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So, he's back in the news again. I was amused a few weeks ago to see a regular sketch in a comedy show (was it the new Harry Enfield one, I can't remember?) where every time there is a Metropolitan Police press conference they give figures on the amount of officer time they've spent arresting Pete Doherty.

And it is a bit of a joke. I wonder if any of our MPs (or perhaps our putative mayoral candidate) might take up the idea and see if the Metropolitan Police could produce figures for just how much the police and courts service have spent hounding this pathetic specimen?

Was this sort of thing what Sir Iain Blair meant when he said he wanted to go after the "dinner party cocaine set"? I have to say I always assumed that was aimed at former Bullingdon Club members in glittering Notting Hill and similar socialite snorters.

Conference is coming, and I'll have an opportunity on Saturday evening to share a platform with Vince Cable and James Graham at the ALTER fringe event, entitled "Economics as if People Mattered" (Saturday, 18:30, Arena Hall 2n, for anyone interested - note the change of venue from the conference program). My task is to set out some more details of the book of essays we propose to publish in time for the Autumn Conference, entitled "The Liberal Alternative". And since I shall also be seeing Vince tomorrow evening at the Oxford East constituency dinner, I thought I ought to prepare what I am going to say on Saturday so I can let him have a copy tomorrow night. So here goes with a first draft...

Tough on poverty, tough on the causes of poverty!

By the next time most of us get together again at Bournemouth in September we will have celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the National Health Service and the centenary of the legislation that gave us the first Old Age Pension. Both of course were the triumph of political economists steeped in a tradition of liberal economics and concern for the least well off in society.

So we've decided that for our big project for the year, and to prepare for next year's centenary of David Lloyd-George's great 1909 People's Budget, we're going to publish a book of essays investigating some of the problems they faced both at the turn of the last century and in the widespread domestic poverty after World War Two that Beveridge sought to address through his "war on the five wants".

We want to show that despite throwing ever increasing resources at tackling the unequal outcomes of our economic system, successive socialist and conservative governments have completely failed to address the causes of inequality that Lloyd-George, drawing on that long tradition started to attempt in that budget.

And we want to persuade you, and the party more widely, that that tradition, never really given the chance to show its potential since then - a whole century ago, is just as relevant today. That it remains a precondition to creating an economically and therefore socially equitable society.

Prevention, in economics as much as in health, is always better than trying to cure or treat the symptoms once a malaise has taken hold. For as the cures become ever more expensive, and consume ever more of our productivity, so they also become steadily less liberal.

We are more, not less, dependent on the decisions of politicians where they deliver monopolistic public services. And the more of our labour they appropriate to pay for those services the less we are able to make our own choices anyway.

Talking of "choice", I know that some of us seem instinctively to shy away from choice, because we feel that it excludes the least well off. But I'll bet we all deep down believe that choice, unlimited choice, would be great if only we could ensure everyone was able to afford to participate in such a market place.

Well that's what we want to show you can happen when we address the central inequities of the economic system we have inherited. Taxing income and productive investment slows the creation of wealth for all of us. Failing properly to tax land allows those who happen to own or have inherited the best locations to absorb much of the value of our labour and productive investment, and especially the labour of the poorest. The wealthiest grow fabulously rich off the back of the labourer through land. And even, in this era of widespread home ownership, as it's called, many benefit unfairly, while paying, through their other taxes, for the attempts to relieve the poverty this system sustains!

If we took that tax shift seriously, our economy could be as much as a third bigger, and distribute that extra wealth more equitably according to what we put into it - our work and our savings. We would be better able to compete with the newly emerging economies of the world without retreating into hiding behind protectionism. We would be able to allow people more choice over their lives and the services that sustain them, whether that be health and education, housing, or basic needs like food.

I want to end with a brief quote from Herbert Spencer, who, writing in 1851 said:

"To mitigate distress appearing needful for the production of the “greatest happiness,” the English people have sanctioned upwards of one hundred acts in Parliament having this end in view, each of them arising out of the failure or incompleteness of previous legislation. Men are nevertheless still discontented with the Poor Laws, and we are seemingly as far as ever from their satisfactory settlement."

I suggest that 150 years later, we are still tinkering with laws, often ever more coercive laws to try and reach that nirvana of the "greatest happiness" through government intervention. We take more from everyone in the process and limit everyone's ability to decide for themselves. Addressing the central causes of our economic inequity has not been tried since 1909. 2009 is high time we put this, left, right and centre at the forefront of the new liberal political economy for the next century.

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So, having read roughly what I'm going to say, you can now come along to theALTER fringe and hear Vince Cable (who will I hope by then have been formally adopted along with Nick Clegg as an ALTER Vice-President!) and James Graham as well!

"Economics as if People Mattered" (Saturday, 18:30, Arena Hall 2n - note the change of venue from the conference
program)

"An established government has an infinite advantage, by that very circumstance of its being established; the bulk of mankind being governed by authority, not reason, and never attributing authority to any thing that has not the recommendation of antiquity."

