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I mentioned the "Political Compass" website in my post from the other day about coming back from "the brink" of left extremism. I've done this test several times before now, and as I mentioned have usually come out way in the bottom left of the chart - in the anarcho-syndicalist area I suppose.

I still think some of the questions are a little awkward. My main concern is that, like many of this sort of questionnaire it assumes to an extent that "private" equals "corporate". I think that there are many models of business and social support and some of them are collectivist, but that such collectivism should be voluntary and not coercive by governments.

So, while I am quite happy saying that, for example, I strongly agree that the sole social duty of a corporation is to return profit to their shareholders" I don't necessarily believe that a corporation is the only way of successfully organizing production. Is that too much of a contradiction?

Anyway - these quandaries, I would suspect, pull me back from being on the very far right of the economic scale, but I am quite surprised (and not entirely unpleasantly), to be, for the first time, to the right of the origin in the left-right economic axis. And definitely pleased to remain in the near anarchist area of the authoritarian-libertarian axis:

Economic Left/Right: 1.63

Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.69



Interestingly, from their analysis of contemporary politicians and such like, there is nobody in this whole quadrant. They do put Friedman in this area, much further to the right but also much closer to neutral on liberatarian/authoritarian issues, which I suspect misunderstands him by painting him solely as an economic ideologist. And just as interestingly they feel Tony Blair is further right and more authoritarian than the supposedly right wing Angela Merkel.

New at 1909, how the People's Budget was intended to change the whole ethos of tax, asking not merely "how much have you got?" but also "how did you get it?" and giving us ideas just as pertinent today for differentiating between people's justified wealth and wealth gained by exploiting the common wealth and the needs of others.

The air, the air, twas God who made the air,
The air, the air, that all of us must share,
Why should we be beggars when democracy's our heir,
God made the air for the people.

(with apologies to the great political song...:)

But it makes a point. The other day I said I wanted to return to one or two things that Chris Huhne said about climate change.

Apparently carbon trading is better than carbon taxing because, said Chris, the incentive of being able to trade away your surplus allowance and make some money is a bigger incentive than simply saving tax.

I'm not very happy about that from someone who is President of ALTER.

The air is ours. Collectively. The air is land. Yes, land. In the economic sense anyway. If we take some and use it (pollute it) and don't leave as much of as good quality for everyone else to have their share we are breaching Locke's Proviso. Clean air, therefore, has a potential economic rent. Why should we "enclose" some, in the form of some kind of carbon allowance, that someone can make money out of?

The mechanism of working out how much one has used is just the same as if one were trading an allowance, every process is still going to have to have a carbon tariff. But it is all of us, collectively, that benefit financially from overuse and increasing air/carbon values. The incentive lies in devising processes that will use less than your competitors and therefore enable you to make more profit from your activity.

Why is that any less an incentive than trading away your surplus of something that doesn't belong to you in the first place? Carbon taxing is just as much an incentive and philosophically and ethically better justified.

The Oxford Mail/Times reports today that the New Westgate [shopping centre is..] Vital For City

Confidential documents have revealed that Oxford would suffer serious economic damage if a hash is made of the Westgate redevelopment.

Plans for the £300m scheme to transform the shopping centre are due to be considered by a specially-convened planning committee later this month.

But papers leaked to the Oxford Mail show real concern at the consequences of the project failing.

When I was on the council I was wary of confidential documents that only councillors were supposed to see. If one were leaked there was always an outrage and often a bit of a witch hunt to try to find out who did it if it weren't already obvious. But most of the time, they did not relate to the specific wellbeing of an officer, as perhaps would details of a pay or disciplinary issue, but that much wider catch-all of "protecting commercial confidentiality" for the council's business affairs.

Well bugger that. It sounds to me from what little is in the Oxford Mail report that this is exactly the sort of information that is needed to help inform the public debate about what will be a massive disruption to our city for many years and which we are now led to believe could have more devastating long term efects on not just the city council's finances, in which we all have an over-riding interest since it is our money they are looking after but the general economic wellbeing and vitality of Oxford's city centre.

So. What precisely was confidential about these reports that the Oxford Mail got hold of? Perhaps the cabinet member for a better value Oxford could shed some light?

