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Remember I sent that email to Keith Mitchell, leader of Oxfordshire County Council, after his characterization of Land Value Tax as some kind of nasty left wing tax that was designed to blight our beautiful countryside. I was slightly hesitant about publishing his reply and my response as I was hoping for a rather more adult correspondence, but since such has not appeared, to hell with it.

For your delectation, his first response:

Thanks for your e-mail, Jock. I understand I was featured on the Politics Programme today but have not yet had a chance to see it. Despite that, I will retain my Thatcherite credentials and wish to distance myself from left wing confiscatory and levelling down policies of the Brown/Ming axis in general and Land Value Tax in particular. I am for Low taxes; real choice; value for money whether applied at the local level or the national level.. I regard the replacement of Blair by Brown as an important step in the process of returning to a Conservative government and the redemption of our country from the awful damage that your Party has done to our country over the last nine years.

As ever

Keith
Leader of the Council
County Hall, Oxford
Oxfordshire: Low taxes; real choice; value for money

Anyway, believing that such an obviously brilliant man, and an accountant to boot, could not have made the mistake of confusing what the tax base should be with what the tax take should be I responded:

Keith,

I realise you are incredibly busy and Sundays are probably the one day you don't want to fill up with such things but...

1. You must be mistaking me for someone else - my party has not been in power for nine years!

2. I particularly chose a quote from the blessed Margaret's favourite economist. However little you like taxes, and you may be surprised that I share that view, Milton Friedman believes that land value tax is the "least bad" sort of thing to tax, though he would not go as far as Henry George would in advocating the full taxation of all economic rent on land (which many Georgists suggest should be distributed as a sort of a "citizens dividend" to which everyone would be entitled in place of the plethora of benefits that we currently have and help trap people in dependency).

3. You may believe you can create a low tax regime through "value for money" policies. However I would suggest that a national LVT, REPLACING all other taxes on incomes, transactions, inheritances, capital gains, profits, sales and so on, is the only viable way of achieving significant reductions in the size of the state as it would significantly reduce the need for transfer payments to support economically less well performing areas as they would become attractive for businesses and individuals seeking low tax environments in which to maximise their profits which they then can use to buoy up those previously underperforming regional economies. Given that such transfers amount to what, half of the tax burden, we should stop piddling around looking for a few billion cuts here and there and start looking at the possibilities of saving hundreds of billions.

4. Unlike the peonage of income taxes, LVT is essentially voluntary in the sense that if you don't like paying the amount demanded of you because you live in a hotspot, you move to somewhere suitable with low land values and hence lower taxes. When the millionaires start moving into Greater Leys to save on tax, watch the need to spend lots of social support money on such an area fall dramatically, for example.

5. The likes of your constituents would be amongst the biggest gainers.

Can Adam Smith and Milton Friedman be *that* wrong in your view? How could the blessed Margaret have been taken in by proponents of such nasty left wing ideas?

But it all goes to prove that dangerous leftie Leo Tolstoy's truism on Land Value Tax: "People do not argue with the teachings of [Henry] George, they simply do not know it."

Sincerely,

Jock Coats - Secretary, Lib Dems ALTER!
(Action for Land-value Taxation and Economic Reform)
www: http://www.libdemsalter.org.uk - http://jockcoats.blogspot.com/

Still my hope for a mature discussion of his knee jerk reaction knew no bounds and I waited expectantly until this morning:

Now why did I think you were a lefty Labour Councillor when you were actually a lefty Liberal Councillor? Sorry for the confusion.

As ever
Keith
Leader of the Council
leader@oxfordshire.gov.uk
County Hall, Oxford
Oxfordshire: Low taxes; real choice; value for money

I dunno - you offer a Tory what you believe has the potential to halve the tax burden and all they can muster is a cheap political jibe. Is it any wonder even I am getting jaded by political partisanship. This man is nominally in charge of hundreds of millions of our money. He's bright, he's clever. I was once considering setting up a political party entitled the "Cooperative Commonwealth of Oxfordshire" which members of other parties could sign up to a manifesto to put the interests Oxfordshire before the party label they are elected under. Clearly people like Keith could not ever live with such co-operation.

Still - it proves the point - condemned by the "right" as a dangerous trot and by everyone else as a neo-lib nutter. LVT - you can't win!

Technorati Tags: conservatives, land value tax, localism, oxford, politics, tax shifting, taxation, tories

I have two problems with the recent Lib Dem policy announcement about using road pricing to lower fuel duties and fund spending on infrastructure for more "environmentally friendly" forms of transport. The one, which I will return to in another post, is about the difficulty of solving two problems - paying for roads and trying to force people off them - with this one policy. But for now I want to suggest a solution to those many commenters on the Lib Dem Voice thread that any implementation of road pricing is going to be necessarily an intrusion on our privacy.

In fact, the technology has been around for five decades: the flight data recorder, or "black box". It even ought to cost less as it would mean no additional physical infrastructure such as ANPR gantries or roadside transceivers.

