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There was a flutter of interest in the Guardian and Times today (interesting to see the difference in emphasis) about some ideas being put forward to the Tories' Tax Commission by the Bow Group. The report in PDF format is available alongside this discussion on ConservativeHome. Not surprisingly, since the press release promoted this aspect in particular, discussion has focussed on what the author describes as "land value tax". But the report as a whole has a whole load in it, from raising income tax thresholds to £11,000 and imposing a flat rate tax of 38% on all earnings above that, to restricting pensions contributions relief to 38% but on just £4,400 worth of pensions contributions a year, from what I can work out. Go read it - it's interesting, considering we Lib Dems are also in the process of making tax policy.

However, despite all the furore over the "land value tax" proposal, it should be noted that it is not, in fact, a Land Value Tax, and it is certainly not intended to be a step towards Henry George's "Single Tax". A hard-core Georgist like myself of course could simplify even Mr Wadworth's attempt to simplify the gargantuan tax system into just one point - replace all other taxes with taxes on land and resource use! You pay for what you take, not what you make.

But in particular the Bow Group proposals are for a straightforward flat property tax, as Tim Worstall points out. That is fundamentally different from a Land Value Tax, in which only the value of a site is taxed, and not the value of any buildings or any other improvements built on that site.

The arguments Mark Wadsworth makes for efficient use of land are far less evident in a straightforward property tax on the whole combined value of land and buildings. It does nothing to actually encourage efficient development - improving a property will result in a higher tax bill as the whole value is taxed. With a Land Value Tax you can make the most efficient permitted use of land without affecting the tax liability of the whole site. One house might pay £20,000 a year on the same site as ten flats each paying £1,000 a year for example.

But the document covers a whole lot more than this that would have been eminently worth reporting - the flat tax of 38%, the raising of thresholds to £11,000, changes to child benefit, pensions provision and many others. I welcome the fact that the Bow Group chose to promote the discussion on property taxes, I think, and if they want a proper LVT will help in whatever way I can, but it's not currently based on Henry George's/David Ricardo's ideas on economic rent and cannot properly be called a Land Value Tax.

Technorati Tags: conservatives, land value tax, politics, property tax, tax shifting, taxation, tories

Oh dear - they've managed it again. BBC4's "Tory! Tory! Tory!" has inspired me again. And I find myself in awe of some strange political heros. Yes, that's Antony Fisher, Ralph Harris, and Arthur Seldon and John Hoskyns, Keith Joseph and yes...her, the great she-devil herself.

On the face of it, they could not be much further from my political viewpoint. So, was Churchill right about socialist at twenty and conservative at forty being the natural course for man? Have I gone a deep shade of blue? Not on yer nelly I haven't. But the movement that these few, it appears, created, from bunch of crank counter-cultural economists, professional and amateur, to dominance of the world political economic orthodoxy in such a short time was nothing short of revolutionary and truly inspiring.

It gives me hope that it can happen again. That just because people think at the moment land value tax and a debt free money supply are crack-pot ideas it doesn't mean that they will always be. That I have to allow myself twenty years or so to make such an impact.

But there were one or two other interesting things about the program. I noticed a section where they were talking about monetarism and shredding pound notes and so on and in the background they showed an advert being introduced by Gordon Jackson with some cheesy musical singers explaining the principles of monetarism to the Great British Public. "We'll count our blessings if we apply/tight control to our money supply"!

This interested me today:

Telegraph - Sharia law is spreading as authority wanes

By Joshua Rozenberg, Legal Editor

Islamic sharia law is gaining an increasing foothold in parts of Britain, a report claims.

Sharia, derived from several sources including the Koran, is applied to varying degrees in predominantly Muslim countries but it has no binding status in Britain.

However, the BBC Radio 4 programme Law in Action produced evidence yesterday that it was being used by some Muslims as an alternative to English criminal law. Aydarus Yusuf, 29, a youth worker from Somalia, recalled a stabbing case that was decided by an unofficial Somali "court" sitting in Woolwich, south-east London.

I expect we're supposed to be appalled. Yet I'm not. I don't see a problem with this idea. In fact it's a good deal more responsible a solution than meting out punishment beatings or kickings to the local scrotes on the say so of the local hard-man.

In fact, I quite like the idea that communities deal with many matters of justice on their own. As the report says, people submit to these courts because their families make them. Those families are shamed amongst their friends and the rest of their communities by their relatives' actions. The only stipulation I'd make is that no punishment should be imposed that would itself be a criminal offense under British law or that the "arrests" do not actually amount to kidnappings - if miscreants do not submit voluntarily to such local community justice.

It has always struck me, especially since the experience of accompanying a friend to a magistrates' court on a driving charge last year, that our good old British magistrate system is failing miserably in many places. They appear merely to be applying a regular slap on the wrist to a group of people, chief amongst them the hapless and hopeless, on behalf of an overburdened legal system. There's no sense, to me at least, that the magistrate system is reflecting the wishes and concerns of the communities they serve in any way that would assist in rehabilitation of relatively minor offenders or reconciliation with the communities they offend against.

