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I know the Lib Dems are always on about how terrible it is that other parties plagiarise our own policies and take the credit, and I thoroughly approve of today's "Making it Happen" announcement and policy document at least as to direction. But might I humbly suggest that when our people are scrambling around in the bowels of government looking for these savings that seem to have been promised by every aspiring government since Nebuchadnezzar they could do a lot worse than to shamelessly borrow these fellow travellers' ideas on demolishing the QUANGOcracy.

There. £64bn savings. Done!

The Guardian on Thursday presages a Downing Street Press-fest at which Tony Blair will apparently claim that we've all "misunderstood me over the Middle East".

Apparently...he will "face down his critics today over his controversial handling of the Middle East crisis by insisting that he has been working throughout for a ceasefire in Lebanon and that his position has been misunderstood. He will argue at a Downing Street press conference that he wanted a ceasefire, but only if it was coupled with a clear understanding that the Hizbullah militia would be disarmed."

So that'll be a "no" then Tony, we've understood you perfectly well. You don't actually give a stuff about the real people whose lives have been cut short and homes and livelihoods torn apart by what's been happening (actually on both sides but since Israel has all the responsibilities and moral capacity of a democratic nation state they bear most of the blame).

You're happiest with your seven good buddies tucked up in some posh hotel like prep schoolers playing that great game of Diplomacy or like the crowned heads posturing in the pier ballroom on "Oh what a lovely war!". You want a ceasefire but only once 20% of a country has been displaced or left utterly destitute. Can you imagine not wanting a ceasefire until after London and the South East region had been evacuated, bulldozed and occupied? No.

The "rules of war" and human rights were established to prevent a recurrence of razing villages, treating civilian areas as battle grounds to target your artillery at. I actually have more respect for what Israel are now doing - starting on the eyeball to eyeball anti-guerilla fighting on the ground - than the softening up and remote control village clearances by artillery and bombing (now acknowledged by Israel to have been completely intentional all along as some of us predicted).

You'd rather condone human rights abuses and war crimes when they're being carried out by the lot on "our side" (apparently) than stick up for what is right - the defense of the innocents (also on both sides). Presumably your party is worried that they'll never be allowed into International Labour Organization meetings ever again having surrendered any claim to being the champions of ordinary people.

I don't believe anyone can really talk properly about what happens in the future until the guns have fallen silent. The difference between that happening two weeks ago and next week will only have been that "our ally" achieved most of its illegal and immoral military aims before you made them stop with hundreds dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. And I have no doubt Hezbullah is now stronger by a few village butchers, bankers and undertakers because nobody else was going to help them fight for their homes, lands and livelihoods.

While governments are pushing options round tables thousands of miles away, hundreds of thousands of lives are being uprooted and devastated. The poor and excluded are always the victims of war.

...predominantly for the Olympics, was question two on Question Time tonight.

Well, despite the news over the past couple of days that tourism might suffer in the years around an Olympic Games coming to town, ultimately the real beneficiaries are those who own land in Olympic cities.

If Londoners don't pay the greater share, they will benefit disproportionately from the tax donations of other parts of the country. Rent seeking, it's called. And it happens wherever new infrastructure is paid for by people far away from those who benefit most from it.

Technorati Tags: london, property tax, olympics, rent seeking, land value tax

I don't suppose young Jonathan Matondo will make as much of a national stir in death as the even younger Rhys Jones a couple of months ago, but it appears the "thoroughly repugnant moralistic stance" on drugs prohibition to quote from Richard Brunstrom, Chief Constable of North Wales, last week, has claimed yet another innocent victim.

Sheffield boy, 16, shot dead in play area - Times Online:

Local resident Douglas Johnson, an advice worker, said everybody in the area thought the death was related to drug dealing.

“This is what happens when drug dealing activity goes on. Kids get involved and start playing with guns,” he said. “It’s a very sad case. It’s very shocking. It’s quite a good area really. It’s had its bad reputation, and obviously something like this does not help, but it’s really not typical.”

