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I don't normally get to see the Daily Politics, but I'm on a week off at the moment and saw today's after PMQs. There was Yvette Cooper being grilled by Brillo who was asking whether Britons' status as the most personally indebted population in the G7 was anything to do with our current travails.

She kept avoiding the point, as usual, insisting that it was an American thing from which we had got infected. For your benefit, Yvette, you lying cow, here's what Eddie George said just eighteen months ago:

"In the environment of global economic weakness at the beginning of this decade... external demand was declining and related to that, business investment was declining," he said. "We only had two alternative ways of sustaining demand and keeping the economy moving forward - one was public spending and the other was consumption.

"We knew that we were having to stimulate consumer spending. We knew we had pushed it up to levels which couldn't possibly be sustained into the medium and long term. But for the time being, if we had not done that, the UK economy would have gone into recession just as the United States did."

He said he was "very conscious" that stimulating consumer demand could give rise to problems in the future. "My legacy to the MPC, if you like, has been 'sort that out'," he said. Under Lord George's governorship, rates were slashed from 6 per cent in 2001 to 3.5 per cent in 2003, pushing house price inflation above 25 per cent and high street spending growth to its highest since the late-Eighties boom.

I hardly expect tomorrow's papers to cover the news of Mrs Balls's resignation - but she is deliberately misleading the public and that would be the honourable course. I understand that you can only really begin to tackle a problem if you admit to it in the first place. Eddie George did; it's time this government did too. Disgusting, lying bunch of shit-crocks.

Just what did she study at Balliol, Harvard and the LSE?  Does she really believe we will just think she is stupid or mistaken?  What the fuck have the people of Pontefract done to deserve her?

I rarely post about computer toys and goodies, but I have been using ecto as my blogging client for ages now and I just suddenly wondered tonight how things were going with the upgrade to ecto version 3. And lo and behold I found that this very day Adriaan has put out an alpha release of version 3 for Mac OS X.

I'm a techie, and I don't mind playing around with alpha software, though it's not for everyone, but I've downloaded it and at first site it looks great. A real improvement on an already very good tool. And this is the first post with ecto 3.

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The Register reports that Lambeth Borough Council is to use lie detectors to finger benefit cheats. And apparently it can all be done on the phone...

By John Oates
Published Tuesday 11th September 2007 13:15 GMT

Lambeth Council has done a deal with KPMG to use voice recognition software to finger cheats contacting call centres to sort out benefits.
Everyone contacting the centre will be told they are being scanned and will then be asked 19 questions. KPMG's "Voice Risk Analysis" will then finger voices it considers suspicious. The pilot is being paid for by the Department of Work and Pensions.

Call centres - stressful enough!
Originally uploaded by Mark Pugh

The technology supposedly works by detecting "micro-tremors" which, we are told, indicate not only stress but also "when stress is generated by an attempt to deceive".

The trouble is, as the Register also points out, calling a call centre is also stressful in itself. And when it's probably got something to do with your imminent eviction from home because someone at the council has not processed your Housing Benefit claim, or a threat about court proceedings because they've not registered your Council Tax Benefit status or something, it's hard to see how one type of "micro-tremor" will be differentiated from another.

Also, there are lies, little white ones, and great big cheating whoppers.  Is a claimant committing the venial sin of claiming to have sent all the documentation "last week" when really they mean yesterday, in a panic, when they realised the urgency, going to be "cuaght" alongside the outright bare faced liar claiming something they've no right to?

Nobody likes a benefit cheat. One way of preventing benefit cheats entirely is to adopt a universal benefit - the Citizen's Income - that wont require all this bureaucratic paper chasing. But this seems to be more than anything the creep of technology driven surveillance. Will callers be informed when the council officer they are speaking to is, in fact, lying, stalling or otherwise palming the genuine claimants off with a "story"?

Whilst I accept that some of the Clarkson protestors objected because they think he’s a boor with a (deliciously) “un-PC” sense of humour, the main concern appeared to be his supposed environmental record.

In this respect, it’s the environmentalist lobby (I rather like Clarkson’s own word, “eco-mental”), that has it dangerously wrong. It is not the search for quality, for fun, for pushing technology to the limits that is the environmental culprit. But the economic system that continually forces more vehicles on the roads travelling further and further.

The traditional green response to “too many cars” seems to be to get people on buses, bikes, anything but cars. And on a small, localised scale, this may be superficially right. Congestion makes our towns seem as if they are choking.

Rather, we must ask why people need to hurtle around day after day and resolve pressures that will add to this. They are pretty fundamental economic questions.

For example, we are, in the developed world, the wealthiest we have ever been. And yet we are about to tell people they need to work for an extra five years at least to be able to afford to retire. That’s an additional 10%+ of rush hour traffic.

The amount of debt-money swilling around our system means that for much of our working lives we work two days a week for the government and one for the bankers, before we ever get to work for our own financial security. Solve that and we could finally see those 30-year old predictions of life in the 21st century, of 70% leisure time and such like, fulfilled.

Each working person in the country is permanently slaving to pay the interest on around £50,000 of systemic debt. Not necessarily their debt, but the trickle-down effects of corporate and government borrowing on top of personal borrowing.

25% of road haulage is just keeping the haulage industry moving – fuel, parts etc. 30% of all transport is shunting food ever increasing distances around the planet. Raw cotton, subsidised in the US, is flown to China and India before arriving here as £2 tee-shirts – all barmy, with diminishing returns and frightening consequences.

Take all that unnecessary debt-fuelled traffic off the roads and we’ll find we can respect the planet and still have fun with Ferraris.

There was a flutter of interest in the Guardian and Times today (interesting to see the difference in emphasis) about some ideas being put forward to the Tories' Tax Commission by the Bow Group. The report in PDF format is available alongside this discussion on ConservativeHome. Not surprisingly, since the press release promoted this aspect in particular, discussion has focussed on what the author describes as "land value tax". But the report as a whole has a whole load in it, from raising income tax thresholds to £11,000 and imposing a flat rate tax of 38% on all earnings above that, to restricting pensions contributions relief to 38% but on just £4,400 worth of pensions contributions a year, from what I can work out. Go read it - it's interesting, considering we Lib Dems are also in the process of making tax policy.

However, despite all the furore over the "land value tax" proposal, it should be noted that it is not, in fact, a Land Value Tax, and it is certainly not intended to be a step towards Henry George's "Single Tax". A hard-core Georgist like myself of course could simplify even Mr Wadworth's attempt to simplify the gargantuan tax system into just one point - replace all other taxes with taxes on land and resource use! You pay for what you take, not what you make.

But in particular the Bow Group proposals are for a straightforward flat property tax, as Tim Worstall points out. That is fundamentally different from a Land Value Tax, in which only the value of a site is taxed, and not the value of any buildings or any other improvements built on that site.

The arguments Mark Wadsworth makes for efficient use of land are far less evident in a straightforward property tax on the whole combined value of land and buildings. It does nothing to actually encourage efficient development - improving a property will result in a higher tax bill as the whole value is taxed. With a Land Value Tax you can make the most efficient permitted use of land without affecting the tax liability of the whole site. One house might pay £20,000 a year on the same site as ten flats each paying £1,000 a year for example.

But the document covers a whole lot more than this that would have been eminently worth reporting - the flat tax of 38%, the raising of thresholds to £11,000, changes to child benefit, pensions provision and many others. I welcome the fact that the Bow Group chose to promote the discussion on property taxes, I think, and if they want a proper LVT will help in whatever way I can, but it's not currently based on Henry George's/David Ricardo's ideas on economic rent and cannot properly be called a Land Value Tax.

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