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There's been a bit of comment about the lack of Lib Dem comment about John Redwood's soon to be published report from the Tories' competitiveness commission (these commissions better hurry up and report if their ideas are going to be thoroughly discussed on Stand Up, Speak Up in time to get a manifesto written and costed for October!). So I thought I'd have a quick go.

I find John Redwood a bit of an enigma. No, enigma, I said, not enema. Nor Vulcan. For he is a libertarian (not, I don't think, the "neo-con" that Polly so caustically describes him). And it cannot be easy ploughing a libertarian furrow in an innately protectionist party. And I'm not sure that it's fair of John Hutton, for example, to say that this is all about a lurch to the right. The latter, in typical tribal partisanship, clearly forgets that the long term agenda of libertarians and anarchists alike, and once supported by the Labour Representation Committee and other Labour Party pre-socialists is the basic belief that freeing trade makes the worker better off. Makes more of the value of production feed through to labour than to capital.

And so, I find, as a fellow libertarian, after a fashion, Redwood's proposals are too timid. My gut instinct is that this sort of tinkering, far from the anti-monopoly true free trade ideas of Spooner, Tucker and George, swings the pendulum back towards employers rather than towards the level playing field that gives employees a fair chance. In that sense, it will sit well with the party of capital and big business. Some libertarian groups will hail it as a "step in the right direction". But it is not the revolutionary libertarianism of Redwood's background I don't think.

In the Lib Dems' manifesto for business in the 2001 election we were far braver - ditching the national minimum wage in favour of deals between trade and labour organizations on an industry and regional basis for example. Sunsetting five thousand, I think it was, pieces of legislation and regulation that bound up business even then. Creating a system where instead of being visited seemingly every week by a different government inspector covering a different aspect of its business an annual audit of all issues pertaining to the type of business would save huge amounts of time and effort and duplication in regulatory bodies. Disbanding the DTI (or whatever its constituent parts are now called).

And tonight on Newsnight Redwood looked a little uncomfortable (when doesn't he I suppose) defending his commission's work. It felt rather like those Lib Dem MPs in the run up to the last election trying not to say that prison/drug/sentencing reform was a fundamentally liberal idea and should be weighed as such by the electorate. Redwood could have gone out guns blazing defending libertarian ideals of a level playing field, anti-monopoly and truly free trade. But it will take a real Edward Scissorhands - more, one suspects, than the Tory party can stomach so long as their voters are the owners or aspiring owners of capital benefitting from protectionism - to cut all the red tape needed to create such an environment. But such is British politics that in the scramble for the middle high ground voter he did lots of side-stepping and back-sliding whenever the Paxman wannabe interviewer portrayed the proposals as reckless cuts for cuts' sake.

I still don't understand why any libertarian is a Tory. And it seems now that people at the Libertarian Alliance, where Redwood cut his libertarian teeth IIRC (or was it the Freedom Association?), now agree and are even thinking that now is the time for a true libertarian party in the UK.

Technorati Tags: Benjamin Tucker, Henry George, John Redwood, libertarianism, tories

...no, good! An opportunity has arisen. Friend and Lib Dem colleague Richard Huzzey, councillor for Holywell ward, has had to step down owing to a fantastic work opportunity he couldn't turn down, so there will be a bye-election in the ward on 12th June. This is a ward which we won last Thursday and the bye-election is two days before the end of the university term so we can get it in with the same electorate.

I'm sure there will be others who want to throw their hat in the ring for it, and there are some fantastic candidates around who either missed out last Thursday or have been hoping for a seat like this to come up and any one of them would make a great councillor for the area. Anyway, it has been pointed out to me that it would be inappropriate, in the event of a contested candidacy, for me to set out my stall so publicly before the internal discussion has been had. And I concur. Whether I go for it or not remains to be seen, but I thought I'd just leave you with thath nice photograph of the nearly not a university fresher Jock from twenty three years ago!

So, should I throw my own selection of snazzy hats in the ring do you reckon? I know one of the other candidates not to get a seat last week previously represented Holywell and may want to go for it himself and others who may be far better suited to it than me may be tempted.  I am sure whoever wins the selection will make a very good candidate and a fine colleague for Nathan Pyle who won the ward on Thursday for us.

