Having set out some of the fantastic potential of Oxford and some of the challenges we face in realising that potential, before I come on to specific policy commitments I wanted to outline some of the principles by which I live and which form my thinking and that will shape many of those policies.

Individualism, mutualism, democracy

Individualism - I am inherently anti-government. I think we have too much of it, we rely too much on it and are consequently disappointed and angry when it fails to deliver what we thought it would. I think people feel better about themselves when they have a choice and can do things for themselves.

Nonetheless, there is a place for a community getting together to achieve things that individuals would find it difficult to do or do economically for themselves or because of being excluded in some way, or to prevent any individual or group monopolising some important shared resource or gaining unfair advantage over others through monopoly or cartel behaviour.

Mutualism - I believe that mutual enterprise is the best way to meet many of these needs. Firstly it is voluntary: an individual becomes a member because they share common goals with the other members of that particular enterprise. And they hold the control between them. The aims can't be hijacked by other parts of a conglomerate style organisation, like a local authority for example, when unrelated priorities change or the allocation of resources changes. They are democratic: nobody can take control for their own ends as all the members have an equal say and a right to expect an equitable return, whether that return is in the form of profit, or more likely in the services that enterprise is established to deliver for its members.

Mutual enterprise is a particularly good way of delivering services where competition exists but in which someone alone is unable to compete without the help of others. Of course government has a role in fostering this kind of business in helping like-minded people with similar aims and wants to get together and achieve it for themselves. But it is not constrained by some of the common problems of government - interference from above, sudden reallocation of resources to respond to others' priorities and so on.

Democracy - In the end, and I do think it ought to be regarded as a "last resort", there may be some things that are near impossible for individuals or small groups to do for themselves or as single issues and that would be unlikely to be profitable in the monetary terms needed by a corporation. This is where we communally "agree" to surrender some of our self-sovereignty to some form of representative management for the common good.

I believe the future of democracy, in an increasingly aware and connected world, is for individuals and small communities genuinely to explore what they can do for themselves and carefully to choose what needs to be done in common and when they need to collaborate in bigger groups - neighbourhood, local, regional, national, international. At the moment we have too much top down government, implemented through broad brush targets and with little local discretion to innovate or incentive to do better.

But also, as representatives of a whole host of interests at a city level, local government can be a body that helps get things done that don't strictly fall within its own remit. If you like as a lobby group for the people of Oxford, taking a strategic view to promote new facilities and protect existing sometimes vulnerable ones.

So these three, I hope, are at the root of my personal political philosophy, and I hope anything I suggest in these pages will be seen as part of that overall model. Next, I will want to look at how these principles might be applied to some of Oxford's pressing problems.