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Well done to Iain Dale on News 24 reviewing the Dead Tree Press tonight. He picked up on the ridiculous story of Andrew Phillips, the Lib Dem peer who wants to start taking things easy at 67 but has run foul of the house rules that say you can never really retire. You can take leave of absence but nobody's quite sure it seems whether that would reduce your party's presence or not and allow an extra place to be allocated next time there were a raft of party appointments.

These are of course the same rules that prevent people like Emma Nicholson from making an open decision about whether to stick with Europe or the Lords under the ban on holding a dual mandate - sitting in a national as well as a European legislatures.

Blair indeed promised to have this particular problem addressed for that very reason - so peers could resign to run for the European Parliament if they wanted to.

Whilst I completely agree with Iain on the necessity to elect the House of Lords, and as soon as possible, it's a bit ironic that the story that prompted it was Andrew Phillips, who takes a contrary line to party policy and would rather see the house remain pretty much wholly appointed as I understand it.

Technorati Tags: electoral reform, house of lords, politics

Conference is coming, and I'll have an opportunity on Saturday evening to share a platform with Vince Cable and James Graham at the ALTER fringe event, entitled "Economics as if People Mattered" (Saturday, 18:30, Arena Hall 2n, for anyone interested - note the change of venue from the conference program). My task is to set out some more details of the book of essays we propose to publish in time for the Autumn Conference, entitled "The Liberal Alternative". And since I shall also be seeing Vince tomorrow evening at the Oxford East constituency dinner, I thought I ought to prepare what I am going to say on Saturday so I can let him have a copy tomorrow night. So here goes with a first draft...

Tough on poverty, tough on the causes of poverty!

By the next time most of us get together again at Bournemouth in September we will have celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the National Health Service and the centenary of the legislation that gave us the first Old Age Pension. Both of course were the triumph of political economists steeped in a tradition of liberal economics and concern for the least well off in society.

So we've decided that for our big project for the year, and to prepare for next year's centenary of David Lloyd-George's great 1909 People's Budget, we're going to publish a book of essays investigating some of the problems they faced both at the turn of the last century and in the widespread domestic poverty after World War Two that Beveridge sought to address through his "war on the five wants".

We want to show that despite throwing ever increasing resources at tackling the unequal outcomes of our economic system, successive socialist and conservative governments have completely failed to address the causes of inequality that Lloyd-George, drawing on that long tradition started to attempt in that budget.

And we want to persuade you, and the party more widely, that that tradition, never really given the chance to show its potential since then - a whole century ago, is just as relevant today. That it remains a precondition to creating an economically and therefore socially equitable society.

Prevention, in economics as much as in health, is always better than trying to cure or treat the symptoms once a malaise has taken hold. For as the cures become ever more expensive, and consume ever more of our productivity, so they also become steadily less liberal.

We are more, not less, dependent on the decisions of politicians where they deliver monopolistic public services. And the more of our labour they appropriate to pay for those services the less we are able to make our own choices anyway.

Talking of "choice", I know that some of us seem instinctively to shy away from choice, because we feel that it excludes the least well off. But I'll bet we all deep down believe that choice, unlimited choice, would be great if only we could ensure everyone was able to afford to participate in such a market place.

Well that's what we want to show you can happen when we address the central inequities of the economic system we have inherited. Taxing income and productive investment slows the creation of wealth for all of us. Failing properly to tax land allows those who happen to own or have inherited the best locations to absorb much of the value of our labour and productive investment, and especially the labour of the poorest. The wealthiest grow fabulously rich off the back of the labourer through land. And even, in this era of widespread home ownership, as it's called, many benefit unfairly, while paying, through their other taxes, for the attempts to relieve the poverty this system sustains!

If we took that tax shift seriously, our economy could be as much as a third bigger, and distribute that extra wealth more equitably according to what we put into it - our work and our savings. We would be better able to compete with the newly emerging economies of the world without retreating into hiding behind protectionism. We would be able to allow people more choice over their lives and the services that sustain them, whether that be health and education, housing, or basic needs like food.

I want to end with a brief quote from Herbert Spencer, who, writing in 1851 said:

"To mitigate distress appearing needful for the production of the “greatest happiness,” the English people have sanctioned upwards of one hundred acts in Parliament having this end in view, each of them arising out of the failure or incompleteness of previous legislation. Men are nevertheless still discontented with the Poor Laws, and we are seemingly as far as ever from their satisfactory settlement."

I suggest that 150 years later, we are still tinkering with laws, often ever more coercive laws to try and reach that nirvana of the "greatest happiness" through government intervention. We take more from everyone in the process and limit everyone's ability to decide for themselves. Addressing the central causes of our economic inequity has not been tried since 1909. 2009 is high time we put this, left, right and centre at the forefront of the new liberal political economy for the next century.

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So, having read roughly what I'm going to say, you can now come along to theALTER fringe and hear Vince Cable (who will I hope by then have been formally adopted along with Nick Clegg as an ALTER Vice-President!) and James Graham as well!

"Economics as if People Mattered" (Saturday, 18:30, Arena Hall 2n - note the change of venue from the conference
program)

Many words have been written about John Biffen and Bill Deedes, Tim Garden and Tony Wilson in recent days. I suspect somewhat fewer will be written about Brian Hodgson, chair of the Labour Land Campaign and former Labour group leader on Oxfordshire County Council who sadly died following a heart attack and short illness from which he had been expected to recover on Saturday 18th August. But that belies the affection with which he will be remembered by anyone who had the good fortune to know or work with him in Oxfordshire or Georgist politics.