In other news, I heard this morning that my Labour opponent last week also complained to my bosses about me working the halls where I live and whether I was getting any special treatment. Maureen, if you (and the Tories) had actually given two hoots about the quarter of your electorate in halls you could have tried weeks ago to start glad-handing and door knocking and certainly delivering, and you would have found no resistance to your presence whatsoever. No point moaning on the day or day before that you've not delivered anything to such a big chunk of your ward!

Given that it was the courts that ordered that even roadside GATSOs had to be painted yellow so they were visible from afar, how do Essex police think this will be ruled legal:

At £1000 an hour, as the Taxpayers' Alliance points out, this is an extremely expensive speed camera!

As one form of government must be allowed more perfect than another, independent of the manners and humours of particular men; why may we not enquire what is the most perfect of all, though the common botched and inaccurate governments seem to serve the purposes of society, and though it be not so easy to establish a new system of government, as to build a vessel upon a new construction? The subject is surely the most worth curiosity of any the wit of man can possibly devise. And who knows, if this controversy were fixed by the universal consent of the wise and learned, but, in some future age, an opportunity might be afforded by reducing the theory to practice, either by a dissolution of some old government, or by the combination of men to form a new one, in some distant part of the world? In all cases, it must be advantageous to know what is most perfect in the kind, that we may be able to bring any real constitution or form of government as near it as possible, by such gentle alterations and innovations as may not give too great disturbance to society.

Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth, David Hume, 1754

We talk a lot about constitutional reform in the Liberal Democrats. And a lot about devolution and localism. But how far dare we go? My fundamental position is that the atomic unit of British democracy is the individual citizen. Or at least it should be. That the social contract is something voluntarily entered into by the individual, agreeing to surrender some part of his or her sovereignty and choice only so far as is necessary to achieve some agreed common good.

And so the presumption, as at present, that power is handed down from the highest level, circumscribing what lower levels of government are able to do with huge amounts of legislation and bureaucracy, is anathema to me. The absolute opposite of what a liberal state, or commonwealth, should look like. It is bonkers that those we trust (constitutionally speaking) with the greatest share of our civic contribution are those most remote from us electorally. If we have to have choices made for us, surely it would be better to have them made by people closest to us, people we can hold to account next time we bump into them at the local pub or supermarket queue, people to whom we can regularly communicate our preferences for them to take them into account because we see them in the street, at work, on the school run every day.

So to me the level of governance that ought to be the most keenly democratic, the one with the general powers, is the one closest to the electors - the parish or community council. These councils could have certain community duties, such as to ensure some minimum standards, and what they can't do acting alone, they can club together to procure services. Counties could be responsible for most strategic services such as procuring enough large scale health facilities for their populations.

In David Hume's system, above this level would be representatives sent up to the capital by the counties, with legislation flowing both ways - suggestions from a number of counties triggering debate in the national senate and initiatives by the senate being subject to scrutiny and revision by the counties. So the state ends up dealing with no more than those biggest issues that a few neighbouring counties cannot cobble together a mutual agreement to do for themselves.

This is not government from Westminster down, but from the individual and the parish upwards. Combined with the Citizens' Income providing a safety net that allows individuals basic financial freedom and their own choice of provider for most essential services, parishes and counties would raise most or all of their revenue locally, through any combination of taxes or service charges they can get past the electorate, to achieve local redistribution or, as locally agreed, to procure better than the minimum standards of provision for their electors. Emboldened and empowered parish and community councils could be the initial vehicle for a radical decentralization of public provision of services from central and local quangos.

The Tories talk the talk on localism, but their most recent history in government belies their much vaunted claims as the party of small government. It was in Thatcher's hey-day that the proportion of local government spending, for example, raised locally fell from more than half to around a fifth of their budgets, with the increasing proportion dependent on central government policy, diktat and oversight. Similarly for all they promised radical reform in 1997, Labour have bloated the quangocracy instead of redemocratizing in most areas, as they continue to tinker with local government structures.

The idea that the "Sovereign Individual" should be the atomic level of our democracy from whom all powers flow is an essentially liberal one that the twentieth century has all but wiped out. If we want to talk about devolution and localism we need to be prepared to take some very bold steps towards reducing the centre, including, especially reducing the number and competencies of national elected representatives, as more decision making is restored to the most local level possible.