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I see from the Oxford Mail that Oxford City Council are considering saving some money by not contributing to crowd control at Magdalen Bridge on May Day morning next year. Not that it bothers me much either way - all I will want next May Day is to be sure that people who want to vote can safely get to their polling place! And I've never really understood why it ought to be a City Council function to deal with the crowds that congregate, ostensibly at least, to watch (if not hear) the choir of Magdalen College serenade the dawn. But it was this bit that intrigued me...

Magdalen College bursar Mark Blandford-Baker added: "The college is not involved with what happens out on the public highway, so I am not in a position to comment."

A narrow interpretation of their involvement or lack thereof I would have thought. Perhaps then they could play their part by keeping their choir inside that day and see whether it makes any difference to what happens outside?

My two connections with Ditchley Park amount to having had to liaise with the estate in a former life about whether the Christ Church Beagles could roam over their land and "starring" as an extra in the Peter Cook version of Black Beauty, some of whose outdoor scenes were filmed in front of the house itself. And yes, the great man did cadge a cigarette off me - but I don't think I actually made it into any scenes!

But I have never been invited along, as Jonathan Fryer has, for a high powered Ditchley Foundation event such as on The Long-term Impact of the Internet. Jonathan doesn't tell us very much about the sort of ideas that came out of the event. I'm always slightly skeptical about these things because looking at the list of the rich, powerful and influential that are members of the Foundation, I can hardly envisage anything coming out that is not already the view of the "establishment" but maybe with such a speculative predictive event as this they would be more adventurous than I give them credit for.

But it's a subject that has long captivated my imagination, so I'll give some of my predictions here. I know of one author, a former international banker, who believes that the internet is a development with the potential for epochal change. The sort of thing that happens only once every few hundred years and when it does, those who look back cannot imagine how the world managed to function without it. His other examples are the printing press and the steam engine.

So do I. But because of the speed of development and more importantly the speed with which information flows as a result, this time the changes will be fast and almost unimaginably far reaching.

Never before have we been able to reach individually into others' homes on the other side of the planet in quite the same way as with the internet. We can now form communities of common interest involving people in diverse cultures and communities the world over. Many of the structures and systems humans have devised are to enable us to relate at a distance with people we don't know. Money is a mechanism for storing trust - you don't know the person you're trading with so you accept a form of exchange you mutually trust. Diplomacy is a mechanism for negotiating deals between whole peoples. Whole nations who have as diverse individual opinions within as any of us. Governments represent our "national interests" to other governments with their "national interests".

The internet, on the other hand, enables one to form networks of trust that don't necessarily depend on currency, to get to know and understand the individual interests of people in other countries, not rely on a "block vote" put forward by a government or a diplomat. And it can give us "presence" almost anywhere on the planet we want ("presence" is a technical term for what happens when you phone your bank in Stevenage and the call is answered by someone in Bangalore).

And then there's the ubiquity and velocity of knowledge. Previously we might have relied on people sending packet mail around the world to know what was going on in other countries. Even only thirty years ago journalists filed long reports after a few weeks' investigation into an issue and sent it all back at once - and that was news. Now we don't even need the journalist, even with his instant electronic news gathering equipment. Now we can learn from each other what's going on. And in the research and knowledge creation arena we have so much more at our fingertips - we can discover what others are doing, focus our energies and cooperate on development more easily.

So what does this actually mean for the way we operate...?

National currencies will be on the wane - many of us will be able to trade directly one with the other with no intermediaries, and trust our trading partners to reciprocate in ways other than perhaps through money transactions. On top of that other currencies will develop, such as the Linden Dollar used in Second Life that will become the currencies of choice for particular communities. This is just logical - I can trade with people close to me with Sterling - I go into the local shop and they accept that. If I want to buy from abroad I have to convert - which is a block and a tariff. But what if my virtual community is amongst people from many different countries? We can make our own currency and trade in that - or just barter trade credits within our new circles of trust.

Why do we need governments striding the globe as at G8 this week when I can discover what my friend in Ghana needs and send them it or find ways they can get hold of it? If the Taleban and the Southern Baptists got together in an internet chat I'll bet they'd soon realise they have far more in common than their respective governments make out! It seems at times that the very function of governments is to set nation against nation. When the peoples of those nations are in direct contact with each other how can that be sustained?

The way we work will change markedly. With "presence" we never need to be in a single place, an office, for hours at a time. Stripped of the need to commute or stamp our time cards our cities can become based more on mutual social and leisure needs than on employment and commuting needs. Instant knowledge of what others are doing elsewhere and focussing our efforts more cooperatively will lead to a step change in the rate of scientific discovery and dissemination of ideas.

