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Just as we are trying to get to grips with whether the Liberal Conspiracy is actually Liberal, so now we have Dave the Chameleon saying the the Conservatives and the Co-operative Movement have always been natural bed-buddies:

The co-op movement has generally been associated with the political left. I think that's a shame. First, because there have always been people on the centre-right concerned about the effects of capitalism on the social fabric. Men like Carlyle and Disraeli, following the tradition of Edmund Burke and Adam Smith himself, who recognised at the outset of the industrial revolution that profit was not the only organising principle of a healthy society. And second, because the co-operative principle reflects an important part of the vision of social progress that we on the centre-right believe in: the role of strong independent institutions, run by and for local people. That's why Conservatives have always argued that free enterprise and the co-operative principle are partners, not adversaries.

It is true that, faced with an alternative between co-operative localism and central state organization, the Conservatives have occasionally championed the mutual. Notably in 1908 when the Old Age Pensions Act was passed the Conservatives tried to promote the use of Friendly Societies and Mutuals instead of a state pension system. And it may be that there have been well-meaning Tories worried about the "effects of capitalism on the social fabric". And yes, co-operatives operate in the same markets as capitalists often and compete, often successfully with them.

However, the International Co-operative Alliance provides the ground rules for bona fide co-operative enterprises. And the Co-operative Values they promote are indeed motherhood and apple pie stuff: "Co-operatives are based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity."

But the Co-operative Principles, developed from this vision and building on the rules of the Rochdale Pioneers, set bona fide co-operatives at odds with the traditional capitalism that the Tory party has long championed. "Democratic Member Control" for example means that every member, regardless of their financial stake, has an equal say in the running of the business. Capitalism is based on the exact opposite - that he with the most shares has the greatest say.

"Voluntary Open Membership" was a challenge to the "Church and State" party - with many mutuals founded precisely because their non-conformist members were barred from services and facilities because of their religious associations.

The Co-operative Movement, at least in Britain, was basically founded to empower the lower classes against the Tory ruling class and its economic hold over them. Its principles can be and are used to democratise and devolve services from an overbearing state as with Cameron's regurgitation of the liberal Milton Friedman's idea for co-operative schooling. But it is an extra-ordinary claim that the principles of the Co-op Movement are compatible with the protectionist capitalism embodied in the Conservative party.

Dave incidentally perpetuated the popular story that the co-operative movement started in Rochdale - they codified the idea of course, but it was proto-socialist Robert Owen who opened the first co-op store for his workers in New Lanark, and, to take it to its logical origins, Gerrard Winstanley's Diggers in 1649 who set the scene for the long battle between co-operation and collectivism on the one hand and enclosure and privatisation of our common birthright on the other. I doubt the Conservative Co-operative Movement will be agitating any day soon for wholesale equitable redistribution of the common wealth.

Incidentally Guido - I believe you are quite wrong in this respect - a hedge fund partnership cannot by definition be a bona fide co-operative since one of the other obligations of a bona fide co-operaive is to promote and educate about the co-operative principles. The hedge fund exploits to the max the capitalist principles of shareholder power - might is right. I don't have a principled objection to hedge funds and private equity - they have their place in this broken world, but they cannot be counted as members of the co-operative movement by any stretch of the imagination.

As someone who has been involved off and on in Charter88 campaigns for a Bill of Rights, who has marvelled at how enlightened a party the Lib Dems must be for having called for one for as long as I can remember being involved, I must say I am pleased. I am pleased that after so long denying it, the Conservative Party has signalled such a big u-turn on something that in my opinion has been fundamental to the rule of law and the place of the citizen in a democracy since...oh Tom Payne and before.

You see, it has been one of the huge blockages to my ability to see the Conservatories as a party I could deal with. The evidence, up till now, has been that they are a party for whom rights were divisible, that fundamentally believed that some people had fewer rights than others. This to me was the outrage of Section 28 for example. It just galled me that a party could go out seeking to claim to be able to represent all of us, yet still want to put some of us in pigeon holes and say we had fewer rights.

So far so good.

But...and you knew there had to be one...the "noises" are all wrong. They're apparently reacting (because in reality they are a bunch of old reactionaries of course) to some whipped up furore about the Human Rights Act, and, by extension, whatever they say, about the European Convention on Human Rights. Have they actually read this document? What rights enshrined in that would we not have? It's not a big document. It doesn't take long to enumerate them.

And the Human Rights Act basically does two things - bring the first responsibility for enforcing the Convention on the British courts instead of the famously slow European Court of Human Rights, and make all public bodies, including the legislature, consider their citizens' rights. For all the harumphing about the Afghan hijackers or Abu Hamza or whoever, 99.99999% of the times (at least) that the Human Rights Act is cited in anything, it is where little jobsworths and council officers all over the country have to consider the impact of their decisions and recommendations on us, the people, whom they exist to serve.

