Randomly Selected Article or Link

I don't get to go to conference. It's always freshers week here at university and I get to give my one speech of the year to a crowd of a couple of hundred steadily drinking freshers who don't want to hear what I have to say and this year were crushed to hear that the arrivals meeting took up the first half hour of the Arsenal-Man United game.

But lame as I am, after a weekend working and with next weekend on duty, I decided my brain felt already a bit like I imagine an egg feels when it realises its next role is as an ommlette and I belatedly took today off work (leave, not sick). And so I was able to see at least part of the Lib Dem conference debate on the Tax Commission proposals on quarter of a TV screen on my set top box.

They say every journey starts with a single step, and it will be no surprise to people who know me as a Georgist "Single Taxer" nowadays to hear that personally I think that the Tax Commission's work has been just that first step. And what a debate. I am glad to be in a party in which such steps are taken democratically, with full and frank debate, with opposing views heard and applauded. But party is only part of the story.

Whether or not Ming's leadership was on the line, however, were they to have voted for Evan Harris's 50% amendment, I very much doubt. Other people do not seem to understand liberal leadership and make everything a test of strength (and let's face it, the Tax Commission was not Ming's vehicle but the party's, triggered by Charles Kennedy after the last election and well on its way to a final report before Ming became leader). I do think my own membership would have been on the line, though, because whilst we might have taken that first step, for me we would have instantly withdrawn our foot and it would have become an uncertain shuffle.

Gareth Epps mentioned in his speech that he was in the party to win elections, and that was what the party also needed to do more than anything, and that "economic purists" were unlikely to achieve that because "economic purism" is difficult to sell to people. Far more difficult, to him and many others, than by maintaining an easily understood totem indicating where our hearts are - that we can and would take from the best off to help the worst off. But it was a totem that, had it been retained, would have been at 180 degree opposition to the economic theory of the rest of the paper, of shifting the burden of taxation off people and onto resource use and depletion. The beginning of the end of the peonage of taxing the results of our efforts and enterprise.

So maybe a political party is not the place for me at all. I don't want to win elections (and I have a fair amount of practice at not doing so to prove it...:) - I only want to change the world. And I don't really believe that politicians change the world. Winning elections may give them the opportunity to do so, but rarely does it actually seem to happen. It's ideas that change the world. And watching today's conference debate made me realise that selling even the most modest ideas to a democratic body is an almost superhuman task. And one left to far better salesmen, demagogues and the occasional spiv than I will ever be.

As I wrote back in spring, Anthony Fisher, Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon became my unlikeliest of political heros when I discovered the history of their part in selling an idea, probably the last idea to revolutionize western politics, to the politicians that actually began to understand and appreciate it and try to implement it. Of course, I could be cynical and suggest that that idea, monetarism, morphed into nothing more than another opportunity for one party to gain an electoral edge. One wonders whether, if Conservative policy in the seventies had been set the way Liberal Democrat policy was today through such open and democratic means, a room full of people would have understood John Hoskyns's Stepping Stones plan (was that its name?) let alone approved of it, or whether it was more a case of strong leadership and a conjunction of celestial bodies taking control behind the scenes.

Anyway, back to the debate today. There were many comments, from both sides of the debate, about being proud of Lloyd-George a century ago and of his peoples' budget. So am I. But I remind everyone that a large and probably the most radical part of that budget was never implemented. A radical idea that many of us, including several members of the Tax Commission itself, are still fighting for while many others who invoke L-G have probably forgotten or never even knew he stood for! Land Value Tax.

It was good to hear Mike Williams who chaired the Tax Commission highlight it as an area we wanted to do more work and produce new policy for as soon as possible. I was sad to hear him say that there are no silver bullets, because those of us who are convinced by the "Single Tax" do believe it is just such a killer application. In the debate over whether to tax incomes or asset wealth it would be worth some of those in favour of the 50 pence rate to consider why L-G was never able to implement it; the implacable opposition of the wealthiest and most advantaged in the land and "their representatives" in the House of Lords and what they gave away - no less than the right to govern - in order to ensure it wasn't implemented.

