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Whatever one thinks of the public spat on the Politics Show yesterday, and plenty of bloggers have made their views plain enough, not entirely always to their own credit, I can't help feeling that this is not the cleverest of moves:

BBC NEWS | Politics | Lib Dems consider Clegg complaint:

Senior Liberal Democrat officials are to consider a complaint by leadership contender Nick Clegg over a document describing him as a "calamity". That paper was issued from the camp of leadership rival Chris Huhne. Writing on his website, Mr Huhne "sincerely apologised" and "disassociated himself from it". Mr Clegg's campaign team lodged an official complaint with the party's chief whip and party officials are to decide whether to take further action.

What action could, or should, "party officials" take? Order an apology? It's already been posted, and presumably communicated directly and personally to Nick (if not it should be - a statement on a website is not enough, one to one). What else is there? Disqualify one of only two candidates? Nothing would be more likely to lead to long lasting rancour and recriminations in the party, and I'm not even suggesting it's a possibility, let alone one "party officials" should consider if it were.  So if your two potential remedies are either already in process or impossible, that's the time to let it lie, or be seen as not taking it all with good grace.

It seems to me that all an "official complaint" does is prolong the least glorious moment of the contest for another few days - maybe longer, and, on an individual level for Nick, ensure that the phrase "Calamity Clegg" gets more airing than it ever warranted (which was none). One thing is sure, there'll be a "researcher" somewhere tonight learning the hard way that you can never put out a "catchy" title for a press briefing and expect said media not to take such a thing literally as summing up what you think about the subject of the briefing.

The document itself raises some pertinent questions about differences between what Nick has said or written and what others, friends, have apparently said or written on his behalf. Or at least they would be pertinent if a leadership contest was about setting policy, which it is not. But in demanding definitive statements on this or that an issue from either leadership candidate it seems to me that all that is achieved is putting an entrenched position on the record that can then be thrown back at you when the party, sovereign policy making body of course, decides something different somewhere down the line.

One can just imagine the smug Mr Sopel in a few years' time putting it to the Lib Dem leader, whoever that may be, that "you are losing control of your party, aren't you, because when you stood for leader you said that you would be against such and such and here's the party voting for it".

I asked this question a few weeks ago when I heard Chris Huhne talking about carbon trading being a better incentive than carbon taxing for businesses to make cuts in their pollution output, but nobody responded with an argument either way. Now, in Obscenity of carbon trading:

The Stern Review's emphasis on carbon trading is wrong, Kevin Smith argues; only cutting emissions at source will curb climate change.

So I'll ask again, since Kevin Smith doesn't actually put forward any mechanism by which people and businesses should be encouraged to cut their emissions.

You see, the air is mine, and yours, and yours, and yours. It belongs to us all collectively. We need it to survive, and there is, sort of, a finite supply of it. So why would we want governments or some other trans-national body, to hand out permits to businesses to pollute a certain portion of it, allowing them to sell some of that portion on if they don't use it all themselves? It is enclosure of the air, just as surely as the enclosure of land sent millions off to rot in the hell of the satanic mills. If it has value at all, and there doesn't overall seem to be much argument about that, it is value that we, the people, own collectively and should be used for our benefit and not for the benefit of corporations.

Smith reports that companies collectively have made windfall gains of £940bn across Europe after persuading governments to allocate bigger chunks which they have then been able to sell on - under any definition that is what is known as "rent seeking".

The polluting widget manufacturer is in the business of making widgets, not trading air (I have a similar problem with UK Coal deciding it is now a property company rather than a coal miner). If it can't break even by making widgets it needs to change its way of working or close. That's the market.

So, why not tax every process and business on its total carbon consumption. Of course, you would want to use that tax to reduce tax on good economic processes. If you can make the same widgets in a less polluting way why should you also pay corporation tax or the consumer sales tax on them. It is consistent with our "Green Tax Shift". It is consistent with Georgists' "Tax Shift" onto economic land and externalities. And it doesn't give away our air to someone to make money out of.

You could get tax credits if you invent a process that actually takes more pollution out of the atmosphere than it puts in, which is fair enough - a sort of "negative carbon tax". The same calculations need to go on anyway whether you use the trading or the taxing mechanism - each process, or end product, needs to have a carbon assessment somehow. And that must already be underway for companies to be able to participate in the various trading schemes that have sprung up around the world.

