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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.

Just by way of another brief interlude in my self-imposed blog silence while I am upgrading software and design, I wanted to mention the wonderful speech I heard yesterday. One of the nice things about being one of the university's governors is that I can get to choose to go to pretty well any number of graduation ceremonies. I don't avail myself of the privilege terribly often, but I went yesterday evening to the graduation ceremony for most of our law students.

The honorary graduand was Clive Stafford Smith, the British born US based death-row lawyer and campaigner against the death penalty and torture and all things Guantanamo. As I understand it, he is, like many passionate campaigners, if not many lawyers, not terribly well remunerated, to put it mildly. His clients tend, almost by definition, to be amongst the poorest, often least educated in US society, and they have no legal right to representation once the sentence is handed down. There's not a lot of money in death penalty appeals or sticking up for the disappeared in America's network of secret GTMO-like prisons.

So he was appealing for these bright young starry eyed graduates to come and be exploited by his charity, Reprieve, for a few months, or more precisely, their parents to fund them while they are there. He promised an experience the like of which they are unlikely to find in a whole career at the Old Bailey or the corridors of corporate power. While they may dream of millionaire partnerships at Clifford Chance, he does it because it is fun! You cannot imagine the fantastic feeling you get, he says, when you "whip George Bush's ass in the Supreme Court" and defeat the world's only super-power in their own courts.

And when you think about it, how do we measure success? Is it the money? Or perhaps the satisfaction of a David victorious against Goliath.

Yesterday in my piece about the Policy Exchange think tank's suggestion that Oxford and Cambridge ought to be allowed to expand to as many as a million homes I mentioned the work "Car Free Cities" by J H Crawford which I came across a decade ago when looking into Oxford's last Local Plan. In it he postulates a city of a million people with a topology and transport system that means that any two addresses anywhere in the city would be no more than 35 minutes apart by foot and rapid transit system.

The city is made up of many districts of about 12,000 population like strings of beads along one of three overlapping rapid transport loops. Every home is less than five minutes walk from open countryside. And whilst the densities within the districts are amongst the highest on earth (similar to Seoul, for example, although nothing is more than three stories in the reference designs) only 20% of the total 100 sq mile (10 by 10) area is developed at all, leaving all the areas between the beads and strings as open countryside or managed parkland or whatever. Overall then the density is not a lot greater than Oxford's current density and less than the average of Greater London as a whole.

So, for a bit of fun, I superimposed Crawford's one million population city topology onto the ten by ten mile square centered on the current centre of Oxford. Now sure, a million population is only probably about a third of the million households the Policy Exchange report was ultimately suggesting, but if anyone says to you that it would simply be impossible to imagine a million people in the area between Wheatley and Eynsham, Littlemore and Kidlington, you can say you have seen how, and with no traffic and only 20% of the land developed to boot! It would currently take me over an hour to get from the end of one of these loops to about a third of the way out the adjacent one, incidentally.

Now nobody is suggesting that we do this, least of all me. I'm just demonstrating that it would be possible, indeed whilst making more of the green belt actually because all the space would be accessible in minutes rather than in half an hour in the car, it would reach right into everyone's neighbourhood - with open country no more than 400m from every front door. Fitting such principles into existing cities is of course much more difficult than an academic sitting at a drawing board with a blank sheet of paper. They need not be loops for example but twelve strings with termini at the end of each. It would increase average journey times but not the overall maximum of 35 minutes door to door and could be fitted in along existing radial roads as a series of villages.

Incidentally, the picture on the right here shows some of the housing in the ward with the highest density in England, at least that I can find - a "middle level super output area" either side of the Cromwell Rd in Kensington & Chelsea.  I notice from Net House Prices that there have been 267 £1m plus residential property transactions in the last eight years in this post code area.  This is getting pretty close to the densities that would be required in a city such as that in Crawford's book.  It's hardly slum clearance stuff is it!

See, some people think I am over the top saying that supporters of drugs prohibition are complicit in the murder of the victims of the illegal drugs trade, but I'm not the only one...

Are you a death enabler?

"If you support drug prohibition policies that make black market drug sales profitable, then you are encouraging violent behavior by criminals and supporting the funding of terrorists. This directly results in the deaths of thousands.

You are a death enabler.

If you support drug war enforcement..."[continues]