Today the party took a small step. It wrapped it up in cuddly, saleable, spinnable terms like "Green Tax Switch" which will serve it well. But it has yet truly to grasp the fairness, simplicity and philosophical superiority of the Single Tax idea, shifting away from the envy and arbitrariness of taxing personal success completely and onto externalities and economic rent. Shifting the whole rationale for the state's interference in what we do with what we make into the stewardship of the resources we share and take and use.

In the process, Land Value Tax would, almost incidentally, achieve more environmentally sustainable patterns of living and working, a better distribution of the wealth generating capacity around the country and create a system that puts more responsibility and freedom to choose back to the individual and community and away from the monolithic state apparatus. The next steps may be harder. They could and should go way beyond the 5% of the total tax burden that this paper switches - the more the more effective. But they head where Liberals should not fear to tread.

...or "we should shackle the permanent secretary of the Treasury along with a clutch of Treasury ministers to the derelict barge in the stinking Hackney cut. And throw away the key."

In today's Observer Will Hutton comes out for Land Value Tax to fund the potential gap in capital funding for the Olympics. Okay, he doesn't actually understand it - why should you issue bonds when you can instruct the money to be created and then retired as the tax comes in but hey - it's a step.

"Tickets, television rights, sponsorship, the lottery and even an Olympic surcharge on London ratepayers have all been stretched to the limit. More is needed. The Treasury refuses additional help. Without some imagination, the Olympic vision will be the casualty. The answer is obvious. If the games go as planned, there will be a huge increase in land values and property prices throughout east London. If the government could capture just a fraction of the increase in those land and property prices, then it could more than repay any bonds it issued today to pay for the games.

"The Chancellor praises entrepreneurs; now is the moment for Treasury officials to practise what they preach. What they have to do is invent a way the government can capture some of the wider gain that its own development is creating. We could copy the Americans and tax the incremental gain. We could insist that private developers form public-private partnerships, with the development gains earmarked to repay Olympic bonds. What we cannot do is to penny-pinch and roll back the ambition.

"It is a pivotal moment. We have to find a way of breaking out of the self-defeating logic that all Britain can afford in any public development is what the taxpayer stumps up, while private developers pocket the benefit. That way, we always build small. You only have to smell the sewage at Old Ford locks and gaze at the desolation to see the results.

"The Olympics must be funded as imaginatively as the project has been devised and the precedent then used across the country. If not, we should shackle the permanent secretary of the Treasury along with a clutch of Treasury ministers to the derelict barge in the stinking Hackney cut. And throw away the key."

So David Cameron is apparently going to explain that we need to learn to understand the "hoodie culture" better - that for many it is a way not of hiding aggression and criminal intent but of "keeping your head down" retreating into anonymity in an hostile world. That instead of opprobrium youngsters need nurturing to make the correct life-choices in a fast moving bewildering (and I'd add very unequal) society.

It reminds me of Germaine Greer's "The Boy" of 2003, a book extolling the real beauty of teenage males that got her some bad press with some decrying her as a middle aged pederast. I recall not buying it myself because I felt it might feel uncomfortably voyeuristic. I heard her explain the rationale behind the book at the time though. What she was trying to do was rekindle a sense of self-confidence; that boys in particular were, through their fashion statements - baggy trousers, hoodies and the like - reacting to being constantly put down, as inherently criminal, as "thickos", as failures in a feminist world that said we can do without men.

For years we have been showered with statistics about how boys are in fact doing worse than girls, at school, at university, at life. Now sure, we've had generations, perhaps millennia, where girls and women were second class citizens, chattels, not worth the same as men, and that had to be addressed. But maybe the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Of course I'm prepared to accept that in fact women are simply just the superior being and that levelling the playing field has begun to allow that inherent superiority to shine through. But even if that is the case, it means we need to pay more attention now to boys and men, to give them the step up to realise their potentials and so on.

