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One of the reasons I am so enthusiastic about Chris Huhne in his bid for the Lib Dem leadership is precisely because he is something new. Obviously there is the fact that he's only been in the hothouse of the Westminster "bubble" for such a short time, and that he would be the first party leader to have served in a parliament we, as Lib Dem, put a lot of store by in the form of the European Parliament, but if you have read my ramblings much you will also know I am keen on what some might call "unorthodox" economics.

Little has been made of the fact that Chris is, currently, President of Lib Dems ALTER (Action for Land-value Tax and Economic Reform). Personally I cannot categorically say that this means he supports Land Value Taxation with the same enthusiasm as most of us in ALTER do, or whether it is just that he is prepared to sponsor pluralism in economic debate, but that pluralism is, in my opinion, key to our producing a new political and economic "narrative" for the twenty-first century that will enable us better to face the challenges of globalisation, international development, the ageing population and pensions crisis, growing wealth disparities and all the rest. Certainly his rhetoric of shifting the tax burden away from incomes and onto resource use is redolent of ALTER's own "Tax Shift Now!" campaign slogan.

Since the "victory" of the monetarists, especially through the likes of Milton Friedman's influence in Reaganomics and Thatcherite neo-liberalism, there has been an apparent unwritten rule in British, and world, politics that the base economic assumptions of monetarism may not under any circumstances be challenged, despite the obvious inequalities that continue to afflict the world that neo-liberalism was purported to have the ability to resolve. We are in many ways in deeper economic crises than we ever have been. Despite a proliferation of the trappings of wealth, the least advantaged are stuck often below the lowest rung - those who question the very notion of "relative poverty" need to get out into communities that are struggling to pay their way and bearing a disproportionate share of the burden of the debt we create in order to keep economies functioning.

This has led to a real poverty in political discourse, where our main parties, including the Lib Dems, spend most of their time trying to persuade us that they are the best deck-chair attendants for the Titanic as it approaches the ice-bergs of climate change, the resurgence of China and India as global economic forces, the ageing populations in the west and the appalling disparities that mark out the rich world from the poor world - where one quarter of one percent of the world's population control as much of the planet's wealth as the other 99.75% put together.

So, "out with the old" is not a reflection on other candidates' ages - after all, one of the issues that affects the pensions problem is that people now of Ming's age can expect to live another thirty years, certainly plenty of time to see us into government! But what we do need is a new approach, to create for us a distinct political-economic narrative to put us in the vanguard for fighting these challenges unencumbered by the history of ideological vacuum that has marked out British politics the last twenty or thirty years.

For this, Chris is clearly the man for the job. His interest in radical alternatives and his ability to comprehend and present them is unquestioned. Let's forget this argument about where we want to "slot in" to British politics - the overcrowded "centre", the economic "right" or the statist "left" - and take this opportunity to promote a radical vision of "sustainable abundance" and equity that a fair and liberal world should have created decades ago and is still abjectly failing to do.

A number of others have kindly blogged about the interesting discussion at the ALTER conference fringe event last Saturday night. From the point of view of being on the platform for the first time it was all the more interesting for me. I wanted to pick up on some of the issues that were raised, not so much by the audience, though many were very insightful questions and observations, but the issues raised by both Tony Vickers in his introduction and especially by Vince Cable in his speech.

First, Tony Vickers introduced the whole event by saying that ALTER wanted to spend some time focussing on the second half of our acronym, Economic Reform more generally, rather than Land Tax which we have fixated on thus far. I'm afraid I rather brushed that aside with my little speech about our book, which will now focus more on land than anything else.

I have always taken the view personally that there is indeed more to the essential economic reforms we need to see in an equitable economic system that will benefit the greatest number of ordinary people than just land. I look to the great individualist anarchists and mutualists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fore-runners of the libertarian movement, who all held that there were four great monopolistic systems we needed to eradicate to level the playing field for all - land, banking, intellectual property and the state itself, or most especially the tariffs they use in pursuit of protectionist policy. Indeed my journey to understanding the land problem began with reading books about the debt-money system.

Colleagues involved in the editorial team for the book, whose economics education is far superior to mine, however, are more convinced that the land monopoly underpins all of these others, and whilst I am yet to understand their arguments fully I do I think see roughly where they are coming from. Essentially their argument is that by creating "free land" the power of the worker is increased by enough to offset the coercive power of debt money, that the ability of governments to manipulate a tax system based on market set values of land to effect protectionist policies is reduced and intellectual property becomes much more a negotiable part of an inventor's portfolio rather than something easily "enclosed" by big business as a result of the relative increase of the power of labour versus capital. At least I think that's how it goes.