This presents huge opportunities for the spread of liberal ideas and freedom for people the world over. There are of course some caveats. If influence of government wanes in our lives, the influence of global telecommunications interests and service providers, transport and distribution organizations, will increase - a big motivation behind my attempt to set up a "Wireless Oxford" initiative - to "socialise" local connectivity at least. We need to protect peoples' rights of access to these services and we need to create access where there is none so that as much of the world's population as possible can join in.

The dark side - or what might stop us...

There are some dark potentials as well. If governments do not recognize these new non-geographic communities as on a par with themselves they could become more, not less intrusive and coercive. If we are able to trade and create wealth in virtual worlds and offshore, they will be unable to calculate and collect income taxes - we will need to shift our tax base to something more tangible - like land, say (did you put money on whether I could bring LVT into an article about the internet?) If planners do not take into account these new ways of living and working we could end up with empty cities or slum cities as the digitally mobile decide to go elsewhere.

And how long is "long term"? Already there are many more people connected to the internet than are represented by the governments of the G8 for example. By the end of next year there will be about a tenth of the world's population armed with WiFi enabled devices capable of connecting them wherever they are. The tipping point is soon, certainly I'd say inside a decade, if governments see the opportunity and enable this by backing off a bit. But if they try and stifle it or control (which they will, with their vested interests in perpetuating concentrations of power, in my opinion) then it could lead to revolutions and war.

If Martin Luther was the author of the "priesthood of all bellievers" and the great upheavals the reformation wrought in the world, it is feasible to me that Tim Berners-Lee is the author of its civic equivalent, the "government of all citizens". And it is, to me at least, and exciting and beautiful prospect. But we must also boldly go into this new future and not have it hijacked from beneath or above.

I've always taken a slightly different view of the inbuilt age discrimination in the minimum wage legislation for under 21 year olds than many it would appear. When I was a councillor in Oxford we had a few instances of employers of young people - mostly restaurants - pushing the limits of the legislation anyway. I never did approve for example of including tips in the minimum wage. If someone's working they get paid, if their customers think they've done a good job they should feel free to enhance that, not make up the employer's shortfall.

But mostly, I felt that young people, people starting out on life's employment journey, are the very ones that need a bit of a boost. They're the ones potentially with the expenses of setting up home and so on, living independently for the first time. So I really never liked the differential wage for under 21s. I can, just about, accept that 16-18 year olds, who if I recall correctly were not even protected by the initial legislation (which was a total outrage if I'm remembering it correctly), may be paid less in order to encourage them to stay in education, and to encourage employers to give them added training related benefits.

So I'm quite pleased to see the quandary apparently being created by this weekend's implementation of anti-ageism legislation:

Age law 'threat to minimum wage':

Young people get a lower minimum wage than the over-21s

Laws being introduced on Sunday, which ban age discrimination at work, could endanger the minimum wage system, a business group has warned.

Workers aged under 21 can currently be paid less than their older colleagues.

But the British Chamber of Commerce (BCC) said this may be considered discriminatory and be open to legal challenge under the new legislation.

I hope there are some test cases, and I hope personally they win. Eighteen to twenty-one year olds are adults. Why should they have any fewer rights than anyone else?

There's been a bit of a giggle going round the blogs over Johann Hari's three point plan for revitalizing our democracy. The Centre Forum's Free Think blog described them, I hope with tongue firmly in cheek, as "radical"; they do not even trim the overgrown leaves of our democracy, let alone get at the root of the problem. Tom Papworth offers a characteristically more critical appraisal and says much that I would have said about Hari's ideas themselves ('boneheaded' and 'rent seeking').

But as his suggestion about compelling students to take a newspaper rather shows, Hari is one of the current establishment and it is that centralized establishment that is at the heart of the problem. Our politicians are so remote that we are being told we must rely on people like him, who few of us will ever know personally well enough to tell whether they're honest or not, in the pockets of the trough feeders, or even at the trough with them, to interpret accurately what's going on it the Westmonster village. This is not democracy in anything other than name.

If we want to make politics the topic of discussion around kitchen tables, in the pub or at coffee after Mass, democracy needs to come down to that level. Street level democracy. Most of the parties witter on a lot about "localism" (I notice "localism" seems to have replaced "devolution" largely in their lexicons), perhaps especially the Lib Dems, for whom devolution of power to the lowest practical level is part of the pre-amble to our constitution, the touchstone of our supposed beliefs. Yet even we don't really explore really radical alternatives.