You have one more day to help put an end to this murder directly caused by the approach the world's governments take on the failed "war on drugs" in the Home Office consultation on their review of the drugs laws here. Please, do the right thing to prevent more young lives lost and ruined, of users, innocent kids, poverty stricken "mules". All these deaths can be traced right back to the steps of the Home Office and the populist, moralising, interfering politicians, accessories to murder all of them, who occupy it.

The Competition Commission has suggested, perhaps commanded (I no longer know what sort of power the CC has given that most competition issues are meant to be dealt with on a Europe-wide basis) that BAA ought to sell some of its airports, and in particular two of the three main London ones. I am uneasy about this for two main reasons...

First off I am deeply suspicious about the timing of the Competition Commission's investigation which seemed to be a (possibly coincidental) reaction to those foreigners (Ferrovial) taking over a British company which had owned those airports for a significant time. If there was a problem with monopoly, surely it should have been taken into account when BAA was first privatised.

And second it is a big step to try and force someone to divest themselves of their own property, especially when it's not as if they are "absentee landlords" but working, and presumably working quite successfully (other than the debt burden) the property.

But there is another problem. The monopoly is not really about the airports themselves - and indeed making them compete directly by being owned by separate owners wanting to maximise their income from each individual airport is likely I would have thought to result in heavier use of all of them, increasing the discomfort for the folk who have to live as neighbours of these smelly, filthy, noisy facilities.

It is exacerbated by the fact that what they really control is access to the airlanes that supply those airports. Airlanes that are, in the economic sense, "land" - part of "unimproved" natural resources with finite space - and in this case also time - (though of course safety technologies can increase the capacity a little) for all the potential users. This is part of the commons, and Ferrovial/BAA and the longer established airlines profit directly from the monopolistic enclosure of those airlanes.

Like the Electromagnetic Spectrum they are part of the "commons" and should be leased at their full economic rent from the state for our collective benefit. They are most commonly called "landing slots" and are worth a huge amount of money - Deloittes reckons that peak day time slots at Heathrow are worth up to £30 million per pair in summer, and there are 9,562 (4,781 pairs - one to land and one to take off on) per week in high season, with an overall limit of 480,000 per year at the moment.

The slot situation is currently, by common consent, pretty chaotic. The government has capped the amount BAA can charge and capped the amount by which it can increase the charge, but 97% of all slots at Heathrow for example are not open to effective competition as they are sold at this capped cost to airlines who have been there the longest, so called "grandfather rights". Heathrow is the only airport in Europe at which there is a significant amount of secondary trading in a "grey" market which is where the £30 million per pair arises. All this profit, the economic rent, goes to the airlines and Deloittes goes on to calculate that BA's slot portfolio may be worth up to £2bn if it were included in its balance sheet as an asset compared with its market capitalisation of around £2.7bn!

The CAA should be auctioning airspace rights to all airports at whatever the market will pay, whilst airports themselves should be responsible for charging the airlines for the use of the "improvements" - the terminal access, ground facilities and so on.

This would force traffic that doesn't actually need to use these massively oversubscribed London airports out to existing regional airports first, often reducing travel times - why travel from Lancaster to London to get a plane if the destination you want is available more cheaply from Manchester - as well as bringing increased economic activity to the areas around those regional airports - airports are a huge draw for international businesses. And unless the overall capacity of slots convenient for travelers' points of origin and destination is actually more than required, would generate a goodly sum for the government in a more market efficient way than say fuel taxes.

I hope we will be having a debate at South Central regional conference on Heathrow's third runway proposals. I believe the rigorous eradicating of this money for nothing monopoly on the part of the airports and airlines through nationwide slot auctions would actually obviate the need for the extra imposition this third runway would cause on teh surrounding areas without affecting overall the competitiveness of Heathrow for flights that really need to use it.