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In one of those odd coincidences, Land Value Taxer colleague Tony Vickers was last week having a few problems adding an article to the 1909 website and eventually he forwarded a quote he had just discovered to me by email to put it into an article.

I hadn't thought that the opportunity would come around so soon to do so, but it transpires that Ming Campbell is today giving a speech at a Joseph Rowntree Foundation conference in which he will announce housing proposals, including:

· Building 100,000 new affordable, social and low cost homes each year

· Devolving and reforming the planning system to make decisions faster and more effective for all parties

· Introducing equity mortgages to ensure that affordable housing is built and maintained for the benefit of generations of buyers

· Building smaller social housing developments which are integrated with private housing

· Cutting VAT on housing renovations and repairs

In Joseph Rowntree’s Memorandum to his advisers on setting up a charitable trust (the "parent" trust of the aforementioned Joseph Rowntree Foundation) in his name, written in 1904, he said: “Every Social writer knows the supreme importance of questions connected with the holding and taxation of land, but for one person who attempts to master this question there are probably thousands who devote their time and strength to relieving poverty and its accompanying evils. … Such aspects of [the Land question] as the nationalisation of land, or the taxation of land values, or the appropriation of the unearned increment – all needs a treatment far more thorough than they have yet received.”

Ming is right to say that "Britain needed a revolution in housing" and that "innovative and imaginative solutions were needed to deliver this revolution".

But he goes on to demonstrate that with our policies we are amongst those "probably thousands who devote their time and strength to relieving poverty and its accompanying evils" but are not yet prepared to become the "one person who attempts to master this [land] question" that Joseph Rowntree wrote of. The aims are admirable, the policies as good as anyone else's (and considerably more than Labour seem to care for), but ultimately it will be futile if we do not rise to Rowntree's challenge and deal with the attitude of Britain to land ownership.

They knew it 100 years ago, it's such a shame that we so obviously need to relearn it today. But relearn it we must, unless we want to be talking about this in another twenty years as just as serious a crisis as today.

Technorati Tags: affordable housing, land value tax, lib dems, property tax

...imagining a Wireless Oxford.

I'm surprised at how good a service they offer on the Oxford Tube, wireless wise. I'm off to a day conference on "Wireless Cities" where I'll hear from other areas miles ahead of Oxford about how they plan to unwire their cities/districts, courtesy of the people that brought us the Oxfordshire Community Network, Synetrix.

EDIT:...but I'm absolutely appalled at the thought that most of my journey companions do this every day. I truly hope they are handsomely rewarded for this monumental waste of their lives...:)

Excellent news - the big broadcasters will soon be wasting less money bidding up for coverage of "premium sport". Now don't give me all that guff about how the money does wonderful things. It skews sport in favour of a few superteams in each sport, making it much harder for lower order teams to bridge the gap successfully. The broadcasters are paying far more than the costs of recovering their technical outlay - they are paying an economic rent on top simply to outbid the next guy.

So the fact that it is harder and harder to stop such broadcasts being available free, and by all reports live, on the internet, would suggest to me that the value of that economic rent is going to fall rapidly. And we, the consumer, will have a freer and more competitive market for sports viewing. And hopefully an American billionnaire will not feel the desire to buy my dear Liverpool FC.

Illegal net sport faces crackdown:
By Ian Youngs

Sports authorities are taking action to stop illegal live coverage of football and other events over the internet.

Almost all English Premiership matches are available to watch live and for free, as are other leagues and sports.

The coverage, mainly from Chinese sport channels, is put on peer-to-peer applications and can be watched anywhere in the world.

As well as football, some sites are also claiming to offer live cricket action from The Ashes in Australia.

We should be grateful to Lord Justice Sedley for one thing - re-igniting the debate about the national DNA database. His prescription, however, is completely wrong, and unjustifiable. He is right when he says that:

...the current database, which holds DNA from crime suspects and scenes, was "indefensible" because it was unfair and inconsistent.

but we should be very wary of his suggested fix for that, that...

...whole population and every UK visitor should be added to the national DNA database.

He is of course correct that the current situation is indefensible, Black men are more than twice as likely to be on the database than white, just because of the disproportionate way in which the police target black men for stop and search operations. But his prescription that:

"Going forwards has very serious but manageable implications. It means that everybody guilty or innocent should expect their DNA to be on file for the absolutely rigorously restricted purpose of crime detection and prevention."

So, we are to be scared from committing any crimes because we know they already have our DNA and when they find that at the scene it'll be an easy next step to "pull" anyone whose DNA is found for questioning. With no other probable cause than that their DNA was at the scene - Paul Walter's Liberal Burblings puts this much better than I have, describing it as "presumed guilt", overturning what must probably be, after Habeas Corpus perhaps, the key principle of English law.

One could imagine a situation where, for example, a victim of crime in the hours before being raped or murdered or whatever was in a place with lots of other people - perhaps a bar or a club. He or she brushed up against countless innocent bystanders, some of whom left a hair on the victim's clothes or sneezed over them or somehow transferred DNA to them or to another item of evidence. The police could just pull all of those people for questioning. Or perhaps that the crime scene was quite a publicly frequented place, and countless innocent samples are collected and the owners of that DNA pulled for questioning.

And as if that weren't enough, what sort of access would the defense have to be given to make this fair? Someday one could imagine the argument succeeding that with evidence disclosure rules, the defense could subpoena anyone whose DNA sample was found to try to create reasonable doubt for their client.

And in future, when the purpose of individual genes are steadily discovered, a witness statement might describe someone that may or may not be involved at the scene and based on that physical description the police could pull all blond men with blue eyes and the obesity gene in the local area to question?

The judge talks also about how many "cold cases" have been solved using DNA evidence. Yes, that may be one of the advances that has been made possible with DNA technology. But I wonder how many of them have actually been solved simply by matching up with the database. I rather suspect very few. That most have probably been a case of arresting the person first suspected many years ago and then checking them up against the DNA. Ie that DNA is used merely to corroborate existing evidence that somehow proved insufficient at the time to convict. That's a very different proposition from having a pro-active database from which to go and pull every person that brushed past the victim twenty years ago and happened to leave DNA that was subsequently collected.

No, storing our DNA is storing a little part of each and every one of us. As I said last week, our DNA should be subject to habeas corpus. It's like putting us all on bail for further questioning, sometime, about any other matter they feel we might be able to help with. The implications even now, let alone in some future time when we may have a seriously authoritarian regime in power or where the technology is available to extrapolate from descriptions what the suspect's DNA might look like, are horrendous.

In an accompanying article, the BBC puts the other side of the case. We already hold proportionally more DNA samples than any other country. Since it was first allowed in 1995 it has been steadily extended. The evidence of "mission creep" is clear already. We cannot trust any government with this sort off information. One only has to have seen the film Gattaca to know why. We must go back to the 1995 regulations, and strengthen them indeed so that people have rights to know and control whether their DNA is held if they are not currently in the criminal justice system for a good reason.