This project is already contentious. Has been in the air for, what, six years now already and has yet even to get planning permission. Frankly, I'm sceptical about the whole thing still and I hope they don't roll over and accept an application just because it might prove least worst for the city council, but local people have got to have a fully informed debate, which now cannot happen before the planning hearing happens if there really are such far reaching potential consequences for the city.

Yes, it's not a planning matter. they can still give planning consent and then pull out of the contract as landowner, but that is the bit we, the people, need to give a steer to our servants in government on.

Iain Dale and "Yellow Peril" variously "broke" a "news" story yesterday about a chap being arrested in Spain apparently over some kind of spat over a business deal gone wrong. From what we can understand so far, it appears that his bankers decided to pull the plug after some dealings with another rich bloke that once had something to do with a famous football club that the guy had tried to cover up or some such when they tried to sue him or something.

Great. So? Well of course the political bubble down in London is all abuzz with it now, because the person concerned, one Michael Brown, of uncertain abode it seems, donated a lot of money, by party standards, to the Lib Dems last year. A donation that drew some attention, most notably in the Times, owned by a man who thinks he owns most of the world's politicians anyway, because it was unclear whether it was a permissable UK based donation. You can read Iain Dale getting all excited about it here:

Iain Dale's Diary: EXCLUSIVE: LibDem Donor Faces Fraud Charges:

So, I just want to say that I cannot get terribly excited about this.

First - it was well known within the party at least, if not at the time, then shortly after the donation was made public (the first most of us wee foot soldiers knew of it), that Mr Brown had made his fortune in property speculation in Florida in double quick time and was on a wanted list for one or more rubber cheques he had written while apparently dirt poor at the start of his meteoric rise. No doubt he had pissed off some counterparty in his property deals at some point. If nobody ever accepted money from anyone who had ever issued a cheque their account could not cover, especially when they were hard up, I suspect there would be precious few donations ever made to anyone, political or otherwise. But Americans are more anal about this sort of thing anyway, so on a wanted list he remains.

Second, and probably most importantly for me, I was personally pissed off that the party had accepted any such donation in the first place - I mean size wise and from one person. We have long traded on the fact that as a party we raise most of our money from local supporters and a few charitable type research organisations' donations such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. I don't eat Weetabix since I discovered they were once big donors to the Tories, and I steer as clear of Sainsbury businesses as I can because of their connection with Labour donations. I don't knowingly smoke Philip Morris products (Marlboro cigarettes in the main) because of their funding of George Bush.

But, from what I can gather, despite people continually dredging the donation up, the Electoral Commission has confirmed that it was permissible and that matter is closed. No doubt someone will correct me, excitedly, on that if they have evidence to the contrary.

What I am pissed off with though is the fact that some chap who apparently did not seek any influence in the party at the time his donation was made has subsequently been pushed, or has pushed himself, into a position of making singularly unhelpful comments about the way the party has moved in the past year or so, with Stewart Wheeler-esque "threats" that he would give more money if they did things the way he hoped they would when he gave the money. As if he actually had some influence, which, in any kind of ballot about it amongst the membership I think I can confidently say he doesn't. I hoped on every occasion that they would have the balls to say "thanks but no thanks" and so far as I can see, they have. And he has gotten increasingly petulant about it. So he did, really, seek some kind of influence, even if after the fact.

I don't know the guy - he seems like quite a fun character. He seems to have gotten involved in funding a political party without really understanding the ethos and independent mindedness of its members. But Ming was right in October - there was nothing at that stage that appeared to make him unacceptable as a donor if he had wanted to give more and the commission said he was acceptable. I would not have accepted it, but then I'm only a foot soldier paying for my own Focuses at election time and so on, and not involved in how much money it takes to run the party as a whole and how easy it might be to raise equivalent sums required in this sad modern world of big money politics from small donations.

And finally, I certainly won't cry for HSBC if they feel wronged in this. As readers will know I couldn't give a fig for the already over-privileged world of bankers and the usury they inflict on society and might even rejoice at one of them having had the wool pulled over their eyes by a relatively small financial operator - if you sup with the devil....

And if somehow, though it seems unlikely, they get the right to demand his money back from us, I will probably be the first in the queue with my thirty-five quid share to make sure we can do so and not have to rely on big donors like this again. And I hope others in the party would do so likewise in proportion to their wealth and level of commitment.