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Having succumbed to this fad for petitioning Tony Blair over anything from the size of underpants available in Marks & Spencer to whether we renew our nuclear strike capability, I got the news that my petition had been accepted - so please - read it, at the address below, and if you like it, sign it. Let's see how far it can get. It's not as sexy as not banning fox hunting obviously, but many times as important though I do say so myself.

Your petition has been approved by the Number 10 web team, and is now available on the Number 10 website at the following address:

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/AbolishDCLG/

Your petition reads:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Abolish the
Department of Communities and Local Government and allow local
people to decide in consultation with the local representatives
they elect to do the job how best to run their localities

Local government has been subject to far too much tinkering,
target setting and control by central government for decades.
If government is by the consent of the governed then surely
that consent, for local affairs, is given in elections to local
councillors. Instead of handing down a menu from on high of
how local government will be permitted to operate, allow real
innovation and local consultation to decide how to run and fund
their local communities.

Thanks for submitting your petition.

-- the ePetitions team

The Telegraph is reporting that the US backs Lord Ashdown for Afghanistan role:

US backs Lord Ashdown for Afghanistan role
By Tom Coghlan in Kabul and David Blair, Diplomatic Correspondent
Last Updated: 12:24am GMT 04/12/2007

The United States is backing Lord Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader who served as the international community's "high representative" in Bosnia, to be the United Nations new "super envoy" to Afghanistan. The proposed role would see Lord Ashdown being charged with uniting the efforts of both Nato and the UN in Afghanistan. Nato officials are understood to support his candidacy for a job with exceptional power.

Can anyone doubt the talents of the man, or the esteem in which he is held around the world? But, given the history of foreign intervention in Afghanistan, could this one be a bridge too far for any international statesman? It's a pity he's probably already too old to be in the running for General Secretary after Ban Ki Moon has done two terms though.

Mr Angry Mkinskey writes the the Telegraph: Town hall tyrants waging class war

So, in the twisted mindset of Richmond's rulers, a local resident wanting to park his own car outside his own house in his own street has been transformed into a nasty polluter who should be heavily penalised for his selfish irresponsibility.

I'm sorry. Whose street? In my opinion streets are for the occasional Fortnum's delivery van and young lads in shorts and blazers kicking a football around after the bus drops them off from school (probably St Paul's). Who the hell said that cars should take up all of our public space in our residential neighbourhoods in the way they have? If you want to park a car outside your house, buy one with a drive (a house that is). Those without drives were clearly designed for committed public transport users.

Of course this has nothing to do with pollution...:) But I wonder if there is a correlation between those households with gas guzzlers and those with two or more vehicles.

Elsewhere in the Telegraph, Alan Cochrane obviously hasn't even read the rest of the newspaper he is writing in:

Yesterday's news that Richmond upon Thames borough council is to slap a £300 annual parking charge on 4x4s, instead of the £200 for "normal" cars, is unwelcome but unsurprising.

If what he says is correct, that his glorious British Land Rover Discovery creates less CO2 emissions than the Ford Mondeo, then he'll be in the same group or lower than the Mondeo. From what I can fathom, this is not a crusade against 4x4s per se but based on their emissions. It just so happens that, possibly unlike his glorious Britsh Land Rover, those pesky foreign 4x4s like Porsche Cayennes also happen usually to be the biggest emitters.

On congestion in general though, here in Oxford some like to make out that we are gridlocked most of the time - they must never have seen the Hanger Lane Gyratory, poor provincial things - but I happened to be waiting for a bus to head into town around the outbound peak times the other day and we have some rolling roadworks at the bottom of my street with traffic lights. One crammed bus with forty something people went outbound through the lights and twelve cars with one person in each. Three minutes later when the lights next changed another twelve cars got through. When I eventually got my bus going the other way, I think I counted seventy eight one occupant cars waiting to get through the other way as we passed the waiting line before I gave up counting (the queue went on far beyond my bus's turning). That's something like fifteen minutes worth of wait. Or two bus loads.

It's scary to think that twenty years have flown by since Big Bang. When I was doing my A levels a couple of years before I had ignored all the advice of my tutors and applied for the wrong Oxford college (New) in the wrong year (their first year taking women) to do the wrong subject (English) and didn't get past the entrance exam (in the last year people a whole year older than me were allowed to take it after their A levels).

I got offered a place at Durham in the New Year, however, but not satisfied with the idea of living on a student grant (remember them?) I tried to get what used to be called "industrial sponsorship". Doing English, the only people who would entertain the idea were Marks & Spencer's graduate recruitment program, and then only to be a Human Remains officer, so I gave up on that idea.

It was the year of a young copper trader who made the headlines on the London commodities exchanges having become a multi-millionaire at 21 and I spent the whole of my summer term not reading the Aeneid, not caring about the Paston letters and not revising W B Yeats, but writing to any firm in the city I could find an address for asking for a job. I so wanted a wardrobe of chalk-stripe suits and red braces!

