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Just a couple of weeks after getting back into full swing blogging frenetically after redesigning the site it's likely to be another slowish week ahead. Mark Wadsworth thinks the new design is a bit confusing, and, whilst it appears to have achieved some of its aims in keeping more readers on the site to look at other stories, I tend to agree it's not been ideal. But I learned a lot in the process and so am starting again and will hopefully take a lot less time to rebuild, this time with more bling. And I've got a busy week ahead, with lots of conspiracies beginning to take off for me this week:

Monday - presentation to an Oxfordshire parish council about Community Land Trusts

Tuesday - meeting with the Oxford group of land taxers to put together a framework for a book we want to publish later this year on how the "Liberal Economic Tradition" exemplified in particular by the 1909 budget can answer our needs for social and economic justice without big state solutions to welfare and public services.

Friday - similarly conspiratorial meeting in London (my first visit to the National Liberal Club) amongst a group of similarly economically liberal thinkers.

...but on the plus side, we are finally interviewing for the position vacated by a colleague in September which holds out the prospect of me being a bit less stressed at work in the near future. However the boss will then be away for the rest of the week leaving me on my own supporting all our users as best I can.

Oh...and sometime in there before Tuesday night I've got to get a motion to Spring Conference on the monetary reform implications of recent events in the international capital markets signed off and in to Cowley Street for the deadline on Wenesday.

An article on the BBC today about housing and nationalists:

BBC NEWS | Politics | Housing 'key to far right rise':
By Dominic Casciani

Competition for housing is the "frontline" of a battle to prevent the far right's rise, MPs have warned.

Labour MP John Cruddas and Lib Dem Simon Hughes said policymakers had failed to recognise BNP gains were linked to anger over who gets homes.

...reminded me of a scene in "Cathy Come Home" the other night where the women in the hostel are arguing with a black woman that "her type" was getting all the available housing.

Plus ca change...

Everyone should read this. Iain Dale's Diary: EXCLUSIVE: Sir Ian Blair Says New Terror Attack Could Lead to Internment. What you make of it is up to you of course, but such a scenario has been in the "narrative" of many dismissed as conspiracy theorists since 9/11 and probably before.

Of course there's a world of difference between a more or less random act of terror by terrorists and the authorities cooking something up in order to be able to impose such restrictions (the most strident would even suggest, in the US at least, the aim is martial law and a suspension of the constitution). But if the establishment is even discussing the idea - and of course we must be open to the possibility that this is Iain Blair speculating on what people will clamour for rather than leading the charge himself - it is truly apalling.