But anyway, the upshot of all this is that the book will be more about land than about any of the other areas I have been interested in and which Tony suggested we would be looking at in the future. Though no doubt the chapters on each area of policy will show how "free land" feeds through into greater empowerment of the individual and worker.

Second, (we weren't ganging up on Tony, I promise!) Vince again turned the discussion around onto land tax. He said, I think, that we had largely won the theoretical argument on land taxes - that the party acknowledged its potential importance. But that there was much work to be done he said to produce "SMART" (my corporate bingo word, not Vince's) policies that can actually be sold to people (ie voters) and implemented. And on that theme I want to post a few separate thoughts of my own in separate posts in the near future.

James Graham rejoined that actually we need to make the "moral case" for LVT, what I would call, and agree with, the TINA (there is no alternative) argument - though my powers of persuasion in the housing debate on that position were clearly not very good! I could put it a slightly different way - "can we afford not to". And that, I think, is also shaping up to be the real message of the "Liberal Alternative" book.

I will end this introduction to a series of posts on "can we afford not to" with a thought on what seems to be a trait in Liberal Democrat policy making. Do we need to have such detailed plans for exactly how we would proceed from day one of a Lib Dem administration, or should we focus more on getting the "big messages" across. It seems to me that the last time we had a big ideological shift in British government, in 1979, that the Tories had a clear "direction of travel" but were not obsessed with landing in Number 10 with a full set of detailed measures to implement that. They may have had behind the scenes, ready to wheel out when the time was right, but the message to the public in the election was of the broad direction of travel.

This is not something we are alone in. Nowadays every party seems to have to have these details all thrashed out in order to give them credibility amongst the electorate that they would be competent to run the country. But I'm not entirely sure that that is what the voter actually wants - perhaps they want the big ideas rather than the detailed minutiae. I suspect this minute detail is a symptom of our modern managerial one-upmanship and the absence of ideological politics. But surely as a party we actually want to return to ideological politics that we think voters will engage with and be excited by.

I don't think I would be accused of disloyalty if I said that we are not going to be the party of government after the next election! So we spend a lot of time selling detailed policies that we will not get to implement before circumstances, most likely, change again. We have had most success with our "big themes" - we are known for PR, for opposition to war in Iraq, and for the idea, expressed through our previous tax pledges (though I hate to admit it in oh so many ways - not least that it will give succour to the likes of Evan Harris!) that we want "fair" taxation. We can sell LVT as "fair taxation" without minute details as to how it would be implemented, perhaps at most a broad timescale for a tax shift, as the Tories did with reducing income taxes in 1979 - something that actually took them three terms to really implement as far as the average voter would feel in their pocket.

Our detailed policy making produces a couple of not always welcome effects - that we are hostages to fortune - what we promise in one election might one day come back to haunt us several elections later when we make it to Downing Street, and it saves other parties a deal of work thinking for themselves when we create policies that they like to nick. We can of course take some pride in others wanting to use our policies, but people soon forget where they originated, and we risk being forever a glorified "think tank" rather than a party with the big ideas that will win us power. LVT is such an idea. We should not be afraid to tout it without trying to explain to people exactly how it would be implemented except in broad outline until we are closer to being in a position to do so. That will not stop the likes of us in ALTER, however, trying to show the party internally how it might work, but in the end, the detail is what the Treasury is for when we have control of the Great Court!

I had hoped to have the Liberal Democrat blogosphere to myself these next few days (well, not really, but while everyone else is away discussion new things I was going to put the boot into existing policy...:)

But, I have I believe fallen victim to a really nasty piece of software by a large and normally respected manufacturer of graphics and designs software. It's put a nasty file in some unicode file name format that has caused my Mac hard disk severe corruption and it looks like I am going to have to wipe and reinstall OS X from scratch. So every spare moment is likely to be spent getting my machine back to where it was as of last night.

Thank goodness I took the precaution some months ago of getting some synchronising software so all my stuff is backed up till Friday night.

But what a load of poo. Which is about as close as I dare to get to naming the software vendor concerned.

...and meant to be settled down somewhere in a nest with wife and kids when you see "The perfect gift for Father's Day...Level 42 - The Definitive Collection".

Oh well.