And that's what we need. Our system of democracy was designed in an era in which central government didn't actually do a lot compared with today. Our "representatives" (of curse really only the representatives of the landed population) got themselves elected by a few sheep and packed off to Westmonster for whole sessions at a time - you could hardly hold surgeries in Edinburgh one evening and be back at Westmonster the next.

The civic movement grew up as a more local parallel system often in response to industrialization and urbanization and, at the height of its power was responsible for most welfare, health and education provision, policing and most local infrastructure like sewage, water supply and later still energy supply, whilst private interests built inter-city infrastructure such as toll roads and later railways. And even that was a centralization of power in cities from the previous parish system - you can still go round and see "Parish School" above the doors of those Edwardian school buildings - Glasgow has some particularly good examples. Until as recently as, I think, 1938, Oxford, for example, had at least three pretty well autonomous local authorities responsible for different parts of the city. A few years before that it still had separate public boards to deal with public health issues and so on.

Now, whilst we live in a fast moving globalized world, I question whether we actually need to rely on one representative for sixty odd thousand of us each packing off to Westmonster and fighting for our local hospitals, say, with a bloke from Hull, or having our policing priorities set by a woman from Redditch. I don't much care how they see such things in Redditch or Hull, it's Oxford I'm interested in and all these decisions ought to be more, much more, accessible to me made by much more locally accountable people. Even many of Westmonster's international negotiating functions are much less needed today. We trade for ourselves with people and businesses all over the planet. The sense that we need a national level broker wheeling and dealing in what is almost always rent-seeking and protectionist ways is diminishing rapidly.

Now there are two approaches to devolution and subsidiarity I'd suggest. The one, it seems the preferred one at Westmonster, amongst all the parties, is for we, the people, to wait for the crumbs to fall from the top table. Look at the department for Communities for example. It is this part of centralized government who announces initiatives, looks for councils to fight amongst themselves for a share of the resources to pilot them and ties them up in knots reporting back on outcomes so that "Communities" can decide whether to make those initiative compulsory on the rest of the local authorities, continue funding them and so on. I suggest that this gradualism is an excuse for the centre holding on to power. Each successful initiative dictated from above is a reason to keep these trough feeders where they are. Any ubnsuccessful ones of course are the fault of local authorities themselves or even ourselves, showing us not ready for such freedoms in their eyes.

But far better to my mind is actually reinventing our democratic structures fit for the modern era. Hari, I think, is wrong to say that nobody talks about government and politics. I hear people all the time complaining about politicians. It is, perhaps, comforting even for people to moan about government and politicians - we are able to assign responsibility for cock-ups to someone else. Someone far away in Westmonster and usually, since only about one in six hundred of us actually gets to vote for the individual who will become Prime Monster, someone we didn't put in power. Even local government does it, though often this is with half an eye on political gain at that higher level - persuading your Tory borough's population that something is Labour's doing at Westmonster is part of the "game" of getting a Tory MP elected next time, or vice versa. It is no wonder people are cynical and disengaged, if that's what they are.

And so I'd like to introduce you, if you haven't already heard about it, to the idea of "cellular democracy". Some commentators in the US (where they already have substantially more local freedoms than we do to innovate and compete with other localities of course), in what I see really as a modern development of Hume's "Perfect Commonwealth", suggest that democracy is no longer at a "human scale". Because we elect to remote bodies people we are likely never to meet (at least for more than their allotted ninety seconds on your doorstep when they want your vote) the system itself inflates the cost of democracy. Parties have to spend lots of money getting a nationwide message out. We rely on people like Hari, whom we don't know, to provide commentary and interpretation. Most importantly, perhaps, parties form their policies not around what is good for particular communities but around what is acceptable to the floating voters in a small number of marginal constituencies.

The idea is that we turn our system on its head. We say, as so many politicians like to claim to believe, even if their actions speak to the contrary, that government literally comes from the people, that we cede only so much of our individual sovereignty to some collective body as is necessary to meet those needs we are incapable, for reasons of economic efficiency usually, to provide for ourselves. You have the principal tier of government at a local level. A very local level. A street or small neighbourhood. Usually of no more than a few hundred residents. Candidates are likely to be known, approachable - you bump into them walking the dog or standing at the bus stop. They get their message across to you through real local contact - not some party worker umming and erring for a few seconds on your doorstep or increasingly over the phone, facelessly. Some even suggest that, like a party caucus in the US, these elections could be by show of hands once a year at a local meeting. In a sense, to the successful candidate, knowing who didn't vote for you gives you an incentive to find out why and work with those neighbours, for they will all be neighbours on whatever issues put them off voting for you.

