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I have two problems with the recent Lib Dem policy announcement about using road pricing to lower fuel duties and fund spending on infrastructure for more "environmentally friendly" forms of transport. The one, which I will return to in another post, is about the difficulty of solving two problems - paying for roads and trying to force people off them - with this one policy. But for now I want to suggest a solution to those many commenters on the Lib Dem Voice thread that any implementation of road pricing is going to be necessarily an intrusion on our privacy.

In fact, the technology has been around for five decades: the flight data recorder, or "black box". It even ought to cost less as it would mean no additional physical infrastructure such as ANPR gantries or roadside transceivers.

Take a regular GPS Sat-Nav system. Already the technology is being developed to deliver all sorts of content to such devices (see the "Sat-nav for people" section on this BBC Click report). It would be a small step to link this to a billing system in the vehicle that got data about the current price of the road you are travelling on, and on other alternatives to help you make up your mind about what route to use, and to calculate a total bill for a journey and initiate a payment transaction without even telling the billing authority where it has been.

Ah but, people say that's open to abuse or tampering to avoid bills on the one hand, and because there's no central information about how your bill is made up it would not be possible to dispute a bill on the other. Well, this is where the "flight data recorder" comes in. You do have the details of your journeys stored, but not centrally, rather in a box in the vehicle. A box say that has to be audited as part of your annual MOT perhaps. And that can only be accessed when security information is provided by both the person or authority wanting to read it and the owner. That way, if you think it is to your advantage to disclose where you have been, for example to dispute a bill, you are in control of when that data is disclosed.

Again, this technology is already around, and in applications much smaller than aircraft. My security guard in the hall of residence has a little device called a "Deister" which they use to "prove" that they have been doing patrols. There's no live link snooping on where they are going, but the Deister gun will be audited and has logged a patrol if there is any dispute.

Can anyone see any other objections to such a way of doing it non-intrusively?

It’s wonderful, while most students are in recess, to see our streets, lamp posts, telephone boxes, park fences, trees, pavements, footpaths and so on clear of the detritus of advertising fliers and posters that make them so tatty during term time.

Once upon a time the City Council and universities collaborated to provide “fly posting boards” in strategic places around east Oxford and Headington. But they’re no longer enough it seems, and we must be deluged with these execrable bits of paper daily while the students are here.

But I believe that the new licensing laws put some power back into the hands of neighbourhoods and residents. A bar or club can have its license reviewed at any time following complaints from the public about anti-social behaviour.

So I would like to put bar and club operators on notice that once the students return, I shall be documenting and collecting such advertising litter around my area (Headington Hill) and ask the licensing authority to do something about the many repeat offenders I find so regularly.

I believe the new law means they cannot hide behind the claim that promoters of individual nights’ events are wholly responsible for advertising if their venue appears on that advertising. Are they willing to put their licenses on the line to prove it?

More and more recently I hear or read people saying that Tony Blair's ten years in power has generated in them a deep distrust and even loathing of politics and politicians. Through sleaze, spin, wars, a vast growth in the reach and size of the state - most of which appears to many to have gone straight into the pockets of corporate bosses and shareholders, he has produced a far more powerful advertisement for the possible benefits of a minimal state than many who have tried to explain it academically through their writings.

Even now, in his political retirement, with his vulgar rush to pick up lucrative jobs where he could use his rent-seeking influence to further the very fat-cat industries he pledged to attack in 1997, he still generates much loathing. Forget the Lisbon Treaty or EU Constitution, I'm ready to campaign for an "out" vote in an "in or out" referendum should Tony Blair get anywhere close to becoming the first permanent EU president.

And from behind the portcullis I don't believe that the current crop of party leaders are rising to the real challenge of Blair's legacy. In fact, ostrich like, I feel they view it as merely a series of mistakes that can be put right by more government, just of a different political hue, when in reality the message of Blair's premiership is clear:

Government is moribund, inherently corrupt, a necessary evil for a particular point of human development. A point that has been passed and government can do no more except fight for its own existence as if it has a right to exist regardless of and separate from the desires and needs of the people it seeks to govern. This infantilizing of the people (indeed we even call it the "nanny state" in tacit recognition of that infantilization) needs to be brought to an end.

I was at some training last week on dealing with "Difficult, Disturbing and Dangerous Behaviour". In an aside about the nature of psychopathy the trainer, himself a clinical psychiatrist, suggested that perhaps politicians are in fact psychopaths. It got me looking up the definition of a psychopath. Judge for yourself how many of these criteria Tony Blair meets:

Personally, I make it at least half of them.

Utter madness! Bliar for Europe?

Dear God, please, no! Or rmaybe, just perhaps, France wants Britain out? Alternatively, Sarkozy recognizes that Blair failed to do anything of any use during the last British rotating presidency that the best way to hamstring the whole organization would be to put the useless, lying, egomaniacal shit in charge permanently.

Tony Blair could be EU President - Telegraph:
By Toby Helm and Bruno Waterfield in Lisbon
Last Updated: 5:47pm BST 19/10/2007

Tony Blair has been placed in the frame to become the first permanent President of the EU after France launched a campaign to install him in the powerful new Brussels job.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, touted the former Prime Minister as his preferred candidate after Gordon Brown and fellow leaders agreed the EU Reform Treaty, which establishes the new post from January 2009.