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...and meant to be settled down somewhere in a nest with wife and kids when you see "The perfect gift for Father's Day...Level 42 - The Definitive Collection".

Oh well.

It must be getting close to local elections time. The disingenuous and downright dishonest are creeping out of the woodwork to try to make themselves seem better than prospective opponents. Last night, labour's Councillor Maureen Christian took her shot. Oxford is going through a sensitive time with the county trying to implement residents parking in many areas and Maureen was trying to make a big fuss of who might and might not support charging for the idea.

In a written amendment to a motion on the subject in council, she accused, by name, a local Lib Dem councillor as being in favour of charging. Now, whether she is or isn't in principle in favour of charging (as the duplicitous Greens are I gather) I have no idea, but I do know that she is against charging for these city schemes and has said as much publicly and in written material distributed amongst her constituents.

Of course way back when a previous Labour run city council was in charge of these sorts of things there was a general feeling, perhaps especially amongst Labour and Green councillors of the time, that charging was desirable or inevitable if only there was a way of making it fair to those in multi-occupation housing who may not have any way of reducing their several car households.

So times have changed, and for whatever reason Labour and the Greens are now, it would seem, against charging. I have no problem with that. It is presumably, as is the case with the Lib Dem councillor quoted in this amendment, representing their constituents which is what they are elected to do.

Too bad however that the very reason why most of Headington needs residents parking now is that Councillor Christian and her Labour colleagues, cow-towing to government policy and threats, were so keen five years ago to foist an ill-considered and hasty hospital development on the area without ensuring that the money would be forthcoming to fund such ameliorating measures in the local neighbourhoods. Those earlier decisions happen also to be screwing up our health services in the city having placed on them huge burdens of PFI debt.

So I figured I would restart blogging with some feedback on what turned out to be an excellent South Central Regional Liberal Democrats' conference on Saturday here at Oxford Brookes University. Given that I see the place every day my motivation to get there in time for nine-thirty speeches on a Saturday morning was not great, and I actually arrived a few minutes into the first keynote speech by Evan Harris.

Some in the party and elsewhere give Evan a hard time I hear, but I have a lot of time for him. I get the impression he works his proverbials off in his constituency and has a penchant for minority interests which suits me. But listening to him on Saturday and then later hearing Vince Cable they between them seem to epitomize what one might call the "old" Lib Dems - leftist, statist, more interventionist - and the "emerging" Lib Dems - more liberal in every sense.

Evan restated his support for the fifty pence tax rate and bemoaned the federal conference at which it was removed from party policy, Vince emphasized that the new tax policy, trying to focus, as Churchill said, on not just "how much have you got" but also on "how did you get it", was in fact the most redistributive set of tax policies on the table from any party.

Harris's main point, as I understand it, was that the fifty pence tax rate sent a signal, even if it did not in fact promise to raise terribly much, that we were prepared to take more from the highest earners if need be to lift the poorest out poverty. It is a simple message to be sure, and easier to communicate than the "new" idea that we should be more carefully targeting tax on externalities and unearned privilege, but not one that adds to the progressiveness of the overall tax system one iota.

But Evan is exactly the sort of person we want to attract to our book the ALTER executive are putting together to launch centenary celebrations of the 1909 People's Budget. We want to show him how rigourously applying what we have been calling the "liberal economic tradition" will in fact raise the lot of the poorest by increasing the returns to labour, by rooting out corporate welfare, and by allowing genuine competition to bring down the cost and increase the quality of all sorts of goods and services some take for granted are best delivered by the state. In short that there need be no dichotomy between "social" and "economic" liberalism.

Okay, so it's that time of year and the arguments are going on about whether A levels have got easier or harder since I/we/whoever did them.

However, in the discussion about whether to change the system, it doesn't matter whether they are easier or harder, they are simply not, it would appear, "fit for purpose" to use a favourite government phrase. Not "fit for purpose" in the sense that it is getting extremely difficult to differentiate between those with high grades and those with really high grades.

It shouldn't matter whether those high grades are being achieved because people are working harder, being better educated, meriting higher scores, or because the assessment is less rigourous allowing more people to pass them more easily. The fact that there is a tighter bunching of grades (and also partly because there are a whole load more higher education establishments now vying for the same pool of students), means that there needs to be a new way of defining the achievements, the rounded academic ability and potential that different institutions, employers and others will need and how to assess them.

Better I say to make a break in such a case; don't pretend that whatever develops is the same qualification as I did twenty odd years ago. It's no value judgement to say it needs replacing though.

Even back then, I was royally screwed by demands that I choose just three complimentary subjects. I started off wanting to study Physics (see my other comments on sciences today) but wanted to combine it with languages, so I chose English, German, Physics and Maths (pure maths was outside the "options" so you could take it as a fourth in those days when even the best generally only did three A levels). There was an outcry and I was soon - well it took half a school year or one quarter of my A level education - talked round to English, Latin and History because they were more consistent - even though I hadn't even done History amongst my twelve O levels (but had A grades in Maths, Physics, Chemistry and a B in Further Maths AO Level) because I didn't particularly enjoy it though I am rediscovering its enticements now thanks to folk like David Starkey, Niall Ferguson and Adam Hart-Davies. A Baccalaureate type mix and match qualification would no doubt have suited this polymath much better.

Technorati Tags: education

There seems to be a spate of group self-abuse going on with excitement at the prospects of a general election. I do not share this excitement. Indeed I look upon the prospect with dread and depression. I'm a democrat, right? So I should welcome the chance for the people to have their say, right? Wrong.

I'm with Winston when he said:

No!
Originally uploaded by Mig_R

"Look at all the power [Mr Attlee] is enjoying today. No Government in time of peace has ever had such arbitrary power over the lives and actions of the British people, and no Government has ever failed more completely to meet their daily practical needs. Yet the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues are avid for more power."

Nobody currently vying for Mr Attlee's job today even remotely proposes sufficiently to reduce what Churchill went on to call "this idea of a group of supermen and super-planners, such as we see before us, “playing the angel,” as the French call it, and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction, [which] is a violation of democracy."

No!
Originally uploaded by Will...

The stakes are abhorrently high. That you and your coterie of friends and sycophants should have control over the better part of half of the entire nation's income. And with it the power to condone or more frequently condemn the personal choices of millions - more, probably, than lived under the Pax Augusta in Rome's entire empire.

I want a revolution. A revolution of devolution. I want power, the vast majority of it at least, held by people I can go and meet at my local civic centre. If there is anything that needs a joint decision between two or more civic centres let them agree on it mutually, and if, in the very last resort, something that has to be dealt with at a national level, let them send representatives to argue the case on an ad hoc basis if possible but with a minimum of permanent representatives - just enough to give every civic centre a voice - if necessary.

No! Not even you!
Originally uploaded by Ming Campbell

And I want to be able to elect some of them every year so that if they are not doing a good job we can make our views plain on a sort of a "1 year moving average" basis to which they will necessarily have to react by forming and reforming their power sharing agreements to reflect the true will of the electors.

I find it repugnant that anyone believes they are so much greater than any of the rest of us that they believe they can run the country and our lives better than the Almighty gave us the free will to do for ourselves. They should humble themselves to recall again what Churchill said:

"Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters."

We seem to be at the last roundabout on the road to Serfdom (probably courtesy of some new town super-planner). We must decide to go right round it and head back the way we came.

Coincidentally, overnight I've been pointed to this article by a fellow Georgist, Fred Folvary, on a similar issue on the other side of the pond.