Randomly Selected Article or Link

While we're in the business of announcing what laws we would shred given half a chance, I want to make a plea for every other Lib Dem shadow cabinet member to take a long hard look at the laws which govern their respective portfolios and choose a few to shred. We could even make it a new "target" - ten pieces of legislation each to be added to the bonfire in the next six months (and so too in the manifesto) could be our spokespeople's primary "Key Performance Indicator".

For me, there would be nowhere better to start than the oxymoronic Department of Communities and Local Government. In fact, for preference I'd like us to propose doing much the same to that as we do the DTI - abolish the thing completely. It's simple, snappy and at a stroke would massively increase the quality of our democracy in the UK. Westminster and Whitehall have, in my opinion, absolutely no business overseeing local government, let alone tying it up in tight knots that our local representatives cannot escape. Why on earth do we have to persuade the member for Bolton West about aspects of running our own localities when we have elected another fifty local people to do just that? If government is by the consent of the people, my consent to be governed on local issues is clearly given to local councillors, not MPs.

If there are things that absolutely every locality in England has to do the same way, then make it a national function - Housing Benefit could be directly administered by the same Department for Work and Pensions systems as other benefits, for example. Though as an aside one might prefer pensions and other benefits to be devolved to local authorities as they were when they ran the poor houses and the parish rate paid for the upkeep of those no longer able to work and when city corporations could borrow to provide affordable housing, all based on local needs and local costs of living.

So, come to think of it, there's an idea for Mr Laws - let's do away with the DWP too - there were a whole raft of local ballot measures passed this week accompanying the US mid-term elections that set state based minimum wage levels. What possible fairness is there in insisting that someone can live on the same level of dole or pension in London as they can in Yeovil, say?

C'mon, if we want to be a liberal party root and branch, let our wonderful local representatives do what we elect them to do. Our democracy would be far saner and far more interesting if we did.

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?

Michael Meadowcroft has a letter in today's Guardian about how middle class folk tend not to live in the "rough areas" where gang culture finds it all too easy to get established. He says:

Gangs grow out of our divided society | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Politics:

How many teachers, solicitors, social workers, politicians and police officers live in such neighbourhoods even when their work closely involves them there? All too often they commute from the suburbs and reinforce the picture of success meaning a chance to get out. Unless there are financial and housing incentives to live and work in one and the same community it will be very difficult to dislodge the feeling of bitterness among those who do not have a choice.

Of course, we wouldn't want a "real liberal" interfering too much with social engineering to create such incentives, but his party does support LVT (although not as a replacement for income taxes and the like which would increase the incentive). Under LVT the savvy professional household would find that they would pay less tax by moving to poorer areas (ie with a lower Land Tax) and in the process take their economic activity and expenditure into those areas creating more prosperity there.

I'm very busy at the moment trying to get a web database up for my old school former pupils' society, but I noticed today a lot of discussion about Tesco and its market dominance.

Personally, I patronize the Co-op and local shops as much as possible and am in some ways fortunate to be able to do so, and I abhor monopoly and monopsony, and it is clear that Tesco, ASDA and others are getting pretty close to such a position if they haven't already. But there's a simple little step that could at a stroke force Tesco and others to account properly for some of the externalities of out of town shopping...

They currently don't pay uniform business rates on their massive free parking areas at out of town developments - a massive subsidy from town centre retailers to the big sheds. With Site Value Rating (Land Value Tax levied at a local level), with which the Lib Dems propose to replace the Uniform Business Rate, such land would be properly valued and taxed.