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There's a chap I stumbled across I think when he left a comment on my blog about my little trouble with Labour leaflets during the local elections. Philip Thomas is a Conservative councillor in Pontefract, but really a libertarian who happens to have joined the Tories from what I can gather (not all libertarians claim infallibility!)

A week or so ago he blogged about the moral panic going on about knife crime, much the same as I did I guess - that it's not the knife that kills or injures but the person holding it for that purpose. Like my "Drugs laws are pointless" faux pas, Philip made the comment that he had bought two massive machetes and a meat cleaver as much because he "thought they were cool" as for any other reason. Of course he goes on to say that never had he imagined using them, nor would he, and moreover is actually a bit more authoritarian than I would be on sentencing for real knife crime. But that didn't stop The Mirror from focussing on the "knives are cool" misquote and now it's been picked up by the local press and other political parties are commenting and demanding resignations and so on.

The flame of liberty flickers all too low already in the Conservatives; if you are libertarian first, party-political second, go support Philip somehow - positive comments on his blog maybe or approving links!

UPDATE: and now local radio it seems too.

If the world is a more dangerous place, it's as much because of people like Richard Armitage: US threatened to bomb Pakistan as it is because of people like Bin Laden.

I hope personally that we will choose to stand shoulder to shoulder with our Commonwealth brothers and sisters who have provided us with many of our residents and not a few friends and colleagues than a regime that even remotely thinks it's acceptable to make such threats.

Interestingly though, this is a similar phrase to one that was alleged to have been used as an ultimatum to the Taliban themselves, BEFORE 9/11, two months before, when they were stalling in talks over a Unocal pipeline from the central asian republics to the Arabian Sea coast.

If you threaten what to most of us seemed like a basket case state and their friends respond with a 9/11, would you really want to threaten a more sophisticated populous and relatively much more influential military one with nukes, even small ones, like Pakistan?

As someone who has been involved off and on in Charter88 campaigns for a Bill of Rights, who has marvelled at how enlightened a party the Lib Dems must be for having called for one for as long as I can remember being involved, I must say I am pleased. I am pleased that after so long denying it, the Conservative Party has signalled such a big u-turn on something that in my opinion has been fundamental to the rule of law and the place of the citizen in a democracy since...oh Tom Payne and before.

You see, it has been one of the huge blockages to my ability to see the Conservatories as a party I could deal with. The evidence, up till now, has been that they are a party for whom rights were divisible, that fundamentally believed that some people had fewer rights than others. This to me was the outrage of Section 28 for example. It just galled me that a party could go out seeking to claim to be able to represent all of us, yet still want to put some of us in pigeon holes and say we had fewer rights.

So far so good.

But...and you knew there had to be one...the "noises" are all wrong. They're apparently reacting (because in reality they are a bunch of old reactionaries of course) to some whipped up furore about the Human Rights Act, and, by extension, whatever they say, about the European Convention on Human Rights. Have they actually read this document? What rights enshrined in that would we not have? It's not a big document. It doesn't take long to enumerate them.

And the Human Rights Act basically does two things - bring the first responsibility for enforcing the Convention on the British courts instead of the famously slow European Court of Human Rights, and make all public bodies, including the legislature, consider their citizens' rights. For all the harumphing about the Afghan hijackers or Abu Hamza or whoever, 99.99999% of the times (at least) that the Human Rights Act is cited in anything, it is where little jobsworths and council officers all over the country have to consider the impact of their decisions and recommendations on us, the people, whom they exist to serve.

Every report of a planning officer has to consider the impact on the rights enshrined by the ECHR of the proposal and their recommendation. Every decision to award a grant to ensure public money is being used fairly and being given to causes that will not discriminate. Every time, in fact, the least of the lowest civil servant so much as takes a dump...

