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The education bill debates present a very good opportunity to show how landowners are the ones to gain from public infrastructure investment for doing nothing and that taxing land values would be a good way of recouping public infrastructure investment more fairly through a market driven tax system...

Picture the scene. You've just moved into your quiet surburban semi ready for your retirement. And the uncaring council comes along and decides it's going to build a new school right across the road. You get out your placards and march on the Town Hall to fight the planning application. You find any reason you can why this "predominantly elderly population area" does not need such a development, that it will "blight your lives" and "adversely affect property value in the vicinity" and so on. You might even fight on beyond the "obviously biased" local councillors, to the High Court.

You are defeated. You settle down to a retirement of valium and earplugs, you might even want to electrify the front drive just in case any kids get too close. You can only just bear the construction traffic. And the following year, this brand spanking new school takes its first pupils, with everyone predicting great things from it. And someone pops up on your doorstep one day having dodged the teen-proofing on the driveway and offers you and extra £42,000 for your home.

You are a bit taken aback. After all, you had been confidently informed by your friendly local amateur surveyor that the new school would depress property values. Surely you just adding triple glazing to keep the intolerable noise of happy children out wasn't worth £42,000? Nothing you've done has added that sort of value. So you ask..."why pay £42,000 more than for that house down the road there?"

"Because you're in the catchment area of this brand spanking new school everyone's got high hopes for and I want my child to have the best education i can afford. So I'm prepared to pay you, who hold a monopoly on the only property for sale in the catchment area, whatever price you name within reason."

You accept, realising, somewhat smugly, that your only contribution to this little windfall was the prominence your anti-school campaign brought to the new school.

Tax Payer -> Government investment -> Landowner

And it happens with most things. That new railway line making your life hell? Just pity poor Don Riley, property developer around the Jubilee Line extension stations, who saw his portfolio value rise by over £3bn when the line opened (and now an advocate himself, by the way, for LVT).

You just need to read any estate agent's property particulars to see the sort of factors that affect land value, none of which the current owner has any great part in - "walking distance from local shopping", "20 minutes Northern Line to City", "easy access to motorway", "good local educational and medical services" and so on.

There's a bit of a kerfuffle started up over a report by eminent science guru Colin Blakemore and David Nutt of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and MPs like the report and want change.

But there's something I would like to know about the research - if anyone finds an answer to this I'd be grateful.

Heroin and cocaine are in there as number one and two most harmful drugs (followed by barbiturates, methodone and then good ole grog incidentally - way ahead of LSD at 14th and Ecstacy at 18th). Now I presume first that they are not distinguishing between different forms of cocaine and that in that figure is both David Cameron's alleged adolescent sniff of white powder and crack or freebase cocaine use (nor presumably the millions of people who use the coca plant itself, or the tonic wine, toothpastes or cola drinks that once contained versions of cocaine).

But I'm intrigued about the heroin place. I was under the impression that biochemically heroin, properly dosed, was actually less damaging to the human body than alcohol - yes, overdosing and so on lead to hearts stopping (as do overdosing on alcohol and all depressants) which is definitely not good for the human body but, well managed, you can get a "high" without taking those sorts of risks and be less damaged by it than a similar high from alochol.

So is this research about the harm of a substance itself or the relative harm of each substance given the peculiar social circumstances in which it is taken. Or put it another way, are they trying to gauge the relative harm despite these drugs being illegal and therefore prone to tampering with and uncertain dosage and the whole criminal world that surrounds their supply chain?

My suspicion is that these placings would change again if all of these substances were legal and controlled.

Certainly any evidence based input to future discussion of illicit drugs is welcome but just changing how legal or otherwise a substance is seen as by the courts won't take away the criminal underworld that surrounds drugs and causes adulteration, misinformation and pushing people into multiple dependencies which they are then scared to deal with even when they want to.

Technorati Tags: drugs laws

I see that the energy review suggests outlawing "standby" buttons on consumer electricals. Good thing too. Because if they're there, as they are in nearly all cases in my little hovel, they are going to get used. I don't know if they really drain as much electricity as they say, but am prepared enough to believe so and feel guilty about having them, however convenient they are when watching "Science Shack" on the TV at 3am to help me sleep (I mean - there's no point really if you have to get out of bed again and wake yourself up to switch the whole thing off, not for the uberlazy like me anyway).

But my TV and Hi-Fi are only a few years old, so they're going to last long after "peak oil" by the looks of it. So I was thinking, what would make it easier for me to do my duty and turn the bloody things off properly.

With computers you can actually turn them right off and still have them turned on remotely if they are on a network using fantastic sounding little things called "magic packets". The network listens passively (yes, I believe it does take a tiny amount of charge, but from the onboard battery rather than the mains if I understand it correctly) and when a magic packet arrives addressed for that particular gizmo it knows to turn the machine on just as surely as if you were pressing the button yourself.

So, for those of us who will have TV and other gadgets with standby buttons on for a good while yet whether they are outlawed or not, could we not have some kind of power plug that works with something similar to these "magic packets". One remote control could do for the whole house with different numbered plugs. Power the thing off at the wall and still be able to roll over in the morning and turn it all back on again without getting out off bed?

Anyone any good with a soldering iron want to have a go at it? Or point me to one someone made earlier?