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In "Let Our Cities Breathe" earlier I wondered whether there was a mechanism that could make it financially feasible to redevelop whole neighbourhoods of private housing to cope with the post oil-age and climate and demographic change without any existing resident losing any of their existing equity value and whilst making space for fifty per cent more bedspaces in configurations more closely suited to current housing market needs and still sell the additional units and below market value.

So I set about to try to prove it on paper, and there is a spreadsheet now that purports to show it is possible. Go here to find out more about how Commmunity Land Trusts and Mutual Home Ownership could make a community led and owned "Wren-esque" grand plan for redeveloping any area a possibility.

Technorati Tags: affordable housing, climate change, community land trusts, localism

I know some of our distant Liberal Party forebears were so imbued with Welsh Methodism and non-Conformism that they viewed alcohol as the work of the devil herself and each town's brewing family as an instrument of the industrial masters' subjugation of the working man, but I cannot square Norfolk Blogger's paean of praise for Gordo's strong hints that the government will once again increase the prohibition on cannabis with any of the schools of thought of modern liberalism...

I wonder if Nich is one of that strange breed who still believes that alcohol should be banned, or one of that rather more populous breed who believes that their own poison is okay but anyone else's must be ruthlessly repressed. I've harped on about cannabis enough lately, so won't say much more except that I just cannot see how a liberal can want to criminalize such relatively harmless personal habits or fail to appreciate how that very illegality is the thing that causes the most harm about drugs. Regret perhaps that some want to indulge (or damage whichever way you see it) themselves in such a way. Desire to help the worst cases who clearly cannot cope transform their lives, indeed. But criminalize? Please.

Technorati Tags: cannabis, drugs laws, lib dems, liberty

I don't blog about work much, but this is exciting news you all ought to share! Last year, here at Oxford Brookes University we got terribly excited about being only the 17th UK Higher Education Institution to have appointed a female Chief Executive , in the form of Vice-Chancellor Janet Beer, who's now had her feet under the desk for nine months or so.

Shami Chakrabarti, new Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University

Originally uploaded at Flickr by martinstabe

In the interim we've been looking for a chair designate of the Board of Governors (I am one of the two elected staff governors), and have selected Joanna Simons, the chief executive of Oxfordshire Councty Council, and of course, another woman.

Today, we are very pleased to have announced that our new Chancellor, a position currently held by Jon Snow, is to be another woman very much in the ascendancy and particularly in the news in the past couple of weeks leading up to last night's vote to abolish Habeas Corpus for people the Home Secretary doesn't like the look of, Shami Chakrabarti, the Director of Liberty (whose "new members pack" I received yesterday by chance!).

We were doing quite well actually with gender balance amongst the top echelon of staff here, but I thought it was important to mark that the top three offices are now all held by women right at the top of their respective careers.

I spotted someone seemingly scouring my blog for articles relating to "citizens' Income" and came across this now seemingly very prescient post I did nine months ago about our tax policies hitting the mark or not.

Here's another thing about the Conservative party and their tenuous claimed link with the Co-operative Movement. It is no coincidence that the international rainbow flag for peace is also the international co-operative movement's flag. Nor that it was the Co-operative Womens' Guild that instituted the idea of wearing white poppies to promote peace instead of red ones that commemorated the "glorious dead". It is axiomatic that the Co-operative Movement strives for peace - the very phrase "Peace and Co-operation" encapsulates the ethos.

So, will Dave be wearing red, for the more traditionally Conservative Remembrance of War, or white for the traditional Co-operative Promotion of Peace? I think we can probably predict pretty well which it will be, don't you?