Keep it simple. There would be no need for a separate aviation pollution tax - it's a process just like any other (though there are other externalities in aviation that ought to be taxed - like use of physical airspace through landing slot auctions), no need for a separate vehicle pollution tax system - the vehicle must have a carbon rating on which any of the suggested emissions based vehicle tax systems will be based.

I don't think you would even need to make it personal, on individuals. They would be paying for the pollution their lifestyles may cost in the price they pay for goods - no need for a complex "personal carbon allowance" as has been suggested.

The most common incidents I have to deal with as a warden in a hall of residence are fire alarms. We wardens go to bed at night - we all have day jobs - so we have a pager each that goes off to wake us in the event of a fire alarm.

Previously we had no discretion but to phone the fire brigade before we went to investigate the incident and organize the evacuees before the brigade arrived. Nowadays at the fire service's request we go and investigate first, so it's very much in our own interests to discourage frivolous fire alarms.

And one of the stories I tell was of one case where the brigade was so pissed off at having been called out to some drunken teenager breaking a fire alarm glass and running off that they not only called the police, but kept everyone outside, at 2 am on a freezing December Sunday right in front of an emptying student club night venue, for an hour while they wandered around checking every bedroom in the block for hazards and non-evacuees.

It seems this kind of just desserts is no longer to be tolerated by the fire service:

Firemen sacked after student call:

Three firemen have been sacked after students were kept out in the cold for almost three hours following an alarm.

The incident occurred in Glasgow in November when firemen from Cowcaddens' station responded to a late night call at student flats in Calgary Street.

The students said that although there was no fire, they were kept outside their accommodation from just after midnight until 0300 GMT.

Oh well!

I don't normally watch More4 news, but this evening they carried an article suggesting that what with the apparent backpedalling on casinos, the reclassification debate about cannabis and the suggestions of small tax bribes for married couples both the Tories and Labour are entering a period of politics focussed on puritan ethics and, as Tim Worstall would say "bansturbation". Reading the runes of news stories it looks to me as if they may be preparing the ground to retreat on twenty-four hour drinking as well.

So it seems to me that they are leaving open an opportunity for a truly liberal party, say one that has the word "Liberal" in its name, to live up to that name and to take a completely opposite tack and lay claim to what I personally believe most of Britain would prefer given half a chance - a radical social liberal option, verging on libertarian. And one should say that this does not imply permissiveness or license. Most would naturally want grown adults to take responsibility for their own actions and their consequences, but in order to do so they've got to have the right to make choices, not have their freedoms limited for them.

On drugs, Ming and Clegg should speak out right now, while the issue is to the fore, about our own party policy for decriminalization and social supply of cannabis and a full commission on the best way to handle all drugs in future. Perhaps even endorse the "Beyond the war on drugs" report from Transform I've mentioned a couple of times in the past couple of days. We know that up to 80% of property crime at least in some places is related to the illegal drugs industry. We can wipe that out almost entirely almost instantly, and save billions - perhaps the equivalent of a fifth of the public sector budget. Oh, and don't give me that comeback about international treaties - it seems to me that the main narcotics treaties are about financing drugs in other countries - we can produce many of the more popular drugs here without recourse to imports if we wanted and, it would appear, stay within the letter and spirit of those treaties.

With the savings we can be harsher on people who use their new freedoms to harm others.

On marriage and family life, we could make clear that where people take responsibility for a significant other in a co-dependent relationship, whatever their legal relationship, the state should recognize that they take some of the burden from the state and be rewarded by some fiscal incentive.

The casino issue irks me. I did not agree with the idea of a government sanctioned super-casino, but not because of its potential effects on addicted gamblers - if they are that addicted I'm sure they can get to Las Vegas for less money than a return rail fair to Manchester frankly - but because it was rent seeking and protectionist corporate welfare of the worst kind. Whether a locality wants to host significant sized gambling outlets ought to be down to that locality, answerable to local trading standards and taxed locally.

The people of Britain deserve a choice - freedom or the continued nannying of the Tories and Labour. Let's seize this opportunity and give them that choice. With choice comes responsibility. We should believe that the responsible people of Britain would act sensibly given the chance.

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