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Anyone who's read any of my blog will know of the work I do on affordable housing through Oxfordshire Community Land Trust in my spare time. After five years of work, persuasion, lobbying, all for nothing, we have the opportunity, thanks to a very generous elderly lady who has settled all she wants to on her children is willing to swap us her house and its plot in return for about half its value and a smaller home carved out of half her existing cottage so we can at last get a site on which to develop a few affordable houses and prove the concept to the communities of Oxfordshire who would like to be able to do similar.

The trouble is that to be viable we have had to buy about half each of the two neighbouring gardens and are likely to try and get another adjacent one. And so, with the efforts of a very energetic fellow board member's contacts in the Society of Friends we have raised a decent chunk of this. Nevertheless we still have to fund the borrowing on about £170,000 worth of loans starting from the end of May when we are due to complete on the first two slices of adjoining land.

Anyway, it works out that in the worst case we probably need to fund interest payments of around £1000 per month until we either get planning consent and can realistically borrow against the land to develop or till we can raise the remainder as gifts and pay off the loan that way, whichever is the sooner.

So we have a variety of ideas about how to scrape together this sum, one of which is a commitment by me that, if in May I were to find myself in receipt of a small additional income, say from a councillor's allowance, the 90% of that I am not already committed to giving to the party to help me pay for Focus leaflets and campaigning in the ward will go to the charitable associate of OCLT, the Stonesfield Community Trust that is fronting our land purchase, to help pay that interest bill.

So, not only do I now have to win for Headington Hill and Northway, its residents, this and next year's new students, freedom and the Liberal Democrats, but also for OCLT and affordable housing in Oxfordshire!

Mad eh? We'll, we've got to pay for it somehow to prove the whole idea to skeptical councillors, the media and bureaucrats? What better a way if it works out right? I am standing in this election at least partly to promote my ideas for innovative financing of things like affordable housing. I'm sure there's not a household in the ward doesn't feel or understand the effects of the gross deficiency we have in Oxford and Oxfordshire of that.

One of the good things about this medium I've found is that nothing is ever permanent (well I suppose it might be on an MI5 backup somewhere but I doubt it!). Blog entries get amended all the time, and sometimes readers do see the amendments in their RSS software. So, following comments it seems I have been a bit harsh on Chris Huhne's criticism of David Milliband's idea for personal carbon bank accounts.

The BBC and others reported in "Labour under fire on 'green' bid" that Chris criticises David Milliband for blue sky thinking on personal carbon allowances. I agree with Chris that such longer term floating of ideas is no substitute for getting things done now - like the LIb Dems' ideas for Tax Shifting - taxing the use and abuse of our common natural birthright such as land, clean air (through taxing pollution and the like) and fossil fuel use. But the idea is an important one, and if, as some suggest, it would take a long time to implement, it is surely good that a government minister is floating what to some might seem a barking mad idea now.

But Chris is also President of the ultimate Lib Dem blue-sky thinking lobby group of which I am secretary, ALTER (Action for Land-value Taxation and Economic reform), so he is only too well aware of the sort of long-term thinking that has to go on to achieve big systemic change.

Whilst I noticed also a Greenpeace (I think) activist on one of the news programs today saying that "it is a good idea, but one whose time has not yet come", both Chris and Greenpeace will know that there have been many groups, including my own and others I participate in, actively promoting the idea of alternative currencies as a way to create an "energy commons" that everyone can participate in.

I have to admit that my interest has been mostly in the other side of the coin - that microgeneration of electricity could be monetised in some form to create an "energy currency". But carbon, on the pollution, is just as good an idea. A carbon allowance would enable us to monetise the "commons", in this case clean air if you like, and pass responsibility to individuals, and tax them when they breach "Locke's Proviso" - a key argument for Land Value Tax.

Indeed in economic terms Carbon Allowances and currency would enable this important part of the commons to be subject to a Land Value Tax, for that is what it is.

And it need not be years away either. As they proved in Argentina it's easy to promote a new "currency" - you just announce that people can pay their taxes in that currency. In Argentina's case, local government decided when they were in the midst of their currency crisis and effectively had no money with which to trade amongst themselves that they would accept "time bank" style credits from companies wanting to pay their local rates.

Exploring different ways of accounting for our "commons" is a good thing. It will become more and more important to make people realise the real costs of living and trading in ever less obvious natural resources. A good example is the licensing of the electromagnetic spectrum - there's only so much of it out there for different technologies and how it is fairly shared out will affect who can participate in future wireless technologies. What we risk by solely concentrating on corporate carbon quotas and licensing of other natural resources is a new wave of eclosure of the commons - in this case the air itself by big business.

I would love to hear what that other Lib Dem radical currency reformer - David Boyle - thinks.