I wrote to money brokers, futures trading firms, lots of commodities brokers of course, and one Stock Exchange firm (already the Stock Exchange seemed quite an old fusty nineteenth century institution and not really the place for a young turk to be dealing in sad old imperial age companies' stock). The money brokers liked me, but they wouldn't give me a job because, they said, if we put a non-graduate onto the phones to American bankers with their liberal arts HNDs they would laugh at them.

The one stock exchange firm I had written to, a stock-jobbing firm called Pinchin Denny & Co, did have a scheme for taking on post A-level youngsters, and so in September 1985 I headed down to the big smoke with nowhere to live and a salary of £3,500 per year.

I was utterly miserable. It has clouded my image of London ever since. I used to get drunk for hours in the Bishop of Norwich, or the Long Room or some such, because all the people I knew in London were my co-workers and to go home and then go out to meet them later meant a 90 minute trip "home" to Wembley, and then probably another 90 minute trip out to Wimbledon or somewhere they lived. So it was far easier to get blotto before going home.

I remember, well, I don't actually, getting so drunk one night that I rode the Northern Line up and down all night until it dropped me off at High Barnet (I was trying to get to Balham where I had moved to share the most god-awful flea pit with two or three other young "blue-buttons" after my Wembley landlord had got pissed off with me abusing his hospitality) and I got sat next to some weirdo with a knife on the night bus back into town - apparently one of our settlement clerks had seen me on the tube about half eight somewhere near Tooting and had tried to wake me up to no avail!

I remember one night I was guardian of the company mobile phone. We were so sophisticated in those days there were these dodgy geezers who sought to put one over on us jobbers who dealt in stocks that had dual listings in London and New York (my "pitch" was chemicals so we had lots of them - ICI, Glaxo, Beechams - remember them?) by "arbitraging". They traded shares from us out of hours when we couldn't see what prices were being made inn New York and what the exchange rates were doing - and flogging them again as "ADRs" in New York - this was even before those Reuters pagers that would give you stock tickers and forex prices. Some Ozzie guys from Smith Brothers saw me with the phone and decided to have some fun with me. They wanted to borrow the phone to make a quick call. The phone bill for three minutes to Australia was more than my pitch's entire book profit for the day and left the four kilo battery with about ten minutes talk time left on it!

Anyway, in April 2006, Morgan Grenfell (remember them?) took over Pinchin Denny in preparation for full deregulation in the October, and gave us blue buttons a thousand pounds raise to go with our yello buttons. I was still utterly depressed, so now was a good time I thought to move back home. At least I could live with mum for free in Glasgow and there were some good brokers there I could join, and I got a job with Laing & Cruickshank's Glasgow office.

If memory serves, the day of Big Bang happened to coincide with the closing date for applications for the British Gas privatisation issue and Laing & Cruickshank flew me down to London with a huge bag of application forms to get them into the Midland Bank (remember them?) in time for the close. And I decided to go and see my old Pinchin Denny colleagues on the Stock Exchange floor (they remained on the floor for a while which was bizarre - all the brokers had gone home to their offices and Chinese walls while most of the jobbers tried to do screen trading on the floor itself - well it did work in Glasgow!).

Several had moved firms. It was a year of lots of moves. Staff, whole teams, were poached as the new corproate owners of Stock Exchange member firms tried to build up their presence, and of course salaries had taken off. The guys I left six months earlier on £4,500 were now on £20,000 plus (at nineteen years old remember). Several had got flash company cars as golden hellos and so on (though nobody, but nobody ever drove to work in the city that I can remmeber!). And I had taken a small cut to go and live at home and was still on £4,000.

Oh well. I could have retired by now I guess. As it is, it was 1998, I think, when I finally got up to twenty grand a year. Maybe my philanthropy would be easier if I had made myself a million by the time I was twenty. Maybe I would just be one of those rather arrogant loadsa money ("I could buy and sell you before breakfast") types. Maybe I could be Tory shadow chancellor by now...:) (One of my colleagues from that 1985 Pinchin Denny intake, a chap called Tom Harris, did stand against Jenny Tonge I think in 2001, having been a Wandsworth Tory councillor for a while already I think)

The worst decision of my life? I don't think so. But it would probably have been nice to have an Oxford degree and a few million quid stashed away somewhere.

On 1st August 1908 the Old Age Pensions Act completed its parliamentary stages, the first step in the development of the modern benefits and welfare system by Asquith's Liberal government and the culmination of several decades of debate and lobbying for some provision to be made for the "deserving" poor in their old age. An alternative to the Poor Laws. On 1st January 1909 half a million or so people over 70 years old became entitled to a 5 shillings a week non-contributory payment administered via the Post Office.

It was not universal; only 5% of people lived beyond 70 in any case - and most were women. It was kept deliberately quite low in order to encourage as many as possible to make their own savings arrangements to top it up.

The BBC has a useful little comparison of then and now pensions arrangements, and you can read the whole act here.

According to an article I dug up last year Lord Roseberry described the Act as the most important piece of legislation since the Great Reform Act of 1832.

I'll refrain from a rant about how it's been a hundred years of mostly Tory and Labour government since and we still have 20% of pensioners living in poverty and dependent on additional means tested benefits and how we can solve this by continuing the legacy of liberal economic reforms those pioneers started.  Let's just enjoy the birthday shall we?