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So, Patricia Hewitt says that tax on alcohol should rise to reduce binge drinking among teenagers.

Jeez - my Puilly Fume is already approaching ten quid a bottle. Why should I have to pay for matron Hewitt's inability to enforce the law? Or to educate people properly about drink and drugs?

It is illegal already for the kids she's talking about to buy booze. But at least it is licensed and there are people who care about their livelihood and liberty enough to help enforce that law when Vicky Pollard comes in to the shop wanting to buy some.

It is also illegal for those kids, and the rest of us, to buy heroin, cannabis or ecstasy. But for the price of two coconut and coal-tar flavoured rum slushes one could, if one wanted, buy a wrap of heroin that will leave you blotto for hours, or several days' worth of cannabis, or several weekends worth of ecstasy.

Face it Pat, you're losing this battle, and imposing penalties on everyone else who does indulge sensibly in oder to try to put off the most determined teenagers is just a nasty, mean minded approach that is doomed to failure.

Prohibition doesn't work. Tax was the weapon of prohibition. The reason Al Capone was famously done on tax evasion rather than anything else he could have been done for is that that is the way prohibition was enforced - you didn't actually ban alcohol, you put a tax regime on it that meant nobody could actually pay the taxes and were therefore breaking the law. It's the same with nacrcotics prohibition in the US too. Because so many drugs do have proper uses under medical direction you don't actually want to ban them completely, but make it so that nobody other than the few people the government licenses to produce and sell them can actually trade legally.

It doesn't work. It's illiberal. It's protectionist. It's patronising.

Maybe it's just the ethos of the new era in Britain under the Son of the Manse, and the Tories running hard to keep up with what is being seen as a neo-puritanism stalking the country, but there's been a lot of talk of new or increased restrictions on things like drugs and drink. Most recently of course we've had the outbursts by Chief Constable Peter Fahy of the Cheshire Constabulary wanting to  prevent "lesser adults", prospective alcohoodies, whose misfortune is merely to be older than we allow them to vote, to fight for Queen and country (or at least Tony Blair and George Bush), to serve in most elected offices, and to stand trial as adults, but less than the arbitrary age of twenty one from consuming the demon drink for fear that they all turn into murderous fiends.

I am a Libertarian and a Christian, and I want to share with you a favourite little passage from the good book that I believe sums up the libertarian response to such nonsense, and shows that it is inconsistent to see "things", substances and the like, as the culprits such that we should not be allowed to touch them. Temperance once meant not abstinence, forced or otherwise, but self-restraint, personal responsibility, and it's just plain wrong to blame the inanimate for what state people get into by abusing them.

From the Gospel of Mark, chapter 7:

18 And [Jesus] saith unto them, Are ye so without understanding also? Do ye not perceive, that whatsoever thing from without entereth into the man, it cannot defile him; 19 Because it entereth not into his heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the draught, purging all meats? 20 And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man. 21 For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, 22 Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: 23 All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.

Christianity is not a po-faced, prohibitionary puritanism, but a way of life that emphasizes the virtue of true Temperance. I wish I could find it now, but I once read one of the works of the Cictercian monk and philosopher Thomas Merton in which in one passage he explains that things like alcohol and tobacco (he might feel differently today about the latter of course but let's suggest he might choose cannabis today) are both gifts and temptations. As a gift, alcohol can be enjoyed in moderation for its ability to lubricate social interactions, but as a temptation can be used to blot out one's other problems or to remove the inhibitions that prevent us doing harm to others or ourselves.

It's up to us all to learn, if we want to use such things, how to do so responsibly, to use them as gifts, and without endangering others or making complete fools of ourselves, abusing them as temptations. We cannot achieve that by banning them, or keeping them from young enquiring minds.

Depending on what side of a fractious political divide in Oxfordshire you sit, news that the South East Regional Plan as amended by Whitehall will next week recommend a review of Oxford's Green Belt and the development of 20% more new housing over the next twenty years than proposed at Oxfordshire Structure Plan level will be seen as victory or worst case scenario.

Whilst some, such as City Council leader John Goddard quoted in the linked Oxford Mail article, point out that we are looking at developing just 1% of Oxford's Green Belt, the true story is that the total number of new housing units demanded of the county in the next twenty years is more than an entire new city the size of Oxford. The fact that it appears that most of the additional units recommended by Whitehall planners seem to be destined for edge of city development, the grandiosely termed "Central Oxfordshire Sub-region", suggests that the city itself will be required to grow by at least 20% in twenty years. A handful of land owners will each trouser nine figure windfalls for their land currently worth about one hundredth of that.

