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A number of others have kindly blogged about the interesting discussion at the ALTER conference fringe event last Saturday night. From the point of view of being on the platform for the first time it was all the more interesting for me. I wanted to pick up on some of the issues that were raised, not so much by the audience, though many were very insightful questions and observations, but the issues raised by both Tony Vickers in his introduction and especially by Vince Cable in his speech.

First, Tony Vickers introduced the whole event by saying that ALTER wanted to spend some time focussing on the second half of our acronym, Economic Reform more generally, rather than Land Tax which we have fixated on thus far. I'm afraid I rather brushed that aside with my little speech about our book, which will now focus more on land than anything else.

I have always taken the view personally that there is indeed more to the essential economic reforms we need to see in an equitable economic system that will benefit the greatest number of ordinary people than just land. I look to the great individualist anarchists and mutualists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fore-runners of the libertarian movement, who all held that there were four great monopolistic systems we needed to eradicate to level the playing field for all - land, banking, intellectual property and the state itself, or most especially the tariffs they use in pursuit of protectionist policy. Indeed my journey to understanding the land problem began with reading books about the debt-money system.

Colleagues involved in the editorial team for the book, whose economics education is far superior to mine, however, are more convinced that the land monopoly underpins all of these others, and whilst I am yet to understand their arguments fully I do I think see roughly where they are coming from. Essentially their argument is that by creating "free land" the power of the worker is increased by enough to offset the coercive power of debt money, that the ability of governments to manipulate a tax system based on market set values of land to effect protectionist policies is reduced and intellectual property becomes much more a negotiable part of an inventor's portfolio rather than something easily "enclosed" by big business as a result of the relative increase of the power of labour versus capital. At least I think that's how it goes.

But anyway, the upshot of all this is that the book will be more about land than about any of the other areas I have been interested in and which Tony suggested we would be looking at in the future. Though no doubt the chapters on each area of policy will show how "free land" feeds through into greater empowerment of the individual and worker.

Second, (we weren't ganging up on Tony, I promise!) Vince again turned the discussion around onto land tax. He said, I think, that we had largely won the theoretical argument on land taxes - that the party acknowledged its potential importance. But that there was much work to be done he said to produce "SMART" (my corporate bingo word, not Vince's) policies that can actually be sold to people (ie voters) and implemented. And on that theme I want to post a few separate thoughts of my own in separate posts in the near future.

James Graham rejoined that actually we need to make the "moral case" for LVT, what I would call, and agree with, the TINA (there is no alternative) argument - though my powers of persuasion in the housing debate on that position were clearly not very good! I could put it a slightly different way - "can we afford not to". And that, I think, is also shaping up to be the real message of the "Liberal Alternative" book.

I will end this introduction to a series of posts on "can we afford not to" with a thought on what seems to be a trait in Liberal Democrat policy making. Do we need to have such detailed plans for exactly how we would proceed from day one of a Lib Dem administration, or should we focus more on getting the "big messages" across. It seems to me that the last time we had a big ideological shift in British government, in 1979, that the Tories had a clear "direction of travel" but were not obsessed with landing in Number 10 with a full set of detailed measures to implement that. They may have had behind the scenes, ready to wheel out when the time was right, but the message to the public in the election was of the broad direction of travel.

This is not something we are alone in. Nowadays every party seems to have to have these details all thrashed out in order to give them credibility amongst the electorate that they would be competent to run the country. But I'm not entirely sure that that is what the voter actually wants - perhaps they want the big ideas rather than the detailed minutiae. I suspect this minute detail is a symptom of our modern managerial one-upmanship and the absence of ideological politics. But surely as a party we actually want to return to ideological politics that we think voters will engage with and be excited by.

I don't think I would be accused of disloyalty if I said that we are not going to be the party of government after the next election! So we spend a lot of time selling detailed policies that we will not get to implement before circumstances, most likely, change again. We have had most success with our "big themes" - we are known for PR, for opposition to war in Iraq, and for the idea, expressed through our previous tax pledges (though I hate to admit it in oh so many ways - not least that it will give succour to the likes of Evan Harris!) that we want "fair" taxation. We can sell LVT as "fair taxation" without minute details as to how it would be implemented, perhaps at most a broad timescale for a tax shift, as the Tories did with reducing income taxes in 1979 - something that actually took them three terms to really implement as far as the average voter would feel in their pocket.

Our detailed policy making produces a couple of not always welcome effects - that we are hostages to fortune - what we promise in one election might one day come back to haunt us several elections later when we make it to Downing Street, and it saves other parties a deal of work thinking for themselves when we create policies that they like to nick. We can of course take some pride in others wanting to use our policies, but people soon forget where they originated, and we risk being forever a glorified "think tank" rather than a party with the big ideas that will win us power. LVT is such an idea. We should not be afraid to tout it without trying to explain to people exactly how it would be implemented except in broad outline until we are closer to being in a position to do so. That will not stop the likes of us in ALTER, however, trying to show the party internally how it might work, but in the end, the detail is what the Treasury is for when we have control of the Great Court!

There's a story doing the rounds on the BBC today about teenage sexual health. One thing that keeps being mentioned is that you can't advertise condoms on TV. I'm sure I've seen such adverts in other countries on UK TV programs about funny overseas adverts.

