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For a while now I've been displaying that red banner in the top right hand corner of this site showing that my blog is not available to readers in China, as if they would ever want to read it!

So I am intrigued to find the following entry in my logs today:

58.251.18.36 (whois, map)
reverse.gdsz.cncnet.net
China
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
Win XP
MSIE 6
Referrer: Google: housing price and money supply
Path
1 2007-11-26 08:48:41 0 seconds /money_supply_house_prices_stocks_exchange_assets_prices

So, hello China! Shall I remove the "not available" banner now?

There's been a bit of a giggle going round the blogs over Johann Hari's three point plan for revitalizing our democracy. The Centre Forum's Free Think blog described them, I hope with tongue firmly in cheek, as "radical"; they do not even trim the overgrown leaves of our democracy, let alone get at the root of the problem. Tom Papworth offers a characteristically more critical appraisal and says much that I would have said about Hari's ideas themselves ('boneheaded' and 'rent seeking').

But as his suggestion about compelling students to take a newspaper rather shows, Hari is one of the current establishment and it is that centralized establishment that is at the heart of the problem. Our politicians are so remote that we are being told we must rely on people like him, who few of us will ever know personally well enough to tell whether they're honest or not, in the pockets of the trough feeders, or even at the trough with them, to interpret accurately what's going on it the Westmonster village. This is not democracy in anything other than name.

If we want to make politics the topic of discussion around kitchen tables, in the pub or at coffee after Mass, democracy needs to come down to that level. Street level democracy. Most of the parties witter on a lot about "localism" (I notice "localism" seems to have replaced "devolution" largely in their lexicons), perhaps especially the Lib Dems, for whom devolution of power to the lowest practical level is part of the pre-amble to our constitution, the touchstone of our supposed beliefs. Yet even we don't really explore really radical alternatives.

And that's what we need. Our system of democracy was designed in an era in which central government didn't actually do a lot compared with today. Our "representatives" (of curse really only the representatives of the landed population) got themselves elected by a few sheep and packed off to Westmonster for whole sessions at a time - you could hardly hold surgeries in Edinburgh one evening and be back at Westmonster the next.

The civic movement grew up as a more local parallel system often in response to industrialization and urbanization and, at the height of its power was responsible for most welfare, health and education provision, policing and most local infrastructure like sewage, water supply and later still energy supply, whilst private interests built inter-city infrastructure such as toll roads and later railways. And even that was a centralization of power in cities from the previous parish system - you can still go round and see "Parish School" above the doors of those Edwardian school buildings - Glasgow has some particularly good examples. Until as recently as, I think, 1938, Oxford, for example, had at least three pretty well autonomous local authorities responsible for different parts of the city. A few years before that it still had separate public boards to deal with public health issues and so on.

Now, whilst we live in a fast moving globalized world, I question whether we actually need to rely on one representative for sixty odd thousand of us each packing off to Westmonster and fighting for our local hospitals, say, with a bloke from Hull, or having our policing priorities set by a woman from Redditch. I don't much care how they see such things in Redditch or Hull, it's Oxford I'm interested in and all these decisions ought to be more, much more, accessible to me made by much more locally accountable people. Even many of Westmonster's international negotiating functions are much less needed today. We trade for ourselves with people and businesses all over the planet. The sense that we need a national level broker wheeling and dealing in what is almost always rent-seeking and protectionist ways is diminishing rapidly.

Now there are two approaches to devolution and subsidiarity I'd suggest. The one, it seems the preferred one at Westmonster, amongst all the parties, is for we, the people, to wait for the crumbs to fall from the top table. Look at the department for Communities for example. It is this part of centralized government who announces initiatives, looks for councils to fight amongst themselves for a share of the resources to pilot them and ties them up in knots reporting back on outcomes so that "Communities" can decide whether to make those initiative compulsory on the rest of the local authorities, continue funding them and so on. I suggest that this gradualism is an excuse for the centre holding on to power. Each successful initiative dictated from above is a reason to keep these trough feeders where they are. Any ubnsuccessful ones of course are the fault of local authorities themselves or even ourselves, showing us not ready for such freedoms in their eyes.

But far better to my mind is actually reinventing our democratic structures fit for the modern era. Hari, I think, is wrong to say that nobody talks about government and politics. I hear people all the time complaining about politicians. It is, perhaps, comforting even for people to moan about government and politicians - we are able to assign responsibility for cock-ups to someone else. Someone far away in Westmonster and usually, since only about one in six hundred of us actually gets to vote for the individual who will become Prime Monster, someone we didn't put in power. Even local government does it, though often this is with half an eye on political gain at that higher level - persuading your Tory borough's population that something is Labour's doing at Westmonster is part of the "game" of getting a Tory MP elected next time, or vice versa. It is no wonder people are cynical and disengaged, if that's what they are.

