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You'd have thought that a city in which the Green Party regularly polls up to 20% of the vote, holds a quarter of the county council seats and a sixth of the city council seats (and the latter in a minority administration to boot where their vote in council can effectively make or break a policy) and where they have been in a joint administration even, would be one of the most sustainable cities in the country.

You'd be wrong:

OXFORD people are among the greediest in the country in consuming the Earth's resources, according to a new league table.

A report by the Worldwide Fund for Nature ranked the 60 cities in England, Scotland and Wales by their residents' average ecological footprints - and discovered each Oxford person consumes more than three times the resources the planet can sustain.

It used data from local authorities to calculate the area each city's residents needed for food, energy and resources and to absorb waste and pollution.

Oxford ranked joint 55th out of the 60 cities, with its residents having among the five largest footprints for housing, consumer items and private services.

I'm sure they would tell us it's all because we don't carry out enough of their policies. My hunch is that in fact voting Green is for most people a substitute for taking personal action. That voting Green is "doing my bit for the environment".

I suspect Oxford's bad showing is nothing to do with local politics, but partly that in the big picture we are a city with a global reach. That we probably have a greater proportion of residents who are visiting from overseas and travel back regularly - at university vacations and so on - certainly judging by the success of the multitude of Heathrow & Gatwick bus services. That we are a magnet for London commuters so have a higher proportion than other cities of people who commute 120 miles a day. And that the city ballooned in the rapid growth of the motor industry resulting in hundreds of acres of relatively inefficient inter-war housing making up the bulk of our built environment.

These are structural issues that are too big for what is seen often as a crusty, crypto-communist, community politics organisation to address purely locally. It needs real devolution of power that can only be granted by the Westminster players so we can have real control of our own development as a city, changes to the way we tax people for environmentally damaging habits and so on.

One thing the Greens could do locally, as some have in the past with the Oxfordshire Land Value Tax study, is to support my calls for Oxford to be allowed to trial LVT as a replacement for the Council Tax, city wide - see if we can't persuade a majority of the city council and city representative county councillors to support such a move. That's part of the bigger picture that we can try to address, and it's their party policy. Efficient use of land is key to reducing our footprint, to getting people able to commute less, to use more local suppliers where possible, to remodel the city with an efficient built environment and so on.

I have no idea what problems Redruth faces with its "yoof". I have no problem with the police taking tough action to end the sort of disturbances that have been seen as the "posh kids" descend on places like Rock for the summer. But a broad brush, "voluntary" (but "we can make orders if parents do not co-operate") curfew is arbitrary and collective punishment affecting innocent and guilty alike.

Clearly "liberal" Cornwall has a different version of the Human Rights Act down there. Are we to assume that the black in the Cornish nationalist flag commemorates the death of freedom?

And now we hear that nine out of ten parents nationwide - the mainland as well as Cornwall that is - would welcome a curfew. That's okay then.

In a liberal world view government exists to temper the tyranny of the majority rather than allow it adversely to affect the lives of a minority. I suppose at least children, whether domesticated or feral, grow out of their minority status, so are only temporarily affected. That's okay then.

What a fekking nonsense. I hear one of our MPs for the People's Democratic Enclave of Cornwall actually supports this idea, not only that but the person concerned has a portfolio that deals with similar such issues nationwide. That's okay then.

In what world view is a curfew, an arbitrary and collective punishment, "liberal"?

On the plus side, all those children will be safely at home in time to see all the post-watershed violence, sex and sweariness on TV. That's okay then!

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.

I believe Michael Brown, the now infamous "largest Lib Dem donor ever", is every bit the "muppet" he called the party apparatchiks, and would personally not hopefully have accepted that money had I been in a position to do so. But if I had to choose between someone who may have swindled a small number of millionnaires out of some of their probably not all ethically gained loot and a Cameron donor accused of 'repugnant' business practices, I would choose Robin Hood over reputedly Rach rentier anyday.

I mean really, how could we even dream that the party of the landlord was changing its spots? Prove us wrong please, G&D! You could start by adopting Land Value Tax to prove your donors don't have policy influence...☺

Mind you, I am led to believe that some of Oxford's supposedly ghastlier rentier landlords are regular donors to the local Labour party so maybe making money out of the misery of the poor and the generosity of the taxpayer in supporting them does not indicate party alignment these days.

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