So wrote David Hume, one Scot few would begrudge a place in a United Kingdom government. Unfortunately that was 1754.

But, whilst there's been much talk of "constitutional reform" playing a big part in Gordon Brown's early premiership, and all the main parties have been lining up in recent days and weeks with encouragement for Brown to go further and be more "radical" or with proposals of their own for devolving power, all have, I fear, taken Hume's accompanying warning too much to heart:

"To tamper, therefore, in this affair, or try experiments merely upon the credit of supposed argument and philosophy, can never be the part of a wise magistrate, who will bear a reverence to what carries the marks of age; and though he may attempt some improvements for the public good, yet will he adjust his innovations, as much as possible, to the ancient fabric, and preserve entire the chief pillars and supports of the constitution."

Regular readers, both of you, will know that I have a passion for tearing up the UK's tax code, but I also have a passion for tearing up our unwritten constitution. And Hume also foresaw that there might come a time when the arrangements so imbued with the recommendation of antiquity would prove inappropriate for a new type of world. I believe that time is now and anyone worth the name of a constitutional reformer must be way more radical than anyone has so far postulated.

Our "constitution" and in particular our representative democracy was developed in and for a time where travel and communications ware difficult and took a long time. There were no other more reliable mechanisms for getting messages from one end of the land to the other than to appear in person at court or parliament. A time when the Berkeley family hunted across lands it owned all the way from Gloucester to London to spend a few months of the "season" at court and then hunt all the way back to their Welsh marches fastness for the remainder of the year.

And even until very recently in political evolution this situation obtained. It's only thirty years since more than half the UK's households had a telephone for example. Similarly, in 1972 only 52% of households had access to a car (I am a bit taken aback to realise that I was in the top 9% of households at the time that had access to two cars, even if one of them was a Ford Anglia). Think about that - about the limits it puts on one's movement and choices.

It must have still been something of an event even for leading political figures to make a "progress" around the country in the elections of the fifties and sixties. Compare that with the breakfast in Tooting, lunch in Truro and after-dinner speech in Thurso (if not Tennessee) style of modern political travel.

Even just twenty years or so ago news reports from Afghanistan took several weeks to compile and get back to us, broadcast almost as historical documentaries in big slots in the middle of news programs. Now we can have our news programs presented by the regular anchors live from Kabul one day and the same anchor in Kansas the following evening. And in between we can have been fed thousands of articles about what's been going on with "in depth" analysis from any perspective one could possibly imagine.

Last week I was struck by something in a TV article I nearly missed. There was the opening of some artistic or anthropological exhibition somewhere, in Britain I think, and people were surprised that someone like the Iranian Foreign Minister or First Vice-President turned up and was saying that such cultural events were a good reminder that "our two peoples both want peace whatever their governments say and do". Well, quite.

Ground up government

So I always come back to Hume, and his "Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth". Localism is the key. True "ground up" government. Yes, it's time to grind up the current arrangements and go local. Last week I was at an area planning committee meeting of the North East Area Committee of Oxford City Council. The room was packed. People say that it's the "usual suspects" that turn up to such things, but even if that were the case scaled up to national proportions it's the equivalent of a Westminster select committee sitting in front of a full Wembley stadium of interested people all pretty much able to have their say on the particular issues that they care about.

Hume's idea seems to me a good place to start. You elect a hundred representatives to each of a hundred county assemblies. Those counties each send a representative to a national forum (and the second choice gets to go to a national sort of opposition/scrutiny forum). Most government functions are exercised by the counties themselves in their own areas. But other initiatives can filter up from the counties or through counties working together. If they affect other counties or the whole commonwealth they can be called into the national forum. Sometimes the national forum comes up with its own ideas but they have to be passed by a majority of the counties before they can become law.

Most issues requiring taxation are dealt with at a county level, with a precepting arrangement for things like national defense when the counties of course agree that as a priority. Tax competition between counties (that could be similar to the tax competition between US states) democratises the shape of where economic activity waxes and wanes across the country.

And before you say that this is pie in the sky nonsense for a small island country, a similar system does seem to serve at least one modern, economically successful, and most importantly relatively peaceful western nation quite well. I commend to you all a two and a half century old prescription for modern ground up government. Go read it, and then tell me it's not the beginnings of a sensible way of governing for the third millennium. A global millennium. With connectivity between peoples and, more importantly, individuals, that the world has never before seen. We don't need a bunch of powerful individuals who dare to dream that they can uniquely represent sixty million of us and our different priorities and opinions.

Technorati Tags: Constitutional reform, Perfect commonwealth, ming campbell, gordon brown, David Hume

I found this mildly amusing. The BBC reports that Town planning blamed for obesity:

Poor town planning which limits opportunities for children to take exercise has been blamed for fuelling an increase in obesity.

I have an answer - more tower blocks with broken lifts!