When I was a councillor it was a very common complaint that there were "gangs of youths" just hanging around, intimidatingly, frightening old ladies going about their ordinary business at the local shop, the chippie or whatever. Cameron is right certainly in one respect - Labour's, and society as a whole's it seems, response to this has been to criminalise them, with ASBOs, curfews, banning their attire from public places in the name of a surveillance society that wants to record our every move, Big Brother like. It seems sometimes that it's not a case of if you offend, but when you offend, we will be able to spot you (and, by extension, punishment will be swift).

The axiom that if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to hide is Labour's mantra for centralising control of our lives and is making people feel that their privacy is under attack. And if you're young and perhaps just a little bit naughty (weren't we all? As DC should know!) and you don't quite have a full understanding of your rights you are going to be tempted to retreat into anonymity.

A friend of mine took a bunch of kids from his council estate on a couple of overseas trips to Oxford's twin cities of Bonn and Leiden last year. Some of them had ASBOs. Whatever he allowed his name put to in his Labour election leaflets this May (he lost anyway) it made him realise that ASBOs were not really the answer to many of these problems - that a little bit of TLC was what they needed to settle down and make the right kind of choices when faces with them. To have some self-confidence.

And then there was Tom Conti's contribution to "This Week" a couple of years back where he speculated that if we throw huge investment at education, that if we make schools, especially in the early years, places of respite from a hostile world, and, in some cases, hostile home lives, with class sizes of just half a dozen in the most formative years so that the environment is more family than cattle-market, that we will foster a sense of personal responsibility that will eventually feed through into massive savings in currently state provided services (especially health and social services related).

Can we afford not to address these issues? And do it better than criminal sanctions? Respect does indeed begin at home, and when prominent, and one presumes well brought up for want of nothing, young political campaigners have so little respect for the "little people" in the council estates that, when caught short, they feel no compunction about pissing in the alleyways of someone else's neighbourhood, maybe the example from the very top could be a bit better!

Whatever the answer, the youngsters of today are our future. They are ours (well not mine personally you understand - no chance of that!), a part of our communities. If our communities are outlawing them in the formative years, what resentment are we storing up for our future? And boy, do we need more people like this to change things.

Technorati Tags: conservatives, education, young

To: letters@independent.co.uk

Dear Sir,

Let's hope that "The Two Sides of Heroin, UK" (Feb 9th) signifies curtains for the worldwide program of brutal prohibition that creates both unlikely heroes and tragic martyrs. Prohibition, and the "War on Drugs", have failed. Worse, they are the primary factors in the misery and death that we see drugs wreaking in communities worldwide.

Compared with alcohol, many are biochemically relatively benign. Yet because of the illegal supply chain, few, except perhaps the affluent Sir Iain Blair attacks, can manage their habit safely. People take more risks to maximise the hit from a limited and uncertain supply. They get dependent on several substances because they have to take what's available from dealers whose only interest is in profit. It was not so in previous eras when predominantly upper class women were the addicts.

The history of prohibition is riddled with the institutional racism Iain Blair rightly condemns - opium in the US because of the moral panic that immigrant Chinese were using opium dens to seduce western women, cocaine because it supposedly turned "negroes" into “frenzied rapists”.

The supply will never be curtailed. If Afghanistan produced none (and it only takes a few acres to produce the entire UK supply), heroin is easily synthesised. It can be so concentrated that a month's individual supply could be concealed under a postage stamp. How can we stop that?

As with all prohibition, the very criminalisation makes it somehow more enticing. Where would be the cachet in something you could buy in measured, safe doses at the newsagent, chemist or over the bar? Humans have used these natural based substances since the dawn of time for medical, recreational and even religious uses. In the past they have actually contributed to social and community cohesion. The death and destruction they wreak now is solely down to this culture of prohibition. If the law kills (let alone the social costs in crime, punishment and rehabilitation) it is an immoral law, and we are all complicit in those deaths.

Sincerely,

Jock Coats