And so I'd like to introduce you, if you haven't already heard about it, to the idea of "cellular democracy". Some commentators in the US (where they already have substantially more local freedoms than we do to innovate and compete with other localities of course), in what I see really as a modern development of Hume's "Perfect Commonwealth", suggest that democracy is no longer at a "human scale". Because we elect to remote bodies people we are likely never to meet (at least for more than their allotted ninety seconds on your doorstep when they want your vote) the system itself inflates the cost of democracy. Parties have to spend lots of money getting a nationwide message out. We rely on people like Hari, whom we don't know, to provide commentary and interpretation. Most importantly, perhaps, parties form their policies not around what is good for particular communities but around what is acceptable to the floating voters in a small number of marginal constituencies.

The idea is that we turn our system on its head. We say, as so many politicians like to claim to believe, even if their actions speak to the contrary, that government literally comes from the people, that we cede only so much of our individual sovereignty to some collective body as is necessary to meet those needs we are incapable, for reasons of economic efficiency usually, to provide for ourselves. You have the principal tier of government at a local level. A very local level. A street or small neighbourhood. Usually of no more than a few hundred residents. Candidates are likely to be known, approachable - you bump into them walking the dog or standing at the bus stop. They get their message across to you through real local contact - not some party worker umming and erring for a few seconds on your doorstep or increasingly over the phone, facelessly. Some even suggest that, like a party caucus in the US, these elections could be by show of hands once a year at a local meeting. In a sense, to the successful candidate, knowing who didn't vote for you gives you an incentive to find out why and work with those neighbours, for they will all be neighbours on whatever issues put them off voting for you.

And that's the only vote you get - except for the right of each five hundred strong neighbourhood to recall their representative. By default it is in the remit of those very local authorities - perhaps twenty members each elected by five hundred residents to meet all the needs of that community that must be delivered through collective action, voluntary co-operation. When they find that they cannot possibly meet some need for their 10,000 strong community - they couldn't, for example, justify building a large general hospital just for their small community - but they could decide to join up with other communities to form a second tier of government, to whom a representative will be delegated by the first level authority and a by-election held, or the runner up, or an alternate, would take their place on the first tier authority. These higher tiers need not even be geographically linked. They may decide to join up with others on particular functional issues. Take the hospital again, here in Oxford the John Radcliffe hospitals serve folk from Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Berkshire and so on so even ceding more control to a body based on the boundaries of Oxford or Oxfordshire does not serve all its users.

If a higher tier wants to raise some money, that request is passed down through the various levels and discussed in these local caucuses. People can really decide whether these higher tiers are offering them value for money, or whether they could meet those needs for themselves better. Each higher level authority, however, is only ministering to the needs of its member authorities in turn so it should be easier to follow the money trail and identify whether something is in fact good value for you, the individual, or your small neighbourhood.

Some will say this gives rise to all sorts of problems about "free loading" - communities that decide not to participate in higher level authorities but gain the benefits of their collective efforts. In such a case, perhaps the authorities that have collaborated could decide to charge more for people from the community that didn't collaborate on a particular facility or policy to access that facility - they will, I am sure, soon find it would be better to join to get the "members rate". But ultimately, one has to ask whether "free-loading" is any worse a problem than the egregious rent seeking and bloated costs of our existing system.

Wouldn't Barrie's Palace of Westminster make an interesting "novelty hotel" - just like Oxford's former prison has here. Or perhaps just a prison. That would be quite fitting, considering everything its occupants have stolen from us for decades. David Hume said that we ought to be ready with new ideas of government for the day when, perhaps, by common consent the existing system is seen as broken. I suggest that the epochal changes in communications and trade that have been made in the past twenty or thirty years is just such a moment, and if we are not to lose our democracy through lack of interest on the part of the electorate, it is more urgent than ever.

I've just been watching Prime Minister's Questions, something I rarely get the chance to do, but I'm off work not very well in this heat so I happened across it today.

Is Blair always so patronizing towards Campbell? It's a good job Ming's one of those polite well-bred advocates - though I dislike PMQs as a rule, even I would say Ming could be a bit more pugilistic against the arrogance of Tone. Anyway, Ming was of course right to ask about mid-east ceasefires and about why, in particular, the rest of the world is not being terribly forthright in demanding one of Israel.

