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Right, if anyone actually cares, I'm probably going to upset a few people with this, but please, don't take any of this personally; to whittle down the 300 or so political blogs I try to "always read" down to just ten was nigh on impossible. To then put them into some kind of order was pretty well beyond me. In the end I kind of chose blogs that sort of represented the various types of blogs I read - you know, ones with think pieces, ones that are group blog type sites, ones that comment frequently, often briefly and incisively on current news, libertarian, Lib Dem and Labour ones say (sorry Tories - the only one for me that would have come close would also have come under the libertarian "category" anyway).

So really I hope that enough people have voted by tonight other than me to dilute my contribution enough to be as meaningless as it appears to me in terms of actually ranking the blogs I "always read"...

1. The Devil's Kitchen
2. Stumbling and Mumbling
3. Cicero's Songs
4. Schneider Home
5. UK Libertarian Party
6. Don Paskini
7. Gladstone Bag
8. Cobden's Comments
9. Liberty Alone
10. People's Republic of Mortimer

As I say - no taking it personally. I should probably have kept my gob shut!

Last week I had the dubious pleasure of attending a meeting in Portcullis House. Perhaps it is indicative of the almost non-existent esteem in which I hold our political institutions that I felt physically nauseous being in a building so full of meddling, superfluous, smugly self-important functionaries and flunkies.

Having a day off today, and finding myself watching the Queen's Speech shenanigans, I have to say I admire her very much more today that I have for a long time. How she can stomach what must be a three hour preparation and get out, all those flunkies in tights doing silly sixteenth century things, Jack boot Straw in his gold braided robes of office as "Lord" Chancellor which would probably pay for a penny off income tax itself farting around arse backwards and me wishing ever so sincerely he'd fall over and cement for the nation the image of Fool he appeared.

All for what, a five minute speech, telling us all how much more interference in our lives we can expect.

What would really bring Her Maj up in my estimation next year is if she finally decides she's had enough of doing all this for fifty-five years and that it's time she sacked the whole lot of the psychotic, useless megalomaniac and sycophantic twats because she knows full well they never achieve what they tell her they're going to and make a liar of her for forcing her to read such legislative drivel.

"My government has become such a sack of manure that Philip and I have decided this year to have them fertilize the roses at Balmoral and not interfere with the management of my once beautiful and powerful country, which they have signally failed to do properly all the time we've been doing this flummery and ceremony. May God bless you all in your efforts in our stables, potting sheds and rose beds."

Eugh. Vomit inducing stuff indeed. If I were Guy Fawkes, I would ensure Liz and Phil got out and then take advantage of the new proposed legislation of causing a nuclear explosion on the rest of 'em.

In the first few sentences on Question Time tonight David Milliband, whom I generally quite like for a Labour minister, said that there's a debate to be had within the Muslim community, that all the great faiths have had in the past, about whether they side with those who seek co-existence with others or domination over others.

He's right of course, this is a debate that has been held by the world's other faiths, as well as Islam, through centuries. And you know what - the faith that seems to have most consistently decided on the "domination" answer over the centuries is Christianity. And it's probably no surprise that even today, the spread of western liberal-democratic hegemony by hook, crook or force, is still driven primarily by those of a Christian religious bent, like Bush and Blair.

If we set ourselves up as world police then those with a grievance against the world are going to target us. Personally, I don't vote for a Westminster representative to see some jumped up MP straddling the world like some Titan. I long to see the day when we put our own problems and communities first, to try to become smaller in the world.

I know that seems counter-intuitive. I understand the arguments about how we are trying to spread freedom and democracy and so on. But it took us centuries to discover true democracy (and in many aspects we are not there yet). Our example, in a globalised world, with media beamed into homes on nearly every square inch of the planet, will stand, whether we are aggressive and imperialistic about it or homely, self contained and introverted.

For those of us who want less government for ourselves, why should we want that to be any different on the world stage? The Co-operative Common Wealth of Oxfordshire is a multi-racial, multi-faith, diverse community with yes, some problems yet also huge opportunities. Were we on our own, or substantially so, would we want to project our might across the world in the same way we seem to do when we combine as a nation? I doubt it. And nor, I would suggest, would we be the target that we are as a nation for disaffected others around the world.

Coexistence for me, rather than the domination of the global power elite.

Technorati Tags: localism, question time, religious wars, imperialism, islam, christian right

I don't get to go to conference. It's always freshers week here at university and I get to give my one speech of the year to a crowd of a couple of hundred steadily drinking freshers who don't want to hear what I have to say and this year were crushed to hear that the arrivals meeting took up the first half hour of the Arsenal-Man United game.

But lame as I am, after a weekend working and with next weekend on duty, I decided my brain felt already a bit like I imagine an egg feels when it realises its next role is as an ommlette and I belatedly took today off work (leave, not sick). And so I was able to see at least part of the Lib Dem conference debate on the Tax Commission proposals on quarter of a TV screen on my set top box.

