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In The poor and the dispossessed Simon Mollan on Inner West writes about an horrific scenario in which an underclass in Britain is trapped in a downward spiral of "violence, poverty, food insecurity, substance abuse, anger..." and so on and wonders whether there are any possible solutions.

I have to say I wrote an essay not too dissimilar to that at school. My teacher gave me nineteen out of twenty but wrote in his comments that it was "worse than Hitler". It took me many years to work out what he meant. And I only became aware really a couple of years ago. He was condemning me for an assumption that these people were irredeemable, that they were born into it and had no chance of escape. Castigating me for a lack of hope.

But I do believe there is a possible solution. I can't claim credit for it - I heard it expounded on This Week a couple of years back maybe now, by Tom Conti, the actor. The symptoms were just as Simon so eloquently and I for one think accurately described. Dependency, fecklessness, down to the next generation, leaving them unteachable with no hope, little future prospects and a complete inability to take responsibility for ones-self.

What Conti suggested, if memory serves, is that there is now a generation that belongs nowhere. Home is hostile. And without that basic need addressed they cannot grow. He suggests massive extra expenditure on education (300/400% massive), such that at the very youngest, class sizes are very small indeed - half a dozen at most at age five and actually rising slowly as you go through school. The idea is that the teacher becomes the surrogate family, that school becomes a place of refuge. That the very basics of life can be taught in a family type environment at the very start of education.

He believes that over the course of a generation this could cut most other social safety net type costs in half or more as people grow up taking more responsibility for themselves, respecting themselves, simply "able to cope" often. Aside from the obvious savings in reducing costs of crime and disorder such as Simon witnessed on the train, he was talking about basics like people knowing how to tell the difference between a common cold and something more serious and stop using up valuable medical professionals' time on trivialities, and longer term know about how to look after ones-self better - all those self esteem issues that so often drive bad health and consequent spiral of employment problems and dependency.

As I write it down though, I begin to doubt it somehow. In one sense clearly, it can be seen as the uber-nanny of all states. But can it be dressed up in those liberal clothes such as leveling the playing field and preventing or removing "enslavement by poverty, ignorance or conformity"? I think it can. Can it be afforded? I don't see how it can't, the price for not doing so is horrible.

If the world is a more dangerous place, it's as much because of people like Richard Armitage: US threatened to bomb Pakistan as it is because of people like Bin Laden.

I hope personally that we will choose to stand shoulder to shoulder with our Commonwealth brothers and sisters who have provided us with many of our residents and not a few friends and colleagues than a regime that even remotely thinks it's acceptable to make such threats.

Interestingly though, this is a similar phrase to one that was alleged to have been used as an ultimatum to the Taliban themselves, BEFORE 9/11, two months before, when they were stalling in talks over a Unocal pipeline from the central asian republics to the Arabian Sea coast.

If you threaten what to most of us seemed like a basket case state and their friends respond with a 9/11, would you really want to threaten a more sophisticated populous and relatively much more influential military one with nukes, even small ones, like Pakistan?

...I'm going to take a shot at it. I see Tia MacGregor, one of the pair of new Tory councillors on Oxford City Council has been a media-whoring, trying to get another opportunity in the local rag to justify the unjustifiable. I notice in her latest self-defense New Tory Councillor Defends Her Move (from thisisoxfordshire) she no longer mentions her earlier suggestion that she was seduced by Tory policy on the NHS.

Could it be that they do not actually have any policy on the NHS yet? For it seems it must be up in the air in one of those interminable policy review groups, for her new colleagues in Cornerstone are trying to influence the outcome...

I wonder if Dr MacGregor agrees with their approach:

Tory right-wingers step up pressure on Cameron over NHS

By Colin Brown

The group, which is led by senior Tory backbencher Edward Leigh and has the support of a number of front bench spokesmen, said in a report that scrapping the NHS as a tax-based system could enable the Tories to offer "massive" tax cuts at the next election.

This is the party you have joined, Tia. How are you going to look your patients and voters in the face and explain this to them?

Pissed as I have been for most of this afternoon and evening, I have retained the mental capacity to register a phone call this evening from a colleague I've been working with on community land trusts for the past three years telling me that we are now properly registered as an Industrial and Provident Society known as Oxfordshire CLT Limited.

For some reason I feel a little like a new mother must feel before the gas has worn off! We now have this little legal entity, ready and waiting for any of you Oxfordshire landowners and local authorities to do business with. The best present I could have asked for at Christmas!