Indeed, when last they were in power, the Conservatories also conspired to let the ECHR do their dirty work for them (and for all his apparent new age all are equal cuddliness in 1997 this is something Mr Blair perpetuated, despite being bunked up every night with a woman making her legal reputation and fortune fighting the UK government on Human Rights). Equalization of the age of consent for gay men - won through the ECHR. The right of gay men and lesbians to fight for their country - won through the ECHR. To be treated the same by employers - yup, ECHR. Presumably now that the problem is foreigners, not poofters, these are not examples of the sort of thing the Conservatories would want to roll back?

So then I hear Dominic Grieve, and he should know cos he's something to do with the law, saying it's not meant to diminish our rights but increase them. And of course that is allowed, and it's welcome. If it were true. If that were the case, certainly in the ethos of Charter88, it would mean a real shift of power towards the individual citizen and away from government - finally redressing the truism, two centuries and more old, that we live in a dictatorship on all but one day out of four or five years. Long something the Conservatories have said they want to do, but yet again have proven they can't when in power. It means to me a need for fewer MPs and flunkies. I don't see many Conservatories saying they stood for parliament in order one day to sack themselves - something I absolutely take as a given for the Lib Dem MPs I know. To curtail and control the power of the executive. In short, a constitution.

Hard cases make good headlines, and bad law. If there is to be a UK Bill of Rights it is not something in the gift of one political party or a couple of reactionary newspapers. In a majority parliamentary system one could easily imagine what human wrongs a Bill of Rights passed by, say, the Reichstag in 1936 might have enshrined. It has to be a broad based effort - perhaps requiring a referendum, or at least an extraordinarily high proportion of the legislature, to get passed, and subsequently amended. What ought to amount to a written constitution and set of guarantees of the citizen's position vis-a-vis the state must be the work of us all.

I welcome the Conservative U-turn on this, bringing them alongside decades of Liberal and Liberal Democrat campaigning on this, but I'll bet they didn't think too carefully about what they were letting themselves, and us all, in for. One of the people I think myself lucky to inhabit the same city as is Vernon Bogdanor, onetime tutor to brave Dave. I'm with him when he said last night that if Dave were still a student of his, he might suggest rewriting this particular essay.

Technorati Tags: tories, rights, conservatives

I have a particular bee on about Oxford City Council's Leisure Services. For as long as I can remember they've been more or less crap. I don't mean the staff, though there have been some problems there as well, I mean what they are given to work with - the leisure facilities. Crumbling roofs here, ivy growing through the walls there, and all, or nearly all, well beyond their designed lifespan.

Seven years ago now I tried to get the ball rolling towards creating a structure that would take the leisure centres out from under the skirts of the City Council where they have to wait patiently in line for precious budget allocations never allowing them to do much more than patch up the broken bits and certainly never enough to allow them to compete in an increasingly sophisticated leisure market.

So it's a bit galling to hear yet again a phrase to which I rather object. According to an article in today's Oxford Mail again: Leisure Services Could Be Privatised. Actually it's not the word privatised I object to, but the phrase used by turncoat independent councillor, Paul Sargent, whose opinion the Oxford Mail seems to think is still worth canvassing, that it should be a "not for profit trust" (the phrase has common currency in the Lib Dem group he welched on, so it's not just Sargent I'm complaining about here).

Now I understand why they use such a phrase. Back in 2002 Labour campaigners shamelessly lied in material put out against me in the ward I was standing in denouncing that we were set to "privatise" the Leisure Centres in the form of a co-operative I had proposed (so annoying for a party so closely linked to the co-operative movement that they didn't understand the concept!) A "not for profit trust" is meant to convey something that doesn't operate as a cut-throat business that it's a trust which will involve some public input so the council aren't handing everything away, and so on.

But it's a fundamental misunderstanding of social enterprise. Like any business, by definition if it's not making a profit it's making a loss. A loss means, in the case of a service the council wants to see continue, subsidy. And then you're back to square one - waiting for handouts amongst all the other spending priorities of a council and managing slow decline as you never get quite what you need.

No, the difference between an "ordinary company" and a social enterprise is that a company is there to maximise value for its shareholders - to make as much profit as it is able - while a social enterprise may have more aims, involving benefits other than mere profit. Many will of course have in their rules that they will never distribute profits to any shareholders - as in dividends - that profits will be used to fulfill other aims, but to do so it has to function as a solvent business with a positive cash flow that can be used for such aims.

