would surely benefit from drawing crowds into the prison and castle site. "Brunch" at the "Living Room" restaurant alone was expensive enough to have included a contribution to my access to the castle.

How much did the County Council receive for the 200 year lease granted Mr Osborne? Presumably nothing - it was, after all a "failed land market", or so they persuaded SEEDA, and all the county appears to have wanted out of it was to remove all risk from the council tax payer, which in itself was laudable, but not necessarily the best they could have got for it. Would the development, now that it's complete, tenancies let and apartments sold, have been profitable without that grant? I know a few land agents locally. Not one of them believes that public subsidy was necessary (at least for the commercial part of the development).

So, was it necessary? And if not, who is going to apologise for wasting all that public money? Or is Osborne Group going to pay it back?

And I still, therefore, have not been up my castle mound - okay, that bit's only a quid, but I'm buggered if as a citizen of this fine city I am going to pay to access what has been public land for a millennium.

Okay, so it's time to give a little plug to my other little venture - "The 1909 Group".

At Harrogate conference in Spring, several of us put our heads together and wondered how we might bring "left" and "right" in the Lib Dems together. In ALTER, our Land Value Tax and Economic Reform campaign group, we just knew we had the answers, or at least the seeds of the answers, to providing both the likes of the Beveridge Group with funds for their high spending ambitions and the "Orange Bookers" with the means to encourage lively and profitable free markets.

The answer was given us nearly a hundred years ago by Lloyd George drawing on a long history of liberal economics. Economics that we have by and large forgotten, subsumed in the argument for an against capital pursued for the last century by Conservative and Labour alternately.

The Free Trade, anti-monopoly, anti-protectionism but pro-individual economic success ethos that pervaded the political scene for the best part of half a century straddling 1900 was the elusive "Third Way", derailed by warfare, national and class-based for most of the succeeding century. And we reckon that if we can rekindle that spirit, we can give the Lib Dems a distinctive, radical liberal "narrative" to use the current buzzword that both respects opportunity and hard work and protects the vulnerable and the public services people have become accustomed to.

So, check out our site - part group blog, part campaigning site - we're hoping to have an inaurgural meeting in Oxford over the weekend of 9th-10th June during the Green Lib Dems conference and possibly a more visible launch at Brighton if we are organized in time.