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Yesterday in my piece about the Policy Exchange think tank's suggestion that Oxford and Cambridge ought to be allowed to expand to as many as a million homes I mentioned the work "Car Free Cities" by J H Crawford which I came across a decade ago when looking into Oxford's last Local Plan. In it he postulates a city of a million people with a topology and transport system that means that any two addresses anywhere in the city would be no more than 35 minutes apart by foot and rapid transit system.

The city is made up of many districts of about 12,000 population like strings of beads along one of three overlapping rapid transport loops. Every home is less than five minutes walk from open countryside. And whilst the densities within the districts are amongst the highest on earth (similar to Seoul, for example, although nothing is more than three stories in the reference designs) only 20% of the total 100 sq mile (10 by 10) area is developed at all, leaving all the areas between the beads and strings as open countryside or managed parkland or whatever. Overall then the density is not a lot greater than Oxford's current density and less than the average of Greater London as a whole.

So, for a bit of fun, I superimposed Crawford's one million population city topology onto the ten by ten mile square centered on the current centre of Oxford. Now sure, a million population is only probably about a third of the million households the Policy Exchange report was ultimately suggesting, but if anyone says to you that it would simply be impossible to imagine a million people in the area between Wheatley and Eynsham, Littlemore and Kidlington, you can say you have seen how, and with no traffic and only 20% of the land developed to boot! It would currently take me over an hour to get from the end of one of these loops to about a third of the way out the adjacent one, incidentally.

Now nobody is suggesting that we do this, least of all me. I'm just demonstrating that it would be possible, indeed whilst making more of the green belt actually because all the space would be accessible in minutes rather than in half an hour in the car, it would reach right into everyone's neighbourhood - with open country no more than 400m from every front door. Fitting such principles into existing cities is of course much more difficult than an academic sitting at a drawing board with a blank sheet of paper. They need not be loops for example but twelve strings with termini at the end of each. It would increase average journey times but not the overall maximum of 35 minutes door to door and could be fitted in along existing radial roads as a series of villages.

Incidentally, the picture on the right here shows some of the housing in the ward with the highest density in England, at least that I can find - a "middle level super output area" either side of the Cromwell Rd in Kensington & Chelsea.  I notice from Net House Prices that there have been 267 £1m plus residential property transactions in the last eight years in this post code area.  This is getting pretty close to the densities that would be required in a city such as that in Crawford's book.  It's hardly slum clearance stuff is it!

I have to say with a certain smugness that I was out in the pissing rain and blustery icy wind delivering Lib Dem leaflets while our two men in suits were spitting feathers at each other on John Sopel's lunchtime politics show. And reading some of the blog comments on it, especially, though understandably I guess as the "victim" of the briefing document with which Sopel ambushed Huhne, in the Cleggosphere, I was prepared to be confronted with a truly undignified public school spat complete with debaggings and wedgies.

So, having just now watched it, and having already read the document in question as published by the Huhne campaign team, I did think it was a bit of an unedifying spectacle, but really nothing to get so worked up about as to start talking about bringing "the party into disrepute" or "consign him to the backbenches" or even, from someone who has one blog entitled "Chris Almighty" and another called "The Anti-Chris Blog", a comment that electing Chris would see him resign from the party.

Nick is a big boy. He will have to weather a great deal worse if he is leader. Chris is, tonight, a very silly looking boy, he will have to learn from this - though I have to say that for me, on reading the document (far more useful than watching the spat on television) many of the "inconsistencies" set out in it do ring true in the various things I seen written about Nick's position on the relevant issues compared with what he says himself (hence my earlier confusion in the early part of the contest).

The bigger problem for me is that I don't want someone who rules out vouchers, insurance, the break-up of state monopolies or any of these things that Chris criticizes Nick for, and the fact that in his attempts to clarify his position Nick also seems to rule them all out means I have nobody squeezing me in my "comfort zone" in this election. So I am sticking with Chris, because as I have said many times, I believe the future of the party and the country is in adopting an identifiably Liberal political economy and I believe that means having an economist as leader who can instinctively make those arguments when put on the spot.

Personally, and I realise that with this post I am adding, possibly minutely, to this, I reckon it's the Lib Dem blogosphere and their shrill partisan screams bordering on vitriol, who are the real losers in this spat and I am sure the men in suits will have made up with each other very soon.  And actually - if they don't make up, neither of them deserve to lead this party!

Oh dear, another pontifical pronouncement condemns me to hell, it seems:

Vatican condemns Amnesty over abortion

By Malcolm Moore
Last Updated: 2:18am BST 14/06/2007

The Vatican has ordered all Catholic organisations and individuals to stop giving money to Amnesty International in protest at the human rights organisation's stance on abortion.

Amnesty, which previously had been neutral on the subject, said in April that countries that had laws making abortion illegal should drop them because tough anti-abortion penalties led to a high proportion of backstreet terminations. Mexico City has recently passed a law decriminalising abortion.

Cardinal Renato Martino, the head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and one of the Vatican's most senior prelates, said in an interview with the National Catholic Register: "The inevitable consequence [of Amnesty's decision] will be the end of all financing from Catholic organisations and individual Catholics."

Well, not this Catholic, I can assure you. I have a feeling that on the day of judgement the fact that I tried to do my best by my fellow human beings by fighting the forces of oppression and torture via what seems to be the most respected international organization on that particular playing field will stand me in quite good stead. I don't support abortion, but nor do I support coercion. And, let's face it, the line Amnesty has taken on abortion deals mainly with the most traumatic situations, such as women who are put in that position by evil acts in the first place like rape (often institutionalized as a means of torture) - and on those even the most hard-core anti-abortionists' opinions tend to wobble and fragment a bit.

Indeed, my membership of Amnesty helps to assuage my conscience that I am also a member of a body, in the Roman Catholic Church that has, over centuries, been amongst the most egregious supra-national torturers, via crusades, conquistadores, forced conversions, bloody Mary, the Holy Office and, more recently, tacit at least support for some of the most oppressive regimes simply because they are Catholic regimes.

It was Charles Kennedy I think who stood up at a party conference one year as leader and suggested that if there was one organization all Liberal democrats should also be a member of it was Amnesty.  I agree, and I hope he still does, as a Catholic and a senior Liberal Democrat, whatever this meddling priest wants to tell us.