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Whilst I am sure that petty threats from a minor blogger well beyond the outskirts of the Westminster village who only leaves Headington Hill once a month to buy toiletries in Crabtree and Evelyn will cut little ice with Lib Dem party apparatchiks either in Cowley Street or the West Midlands region, I hereby pledge my support for Cllr Gavin Webb, the "Stoke One". Gavin has been suspended from the party pending a full hearing for, ostensibly at least, voicing personal opinions on liberal and libertarian issues which we both largely share.

If he is out of the party for that, then it is likely that I would be too if it weren't for the fact that I get on seemingly much better with my local party.

I am aware that Gavin has taken the decision not to be in the official Lib Dem council group at Stoke for some time, and that to some he has been a bit of a thorn in the side, but that in itself is no good reason to expel him from the party, nor, he says, has he actually been given details yet (six weeks or so after the event now) of the "charges" against him, so we can only really assume it is for the temerity of holding an opinion.

A number of fellow party members with libertarian leanings have started up a web site to support Gavin at "Save the Stoke One". Having spent my best years at school very near Stoke, I never thought I'd find anything amongst the former smoke stacks and bottle kilns to want to save! Though I distinctly remember some older school friends raving on about seeing The Clash at Victoria Hall in the early eighties!

...it is the economy (stupid), or at least the political economy.

James Graham comes out for Clegg today in his piece at Comment is Free, Ich bin ein Clegghead:

Lesson one from the latest (and hopefully last for a good long while) Liberal Democrat leadership contest is that everything I thought I knew about the candidates was wrong. Chris "master strategist" Huhne has ended up making some appalling tactical blunders, while Nick "great communicator" Clegg, it emerges, can be a bit rubbish on the telly. They both have feet of clay. Despite this, I remain as sure as I was a month ago that both are better potential leaders than either of their two predecessors.

Leaving aside the superficial similarities, what emerges are two very different personalities coming at this campaign at a very different point in their lives and focusing on very different priorities. Huhne invokes Bill Clinton when he states that it's the economy (stupid); Clegg talks about how the economy-focused politics of the 1970s and 80s are now long dead and buried. Huhne talks about devolution, of bringing government closer to people; Clegg talks about empowerment, of giving people more direct control over the public services they use.

It's not his choice I particularly object to, though I disagree with him on that too naturally, but one particular part of the assessment he goes through to arrive at that choice. It's mentioned twice, one of them in the part of his article I quote above, that "the economy-focused politics of the 1970s and 80s are now long dead and buried". This leads to the conclusion, later, that whilst Nick "isn't an economist and notwithstanding his observation that the political debate has largely moved on from such matters" he could "wing it" if he is "surrounded [by] people who can talk with authority on the subject."

See personally I don't think that the focus on the economy in politics should be dead. As I've argued before, I do think the "cosy consensus" between Labour and Tory makes it appear that way - that we are in an era of managerial politics, but that the job of liberals is to put it back on the agenda. Or at least, and it is different, to revive the study and promotion of "political economy". For too long now "economics", the pseudo-science that divorced itself from "political economy" in the nineteenth century, has sought to position itself as a set of inviolable laws, as if they are to society what Newtonian laws are to the universe. That economics somehow trumps politics, is master of the system rather than just a part of the system of how people and resources get on together.

Only a certain amount of politics deals with how things currently are, which is necessarily bound by the parameters of the contemporary economic orthodoxy, because that's how economists tell us the world, markets, property, wealth accumulation and so on works, and that it's inviolable. But the real visionaries are those who can subjugate economics to political principles, who can see ways to change the contemporary orthodoxy to achieve real political priorities. And, whilst I have a healthy skepticism of "schooled" economists, educated with that orthodoxy ingrained into them such that few of them ever dare to challenge it, I believe what we do need is an economist first who can think out of the box, instinctively and be able to defend an unorthodox economic idea spontaneously and with authority.

I think that's what Chris means when he says, as quoted by John Abrams at Liberal Revolution when he asks "Is Chris pitching for the Shadow Chancellors job?"

`Well I think we all have our strong suits, I’m simply saying that my strong suit, clearly having been in those areas is being able to take Gordon Brown on on the Economy, which is going to be dominant issue as Bill Clinton said.`

And I think he's right. Which is why, whatever I may disagree with in the way he has promoted himself as a staunch defender of public provision of public services, I will still be voting for the economist. He may not be as radical as I would like, but neither of them are, but I really think the one with the greater potential for radicalism is the one who stands a chance of understanding how changing the economic rules can feed through into great social change for the better.

...I know we do in Oxford, and I also notice that at least three of the surrounding councils use it, so I presume this is de facto the "market leader" in public access planning application systems on the web. At least at Oxford City, very little appears to have been done to the system since they implemented it six years ago - and that MAY be the council's fault for not upgrading or whatever. However I have two big issues with it that I would like as many councillors from as many authorities as possible to complain about in the hope that their authorities will start to pressure for these changes, one of which would be an enhancement but the other definitely a fix for a non-compliant system in my opinion.

1. It has never worked properly with any browser other than Internet Explorer. In particular, the mapping system does not work in Firefox (2 or 3) or Safari. It may load the first, whole borough map, but if you want to start zooming in to the site you want to look at it refuses to play. In my opinion whilst IE may be the most frequently used browser, it limits users to Windows operating systems now. It will not work properly on any other type of machine - Mac or Linux for example. If yours does work correctly, perhaps you could let me know so I can continue to nag Oxford City Council to get updates or whatever would be needed to get it working. As far as I am concerned by excluding anyone other than Windows users it does not comply at least with the spirit of e-Government.

2. RSS feeds please! At the moment the closest you can get to a regular list is a weekly application list by going through several pages of the site. Here in Oxford apparently they are planning on piloting an e-mail alert system which will necessarily involve people submitting yet more personal information to the council in order to get alerts, and it will no doubt be difficult to change the alert you want (it may for example simply mean sending out the weekly applications list for a ward or some such simple response).

RSS feeds would be far better. They can be made infinitely variable - some people might only want applications in a post code, others for telecoms masts only but borough wide, others for a ward or area committee bundle of several wards. All this should be possible with RSS feeds. Also, many councillors like to keep their constituents in touch by copying "long hand" the weekly list applicable to their ward onto their websites. RSS feeds would allow them to automate this tedious process. I myself am planning a non-council local website, ox2online.net, to complement the area's e-democracy forums and so on, and RSS feeds would be ideal.

So please, if you are reading this and work or are a councillor in any authority that uses this system for public access to planning applications, can you think about these and have a nag at your planning/IT/eDemocracy officers and see if we can't get these changes.

(Oxford City Council appears to be on "Version 7.4")