The existing Green Belt, the nation's second oldest only after London, took forty years to agree - talks began in the late 1950s and the boundaries were only finally fixed in the Oxford Local Plan 1997. So, unless the process of redrawing the Green Belt boundaries is going to be railroaded through with all the attendant risks of riding roughshod over dissenting opinion, it seems highly unlikely that development would be able to start on any of these major sites inside a decade at the very least.

Now, I'm no great fan of the protectionist Green Belt policy in the first place - it has just as often worked as a "choker" than a belt. In Oxford's case, its main raison d'être was to preserve the historic character of Oxford. And I have often observed that the real, human historic character of Oxford, of "poor scholars and clerks" here to study and the attendant infrastructure that makes the city's very purpose in the world possible, is itself compromised by making housing unaffordable to those very people. I have also consistently pointed out that fulfilling even the government's latest plans for three million new homes over twenty odd years would require just over half of one per cent of England's non-urban land so this is not a NIMBY or "BANANA" anti-development rant.

Mistaken interpretation of needs data.

But I do rail against inappropriate development wherever it surfaces. And I completely believe that this "Central Oxfordshire Sub-regional Growth Zone" is inappropriate. And unnecessary. For a start the housing need data on which it was largely based are just plain wrong - well, more wrongly interpreted I suppose. In 2004 Fordham Research produced a Housing Needs Assessment for Oxford City Council that concluded that 750 units of additional affordable housing were required every year for the next decade just to stand still. Delivering such a requirement with the current maximum affordable-market priced housing quota of 50:50 would imply development of 15,000 new homes in a decade, which is clearly not even in the thinking either of the City Council's planners nor of the South East Regional Plan, even as amended by Whitehall.

However, that figure of 750 affordable units is naively misleading at best, utterly mistaken at worst. For 75% of all the people represented by that annual need are currently housed in the city. And whilst some of them are in unsuitable or overcrowded housing and by definition all of them in unaffordable housing for their incomes, it equates to an overcrowding rate of around 2% of households. Whilst anything up to about 40% of housing if it follows the national pattern is underoccupied. The naive extrapolation from these figures, which is what has been pushed as the "growth zone" option, is that most of that 750 a year requirement can only be met by creating net additional housing units as near as possible to that 750 figure. But, since 75% of them are already housed in the city, such a solution in reality means not merely housing those in housing need in the city, but growth of the "greater Oxford" population to the tune of 20% in twenty years.

No consensus on large scale city growth.

And the one thing we have not had is a debate about whether such overall growth is justified or necessary. In fact, the whole debate, driven as it has been by high housing costs for people already in the city mainly (and quite rightly in many ways - for that is the pressing problem) has not really discussed growth so much as an imperative to get housing costs down for existing residents. For a start, such a rapid rate of growth is likely to cause all sorts of demographic and other social problems that cannot be planned for through mere spatial planning policies. Oxford does have a shortfall of resident working age population compared with the number of jobs in the city, but in the context of a county town in a predominantly rural county that is actually a good thing. If we suddenly meet the employment requirement within the city or on its near borders we risk the economy of the rest of the county insofar as it relies on people earning money in Oxford itself and thence able to support the smaller county towns and villages.

The cost of urban extensions.

Further, concentration on developing virgin edge of town land and new additional housing abandons existing housing to its inexorable decline. One of the most naive, I feel, enthusiasts for the Whitehall changes to the South East Plan, Labour City Councillor Antonia Bance, who positively whooped with joy in her blog the other day when the news broke, represents a ward, Rose Hill, that illustrates quite nicely both the pitfalls of the growth plan and the better solution to the housing need. Tagging new estates onto the edge of the city is no great answer. As Rose Hill shows, such marginal land housing tends to be taken up by the least well off, people who actually could do with being closer, not further, from centers of employment and social interaction.

One can only imagine the potential effects of plonking another 3,500 homes on the edge of the most deprived wards in the city. Optimists will say that it will drag up the fortunes of its neighbours, making it more likely that that whole swathe of post-war development on the edge of the city will attract the infrastructure is still needs to become prosperous and desirable. But the history of such developments tends to prove the pessimist more likely to be right. Indeed, the same was said of what is now Northfield Brook ward - that the new mixed tenure housing of the eighties and nineties in Greater Leys would pull the whole area of the Leys up out of the doldrums, yet just a few years on and Northfield Brook has made its mark as being the newest most deprived area of the city. At the very least, it proves just how long it takes to create new, vibrant communities - a generation and more.

Redeveloping existing urban areas the better alternative.

So, if we are likely to take a decade to get started on these new developments if everything goes well in the Green Belt review, and in the process negate the very ethos of Green Belt - that it should be as permanent as possible and not seen as a stock of land on which the city can call every few years, we should also make attempts to look at other mechanisms for delivering more affordable and more appropriate living spaces for the current needs of the city first and foremost before we plan for topsy growth.

