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Norwich City Council to pursue hairdressers with undercover agents to check they're not giving their customers a glass of complimentary mulled wine while they wait:

You couldn't make it up!

...for a few days. As will responding to peoples' comments.

A couple of months ago I bought myself a new great big server and shamefully I have not set it up yet. Since it is priced in dollars and the pound is falling I suppose I ought to get on with it so I can cancel the existing one before it next needs paying!

For anyone interested it will be Debian Etch, running Xen virtualization, to give me a Zimbra virtual server for email and collaboration, a web server for my various projects and then back end servers for databases and user data.

I really need to redesign the blog, and in the process move it to my new domain jockcoats.me and upgrade to Drupal 6.

Additionally, a number of projects have been languishing waiting for this shift to the new bigger server:

OX3Online - a project to produce a community portal for the Headington area of Oxford

LiberalALTERnative.org to accompany the book on economic liberalism I am co-editing with members of the Lib Dems ALTER executive

OxfordBloggers.net - an aggregator a little like LibDemBlogs to link together as many bloggers writing in or about Oxford

OSEF.org.uk - a new site for Oxfordshire Social Enterprise Forum which we intend to relaunch in November's enterprise week

...and my latest wheeze...

f5c.org - "Freedom's Fifth Column" to provide a space in which libertarians (especially those hiding within existing non-libertarian parties) can write, pseudonymously if necessary, to try and show how libertarian and anarchist ideology can work through most existing parties to achieve our freedoms.

Lots to do! But don't worry, the suspension of blogging is only in order to give me a few days while I am off work this week to get the server up and running - these other projects have to work alongside my own writing...:)

Hat tip, though I hate to say it, to Yellow Peril for this story: LibDems soften on axing council tax - [Sunday Herald]:

LibDems soften on axing council tax

By Paul Hutcheon, Scottish Political Editor

SCOTTISH Liberal Democrats are backtracking on plans to replace the council tax with an income-based alternative, the Sunday Herald can reveal.
Nicol Stephen’s party is softening its support for abolishing the successor to the poll tax because it does not want to jeopardise a third coalition deal with Labour. Senior LibDems believe the policy, which could increase the bills of middle-class Scots, is not worth a huge political fight.

The development is significant as the introduction of a local income tax was presumed to be a key plank of the party’s electoral strategy for next year’s Holyrood election.

The issue separates the LibDems from Labour, who remain staunch supporters of the council tax, and was thought to be a factor preventing another coalition deal.

Of course they are perfectly able to vary policy in a properly federal party where different areas may demand different tactics, and this is great news, if true. Scotland has led the way on land reform and voting reform. Land Value Tax would be the natural extension of the community land ownership laws they passed. I hope ALTER and the Labour Land Campaign can maybe get together and persuade our respective party groups north of the border to go for a Site Value Rating for local government in Scotland.

Glasgow, I believe, has the lowest rate of home owner-occupancy in the UK - LVT with a homestead allowance could help spread home ownership.

Glasgow is also the city that, at the turn of the last century, was being squeezed by surrounding landowners till the poor people squeaked as highlighted in several speeches on Land Value Tax by one Winston Churchill - and he made one of his best known speeches on the subject in Edinburgh.

It was predominantly Scottish ex-patriate business-men and colonialists of course who took Land Value Tax to places like Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand - implementing overseas the solution to the problems of a feudal landowning system they had laboured under and escaped from back at home.

Let them now lead the way and prove to the rest of us how it can be done!

Technorati Tags: land value tax, lib dems

Can anyone help me find this quote and who said or wrote it. It's to do with when a government does something or other nasty that may affect the citizens they have lost their legitemacy and the citizen is no longer obliged to follow their decree. My hunch is that it was perhaps Locke but I can't find what I'm looking for anywhere. Anyone help?