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I know - it's a week late. But I picked up a snippet the other day that tells you why Labour lost in Glasgow East...

Apparently voter contact had been absolutely zero for years. David Marshall had done virtually nothing for years (apart from perhaps collecting money from us for his carefully chosen constituency staff). He supposedly didn't even venture into the constituency much and held few if any surgeries. When they started the by-election campaign they were starting voter identification from scratch with no reliable previous data at all.

Utter bonkers. They absolutely deserve to have lost with the level of contempt towards the constituents that smug inactivity over the years demonstrates.

On the other hand, it puts the SNP victory in some context - were they any better than, say, the IWCA in Oxford whose only reason for existing as a force on the council was Labour's contemptuous attitude in their "safest" wards.

UPDATE: And I see from Dan Paskins that there is a motion in to conference saying much the same .

Tucked away in the comments to Lib Dem Voice's How rich are you? article comes this snippet from Tim Leunig (LSE economist, and member of the Housing Policy working party I was on a couple of years back):

"The obvious new incentive effect is on house prices. We would expect them to increase (by around 8x the level of council tax, so around £15k), as happened when rates were replaced by the poll tax."

Well quite. We in ALTER have been saying this since the Local Income Tax policy was first debated. We've gotten the impression that the rest of the party has not been listening. Hopefully someone as respected as Tim within the party will make someone listen with comments like that.

To reiterate...not only will most of your national income tax reduction be eaten up with your new Local Income Tax but if you happen to be in that growing group who are getting no help with housing costs and cannot afford to buy a home, you'll be likely to find prices even further out of your pocket by at least another half an income multiple.

Perhaps this is why the Lib Dem Youth and Students annual conference this year voted against Local Income Tax and in favour of Land Value Tax instead. That cohort is what we usually regard as our "core vote" I believe. Not the people you'd want to piss off I'd have thought.

"Axe the Tax" was, and remains, a great idea - Council Tax is as regressive and unfair as taxes come. Local Income Tax was an easier thing to sell, perhaps, than another type of property tax. But, as Keynes was it said "when the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?" it is time, three years on with property prices up another third, to think again about a tax policy that will extend the misery of those we want to help. There's no shame in changing policies if a better idea presents itself. Affordable housing is, as Gordon Brown said this week, right at the top of the agenda now - we should not continue with a tax policy, in the form of Local Income Tax, GUARANTEED to exacerbate the affordability crisis all parties appear to want to solve.

Technorati Tags: axe the tax, council tax, land value tax, ldys, lib dems, local income tax

Now I'm not normally one for the line that for every nuisance we need a new law, but with fireworks I'm perilously close to calling for a complete ban.

I cannot imagine any circumstances in which letting off an explosive charge, however much fun it might be for those doing it or watching the spectacle, does not harm another. I suppose if, like the Barclay brothers, you own a private island out o sight and sound from any other inhabitants then maybe.

But for the rest of us, pets and children get scared - I know several dogs that turn frankly neurotic if they hear just one from miles away, and if they are out on a walk they scarper and risk being knocked down if you can't catch them before they reach the road. Tonight I've lost four hours' sleep because some bastard let one off near my window and I woke up like I was living in Baghdad or somewhere to find that several more were being let off, including one that set fire to a waste bin into which it had been thrown. Presumably the perptrator had no real idea as to whether it would simply start a fire or blow the bloody doors off and maim someone with them.

Despite what I thought were some tightening up of the regulations about when it was permissible, or anti-social, to let them off, this past week has seen several in Oxford at one, two, three and even as today four in the morning. And they are next to impossible to police - it only takes one to wake everyone up for miles around and the chances of pinpointing where it came from unless you are very quick and very local are zilch.

Maybe it is time only to allow licensed displays to even purchase any but the most innocuous "flash and fizz" type ones. Why does anyone think it is their right to hurl explosives that make loud noises into the air over our heads at any time of the day or night?

Just a little tangential information for Mr George "Heres my comeback on the road again" Osborne who's biggin it up in Japan at the moment.

If the UK were at the same population density as Japan, we'd have space for some 22 million additional inhabitants to come and work our economy!

Oh, and I reckon we'll have the wrong kind of leaves for Mag-lev.