But it set me wondering - if you were advertising condoms wouldn't you want a different name for them? It's not the connotation that irks me, it's the word...con-dom. For some reason it just sounds odd and unappealing. So I wanted to know where it came from and looked it up in the OED. They don't record an etymology, but note that there is an unconfirmed suggestion that there was a Dr Condom, or Conton, or similar in the 18th century.

But the historical quotes are more interesting:

1744 The Machine 10 Let not the Joy she proffers be Essay'd, Without the well-try'd Cundum's friendly Aid.
1936 D. V. GLASS Struggle for Population iii. 35 [In Italy] condoms are listed as preventatives of disease and not as birth-control appliances, and are thus easily available.

The message has been the same for 250 years!  Particularly interesting that second one, as it implies that the Vatican were less concerned about them then as a means of preventing disease than they are now.

Technorati Tags: advertising rules, sexual health, condom

How gallant of them!

Tories advocate watchdog to monitor aid impact

Larry Elliott
Monday June 4, 2007
The Guardian

The Conservatives last night called for this week's G8 summit in Germany to create a new international body to measure the effectiveness of aid spending as they warned that much of the west's development budget was being badly used.

Andrew Mitchell, the shadow international development secretary said Tony Blair should used Britain's position as the most effective aid spender in the G8 to put pressure on other rich countries to make better use of the resources earmarked for tackling global poverty.
...
The Conservatives have already announced plans for an independent aid watchdog to scrutinise British aid, and Mr Mitchell believes that, if successful, it could be used as the template for an international monitoring body.

He added that there would be a built-in international dimension to his new body for assessing UK spending, since so much of British aid went through multilateral channels such as the World Bank, or was used in partnership with other bilateral donors.

All those trips to aid recipient nations - wouldn't they just love it!

Funny thing, looking through my blog stats, we are all just a bunch of big gossips aren't we. Forget all my screeds of writing on my pet subjects like drugs laws, land value tax, whacko economics and community planning and development. The top posts, every time, are ones that have a whiff of scandal about them, or at least someone's name in the title. Yesterday I got the most hits for a while and the most popular of those was my post about Greg Barker. I notice it also made it to top outgoing post on the Lib Dem aggregator.

Sad lot you are! But it gave me an opportunity to test out a new (to me at least) free blog posting client, Qumana.

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I seem to remember being told that once upon a time Inland Revenue officers used not to be allowed to work on different tax schedules so that no one officer would ever know a citizen's true financial position. Oh for such propriety today when whole records in their millions are transported around different departments merely for audit purposes. Much has been said today about the loss of disks containing the child benefit records of 25 million people and many have suggested that it would be quite wrong now to go ahead with ID cards knowing that information security is so lax in a government department that already holds sensitive data on each and every one of us.

I want to take a slightly different line. I have always been and remain utterly opposed to the system of ID cards linked to a database that is now legislated for. However when I was on the Lib Dems' Civil Liberties working party eight years ago or so I did propose a wholly different type of ID card/account that would come into its own in this situation.

My idea was that we could all have a card or account that would "lock" all data held on us by government and that would require us to be present, or able to authenticate online or on the phone like you do with your telephone or internet banking systems, before any government officer could access your data or authorize any transfer of a part of it to someone else. A sort of a "nuclear key" where both the data subject's and the data user's half of that key would effectively be needed to decrypt any of the data subject's personal information. Yes, it might slow certain things down, but let's face it, there are some things we really don't want government interfering in unbeknownst to us. One needn't even have to trust government to guarantee one's identity - you could open it up so an individual could choose a firm like Thawte, who provide guarantees of identity to online commerce sites we trust with £40bn of our custom each year, to guarantee their identity and private key.

Data about us is part of us. It is our right to know it's secure, especially when we have no choice in handing it over - and such circumstances should be minimized. Whether it's bank account details or DNA it's an invasion of our privacy and self-ownership and every additional byte stored about us is a step towards totalitarianism. The apparatus of government should be our servant and not our master and many fought and died to ensure that we were not enslaved by overbearing states in the twentieth century.

I do not see why the National Audit Office should want all the records on the database. Surely audit is about taking a sample to prove that procedures were being followed and the bona fides of the person being audited and the figures they have produced. HMRC should have a system of internal audit that itself can be verified without any other department needing access to the original data. And if they do need access to the original data, then it should be done on site in a secure area or through secure access direct to the systems concerned. No other business surely sends all of their customer records to their external auditors do they? Nor should they in the civil service, and if that's how NAO and District Audit work then that too should change and urgently.

Commentators like Richard Murphy are just plain wrong in insisting that this is not an extremely serious breach that highlights systemic problems in organizations that handle such huge amounts of data without the effective scrutiny of competition for their customers to keep them on their toes. No junior official, in fact I'd go so far as to say no individual official should have had access to the whole data universe without a great deal of additional verification. It defies belief that anyone thought this system was sufficiently secure.

And finally - a word of warning...

In this highly interactive and globalized society, if we continue to insist on potentially intangible bases - our incomes - for tax, the amount and intrusiveness of data they will need to hold on us can only increase. Another plus for taxing land.