They say every journey starts with a single step, and it will be no surprise to people who know me as a Georgist "Single Taxer" nowadays to hear that personally I think that the Tax Commission's work has been just that first step. And what a debate. I am glad to be in a party in which such steps are taken democratically, with full and frank debate, with opposing views heard and applauded. But party is only part of the story.

Whether or not Ming's leadership was on the line, however, were they to have voted for Evan Harris's 50% amendment, I very much doubt. Other people do not seem to understand liberal leadership and make everything a test of strength (and let's face it, the Tax Commission was not Ming's vehicle but the party's, triggered by Charles Kennedy after the last election and well on its way to a final report before Ming became leader). I do think my own membership would have been on the line, though, because whilst we might have taken that first step, for me we would have instantly withdrawn our foot and it would have become an uncertain shuffle.

Gareth Epps mentioned in his speech that he was in the party to win elections, and that was what the party also needed to do more than anything, and that "economic purists" were unlikely to achieve that because "economic purism" is difficult to sell to people. Far more difficult, to him and many others, than by maintaining an easily understood totem indicating where our hearts are - that we can and would take from the best off to help the worst off. But it was a totem that, had it been retained, would have been at 180 degree opposition to the economic theory of the rest of the paper, of shifting the burden of taxation off people and onto resource use and depletion. The beginning of the end of the peonage of taxing the results of our efforts and enterprise.

So maybe a political party is not the place for me at all. I don't want to win elections (and I have a fair amount of practice at not doing so to prove it...:) - I only want to change the world. And I don't really believe that politicians change the world. Winning elections may give them the opportunity to do so, but rarely does it actually seem to happen. It's ideas that change the world. And watching today's conference debate made me realise that selling even the most modest ideas to a democratic body is an almost superhuman task. And one left to far better salesmen, demagogues and the occasional spiv than I will ever be.

As I wrote back in spring, Anthony Fisher, Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon became my unlikeliest of political heros when I discovered the history of their part in selling an idea, probably the last idea to revolutionize western politics, to the politicians that actually began to understand and appreciate it and try to implement it. Of course, I could be cynical and suggest that that idea, monetarism, morphed into nothing more than another opportunity for one party to gain an electoral edge. One wonders whether, if Conservative policy in the seventies had been set the way Liberal Democrat policy was today through such open and democratic means, a room full of people would have understood John Hoskyns's Stepping Stones plan (was that its name?) let alone approved of it, or whether it was more a case of strong leadership and a conjunction of celestial bodies taking control behind the scenes.

Anyway, back to the debate today. There were many comments, from both sides of the debate, about being proud of Lloyd-George a century ago and of his peoples' budget. So am I. But I remind everyone that a large and probably the most radical part of that budget was never implemented. A radical idea that many of us, including several members of the Tax Commission itself, are still fighting for while many others who invoke L-G have probably forgotten or never even knew he stood for! Land Value Tax.

It was good to hear Mike Williams who chaired the Tax Commission highlight it as an area we wanted to do more work and produce new policy for as soon as possible. I was sad to hear him say that there are no silver bullets, because those of us who are convinced by the "Single Tax" do believe it is just such a killer application. In the debate over whether to tax incomes or asset wealth it would be worth some of those in favour of the 50 pence rate to consider why L-G was never able to implement it; the implacable opposition of the wealthiest and most advantaged in the land and "their representatives" in the House of Lords and what they gave away - no less than the right to govern - in order to ensure it wasn't implemented.

Today the party took a small step. It wrapped it up in cuddly, saleable, spinnable terms like "Green Tax Switch" which will serve it well. But it has yet truly to grasp the fairness, simplicity and philosophical superiority of the Single Tax idea, shifting away from the envy and arbitrariness of taxing personal success completely and onto externalities and economic rent. Shifting the whole rationale for the state's interference in what we do with what we make into the stewardship of the resources we share and take and use.

In the process, Land Value Tax would, almost incidentally, achieve more environmentally sustainable patterns of living and working, a better distribution of the wealth generating capacity around the country and create a system that puts more responsibility and freedom to choose back to the individual and community and away from the monolithic state apparatus. The next steps may be harder. They could and should go way beyond the 5% of the total tax burden that this paper switches - the more the more effective. But they head where Liberals should not fear to tread.

It's nice to know that I've attracted the attention of some in the corridors of power. After my post the other day about whether it was better to tax emissions or to give out emissions permits and allow companies to trade any surpluses with other corporations that need to buy more for whatever reason, I got an email from Chris Huhne tonight to let me know that he'd put something more about it up on his own website.

I presume he refers to his speech in response to the Stern Report which contains lots of good stuff. Though it doesn't (and nor would I have necessarily expected it to) factor in my personal philosophical bias towards viewing the air/atmosphere as a part of the commons, like land, which ought not to be enclosed if possible and which bias leans me towards taxing emissions rather than trading emissions.

I accept that they sort of emissions taxing I was thinking of is probably not possible at present - that we do not have a "carbon footprint" for every process and that just as it would be technologically difficult in the time frame required for action to introduce personal carbon allowances and trading it would be similarly difficult or impossible to produce a fair tax system without knowing that "carbon footprint" of every process in the economy.

Technorati Tags: climate change, lib dems