But in terms of these Sharia courts, I don't see why we should get any more worked up about it than by, say, a Catholic Charismatic Renewal church that holds confessions in public, or the idea of church congregations "shunning" miscreants in some Christian sects. All our communities should be encouraged to find their own answers within the overall framework of the law to the sort of crimes against the community these courts are dealing with. Far better, say, than a broad brush "Anti-Social Behaviour Order" I'd say.

I recently discovered a Conservative version of the Lib Dem Blogs aggregator and so my eyes have been opened to a whole new genre of political blogging! Today I spotted a chap called Mike Rouse writing about "spectrum auctions" as it was called:

I am hoping, nay praying, that Gordon Brown is out of office when the analogue TV signal is switched off. You see, that old airspace is very valuable to mobile phone operators and the likes of Google. They would be able to use it to send fast data to mobile devices and other cool things like that. The last time this government oversaw the sale of airspace to mobile networks it managed to amass itself millions of pounds, in fact it actually got too much money for it, leaving the people that bought the space with not much money to do anything else with it. Going by the track record of this government in screwing things up I wouldn’t put it past them to screw up this potentially lucrative deal when it comes around. We have to be careful to balance the government’s desire to fill its coffers and the need for a competitive marketplace that will benefit the economy in the long run. [From Not Bad for Essentially Privatising Thin Air | Mike Rouse]

Er, no Mike, the sale of 3G spectrum was an auction. That means the bidders decide how much they feel it's worth to them. Yes, they may well have made catastrophic miscalculations, but, as they say, you live and learn. These "locations" on the electromagnetic spectrum - so called "Electromagnetic Frequencies" or EMF - are, in economic terms, "land" - finite bits of nature that everyone wanting to operate in a particular technology has to share. So they should be auctioned, or leased, for whatever the market can bear and the proceeds used for public revenue (which was £22 billion in the UK). It is a form of Land Value Tax. It encourages ingenuity in ensuring the optimal use of a precious and finite natural resource (though I accept the point, that the operators chose to pay so much they could no longer raise the money to exploit it properly - but that wasn't the government's fault).

One thing I wish the government, or Ofcom, would do, is to make local bandwidth genuinely local, however. The current wireless spectrum for example is only useful over distances of a few hundred meters at most with present technology. It should be a source of revenue for local authorities rather than central government.

Having set out some of the fantastic potential of Oxford and some of the challenges we face in realising that potential, before I come on to specific policy commitments I wanted to outline some of the principles by which I live and which form my thinking and that will shape many of those policies.

Individualism, mutualism, democracy

Individualism - I am inherently anti-government. I think we have too much of it, we rely too much on it and are consequently disappointed and angry when it fails to deliver what we thought it would. I think people feel better about themselves when they have a choice and can do things for themselves.

Nonetheless, there is a place for a community getting together to achieve things that individuals would find it difficult to do or do economically for themselves or because of being excluded in some way, or to prevent any individual or group monopolising some important shared resource or gaining unfair advantage over others through monopoly or cartel behaviour.

Mutualism - I believe that mutual enterprise is the best way to meet many of these needs. Firstly it is voluntary: an individual becomes a member because they share common goals with the other members of that particular enterprise. And they hold the control between them. The aims can't be hijacked by other parts of a conglomerate style organisation, like a local authority for example, when unrelated priorities change or the allocation of resources changes. They are democratic: nobody can take control for their own ends as all the members have an equal say and a right to expect an equitable return, whether that return is in the form of profit, or more likely in the services that enterprise is established to deliver for its members.

Mutual enterprise is a particularly good way of delivering services where competition exists but in which someone alone is unable to compete without the help of others. Of course government has a role in fostering this kind of business in helping like-minded people with similar aims and wants to get together and achieve it for themselves. But it is not constrained by some of the common problems of government - interference from above, sudden reallocation of resources to respond to others' priorities and so on.

Democracy - In the end, and I do think it ought to be regarded as a "last resort", there may be some things that are near impossible for individuals or small groups to do for themselves or as single issues and that would be unlikely to be profitable in the monetary terms needed by a corporation. This is where we communally "agree" to surrender some of our self-sovereignty to some form of representative management for the common good.

I believe the future of democracy, in an increasingly aware and connected world, is for individuals and small communities genuinely to explore what they can do for themselves and carefully to choose what needs to be done in common and when they need to collaborate in bigger groups - neighbourhood, local, regional, national, international. At the moment we have too much top down government, implemented through broad brush targets and with little local discretion to innovate or incentive to do better.

But also, as representatives of a whole host of interests at a city level, local government can be a body that helps get things done that don't strictly fall within its own remit. If you like as a lobby group for the people of Oxford, taking a strategic view to promote new facilities and protect existing sometimes vulnerable ones.

So these three, I hope, are at the root of my personal political philosophy, and I hope anything I suggest in these pages will be seen as part of that overall model. Next, I will want to look at how these principles might be applied to some of Oxford's pressing problems.