But Blair's response gives me the hook for something I've been pondering about writing since the latest Israeli attacks on Lebanon began last week. Blair was responding to the notion, implied by Campbell, that Israel's response to Hezbollah's kidnapping and subsequent rocket-bombing of northern Israel is "disproportionate".

Set aside for the moment the question of "which came first" (because although it's clear that this immediate inflammation is ostensibly a reaction to the kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers it' not at all clear for example that Hezbollah would have been shelling northern Israel quite so strongly - 1600 rockets according to Blair - if they themselves were not now under attack). The big problem I have with Blair's response was that it appeared to place Hezbollah and the Israeli government on a level of moral equivalency they simply do not share.

What's happened is that a more or less maverick and self-selecting group, which yes, has some influence at the government level of the country (Lebanon) in which they base themselves, but over whom the civil government of that country is hopelessly ill-equipped to exercise control, has taken it upon themselves to commit criminal acts against citizens of the neighbouring country.

Hezbollah is a terrorist organization under any definition of that word. Ehud Olmert heads an elected government. Moreover he heads a government whose forces are amongst the best armed in the world, in quantity and technology, and whose intelligence services have, or at least had, a reputation second to none for the most part. A government that is fairly elected. It can be said to be better representative of the people of Israel for example than Tony Blair's can of Britain's. Much moreso than representing merely their idea of political policy, they stand as representatives of the moral conscience of their citizens.

So, in the red corner, we have a bunch of criminal thugs. They may or may not have a real grievance against Israel over their perception of justice that has put dozens of their colleagues in Israeli prisons, but they go about addressing that using criminal means - kidnapping on some kind of tit-for-tat basis. But they are criminal, immoral, or at best amoral.

In the blue corner, we have one of the most advanced and sophisticated nations on the planet. One would have thought that even if they were so frustrated by the inability of the neighbouring government to exercise control over the criminals harrying their citizens from the other side of the border, and having concluded that diplomatic efforts were a waste of time (if they genuinely tried, which I doubt, given the reaction of clear surprise around the world), and so deciding to do something about it themselves, a surgical strike of some kind against the criminal organization itself would not be beyond the bounds of their capabilities.

But what route do they in fact take? They aim to "set Lebanon back twenty years". They cut the country off from the rest of the world. And far from any technologically surgical attack they lob shells from T-17 tanks and motorized artillery all over the place, destroying civil infrastructure. They kill countless of for all we know totally innocent and Hezbollah-hating ordinary civilian citizens of the Lebanon. Of course the destruction of the infrastructure has the pretense that it is used by those criminals or their supporters on occasion, but that does not mean it's justified to so affect the ordinary lives of ordinary Lebanese, to terrorise them, trapped by blown up bridges, ports, airports and expecting their homes to be shelled any minute.

This has all the morality and justice of hanging any ten men, women and children in in the village square because you believe some insurgent might have operated from there. It is not the action of a moral state. Iain Dale at the weekend mentioned that Olmert was never a military man and had to prove his credentials, but when that assuredly involves killing civilians, turning their world upside down in a foreign country, it is just as evil as any terrorist. It is the politics of the old testament - "Saul has killed his thousands, David his tens of thousands" - immoral.

Yet the rest of the world's reaction is what really gets me. We sit here scribbling in the media and so on about whether the response is justified, proportionate, yet do very little about it. We are too comfortable. We have four million counsellors counselling people affected by reading about the London bombs in their newspaper the next day; we cannot imagine what life is like when everything is suddenly taken away and there's no help on offer. It's bad enough when such a tragedy is inflicted by nature, and we all jump to help with aid appeals and so on, but when it's inflicted by other humans, humans moreover that are the moral agents of their countryfolk, and the world does so little to help, it's sickening.

I've just received another electronic communication from one of our South East European candidate hopefuls. It repeats Linda Jack's recent gripe about not being able to say who they are supporting for the leadership.

Apparently this is because such an endorsement by a Euro-hopeful might be interpreted as an implicit endorsement by the relevant leadership candidate for that Euro-hopeful and thereby possibly increase their chances of selection.

If it hadn't been made up by the powers that be it would not have been a conclusion I would have leaped to, I have to say. However, given that I do support a particular leadership candidate I would like the opportunity at least to consider giving extra weight to those Euro candidates who share my opinion of what would be best for my party in the leadership. It might very well not make any difference of course.

So, let's remove the gag. It's a bonkers idea. Sure, we did not know there would be a leadership election when the Euro selection process started, but now that we have one, it could very well be another factor in whether to prioritize one candidate over another.