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Over at The 1909 Group, a critique of the Olympic Games financing.

Alexis Rowell, of the Belsize Lib Dems blog, gets a fabulous write-up from Peter Stothard of the TLS:

A worm's eye for politics

After decades of living in North London, meeting politicians (too many) and writing about politics (too much), I'm beginning to feel for the first time that I'm genuinely represented by one.

No, not Glenda Jackson, the movie-star-turned-axe-face-of-the-old Left and my veteran Member of Parliament here in the Hampstead part of Camden. There is still some way to go before the House of Commons itself has anything for me.

No, not Lord Adonis of Camden Town, the former Andrew Adonis, the closest thing to a natural TLS-reader in the Blair and Brown governments. His choice of title for his appointed place in the Upper House of our legislature, while pleasing, does not make him strictly any representative of mine.

I do, however, have a local Councillor. He is called Alexis Rowell, a Liberal Democrat, an environmental campaigner, a blogger, a man with a wormery in his garden and good advice on electricity suppliers - and, mirabile dictu, he deals with his constituents about what is happening in the streets around us.

He genuinely represents.

Read the rest at The Times - nice one Alexis!

In one of those odd coincidences, Land Value Taxer colleague Tony Vickers was last week having a few problems adding an article to the 1909 website and eventually he forwarded a quote he had just discovered to me by email to put it into an article.

I hadn't thought that the opportunity would come around so soon to do so, but it transpires that Ming Campbell is today giving a speech at a Joseph Rowntree Foundation conference in which he will announce housing proposals, including:

· Building 100,000 new affordable, social and low cost homes each year

· Devolving and reforming the planning system to make decisions faster and more effective for all parties

· Introducing equity mortgages to ensure that affordable housing is built and maintained for the benefit of generations of buyers

· Building smaller social housing developments which are integrated with private housing

· Cutting VAT on housing renovations and repairs

In Joseph Rowntree’s Memorandum to his advisers on setting up a charitable trust (the "parent" trust of the aforementioned Joseph Rowntree Foundation) in his name, written in 1904, he said: “Every Social writer knows the supreme importance of questions connected with the holding and taxation of land, but for one person who attempts to master this question there are probably thousands who devote their time and strength to relieving poverty and its accompanying evils. … Such aspects of [the Land question] as the nationalisation of land, or the taxation of land values, or the appropriation of the unearned increment – all needs a treatment far more thorough than they have yet received.”

Ming is right to say that "Britain needed a revolution in housing" and that "innovative and imaginative solutions were needed to deliver this revolution".

But he goes on to demonstrate that with our policies we are amongst those "probably thousands who devote their time and strength to relieving poverty and its accompanying evils" but are not yet prepared to become the "one person who attempts to master this [land] question" that Joseph Rowntree wrote of. The aims are admirable, the policies as good as anyone else's (and considerably more than Labour seem to care for), but ultimately it will be futile if we do not rise to Rowntree's challenge and deal with the attitude of Britain to land ownership.

They knew it 100 years ago, it's such a shame that we so obviously need to relearn it today. But relearn it we must, unless we want to be talking about this in another twenty years as just as serious a crisis as today.

Technorati Tags: affordable housing, land value tax, lib dems, property tax