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I have to admit that I viscerally loathe defectors. So don't expect any nice words of regret at losing Sajjad Karim to the Tories, for whatever reason he thinks justifies his actions.

But back within the party he has just run away from, I wonder whether it has any importance. One of the things that Nick Clegg got plenty of plaudits for recently was the idea of an "earned amnesty" for existing illegal immigrants, a measure that I have not seen Cameron, even last week in Prague, beat. But given that this is one area where we have clear blue water between us and the Tories on if Sajjad thinks we've made a mistake, does this translate into a bit of a blow for Nick's policy?

Me, of course, I'm an open borders advocate. You cannot expect to have free movement of goods and services without free movement of people. The challenge is not how to stop people coming here for whatever reason, but to help build a world in which people do not feel the need to migrate simply to better themselves in a minimum wage job.

Such a task is not one for the petty isolationists in the Tory party, and will need a truly co-operative internationalist party to understand. Which is, in the UK, only the Lib Dems, at least of the major parties.

Here's some century old words of wisdom and humour for Sajj:

I often think it's comical -- Fal, lal, la!
How Nature always does contrive -- Fal, lal, la!
That every boy and every gal
That's born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative!
Fal, lal, la! —
(Iolanthe, Gilbert and Sullivan, 1882)

"Liberal Conservative" or "Conservative Liberal" are ideological oxymorons. Sayonara, Sajj, I hope you really do know what you are joining.

UPDATE:  It just goes to show what people will read and what they won't that this post makes it into the "Golden Dozen" and some of my more thoughtful posts don't!  Maybe I should try to be salacious more of the time! 

Gordon Brown was quite effusive, for him, over the sad (though at ninety seven one could never say untimely) passing of John Kenneth Galbraith.

Maybe he should read "Money: Whence it came, where it went".

If Galbraith did one thing, I would say it was to challenge the idea that economists have some monopoly on wisdom that ordinary folk were excluded from. Rather, he claimed, they made up rules and complex models deliberately to obfuscate logic so that even the best educated who were not in their little club would accept their dictums unquestioned.

Too bad Gordon Brown didn't seem to pick that up in the advice JK gave him.

...and meant to be settled down somewhere in a nest with wife and kids when you see "The perfect gift for Father's Day...Level 42 - The Definitive Collection".

Oh well.

The BBC reports that in the US an ex-defence adviser attacks Bush:

[Richard] Perle says in hindsight he would not have backed invasion

It seems to me that this was one of those neo-cons specially brought in to sell the war against all the evidence. Three days before elections too! That's gratitude for you.

I cannot claim to speak for the Oxfordshire Community Partnerships’ Key Worker Housing Ambition Group, but I am personally disappointed by Bob Langton’s resignation (“Expert quits housing group”, page 2, 9th September). I think he has chosen the wrong group to dump.

There are indeed several groups working on affordable housing issues. There also does seem to be overlap, especially in the groups of local authorities’ housing and planning officers, sometimes augmented by other social housing providers. But this is the only one where employers wanting to help essential workers are the main drivers. We also appear to be the only group encouraging broader thinking on wider affordability issues and innovative mechanisms to provide more affordable housing for a wider group of households in need.

I haven’t seen Bob at a meeting of the group this year, and we could have done with him to help drive forward the outcomes from the excellent developer event he organised for us in December. But just as one example of many if he had come along on 8th Sept he would have heard of an event that will launch a new mechanism for developing affordable housing. One which empowers local communities to control their own development to meet their needs, and, it has to be said, not just the wants of those who would trade in nature’s gift to us all – the land itself - primarily for private profit.

Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts would probably not exist without a workshop in June 2003 the KWHAG held at which some of us decided to take up their challenge and be innovative instead of waiting for the powers that be to do more of the same old hand-me-down grant funded social housing, which simply isn’t happening in anything like sufficient quantity.

And OCP, through the KWHAG, has been the only body to have supported us all this time. We hope that Oxfordshire’s county and district councillors will give us added impetus next month following our launch.

Still, as your regular coverage of landowners around Oxford clamouring to persuade the authorities to let them make huge profits shows, people can be impatient when their living turns on it. Nevertheless, none of this can flourish without landowners, authorities and those in need of housing co-operating. The KWHAG is unique in bringing all those together.