Every report of a planning officer has to consider the impact on the rights enshrined by the ECHR of the proposal and their recommendation. Every decision to award a grant to ensure public money is being used fairly and being given to causes that will not discriminate. Every time, in fact, the least of the lowest civil servant so much as takes a dump...

Indeed, when last they were in power, the Conservatories also conspired to let the ECHR do their dirty work for them (and for all his apparent new age all are equal cuddliness in 1997 this is something Mr Blair perpetuated, despite being bunked up every night with a woman making her legal reputation and fortune fighting the UK government on Human Rights). Equalization of the age of consent for gay men - won through the ECHR. The right of gay men and lesbians to fight for their country - won through the ECHR. To be treated the same by employers - yup, ECHR. Presumably now that the problem is foreigners, not poofters, these are not examples of the sort of thing the Conservatories would want to roll back?

So then I hear Dominic Grieve, and he should know cos he's something to do with the law, saying it's not meant to diminish our rights but increase them. And of course that is allowed, and it's welcome. If it were true. If that were the case, certainly in the ethos of Charter88, it would mean a real shift of power towards the individual citizen and away from government - finally redressing the truism, two centuries and more old, that we live in a dictatorship on all but one day out of four or five years. Long something the Conservatories have said they want to do, but yet again have proven they can't when in power. It means to me a need for fewer MPs and flunkies. I don't see many Conservatories saying they stood for parliament in order one day to sack themselves - something I absolutely take as a given for the Lib Dem MPs I know. To curtail and control the power of the executive. In short, a constitution.

Hard cases make good headlines, and bad law. If there is to be a UK Bill of Rights it is not something in the gift of one political party or a couple of reactionary newspapers. In a majority parliamentary system one could easily imagine what human wrongs a Bill of Rights passed by, say, the Reichstag in 1936 might have enshrined. It has to be a broad based effort - perhaps requiring a referendum, or at least an extraordinarily high proportion of the legislature, to get passed, and subsequently amended. What ought to amount to a written constitution and set of guarantees of the citizen's position vis-a-vis the state must be the work of us all.

I welcome the Conservative U-turn on this, bringing them alongside decades of Liberal and Liberal Democrat campaigning on this, but I'll bet they didn't think too carefully about what they were letting themselves, and us all, in for. One of the people I think myself lucky to inhabit the same city as is Vernon Bogdanor, onetime tutor to brave Dave. I'm with him when he said last night that if Dave were still a student of his, he might suggest rewriting this particular essay.

Technorati Tags: tories, rights, conservatives

The Times continues its single minded investigation into that donation...Lib Dems' £2.4m was donated by fraudulent firm.

Now, don't get me wrong - if it came to it I would pay my share, on the condition that all the "muppets" were fired first of course...but the Times says at one point:

If the Electoral Commission forces the party to surrender the gift, each member will become liable for a share of the debt.

Whaaat? Since when? I expect the remaining few members of the Labour and Tory parties to resign immediately then to avoid being severally liable for their parties' debts. I've read and reread the section of PPERA on donations since this story broke. It mentions none of this whatever. Can the Times back this up?

Still...the judge did say that "It is also clear that Michael Brown tried to hide the fact that there had been no legitimate trading with the funds supplied to him". Seems like a good defense to me - if the person making the donation was trying to hide the fact that he wasn't trading to the extent that a judge mentioned that is what he was doing, how on earth is anyone else meant to determine otherwise in 30 days, when it has taken the resources of HSBC and the legal system 18 months to do so.

...but if some of you arrived here because of a scurrilous Labour leaflet trying to discredit me because of my opinion on drugs issues, I wanted to settle your minds, I hope, with a synopsis of my position...

I am indeed in principle in favour of legalizing the vast majority of recreational drugs - for adults. Once legalized, their supply should be regulated, controlled through a licensing system, and taxed - which can help fund more treatment instead of prison cells. It is not the state's job to prevent adults in particular choosing to put something into their own body, or indeed, like dangerous sports and so on, what they do with their own body, if others are not harmed by that. Such laws actually remove the ability of the individual to be morally responsible for what they themselves do.

That is not to say that I want to see an increase in drugs use. Just that I believe that it is the current approach, the "war on drugs", that creates and sustains an illegal underground market that encourages people into multiple addictions and puts people into the hands of criminal suppliers who could not care less about the health of their customers so long as the money rolls in. It was recently suggested that the international trade in illicit narcotics is now the world's third largest trading sector, after I think it was financial services and energy. When heroin was legal in this country we had 18 registered addicts in the country - despite it being used in common, over the counter, drugs such as cough syrups. Make it illegal and we have seen the level of addition soar exponentially.

