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I'm sure there are probably a good few people rubbing their hands with some relish at the thought that private schools might feel the squeeze from this edict from the Charities Commission that they have to prove the value of their contribution to the wider community to retain their charitable status.

But before they get too excited, perhaps they might want to think about the numbers. I read that independent schools have about 600,000 pupils. If we accept the figures put forward by Nick Clegg, I think, when he was talking about the "pupil premium" in which he said, if memory serves, that the average cost was about £9,000 per year per pupil - which allowing for endowments and so on is probably a bit more than the average fees - it is an "industry" with a turnover of nearly £5.5 billion per year.

The statements about the level of charitable benefit they receive suggest that it amounts to about £100 million. This is therefore just under 2% of their combined turnover. Hardly insurmountable if they decide to stick two fingers up to the Charities Commission. But there's another side to it, isn't there. If we accept government figures that they spend about £6,000 per year on average on each state school pupil, then the 600,000 pupils whose parents are often scrimping and saving to put them through a private school are saving the state sector just over £3.5 billion.

It seems to me that whatever you think of private education, the charge that they do not contribute financially to the state sector through their customers' taxation cannot be upheld. Of course, since most of the charitable benefit is presumably in the form of reclamation of VAT on some expenses and I would argue that nobody should pay VAT, the most iniquitous tax on production we have, they would not have such a benefit in my fiscal regime anyway!

BBC Scotland reports that Labour in addicts' children plan:

Labour MSP Duncan McNeil has proposed that addicts sign a "social contract", obliging them not to have children until they have beaten their habit.

...which begins to sound like Sweden's infamous eugenics program of sterilising young women they felt oughtn't to have children.

Now, whilst we should of course do everything we can to ensure that we don't inflict on children a home-life from hell, how on earth would withdrawing benefits from women who "slip up" and breach their "contract" and pop out a sprog (and we should always remember that it takes two to make a baby, as I understand it), going to make that resultant child's life any less hellish?

Further, there is the crass assumption that people with addiction problems are bound to be bad parents which listeners to Professor Jo Neale's recent public lecture here at Oxford Brookes University will have learned was an erroneous assumption for the most part. Whilst I did not agree with some of what Jo had to say - most notably that I am firmly in favour of decrminalising, nay legalising and being able to regulate, illicit drugs - she made a poignant case for treating drug users as fully human, deserving of compassion and respect, and acknowledging that the vast majority of them actually crave no more than a "normal life" beyond the drugs.

Labour's invasion of our private lives goes on apace. Pigeon-holing people into convenient categories to make taboos of them. It is, as the Scottish Drugs Forum has apparently described it, "vicious" and "deeply disquieting". We'll take no lectures on public morals from the likes of Prescott and Blair thank you very much.

Spotted this on Guardian Unlimited today: Mac adverts on behalf of exploited Chinese workers

You know those artsy Mac adverts where a couple of people explain why they have a Mac against a white background - well a group has done one highlighting the plight of workers in the electronics manufacturing industry in the far east mostly. As you watch it, of course, bear in mind that since Macs basically use the same bits inside as any other PC they're not particularly worse than anyone else - just that the slightly "holier than thou" (I'm a Mac user - I can say that) advert style is easy to spoof.

But it puts me in mind of another one of my unrealised "inventions" - the "Fair Trade PC". We get Fair Trade clothes, footwear, foods. We can try to buy locally produced goods. But with computers and most other consumer electronics we're more or less stuck with what we're given. Why not a "Fair Trade" PC? People pay a premium for Jonathan Ive's beautiful designs, why not for better conditions for the workers?

Tucked away in the comments to Lib Dem Voice's How rich are you? article comes this snippet from Tim Leunig (LSE economist, and member of the Housing Policy working party I was on a couple of years back):

"The obvious new incentive effect is on house prices. We would expect them to increase (by around 8x the level of council tax, so around £15k), as happened when rates were replaced by the poll tax."

Well quite. We in ALTER have been saying this since the Local Income Tax policy was first debated. We've gotten the impression that the rest of the party has not been listening. Hopefully someone as respected as Tim within the party will make someone listen with comments like that.

To reiterate...not only will most of your national income tax reduction be eaten up with your new Local Income Tax but if you happen to be in that growing group who are getting no help with housing costs and cannot afford to buy a home, you'll be likely to find prices even further out of your pocket by at least another half an income multiple.

Perhaps this is why the Lib Dem Youth and Students annual conference this year voted against Local Income Tax and in favour of Land Value Tax instead. That cohort is what we usually regard as our "core vote" I believe. Not the people you'd want to piss off I'd have thought.

"Axe the Tax" was, and remains, a great idea - Council Tax is as regressive and unfair as taxes come. Local Income Tax was an easier thing to sell, perhaps, than another type of property tax. But, as Keynes was it said "when the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?" it is time, three years on with property prices up another third, to think again about a tax policy that will extend the misery of those we want to help. There's no shame in changing policies if a better idea presents itself. Affordable housing is, as Gordon Brown said this week, right at the top of the agenda now - we should not continue with a tax policy, in the form of Local Income Tax, GUARANTEED to exacerbate the affordability crisis all parties appear to want to solve.

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