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Alexis Rowell, of the Belsize Lib Dems blog, gets a fabulous write-up from Peter Stothard of the TLS:

A worm's eye for politics

After decades of living in North London, meeting politicians (too many) and writing about politics (too much), I'm beginning to feel for the first time that I'm genuinely represented by one.

No, not Glenda Jackson, the movie-star-turned-axe-face-of-the-old Left and my veteran Member of Parliament here in the Hampstead part of Camden. There is still some way to go before the House of Commons itself has anything for me.

No, not Lord Adonis of Camden Town, the former Andrew Adonis, the closest thing to a natural TLS-reader in the Blair and Brown governments. His choice of title for his appointed place in the Upper House of our legislature, while pleasing, does not make him strictly any representative of mine.

I do, however, have a local Councillor. He is called Alexis Rowell, a Liberal Democrat, an environmental campaigner, a blogger, a man with a wormery in his garden and good advice on electricity suppliers - and, mirabile dictu, he deals with his constituents about what is happening in the streets around us.

He genuinely represents.

Read the rest at The Times - nice one Alexis!

This story caught my eye. It seems a bit bonkers really. Though I know the law is changing is respect of standing for election, but it seems you can judge your fellow citizens at 19 but not yet represent them:

New JP, 19, youngest in country: A 19-year-old law student has become the country's youngest magistrate, the government has confirmed.

Fair play to Miss Tate - if you can, do - it just strikes me as odd that you can get selected by a "local advisory committee" but not elected by a plebiscite.

On the subject though of making the bench more representative of the community, I think this is a fudge personally. A year ago I took a friend to his speeding hearing at Rugby magistrates and was sitting there all day waiting for his case to be heard, despite arriving well before the doors even opened as we were advised to do in order to get dealt with early. Apparently, if he had taken a brief along, he would have been seen earlier. Frankly I don't think it's relevant - if they tell you it's first come first served they should stick to that. Just because someone might be paying for representation shouldn't mean the rest of us have to wait all day.

All day there were whole families trooping in and out and hanging around. It was clearly a day out for people who wouldn't or couldn't pay their child support or who had breached their DTTO. It all made me feel that the time and money that processing these sorts of cases through the magistrates courts was certainly not in the community's interest. Most were clearly "regulars". Well known to the court staff and the duty solicitors.

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!

Last week, reminds The DrugSpot: Anniversary of the Opium Exclusion Act, was an anniversary (though not quite centenary yet) of the start of one of the most destructive and baseless wars the world has seen - the "War on Drugs".

I recommend anyone with a vague interest in it to go read the blog article. It highlights how prohibition was, by turns, a muddled policy led by a few evangelical campaigners (think the Temperance Movement in the UK) on moral rather than medical grounds, a racist policy aimed at people of far eastern origin where missioinaries were trying to do that imperial thing "civilise them", and a measure sponsored by the vested interests of the pharmaceutical companies (recall for example that Merck acquired a patent on MDMA - Ecstasy to you and me - as early as 1912).

It highlights that the principal effect of prohibition was a flight to using as yet uncontrolled substances like morphine and heroin and the birth of the junkies' love affair with far more dangerous forms of what had been relatively benign narcotics.

And the cost of that continuing "war" in money and lives is a tragedy of enormous scale. Do we have time to call a truce before it reaches that centenary?

Did anyone see "Tory! Tory! Tory!" last night on BBC4? Fascinating, and challenging. I've often agreed with things from the Institute of Economic Affairs, as they have always seemed to be on the correct side of Libertarian to me. And indeed recently they published a very good pamphlet promoting Land Value Tax by a chap called Fred Harrison which definitely got me excited! But I had no idea that they were quite as instrumental as last night's program portrayed in the "creation" of Thatcherism.

It turns out I am a monetarist. And that I rather expect that there's a big difference between Hayek's and Friedman's monetarism and what became diluted and corrupted by governments, including Thatcher's and Reagan's. Just as there is between Keynes's exhortation for governments to ensure the sufficiency of effective demand (enough money in the system to consume the products of that economy) and the application of that by governments of the fifties to seventies in the UK spending money like water to satisfy labour demands and the like.

Though these two economic "camps" are portrayed often as diametrically opposed, I'm not so sure they are now. I always thought that Keynes wanted restraint in government money creation, such that over time it would be hovering around the capacity of the economy. Exceeding that capacity over a prolonged period would indeed be inflationary and he knew it. So you either need to be careful about how much you want to spend into the economy or find a mechanism to regulate it so you can withdraw some if things overheat.

On the other hand the monetarists' political acolytes have also got it horribly wrong. They have never really restrained money supply, just privatised it. Sure, there are only about £50bn in notes and coins circulating in the UK economy, but well over a trillion pounds of debt created money simply willed into existence by the banking system. It is kept approximately in synch with economic activity through varying interest rates, but it's always increasing - have a look at "M4" money supply. Remember how the Tories kept abandoning one or other monetary measures because they could never hold them properly in check - it was because they were doing so "second hand" as it were, via interest rates, and not by some agency directly manipulating the amount of real money in circulation.

How do we know they got it wrong? Well Friedman himself has consistently railed against "fiat money". He has recognised for a long time that this money created by private debt, as most (97%) of ours is, is itself inflationary. And nowadays he acknowledges that he was, in any case, too prescriptive about money supply - presumably acknowledging there is some room for over or under-shooting the monetary base depending on circumstances so long as they line up with economic activity in the longer term.

But the biggest thing I took away from last night's program was that it all started with a small group of outsiders prepared to put twenty odd years into the development of the theory and lobbying for it. How influential were Friedman and Hayek before all this? I don't know - I'm not clear on the timeline. I'm not likely to be getting a Nobel Economics prize any time soon for sure - you tend to have to be an economist for that.

But if we can reconcile Keynes and Friedman (if not, quite, Hayek), promote the careful replacement of fiat money with harder money (if not a return to the sort of specie money Friedman advocates) created for our benefit and not as private debt, and promote a system, such as land value tax, to act as a pressure release if one is needed, we can produce a radical economics that promotes sustainable development, levels many commercial and social playing fields (because it takes the extraordinary power of money creation away from private interests) and solves some of the pressing problems of highly indebted poor countries, the demographic time bomb in the west and the resultant pensions crisis, and reduce the need for a headlong rush for growth just to pay off our debts.

And then I saw this and realised that I cannot be a Tory, just yet anyway.