And here, Antonia's ward also proves that it can be done. The Rose Hill redevelopment program proves that where there were 138 housing units of very low, almost derelict, standard you can provide 238 brand spanking new homes better matched to today's household composition and importantly energy needs. Of course I believe it's been badly handled - handing over nearly half of them all to private sale is the equivalent of enclosing half of what up till now has been land held in trust by the council for the people off Oxford, and the resulting housing will not be what it could have been in terms of 21st century energy efficiency. But the principle is correct - and all over Oxford we have lots of twentieth century housing that is not now, or will soon not be, appropriate or efficient in an era of high energy costs.

What Fordham showed was that we need to make around 600 existing units of housing more affordable each year, plus plan for more modest demand of about 180 units a year for people who aspire to move into the city. We can achieve this without wholesale estate building, by redeveloping existing estates (including the private inter-war housing estates in the inner suburbs), But to do that we need to transfer our property tax from taxing both land and buildings to taxing just land. This will relatively penalize underoccupancy and encourage redevelopment of areas that are below the optimal density. In the process more of our existing housing land will be equipped for that low energy 21st century living. And the additional units that can be incorporated by increasing densities will mean that newcomers slot into existing mature communities.

LVT the 21st century radical key to urban regeneration/redevelopment.

Much of Oxford's development in the nineteenth century was the work of Liberals and Radicals through vehicles such as the National Freehold Land Company which, amongst other things, was a mechanism for enfranchisement of the working classes before universal suffrage was enacted. It was a model for social change built, if you pardon the pun, on the idea that land ownership was what made a person free and give them full citizenship. What we need now (and what more fitting a tribute to the recently late Brian Hodgson who a few years ago got the county to investigate LVT's effects on a part of the city) is for that Liberal-Progressive coalition at the Town Hall to demand the right to try out this approach which has recently been making such a vision as I have given here possible in cities across the United States, such as Philadelphia and Harrisburgh, before the bulldoizers move into South and West Oxfordshire and land owners pocket several hundred millions of pounds at our expense.

Finally, if none of that works, I will consider supporting some edge of town new development if we find a way of using the land owners' unearned increment from their rent seeking to create a light rail service from Shipton right round to the Cowley works, taking in all the proposed new estates and employment growth areas such as the Oxford Science Park and the Oxford Business Park. Only with such a piece of infrastructure will these potential new estates be anything other than marginal. At the moment it takes over an hour to get by bus from Kidlington round to Headington for example. Such travel times are unacceptable for estates that would be intended to supply housing for workers in the main employment areas of the city.

Congratulations, Rose Hill (“Housing Scheme Wins Approval”, p5, 8th Nov); maybe soon you’ll begin to see improvements.

But Alex Hollingsworth claiming we are “getting £20m of affordable housing for £1m” displays the sort of muddled accounting that makes one wonder whether he understands what he is spinning. The city, up till now, owns that land on behalf of the people of Oxford. They are giving all that land away.

The half that is going to be private housing is lost forever to this common wealth. That is the true price of this development – maybe £10m of community owned land being privatised, enclosed it used to be called, in order to pay the build costs of maybe another £10m on the redeveloped affordable housing. And the city is pumping in a million pounds of cash as a sweetener on top of that! The council may think that’s a good deal – but land traders and other local authorities think it’s a “steal” for the developer.

The Orlits saga has rumbled on for so long, so I’m sure nobody wants it delayed longer, but other mechanisms may have delivered better value, permanent affordability and community ownership. But it would be more accurate to say that OCHA is gaining about £10m of affordable housing, plus land, for a giveaway of about £11m in public assets…forever. As I say, congratulations!

I have no idea what problems Redruth faces with its "yoof". I have no problem with the police taking tough action to end the sort of disturbances that have been seen as the "posh kids" descend on places like Rock for the summer. But a broad brush, "voluntary" (but "we can make orders if parents do not co-operate") curfew is arbitrary and collective punishment affecting innocent and guilty alike.

Clearly "liberal" Cornwall has a different version of the Human Rights Act down there. Are we to assume that the black in the Cornish nationalist flag commemorates the death of freedom?

And now we hear that nine out of ten parents nationwide - the mainland as well as Cornwall that is - would welcome a curfew. That's okay then.

In a liberal world view government exists to temper the tyranny of the majority rather than allow it adversely to affect the lives of a minority. I suppose at least children, whether domesticated or feral, grow out of their minority status, so are only temporarily affected. That's okay then.

What a fekking nonsense. I hear one of our MPs for the People's Democratic Enclave of Cornwall actually supports this idea, not only that but the person concerned has a portfolio that deals with similar such issues nationwide. That's okay then.

In what world view is a curfew, an arbitrary and collective punishment, "liberal"?

On the plus side, all those children will be safely at home in time to see all the post-watershed violence, sex and sweariness on TV. That's okay then!