This is a long considered and pragmatic position, that agrees with many professionals in the fields both of law enforcement and drug treatment. Basically, that the current system, based on criminal enforcement, puts far more people in danger from drugs - it makes it easier to peddle to children, because the peddlars are unseen and uncontrolled (and sometimes children in the schoolyard themselves). It creates the core of gang and gun culture. It makes it harder to seek help when, in doing so, you have to out yourself as a criminal.

From Colombia to Croxteth, Afghanistan to the Aylesbury Estate, more people die because of the criminal networks engaged in the drugs trade than from the drugs themselves. Our politicians know this and continue to pursue the obviously failed "war on drugs" strategy because it is a populist one that's sure to get some people huffing and puffing and voting for them - don't fall for it - they are nothing short of accessories to murder! We need a mature debate about these immoral laws (any law that actually colludes in and creates the environment that breeds killings in our communities is an immoral law).

Nonetheless, as the desperate Labour party scaremongers know, my theoretical position on drugs is not one that has much relevance in the role of a city councillor, which is why we Lib Dems have decided not to rise to this astonishing personal attack, marring as it does what has been a reasonably well conducted campaign so far, and concentrate on the positive things we wish to do within the remit of the city council. I do not want any more people, and predominantly younger people as many of the victims of the current drugs system are, dying because of a populist and immoral set of laws that create more problems than they fix.

Now, perhaps you will stick around a bit and read up on my positive ideas for the pressing problems on which Oxford City Council could have an influence, such as affordable housing, and partnership working to bring a bit of business sense and community ownership into the management and development of community owned assets - in the process, I hope, giving more opportunities to people to do something fruitful with their lives and leisure time and not get onto drugs in the first place!

Property "guru" (well I say guru as I understand she participates in one of those DIY developer programs on a TV channel I don't receive, probably thankfully) Lucy Alexander reflects in the Times today on some of the potential effects of the Tory plans to try to take most family homes out of Inheritance Tax by lifting the threshold to £1m:

The property boom under Labour has created a generation of accidental property millionaires, many of whom are forced in later life to sell their homes to avoid imposing a punitive inheritance tax burden on their children.

Under the Tory proposals, the inheritance tax threshold would be raised from £300,000 to £1 million, knocking £280,000 (40 per cent of £700,000) off the tax bill for £1 million-plus homeowners. Will these now choose not to sell and instead, in time-honoured fashion, leave their homes to their children when they die?

Bless 'em. These poor APMs ("accidental property millionaires") are clearly now left in a dilemma few of the rest of us can actually comprehend. But the solution is all in the name...ACCIDENTAL property millionaires. Of course no doubt Ms Alexander, echoing Mlles Beeny and Allsopp, would say it is all down to the skill of the purchaser some years, perhaps decades, earlier that they had spotted an "up and coming neighbourhood" and bought into it when it was good value and have just sat back and enjoyed their "investment".

"Ricardo's Law:
House Prices and the
Great Tax Clawback Scam"
(Fred Harrison)

Well of course as property professionals they have to sell the dream, and Mandy Rice-Davies Applies; they would say that wouldn't they? But in reality it's absolute rubbish. When one spots an "up and coming neighbourhood", if one has been so assiduous in looking for a home, it's up and coming because other people want it, because there is public and private investment going into the local infrastructure and environment. It's yours and my tax money often enough that has been ploughed into an area and filters out like gold in a panning tray in the form of increased property values - as we shall perhaps one day see again when all the property around new Crossrail access points shoots up in value as a result of our billions of public investment.

Now I have said many times before I have no problem with the handing down of wealth from one generation to another. I do not share the notion of J S Mill that wealth ought to revert to the state upon death. If one has offspring, one works for them as much as for oneself. But what one passes on to them on one's death ought to be honestly and fairly gained. Not the result of hoarding what others need as a particular location gains in popularity and value because of the commercial and public economic activity that builds up around it.

If we taxed the land properly, the house buyer would perhaps be paying less than half what they have to today for their home, leaving them the opportunity to save their spare money in truly productive financial assets to leave to their heirs instead of the accumulation of other people's tax and economic activity and need for a place convenient for their work or their children's schooling or their college campus in the case of Oxford.

And how on earth are the non-Tory media and the other political parties letting the Tories get away with this scam of a tax cut for the tiny minority as if it's some beneficent gesture of redistribution? It's quite the opposite - the enclosure of the returns to public, commercial and community investment. Protectionism for the already privileged.