And that's the only vote you get - except for the right of each five hundred strong neighbourhood to recall their representative. By default it is in the remit of those very local authorities - perhaps twenty members each elected by five hundred residents to meet all the needs of that community that must be delivered through collective action, voluntary co-operation. When they find that they cannot possibly meet some need for their 10,000 strong community - they couldn't, for example, justify building a large general hospital just for their small community - but they could decide to join up with other communities to form a second tier of government, to whom a representative will be delegated by the first level authority and a by-election held, or the runner up, or an alternate, would take their place on the first tier authority. These higher tiers need not even be geographically linked. They may decide to join up with others on particular functional issues. Take the hospital again, here in Oxford the John Radcliffe hospitals serve folk from Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Berkshire and so on so even ceding more control to a body based on the boundaries of Oxford or Oxfordshire does not serve all its users.

If a higher tier wants to raise some money, that request is passed down through the various levels and discussed in these local caucuses. People can really decide whether these higher tiers are offering them value for money, or whether they could meet those needs for themselves better. Each higher level authority, however, is only ministering to the needs of its member authorities in turn so it should be easier to follow the money trail and identify whether something is in fact good value for you, the individual, or your small neighbourhood.

Some will say this gives rise to all sorts of problems about "free loading" - communities that decide not to participate in higher level authorities but gain the benefits of their collective efforts. In such a case, perhaps the authorities that have collaborated could decide to charge more for people from the community that didn't collaborate on a particular facility or policy to access that facility - they will, I am sure, soon find it would be better to join to get the "members rate". But ultimately, one has to ask whether "free-loading" is any worse a problem than the egregious rent seeking and bloated costs of our existing system.

Wouldn't Barrie's Palace of Westminster make an interesting "novelty hotel" - just like Oxford's former prison has here. Or perhaps just a prison. That would be quite fitting, considering everything its occupants have stolen from us for decades. David Hume said that we ought to be ready with new ideas of government for the day when, perhaps, by common consent the existing system is seen as broken. I suggest that the epochal changes in communications and trade that have been made in the past twenty or thirty years is just such a moment, and if we are not to lose our democracy through lack of interest on the part of the electorate, it is more urgent than ever.

News reaches me of moves at long last by Lib Dem led Oxford City Council to get more private sector landlords' properties licensed to ensure a basic decent standard:

BBC NEWS | England | Oxfordshire | Licence plan for more landlords:

There is a "widespread" problem of sub-standard conditions in rental properties across Oxford city, a councillor claims.

With more than 1,000 complaints last year Councillor Patrick Murray wants more residences licensed.

This is something I fought for not far shy of ten years ago now when I was on the council. In some predominantly student areas of other cities quality has been driven up by voluntary schemes run by organizations such as UNIPOL housing which we tried to whip up some enthusiasm for in Oxford ten years ago. But to little avail. And why should they - in some cities, students have a choice, and the difference between being licensed and not being licensed could be the ability to let your property at all. Here in Oxford the market is so tight it's nearly always a landlord's market.

Patrick knows, and I know, that there are some scummy shitholes out there that get in under the wire of compulsory licensing. If you want to provide boarding kennels for animals you've got to get them licensed. If you want to feed us kebabs at three in the morning you've got to get licensed. Yet if you want to house people, you can more or less do as you please. I've seen bare wires, broken bogs, even still some outside privies. And as to what passes as "furnished" the thought even for me, slob as I am, of sitting let alone sleeping on some of the fleabitten stuff turns my stomach. And in Oxford students often end up taking whatever they can get.

However, there is a market mechanism for achieving a similar outcome. Let's use Land Value Tax instead of Council Tax. Council Tax falls on the occupier. Land Value Tax on the owner. Council Tax combines the value of the location and the property to produce a taxable value, Land Value Tax just acknowledges the value of the location.

So a landlord offering a scuzzy shithole in an in demand location is going to have most of his income taken from him in tax unless he bucks his ideas up and produces a property which people are actually going to pay a premium over location value to rent. It would also prevent those landlords not renting out part of their properties to avoid the current compulsory system as they'd be losing out on income from the bit that is theirs, the property value, whilst still having to pay the tax on the location value.

Oh, and of course, it would promote the redevelopment of some sub-standard housing into dedicated single person housing more appropriate for the student and young professional market, taking some of the heat off family housing.