Randomly Selected Article or Link

Tomorrow is the Lib Dems' South Central Regional Conference at Newbury. Since there is now a leadership election, and both candidates (I still hope for more but it's looking increasingly a remote possibility) will be there and will effectively make a first "hustings" in the campaign the other bbusiness of the conference may well get curtailed. I was hoping to have the floor in the Affordable Housing debate, so in case I do not get to speak after all I thought it worth while putting my three minutes' worth online. So here it is:

"Make no mistake, colleagues, I do not believe it is ultimately possible to have sustainable, equitable and affordable housing without radical land reform, by which I usually mean Land Value Tax. There is no shortage of land - if all of us in this region lived at the same density as the population of Singapore or New York City we'd all fit easily onto the Isle of Wight. And, by and large, there is also no real shortage of housing; the vast majority of households in housing need are in fact housed somewhere, just it is often either beyond their means, hopelessly cramped, or both. And yet up to 45% of our housing stock is UNDER-occupied while 2-3% is over crowded. Only LVT can solve this kind of mismatch. And trying to build ourselves out of the problem in popular areas is going to do nothing longer term for regional equilibrium as it increases the capacity in, for example, the south east, to absorb yet more of the rest of the country's economic activity.

But there's another, more localized, land reform that could help. It's party policy, though hasn't received much promotion or support, and our local councils do not seem to be encouraging it terribly enthusiastically. Community Land Trusts are a practical and immediate measure that party members can take home from here today and get their members and councils working on. A Community Land Trust is a vehicle established to hold land on behalf of a defined community - it could be a city, an individual neighbourhood, a rural parish or a countty-wide umbrella organization. The idea is that we acquire land, either through the planning process, by outright purchase or donation by philanthropic land owners (there actually are such creatures!) and lock it up in a trust. This way we do not need to pass the cost or developed value of the land onto the buyers of the housing we build on it, built, always, with community buy in and if possible self-management of the specification and design process.

We then bundle the whole development up and turn it over to a "Mutual Home Ownership Society" which the occupiers join by paying a share of the borrowing used to develop the properties. The share they pay is based on what they earn, not the housing they need and they don't pay any extra rent as with shared ownership schemes. If the development is itself large enough, we hope the incomes across all the households involved will between them cover the repayments, and each gets a share they can sell when they want to move on based on the proportion of the borrowing they have committed to, plus (or minus I suppose these days) an adjustment based on an agreed local property index. When they want to sell up, they need to find a buyer for their share. If the incoming household has not as high an income, they can place the balance of their share with other member households whose incomes have risen since they joined - and who by the terms of their lease are bound to buy additional shares when required up to a commitment of around 30% of their household incomes.

The model can be tweaked for use in many different scenarios - a small scale rural exception site where there is as yet no subsidy for developing social rented housing, an urban development where we want 100% affordable - as in sub-market - housing instead of 50:50 posh:poor for the same land cost, or even an existing mature suburban neighborhood willing to club together, pool the new found wealth of their existing housing equity and take charge themselves of the regeneration of their neighbourrhood, instead of leaving it to the buy-to-let absentee landlord or the local developer of flats crammed into the corner plot.

Schemes can be financed by conventional borrowing backed by the freehold land value, or, we hope, by a new vehicle christened an "Open Capital Partnership" which would allow ordinary investors to yield an index linked return for investing in their local communities. As a side-bar at that point to finish with, we might want to look at Building Society legislation: being a mutual ownership system many of us CLT promoters would like to work with mutual financing organizations, but your local Newbury Building Society tells me they are prohibited by law from investing in something that is not an individual taking out a mortgage for a single house, despite the movement's origins as mutual savings clubs building local neighbourhood housing."

See, some people think I am over the top saying that supporters of drugs prohibition are complicit in the murder of the victims of the illegal drugs trade, but I'm not the only one...

Are you a death enabler?

"If you support drug prohibition policies that make black market drug sales profitable, then you are encouraging violent behavior by criminals and supporting the funding of terrorists. This directly results in the deaths of thousands.

You are a death enabler.

If you support drug war enforcement..."[continues]

I seem to collect these. Why can't I find a few that pay though! I have just been elected a director of the SE² Partnership Limited (Social Enterprise South East) which takes over from a SEEDA funded project supporting and promoting social enterprise in the South East region.

"Your typical loyal Conservative wife" has long been a synonym in some circles for what the rest of us shirt-lifters affectionately call "fag-hags". Actually - it's a bit more than that - she is a byword for heterosexual "cover" for gay men wanting to make their way in supposedly homophobic conservative politics. Ffion Jenkins got the same when she married Willie Hague. If truth be told, the same was said of Sarah Gurling, now Mrs Charles Kennedy, and of Sarah Macaulay, now Mrs Gordon Brown.

So, it's terribly tragic for everyone concerned when you hear of a real case of shall we say "sexual confusion" and there is speculation as to whether someone was really hiding his light under a bush, so to speak, all along. Doubly, trebly in this case, tragic when there are children involved. But no more so than if he was running off with another woman. So all credit to David Cameron if he holds to his word and refuses to judge Greg Barker's political ability and future on what is a bit of a personal mess. This is, after all, the twenty-first century, and not the nineteen-eighties when his party would be condemning his new "pretend family relationship" with legislation.

Since Greg is 40, and I am approaching the same, I can identify with him in a way - certainly my feelings have changed, becoming more open to finding love in people of either gender. It's not terribly trendy to say so in the entrenched "gay community" just as much as the "heterosexist community", but we need to appreciate that sexual identity is more fluid than the last two or three hundred years' of predominantly British macho-masculine history has led us to believe.

Has he always identified in secret as "gay" but been living a double life? He's sired three children, after all. People change in all sorts of ways. Loves change. He seems no better, or worse, than anyone who, after some years of marriage, has lost the fire that was once there and fallen for someone else. The gender of his new love should make no difference to the rest of us. It likely will to his kids - just because other children can be the cruelest.

But...he did work for one of those Russian kleptocrats we grace with the term "oligarch". That's the real skeleton in Mr Barker's newly redecorated closet. And if he ends up getting fired for anything, it should be the hug-a-huskie stunt he led his boss on a few months back!

But if there are young, gay, Tories out there (I can never quite understand why) Cameron's support for Barker will I hope make them think twice about taking on a fag hag till death do they part for the sake of a selection meeting.