Technorati Tags: climate change, land value tax, politics, tax shifting, taxation

Health seems to have become the theme of the day in the Lib Dem leadership debate, at least amongst bloggers (John Dixon's "A Radical Writes" here, and Tristan's "Liberty Alone" here as examples). The two candidates themselves have both now produced manifestos of sorts with Chris Huhne (page 9) promoting "the principle of universal access on the basis of need" and Nick Clegg earlier (despite John Dixon's interpretation otherwise) setting down the principle that "our universal public services must be free to use and accessible to all".

Both have admirable reasons for wanting to retain this universality and free access; that if we choose any other paradigm the poorest will miss out by not being able to afford to pay in a non-free system. But, as I've said about education, and more recently touched on in my piece about protectionism last week to me this seems, if you pardon the terrible health-related analogy, merely a sticking plaster. The ideal revolutionary liberal position surely would be to ensure that everyone had the financial wherewithal to participate properly in a market system and then to trust them to make their own choices.

On the day that the Marmot report into diet and cancer appeared, and whilst acknowledging that he said that his commission was still to deal with policy recommendations, one can be fairly certain that they are not going to recommend that the government, local or national, takes control of what dietary choices people are allowed to make. And yet our knowledge increases all the time that such choices are likely at least as important to our health outcomes as the treatment we may receive once we are ill. So why do we not do the same for illness care when all the evidence suggests that despite £110bn a year public expenditure, we are still the "sick man of Europe"?

Surgeons operating
Originally uploaded by el Reino

The NHS was, I believe, a fantastic idea at the time, in the context of the war on the five wants. In a near bankrupt nation post-war it was also clearly in the national interest to try to use economies of scale and national bargaining to ensure that you could provide a basic level of universal service to all. But let's face it, right now it is a gigantic protection racket, the mother of them all if you ask me. We also heard today that the average GP salary is now at £110,000 - a ten per cent rise in the second year of their new contracts - and yet the Department of Health today has said that 1200 British medical graduates are unlikely to get training places in the UK this year. So there's almost certainly an economic rent arising from the triple protectionism of the NHS, the GMC and the BMA.

Hopefully at least this and the national bargaining for other staff would end with localization so that those parts of the country where it is difficult (read near impossible) to live on a Grade D nurse's salary can offer decent packages, but I haven't even touched on the protectionism of NICE, NHS drugs contracts, the drugs patenting system as a whole and the stifling bureaucracy surrounding anything innovative by way of ways of treating and so on.

None of this is to say that the "private sector" is necessarily the best solution in all areas. I'm against monopoly and public protectionism, not public service per se - after all the nature of the hippocratic oath is dedication to a public service. And the worst of all worlds could be one in which there's a certain amount of public funding up for grabs by private operators who have no incentive to innovate and be really efficient - that's simply transferring the protectionism to shareholders.

No, the problem is really one of how to ensure that everyone would have the ability to pay for their choice of provider. And I return to the Citizen's Income and the systemic economic imbalances that concentrate unearned wealth, or more correctly the wealth created by the community as a whole rather than by an individual's or firm's own innovation, investment and labour. I'm not a good one to talk on health issues - the last psychiatrist I saw reckoned my attitude to my developing diabetes was one of the "slow suicide". But I'll bet if I was faced with a bigger insurance premium or buying more fruit and veg instead of eating crap, I'd probably plump for the healthier lifestyle to minimize my insurance. Redistribute the common wealth properly to everyone as is our birthright and we have these choices.

Just look at Nuffield Hospitals Group right now - it's buying up private gym firms like Cannons (effectively turning private companies into social enterprises of course). Why would it be doing that? Because BUPA really wants its members to live healthily, not to call on them when they're in a preventable medical condition. I'm also sure that insurance firms are likely to be better, with safeguards against abuse, at sifting out bad clinicians; it's in their interests to do so. Their actuaries will be poring over doctors' success and failure rates to ensure they're not granting accreditation to people whose patients inexplicably drop like flies, or who routinely over-diagnose or over-prescribe. Nor would they be likely to allow their members to spend a single night in a hospital where they're more likely to come out with a worse illness with attendant higher costs, if they come out at all.

One model I've looked at, for example, would see a GP as a "personal health adviser" who advises their clients through the maze of choosing lifestyles, treatments, clinicians and therapies that will be efficient and varied. I'd like to see surgical firms organized more like barristers' chambers with large national firms specializing in different clinical areas ready to hot-foot it to a treatment centre several hours away at the drop of a hat to do an op in their specialism rather than a patient wait on a list for the local, perhaps only semi-specialist to have a free spot in a tight general surgery list. You could have a choice of a large general hospital sized treatment centre thirty miles away in the local city, or a ten bed rural town cottage hospital with one theatre with the same surgeon prepared to visit either for the right fee but with different approaches to aftercare based on different needs of patients and families.

Sure, there's still a role for some kind of local democratic input - most especially in procuring facilities and staff for emergency medicine, but even their funding options could be varied - with some able to provide that by engaging local charitable resources, others perhaps by raising a local tax of some kind, perhaps even through planning obligations, who knows. But one thing is certain: these options and innovations are unlikely to appear when the system is riddled with protectionism and political game-play.