Take a regular GPS Sat-Nav system. Already the technology is being developed to deliver all sorts of content to such devices (see the "Sat-nav for people" section on this BBC Click report). It would be a small step to link this to a billing system in the vehicle that got data about the current price of the road you are travelling on, and on other alternatives to help you make up your mind about what route to use, and to calculate a total bill for a journey and initiate a payment transaction without even telling the billing authority where it has been.

Ah but, people say that's open to abuse or tampering to avoid bills on the one hand, and because there's no central information about how your bill is made up it would not be possible to dispute a bill on the other. Well, this is where the "flight data recorder" comes in. You do have the details of your journeys stored, but not centrally, rather in a box in the vehicle. A box say that has to be audited as part of your annual MOT perhaps. And that can only be accessed when security information is provided by both the person or authority wanting to read it and the owner. That way, if you think it is to your advantage to disclose where you have been, for example to dispute a bill, you are in control of when that data is disclosed.

Again, this technology is already around, and in applications much smaller than aircraft. My security guard in the hall of residence has a little device called a "Deister" which they use to "prove" that they have been doing patrols. There's no live link snooping on where they are going, but the Deister gun will be audited and has logged a patrol if there is any dispute.

Can anyone see any other objections to such a way of doing it non-intrusively?

I'm not sure whether to tip my hat to Linda Jack for highlighting this non-story or to criticize her for regurgitating excitedly and in the manner of a parrot a scurrilous and unthinking story from the Torygraph that Chris Huhne owns shares in surveillance firm.

By James Kirkup, Political Correspondent
Last Updated: 3:07am GMT 03/11/2007

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat leadership contender who has strongly criticised both supermarkets and the surveillance state, is a major shareholder in a company that supplies "people monitoring" technology to Tesco.

The revelation by The Daily Telegraph of Mr Huhne's links to the country's biggest supermarket may raise questions among party members about his consistency.

Mr Huhne, 53, the party's environment spokesman, owns £250,000 worth of shares in Irisys, a Northamptonshire company that makes thermal imaging technology used to track people as they move.

It's a bit like saying we should criticize the medical use of morphine because some people misuse its close cousin heroin. So far as I can see the criticism of the "surveillance state", criticism which I fully join with , is about being able to snoop on and track identifiable individuals, usually as they go about mundane ordinary lives. This is the heroin, open to abuse and getting worse.

However the company in which Chris owns a significant shareholding, Irisys, does not do this sort of stuff. What it provides is the morphine of the surveillance world - generally beneficial when used properly. It does infra-red surveillance. Individuals cannot be identified*.

Its original application of this technology was to examine structures for stress points - it's the stuff that stops the plane you're traveling falling out of the sky because nobody noticed a hairline crack in the wing, or that keeps oil rigs safe from the stresses of the open sea.

Can you tell who it is yet?
Originally uploaded by carolyne_ej_smith

Used on humans, its thermal imaging technology allows for such helpful things as finding a person buried in rubble in an earthquake zone. More sophisticated applications combining it with computers in various situations would have helped prevent the Hillsborough disaster by preventing too many thermal blobs getting into the enclosed area where all the crushing took place. It helps to prevent unauthorized access to secure areas by one thermal blob "tailgating" someone with a card (it alerts a security guard who goes to take a look presumably) or keeps a count of the number of thermal blobs having entered a building so that if it needs to be evacuated the emergency services can see that everyone who went in is accounted for.

All good stuff I think you would agree. Then there are also applications that simply enhance the experience of the user - Tesco (amongst others) use it to tell how many people are in the store and to open up extra tills so that when they get to the end of their shop they don't have to wait in a queue. Others use it to count "footfall" into a shop or shopping centre to help them provide the optimal layout in the store. One could imagine it being used for example to check how many "thermal blobs" there are at bus stops along a route and decide to put on extra buses.

Of course, just as you can abuse morphine alongside its cousin heroin if you want to, you could couple this technology with CCTV and do actual snooping on identifiable individuals. But it's not what Irisys does. So I reckon Chris is in the clear here, personally. Indeed, by investing in a non-invasive application of modern technology, he is probably more than in the clear - he is on the side of the angels!

All this is readily discoverable from the firm's website. It's just lazy journalism and even lazier parroting of that journalism to peddle that this is some conflict of interest portraying Chris as a secret supporter of the surveillance state.

*There is research going on at the moment that suggests that you can identify an individual solely by their gait and I suppose this could be an issue even with medium resolution infra-red images, but so far as I am aware it's neither proved yet or in production applications. Presumably Irisys, and their shareholders, would take a view on whether this is an area they would want to get into when it is possible and proven.

...it's Parliament that makes the decisions.

I don't know how many times he's used this excuse in his interview with John Sopel so far. Detention without trial, ASBOs, House of Lords reform - "the government puts forward its policies but parliament makes the decision".

On the one hand, at least there is someone in the government that recognizes this basic tenet of the British democratic system, but on the other, we work on a majoritarian system; if government can't persuade its own people who are in that majority, surely it's not parliament to blame, but the government not putting forward policies even their own people can support.

Excuses.

Technorati Tags: house of lords, politics, ASBO, liberty