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...imagining a Wireless Oxford.

I'm surprised at how good a service they offer on the Oxford Tube, wireless wise. I'm off to a day conference on "Wireless Cities" where I'll hear from other areas miles ahead of Oxford about how they plan to unwire their cities/districts, courtesy of the people that brought us the Oxfordshire Community Network, Synetrix.

EDIT:...but I'm absolutely appalled at the thought that most of my journey companions do this every day. I truly hope they are handsomely rewarded for this monumental waste of their lives...:)

Over at Antonia Bance's blog she's got a piece on what we can do to help prevent any more Rhys Jones type horrors. One thing stands out for me. She says:

I don’t believe that anyone is born a criminal (one of the reasons why I’m on the left)

I'm not sure that follows. The other day I was having a dicsussion on another forum with someone whose personal political hero was, he said, Peter Hichens. I don't think that people at that end of the spectrum would ever believe that people are born criminal either.

Where they would differ is in whether the chance of committing crimes was determined by one's socio-economic outlook and therefore whether spending money on particular groups of people helps prevent such a descent into crime or not.

What they would say is that the suggestion that because you're in a poor or deprived area or have few opportunities you are more likely to turn to crime is itself an unjust slight on the vast majority of people in poor or deprived circumstances who live without committing crimes.

They would say that the sort of language used by the late Victorian social reformers, such as in that Charles Booth map of east London poverty where whole areas were blocked out as being "vicious and semi-criminal" that, with a bit of outside assistance, could be lifted out of such a plight, was patronising middle class liberal rubbish that let people off the hook of taking personal responsibility for themselves. And that "the left" by adopting that prognosis perpetuate the problem.

Me - I don't know. I believe in the innate goodness of everyone. And that the free will with which we are all vested means that everyone, rich or poor, chooses to do right or wrong. But I also believe that many are diddled out of their natural birthright by the great monopolies that the anarchists, libertarians and liberals of that late nineteenth century idenitifed. And that pre-distributing that common birthright ought to be enough to give everyone sufficient opportunity to be able to make he choice not to commit crime. That we ought not to be deciding how to spend others' money so much as simply making sure that people have their common birthright in the first place and then leaving them to their own decisions.

Just one final thing on Rhys Jones and other teen murder victims before I shut up about it...

I spotted this comment on another blog :

"what is going on in this country, if children are not being abducted and killed, by adults, they are being killed by people of their own age, we need to stop this now"

...and to be sure, the reaction of some in the political and media sphere is encouraging this kind of hysteria, but, whatever the tragedy of each individual case, we ought to recall that these incidents are still very rare. There are over thirteen million under eighteens in this country and the vast, vast majority will make it to adulthood without these sort of traumas.

If I'm a bit quiet at the moment it's because a. I have half a dozen unfinished blockbuster blog posts in progress and b. I seem to be putting in 12-14 hour days at work at the moment as I'm in the middle of a big software rollout. In fact I've just finished (at half past three in the morning) shutting down remotely tonight's 25 updated machines - perhaps I would be better off in India!

But I seem to have been "tagged" by James Graham for a response to George Osborne's statement that we are all living off the coat tails of the City of London, so I will try and honour him with a response! I'm not sure I share his or Jonathan Calder's interpretation that Osborne means the rest of us are living as "parasites" on the City. I don't detect such a value judgement in Osborne's comment. Rather I think he is in fact describing the status quo.

When as much Sterling is traded on forex markets in a week than our entire annual GDP - more in a single month than our entire national wealth - and when every trade generates a commission or turn for the middle-men in the City, Osborne is right if he is merely pointing out that we are too dependent on the City. What I can't fathom from what has been reported of his interview is whether any solution he might have to offer involves reducing the influence of the financial sector at the same time as trying to increase the competitiveness of British industry and non-financial sector wealth creation.

However much we may be dependent at the moment on financial markets for our national cash-flow (I won't say wealth creation because money is not itself wealth and pushing money around is not producing any tangible wealth, just pocketing tokens that could be used to buy actual wealth) it is unhealthy because it exploits all of us. In order to have enough tokens to trade in the volumes the interbank market needs to make a decent return they artificially inflate all the world's currencies. And then skim the cream off of what they have created.

I confess my mind is sorely troubled by recent events in the financial markets - partly why I am finding it very difficult to write about it. For several years now, after reading the likes of "The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work and a Wiser World" (B.A. Lietaer) and "The Grip of Death: A Study of Modern Money, Debt Slavery and Destructive Economics" (Michael Rowbotham), I have become convinced that we are in the "last days" of a system based on debt, speculative froth and the dominance of money pushers, abetted by state protectionism of the highest order. Part of me wants this current crunch to precipitate the sort of crisis that will force us to find an alternative more sustainable system. The other part recognizes the inevitable pain to ordinary people such a collapse would cause unless we have an alternative waiting in the wings.

