...or "we should shackle the permanent secretary of the Treasury along with a clutch of Treasury ministers to the derelict barge in the stinking Hackney cut. And throw away the key."

In today's Observer Will Hutton comes out for Land Value Tax to fund the potential gap in capital funding for the Olympics. Okay, he doesn't actually understand it - why should you issue bonds when you can instruct the money to be created and then retired as the tax comes in but hey - it's a step.

"Tickets, television rights, sponsorship, the lottery and even an Olympic surcharge on London ratepayers have all been stretched to the limit. More is needed. The Treasury refuses additional help. Without some imagination, the Olympic vision will be the casualty. The answer is obvious. If the games go as planned, there will be a huge increase in land values and property prices throughout east London. If the government could capture just a fraction of the increase in those land and property prices, then it could more than repay any bonds it issued today to pay for the games.

"The Chancellor praises entrepreneurs; now is the moment for Treasury officials to practise what they preach. What they have to do is invent a way the government can capture some of the wider gain that its own development is creating. We could copy the Americans and tax the incremental gain. We could insist that private developers form public-private partnerships, with the development gains earmarked to repay Olympic bonds. What we cannot do is to penny-pinch and roll back the ambition.

"It is a pivotal moment. We have to find a way of breaking out of the self-defeating logic that all Britain can afford in any public development is what the taxpayer stumps up, while private developers pocket the benefit. That way, we always build small. You only have to smell the sewage at Old Ford locks and gaze at the desolation to see the results.

"The Olympics must be funded as imaginatively as the project has been devised and the precedent then used across the country. If not, we should shackle the permanent secretary of the Treasury along with a clutch of Treasury ministers to the derelict barge in the stinking Hackney cut. And throw away the key."