I first came across Brian when, as a City Councillor in 2001, we formed a joint group with the County Council where he was Labour opposition leader to explore ways in which we could better collaborate in support and provision for asylum seekers in Oxford. But soon learned he was a kindred spirit in Land Value Tax and in the "spirit of 1909". When I say he was unashamedly "Old Labour" I do not mean the bad old days of Militant Tendency, but of Diggers, Levellers and the spirit of the early days of Labour politics. UPDATE: Thanks Gareth for reminding me of Brian's own description as "Vintage Labour".

I have to say slightly unkindly that he always made me smile. For any familiar with the paintings in Oxford Town Hall, he always reminded me of one of the "Old Gaffers" watching proceedings in the Old Library with his somewhat 19th century style beard. But he was as kindly a man as one could wish to meet.

It was his motion to Oxfordshire County Council in 2001 that led to the council establishing a pilot project to investigate the potential effects of replacing the Council Tax with Land Value Tax and he was able to steer a coalition of Lib Dems and Greens in developing the study which has become a highly regarded contribution to the evidence in favour of LVT.

Having not been re-elected in 2005 to Oxfordshire County Council in the rout of Labour in his home area in David Cameron's Witney constituency, he put a lot of effort into the causes he had long supported - Land Value Tax and, more recently, Community Land Trusts. I last saw Brian when to my pleasant surprise he turned up to support a mutual colleague giving a talk to Woodstock Town Council in July where we are trying to build some interest in a Community Land Trust project to develop affordable local housing. He had been active already in such mechanisms as a trustee of the Stonesfield Village Trust, which in twenty or so years has provided fourteen affordable homes for local people with no subsidy - proving it can be don. We had a good long chat, with him still wondering when I was going to join the real progressive party that he had supported all his life!

I suspect Oxfordshire politics will be a more tribal arena without his conciliatory style and "elder statesmanship". Rest in peace Brian.

Not a lot of people know this, such is the popular perception of the city of Kingston upon Hull that I rarely even admit it to myself, but Haltemprice and Howden is my place of birth. To be more precise, Woodgates Nursing Home, North Ferriby. At the time my folks lived in Woodlands Drive, Anlaby and my dad worked for Northern Foods.

We returned to the area when I was eight and lived in West End, South Cave for a year or so. I went to Hymers, dad worked as Finance Director at Moore's of Hull (then an Opel and Colt main dealer), with a chap who would become a life-long friend, Ben Moore. I remember the school bus from Elloughton into town, getting a taste of silage when on a school trip to Bishop Burton Agricultural College, the (much tastier) Stroganoff at the Cave Castle Restaurant, the horses in the field behind the house (I see it's been developed now for housing from Google Earth), standing in a crowd around Hull Parish Church to see the queen on her Silver Jubilee tour of Britain (and the beacon on the hill up behind South Cave come to think of it that was lit on Jubilee day tiself) and discovering snails of all things down the lane leading to the A63 (we were allowed to play near the dual carriageway in them days without being taken into care!).

Ah! The A63. Blessed road, for it leads you away from Hull! The landmarks along the way - Howden Abbey, the high bridge over the Humber before Goole, Drax power station are all signs that you are approaching civilisation!

And then, inexorably it seems, it draws you back too, and so, with me just a year or so into a boarding school career, my folks moved back to Hull, and I find the street we lived in there, Maplewood Avenue - one of the worst hit in last years flooding I believe - is more or less the very easterly most road in the Haltemprice and Howden constituency. I remember big rows between my mother and father during school holidays. I remember finally uncovering the fact I had suspected for some time - that Santa Claus was actually my mother with a bag of Boots cotton wool stuck to her chin. But dad was back at Moore's meeting the new wife, so I remember divorce. And depression. I remember getting caught smoking by my mum the first time. I remember trying to make lager from a Boots kit. And her wondering why she had found a condom in my coat pocket when she washed it!

My sister did most of her secondary schooling at Willerby, and they went to church at St Luke's in Willerby. I learned to swim at the Haltemprice Leisure Centre. I discovered a friend at school 200 miles away (and not a mile too many!) who at the time lived in Malton so we shared most of our train journeys to and from school as far as York. When I got back in touch with him after school, my father was living in Driffield and his in Cottingham, so I've spent a good few nights out in Cottingham on Sam Smiths and Hull Brewery Co beers.

So actually, a pretty significant place for so much of my formative life. But the days when a boy from Hull had to deny his city and support Leeds if he wanted to support a top flight football team are over. I still managed to feel a little glow of pride on hearing that Hull City FC had made it into the premiership!

I'm sure there are probably a good few people rubbing their hands with some relish at the thought that private schools might feel the squeeze from this edict from the Charities Commission that they have to prove the value of their contribution to the wider community to retain their charitable status.

But before they get too excited, perhaps they might want to think about the numbers. I read that independent schools have about 600,000 pupils. If we accept the figures put forward by Nick Clegg, I think, when he was talking about the "pupil premium" in which he said, if memory serves, that the average cost was about £9,000 per year per pupil - which allowing for endowments and so on is probably a bit more than the average fees - it is an "industry" with a turnover of nearly £5.5 billion per year.

The statements about the level of charitable benefit they receive suggest that it amounts to about £100 million. This is therefore just under 2% of their combined turnover. Hardly insurmountable if they decide to stick two fingers up to the Charities Commission. But there's another side to it, isn't there. If we accept government figures that they spend about £6,000 per year on average on each state school pupil, then the 600,000 pupils whose parents are often scrimping and saving to put them through a private school are saving the state sector just over £3.5 billion.

It seems to me that whatever you think of private education, the charge that they do not contribute financially to the state sector through their customers' taxation cannot be upheld. Of course, since most of the charitable benefit is presumably in the form of reclamation of VAT on some expenses and I would argue that nobody should pay VAT, the most iniquitous tax on production we have, they would not have such a benefit in my fiscal regime anyway!