The problem is that they really do rule the world. Because we have given them the ability to create credit at will, to manipulate money supply, currency circulation and so on they utterly outgun all the real wealth production in the global economy. And it's only when we wake up to the fact that they are only able to do so by persuading us to borrow, usually on the back of land values that are in turn driven up by that borrowing until they reach what in the US has recently become a bursting point threatening the stability of the rest of the global market, that we will be able to do something about it.

A couple of blog posts in the past few days - one by Lynne Featherstone on Lib Dem Voice - have highlighted the issue of corruption, but there is no greater confidence trick and fraud than that perpetrated every day against us by the financial sector. Let's have some more discussion of how that affects us and what we can do about it.

Having been a bit behind the mood on Charles Kennedy's resignation, I quickly made up for it getting ahead of the game by encouraging others to urge Chris Huhne, MP for Eastleigh to think about putting his name forward...

What a sad weekend of intrigue and at times farce it's been. Anyway, as no doubt people are going to be trying to move quickly I thought I'd drop you a note to encourage you to contact anyone you can in the first instance to ensure that there should be a leadership election. If our parliamentarians were annoyed on Thursday night that CK was going over their heads as the news suggests, their position will be no more tenable in the view of many members if they engineer a stitch up for one candidate. So please, tell anyone you can that we need an election!

And there will be one. I've been in contact all weekend and emailing privately one or two MPs and one for sure is intending to stand to make a contest of it if nobody else comes forward (I would actually like John Hemming to win and I've offered to work on John's campaign assuming someone else doesn't stand).

That someone else, I'd like to lobby you to encourage, is our own former MEP, Chris Huhne. He's either only just back from holiday yesterday or today so I have not heard from him but have written to him encouraging him to think about it. Here's why:

1. Europe. With Blair having failed to make much of his EU presidency and Brown more anti- due to succeed him, and with Cameron anti- and likely to take the Tories that way, there is room for us to be the party of Europe and internationalism as we should be, I may not agree 100% with Chris about the Euro (I prefer James Robertson's idea of a "Common Currency" to a single currency at the moment), but it would be a first to have a former MEP as a party leader at Westminster. Both he and Nick Clegg, who I think has ruled himself out and is supporting Ming, have a full term at Strasbourg/Brussels under their belts and we should be prepared, as a pro-European party, to count that for what it is - parliamentary experience. It might even make a refreshing change to have someone who has cut his parliamentary teeth on something other than the yah-boo of Westminster (though watching the European parliament does not look all that different at times!). Let's get him in there now while he has more MEP experience than MP experience. He is in the ideal position, having done it himself, to explain and develop how we scrutinise and criticise Europe positively compared with the other positions seen to be either plain anti-Europe, or, on the other side, the "Europe can do no wrong" type pro-Europeans.

2. PR. I am disappointed that we quietly dropped PR as "unattainable", and didn't get terribly involved in the campaign after the general Election last year led by the Independent. Chris is not only committed to PR but of course is one of our two parliamentarians who has actually been elected under a PR system, of sorts. He was a director of Electoral Reform Ballot Services. We should be pushing PR right now in view of the probability that Labour will be waning in the run up to the next election and the dissatisfaction with the present situation.

3. International Development. Chris's economic interests have focussed on International Development. If we are to believe Cameron and Brown and their "save Africa" type rhetoric, Geldof Groups and so on, this is to be the foreign policy and humanitarian agenda for the next few years. Chris is a real economist who has made real studies of different mechanisms for International Development. Gordon Brown's naive sounding "drop the debt" type measures will not be sufficient in the longer run and we need someone who really understands these issues to promote better solutions.

4. Radical economics. Chris is President of Lib Dems ALTER (Action for Land Tax and Economic Reform). Personally I have not met him yet in that context, having only been Secretary of ALTER for less than a year and not having attended any of the conference events yet. So I don't know if he is a passionate proponent of LVT or simply someone who recognises the benefits of being open to unconventional economic and fiscal ideas. But either way, we do need to be open to radical economic solutions and need someone to promote that openness. If memory serves he was also supportive of our earlier attempts to set up an Association of Lib Dem Co-operators and supports mutual solutions to delivering public goods where appropriate.

5. Meedja. Chris is of course a former journalist. I do think we need someone whom the media can feel is "one of their own". But he also has strong credibility in the city - writing for the Economists and at times the FT as well as the economics pages of the Guardian and Independent.

Yes, he's likely to be an outsider. But that didn't stop some of us previously supporting David Rendel (who I would nominate again if we hadn't lost Newbury). But he's "different", "fresh" in all sorts of ways. He may feel that he's too new in Westminster but that's not been too great a barrier to Cameron for example (who would have recognised him this time last year if we weren't Oxfordshire activists?). I feel it is time to make use of the great strides we have made at Westminster over the past five years and skip the generation that seems lining up to arrange a succession (Simon/Ming/Mark etc). However he is being spoken of very positively as someone who would make a very good leader, so there is some momentum behind him.