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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!

Responding to Michael Gove's announcement on Tuesday that the Tories were going to support the idea of Community Land Trusts as a key part of housing policy Dan Rogerson's press release was out today:

Liberal Democrats : Tories are playing catch up on community land trusts - Rogerson:

Tories are playing catch up on community land trusts - Rogerson

4 January 2007

The Liberal Democrats today attacked the Conservative’s latest housing policy initiative as a desperate attempt to catch up with reality without offering a new vision. Liberal Democrat Housing Spokesperson, Dan Rogerson MP said:

"There’s no need to set up a taskforce to look at whether community land trusts can deliver affordable housing - they already are, and have been doing so for many years in the UK.

"The key issue is whether there is land available to make them work. One answer is to use surplus land held by Government departments such as the MoD, the Department of Health and English Partnerships.

"Another is to use the planning system to require developers to provide land that can then be handed over to the land trusts.

"For all of Mr Gove’s claims to be following in the footsteps of the 17th century Levellers, I can’t imagine he’ll be clearing the millionaires’ mansions off St George’s Hill in Weybridge, Surrey, where the Levellers’ first community land trust was set up."

The problem I have Dan, as a Lib Dem activist and Community Land Trust activist, is that two years ago we were all very excited about the party supporting CLTs in the Housing Policy paper. We had a conference at Warwick the following week and a magazine did the rounds with Charles Kennedy in full flow at conference on the cover setting out our Community Land Trust policy. But in those two years we have done absolutely nothing to back up our policy that I can see or hear, and I'm pretty well plugged into the CLT gossip.

Tell your local government planning and housing leaders that "there’s no need to...look at whether community land trusts can deliver affordable housing - they already are". You may be convinced but that hasn't filtered through to local policy making even in those local authorities we actually control. I know of one council with a "CLT officer" if you will, and another paid for out of housing pathfinder money or whatever it's called.

The plain fact is that Michael Gove on Tuesday did more to get CLTs in peoples' minds and on their lips than we have in the two years we've had the policy. Truth is, I never did really believe we understood the model when we adopted it as policy and have been shy in promoting it as a result. I have offered your team leader that I could go round to Lib Dem council groups to explain it to them if he thought it was worthwhile and it didn't even get a response.

Well guess what, tonight I've written to all the Tory group leaders in Oxfordshire offering to go and give them group briefings on it. When will we as a party learn that if we have good ideas, it's no use sitting back and waiting for one of the others to adopt it and then complain that they're johnny-come-latelies adopting a good policy that we first thought of?  We need to yell about such things with conviction as soon as we adopt them and be the obvious reason others adopt it too!

Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see the local MP speaking on the same platform at Burford as Billy Bragg and Tony Benn!

I asked this question a few weeks ago when I heard Chris Huhne talking about carbon trading being a better incentive than carbon taxing for businesses to make cuts in their pollution output, but nobody responded with an argument either way. Now, in Obscenity of carbon trading:

The Stern Review's emphasis on carbon trading is wrong, Kevin Smith argues; only cutting emissions at source will curb climate change.

So I'll ask again, since Kevin Smith doesn't actually put forward any mechanism by which people and businesses should be encouraged to cut their emissions.

You see, the air is mine, and yours, and yours, and yours. It belongs to us all collectively. We need it to survive, and there is, sort of, a finite supply of it. So why would we want governments or some other trans-national body, to hand out permits to businesses to pollute a certain portion of it, allowing them to sell some of that portion on if they don't use it all themselves? It is enclosure of the air, just as surely as the enclosure of land sent millions off to rot in the hell of the satanic mills. If it has value at all, and there doesn't overall seem to be much argument about that, it is value that we, the people, own collectively and should be used for our benefit and not for the benefit of corporations.

Smith reports that companies collectively have made windfall gains of £940bn across Europe after persuading governments to allocate bigger chunks which they have then been able to sell on - under any definition that is what is known as "rent seeking".

The polluting widget manufacturer is in the business of making widgets, not trading air (I have a similar problem with UK Coal deciding it is now a property company rather than a coal miner). If it can't break even by making widgets it needs to change its way of working or close. That's the market.

So, why not tax every process and business on its total carbon consumption. Of course, you would want to use that tax to reduce tax on good economic processes. If you can make the same widgets in a less polluting way why should you also pay corporation tax or the consumer sales tax on them. It is consistent with our "Green Tax Shift". It is consistent with Georgists' "Tax Shift" onto economic land and externalities. And it doesn't give away our air to someone to make money out of.

You could get tax credits if you invent a process that actually takes more pollution out of the atmosphere than it puts in, which is fair enough - a sort of "negative carbon tax". The same calculations need to go on anyway whether you use the trading or the taxing mechanism - each process, or end product, needs to have a carbon assessment somehow. And that must already be underway for companies to be able to participate in the various trading schemes that have sprung up around the world.

Keep it simple. There would be no need for a separate aviation pollution tax - it's a process just like any other (though there are other externalities in aviation that ought to be taxed - like use of physical airspace through landing slot auctions), no need for a separate vehicle pollution tax system - the vehicle must have a carbon rating on which any of the suggested emissions based vehicle tax systems will be based.

I don't think you would even need to make it personal, on individuals. They would be paying for the pollution their lifestyles may cost in the price they pay for goods - no need for a complex "personal carbon allowance" as has been suggested.