So anyway, now we have that established - profit is not a dirty word. It's what enables you to deliver on your other aims. In social enterprise circles the favoured phrase nowadays is "more than profit". So the choice the city seems to be faced with is whether they want the Leisure Centres to operate as a private enterprise or as a social enterprise. Well, not quite. There's another variation that I would encourage the City Council to look into: the Open Capital Partnership.

The Open Capital Partnership is quite a new idea. In response to fears (such as became apparent when Arthur Anderson were held liable for Enron irregularities) that traditional British partnerships, such as used by legal, accounting and other professional firms, meant that all their partners were individually liable to an unlimited extent for any debts of the whole partnership - they could lose everything they owned ultimately - the government created a new business structure, the Limited Liability Partnership (you'll see "LLP" after the names of law firms and so on).

Like a traditional partnership they are very flexible, particularly as regards membership - anyone can be made a partner, not just people who put money in or buy shares in a company and like a company, the partners' liability is limited to what they put into the partnership. And there are other differences - such as tax arrangements - but for this purpose it is the structure that's important.

In Leisure Services, for example, the City Council could be a partner, contributing the sites (not necessarily the buildings if they are to be rebuilt), some investors contribute their cash to develop the sites. Both, in normal circumstances, would probably expect to get paid for their contribution - rent for the sites and rent for the capital. Though in this case where the City Council is providing the land or buildings in order to deliver a service they would previously have funded (and in the case of Leisure Centres at a cost of £3.5m per year to the taxpayer) they might waive that rent as its contribution to the service.

The staff and management could be partners, as could the customers or users of the facilities, providers of other services - say the county council contributing its school playing fields, or colleges contributing their sports facilities, or perhaps, on occasion, a private operator whom you want to contract to provide some part of the overall leisure services package. But the capital investor does not take ownership or have a charge on assets of the partnership such as with a company or a loan arrangement, and cannot act to the exclusion of the other partners.

Partners over time can change the type of partner they are, or be in more than one category - a user may wish to buy some of the capital rent entitlement - imagine it an investment similar to an undated index linked bond - it would be particularly apt for a pension fund investment for example. As I say, one of the consummate benefits is the flexibility of the structure. The City Council does not lose ownership of its current assets, they get huge investment in the service and a place on the board. The management and staff are enthused to plan, build and maintain a highly professional leisure business that seeks to do well financially in order to fund its other aims. Users are valued as co-owners of the business and take a more direct interest in the services offered.

As an illustration, if you were to set the capital rent payable to the partners who put in the development capital (I won't call it "lend" for a variety of reasons but it's a similar process) at an index-linked 4% and the city council were not going to take rent for the current leisure estate, the money the city already puts into these services each year, some £3.5million in revenue financing currently, could be used to pay the capital rent on some £87m worth of investment - certainly enough to rebuild what they've got and provide that Olympic swimming pool if you really need to!).

As a structure it has it all. The capitalist cannot take control, the council does not lose its assets, it can raise money, without putting the buildings in hock to a traditional lender. It could provide a vehicle for a wider ranging partnership with other providers of leisure facilities in the city - at long last helping to bring into more public use some of those social assets, school playing fields and university facilities, for example, that are currently exclusive or closed when the community wants to be able to use them.

Out of interest, this is the same partnership model as I am proposing for housing stock improvement, for the Town Hall development, and for supporting locally owned businesses through rental partnerships on City Council owned commercial properties.

Incidentally, as an aside, I realise that Olympic swimming has always been in 50m pools, but when Oxford University was going for planning consent to build its new pool on the Iffley Rd site I specifically asked of them (I was on planning committee at the time) if they couldn't try and fit in an Olympic sized pool and the university sports office definitely responded to the effect that Olympic sized pools were going to be reduced to the more common 25m length so they didn't need to. What, if anything, happened to that?