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...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!

Mr Angry Mkinskey writes the the Telegraph: Town hall tyrants waging class war

So, in the twisted mindset of Richmond's rulers, a local resident wanting to park his own car outside his own house in his own street has been transformed into a nasty polluter who should be heavily penalised for his selfish irresponsibility.

I'm sorry. Whose street? In my opinion streets are for the occasional Fortnum's delivery van and young lads in shorts and blazers kicking a football around after the bus drops them off from school (probably St Paul's). Who the hell said that cars should take up all of our public space in our residential neighbourhoods in the way they have? If you want to park a car outside your house, buy one with a drive (a house that is). Those without drives were clearly designed for committed public transport users.

Of course this has nothing to do with pollution...:) But I wonder if there is a correlation between those households with gas guzzlers and those with two or more vehicles.

Elsewhere in the Telegraph, Alan Cochrane obviously hasn't even read the rest of the newspaper he is writing in:

Yesterday's news that Richmond upon Thames borough council is to slap a £300 annual parking charge on 4x4s, instead of the £200 for "normal" cars, is unwelcome but unsurprising.

If what he says is correct, that his glorious British Land Rover Discovery creates less CO2 emissions than the Ford Mondeo, then he'll be in the same group or lower than the Mondeo. From what I can fathom, this is not a crusade against 4x4s per se but based on their emissions. It just so happens that, possibly unlike his glorious Britsh Land Rover, those pesky foreign 4x4s like Porsche Cayennes also happen usually to be the biggest emitters.

On congestion in general though, here in Oxford some like to make out that we are gridlocked most of the time - they must never have seen the Hanger Lane Gyratory, poor provincial things - but I happened to be waiting for a bus to head into town around the outbound peak times the other day and we have some rolling roadworks at the bottom of my street with traffic lights. One crammed bus with forty something people went outbound through the lights and twelve cars with one person in each. Three minutes later when the lights next changed another twelve cars got through. When I eventually got my bus going the other way, I think I counted seventy eight one occupant cars waiting to get through the other way as we passed the waiting line before I gave up counting (the queue went on far beyond my bus's turning). That's something like fifteen minutes worth of wait. Or two bus loads.

Charlotte Gore mentioned that Nick Clegg has provided us with a 4000 word (I'll take her word for it) treatise on his "Vision for Britain" and so I went in search of this document to have a look. I have to agree with her lament that Chris has, as yet, not produced something similar, though you'll remember my disdain for people with "visions" when actually i want government and politicians to interfere less, but I suppose when you are claiming that your vision actually involves government and politicians interfering less it is forgivable!

I do think Chris needs to produce something of this sort, given the relatively few electors who are going to get to hear and question the two candidates in person at hustings around the country, and Nick's document has certainly cleared up one or two things about his position statement that I had erroneously interpreted from his speech at Newbury last weekend.

So to the apology...several times Nick refers to protectionism as a bad thing in his "Vision", so I take it as read that he is in fact against protectionism as he sees it anyway (which I suspect will always be different from how a mutualist or libertarian sees it) and am happy to be corrected for suggesting otherwise in my post last week.

But neither do I find anything much in Nick's vision statement that moves me "outside my comfort zone". Nor the timetable terribly ambitious. Others may feel that ten years to break "stifling deadlock of two-party politics in Britain ... for good" is just realistic, while I dream of radical liberalism recapturing the same levels of imagination as 1906. Nick points the way, in the form of the issues he picks out, but not, perhaps, the truly radical liberal solutions that could really ignite a fire in people:

"How to counter the epidemic of powerlessness that has left people bewildered by giantism in both the public and private sectors;"

Today's "giantism" was 1906's protectionism. The liberals then offered free trade and captured the mood. That same debate needs to be reopened today. If we are not going to join what Nick calls the "‘Sat-Nav’ politics we are seeing today" we must boldly go, "balls out" as a friend of mine says, with a manifesto that is, to all intents and purposes, "do or die" next time round and not flinch when the others try to portray us as quite mad!

I don't want to fisk the whole "vision" and I do think there is plenty of good stuff in there, but there are a few markers I would put down that really don't, I think, challenge that comfort zone:

"We need to set some ground rules here: our universal public services must be free to use and accessible to all. But beyond that, I want us to think afresh about how they should be funded and delivered."

Why should we assume any government provided services ought to be "universal" and "free" or indeed "publicly" provided? I believe what we should be aiming for in order to "extend opportunity" is "financial independence" for all. We should be aiming to provide people with a basic income as of right that allows them to make choices for themselves and their children, for liberalism must, if anything, be about trusting people to make the right choices if they only had the means to do so.

State monopolies are only needed because other (ie private) monopolies and the (state and multi-national) protectionism that maintain them skew the distribution of the national income towards the already haves. And local state monopolies are not greatly better than a national state monopoly, be it in health, education or anything else - it may increase accountability but it doesn't necessarily increase personal freedom to dissent from the general consensus and choose an alternative. Break those other monopolies and protections, using their surplus "profit" to fund a dividend to all citizens, and you achieve that "financial freedom" and "freedom to choose".

For example, if we "want to see funding for the poorest state school pupils rise to private school levels, not one day, but straight away" then why not let that money be used to buy places at private schools? Why not let St Paul's or Westminster Schools open "branches" in Peckham or Brent, or City of London School in Tower Hamlets? Well maybe not them, per se, because they tend to be aggressively selective on ability also, but there are plenty of private schools in which parents put their faith and cash to add extra value to less able children too. With Land Value Tax you'd soon see these currently deprived areas becoming the haven for "smart money" anyway, pulling up their economic fortunes as people want to trim their land tax bills move there and spend their money there.

Anyway, as I say, there is much that's good in Nick's "vision" and he finishes with a flourish with which I reckon we can all agree:

So my message to my party is a very simple one: trust your instincts and stay true to your beliefs. The politics of the 21st century will increasingly be played out on liberal territory. And we will have home advantage.

Our liberalism is instinctive. It cannot be faked.

Empowering individuals, extending opportunity, balancing security and liberty, protecting the environment, engaging with the world – these are causes which we have espoused for years, but which we must now champion in new ways, with renewed leadership and vigour.

I do still think that we can be even more ballsy though and aim to turn the electoral landscape around, 1906-like, as a result:

Some argue that the best the Liberal Democrats can hope for is third place and a toe hold in government if we’re lucky.

That surely cannot be our aim.

Third place is not good enough. Not good enough for me, for the party or for Britain.

In a time of real political change and shifting public opinion I believe we must be much more ambitious.

If we can address the concerns of the British people and the challenges facing our country, then the next big shift of opinion will be towards Liberalism.

The demands facing us require ambition, verve and self confidence. That is what I promise to bring to the leadership of the Liberal Democrats.

Too right; would it be too much to work towards being enough of a power in 2009 to force the "Spin Twins" to work with each other against the Liberal Democrats as their opposition and win for liberal Britain a few short years after that?