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Not a lot of people know this, such is the popular perception of the city of Kingston upon Hull that I rarely even admit it to myself, but Haltemprice and Howden is my place of birth. To be more precise, Woodgates Nursing Home, North Ferriby. At the time my folks lived in Woodlands Drive, Anlaby and my dad worked for Northern Foods.

We returned to the area when I was eight and lived in West End, South Cave for a year or so. I went to Hymers, dad worked as Finance Director at Moore's of Hull (then an Opel and Colt main dealer), with a chap who would become a life-long friend, Ben Moore. I remember the school bus from Elloughton into town, getting a taste of silage when on a school trip to Bishop Burton Agricultural College, the (much tastier) Stroganoff at the Cave Castle Restaurant, the horses in the field behind the house (I see it's been developed now for housing from Google Earth), standing in a crowd around Hull Parish Church to see the queen on her Silver Jubilee tour of Britain (and the beacon on the hill up behind South Cave come to think of it that was lit on Jubilee day tiself) and discovering snails of all things down the lane leading to the A63 (we were allowed to play near the dual carriageway in them days without being taken into care!).

Ah! The A63. Blessed road, for it leads you away from Hull! The landmarks along the way - Howden Abbey, the high bridge over the Humber before Goole, Drax power station are all signs that you are approaching civilisation!

And then, inexorably it seems, it draws you back too, and so, with me just a year or so into a boarding school career, my folks moved back to Hull, and I find the street we lived in there, Maplewood Avenue - one of the worst hit in last years flooding I believe - is more or less the very easterly most road in the Haltemprice and Howden constituency. I remember big rows between my mother and father during school holidays. I remember finally uncovering the fact I had suspected for some time - that Santa Claus was actually my mother with a bag of Boots cotton wool stuck to her chin. But dad was back at Moore's meeting the new wife, so I remember divorce. And depression. I remember getting caught smoking by my mum the first time. I remember trying to make lager from a Boots kit. And her wondering why she had found a condom in my coat pocket when she washed it!

My sister did most of her secondary schooling at Willerby, and they went to church at St Luke's in Willerby. I learned to swim at the Haltemprice Leisure Centre. I discovered a friend at school 200 miles away (and not a mile too many!) who at the time lived in Malton so we shared most of our train journeys to and from school as far as York. When I got back in touch with him after school, my father was living in Driffield and his in Cottingham, so I've spent a good few nights out in Cottingham on Sam Smiths and Hull Brewery Co beers.

So actually, a pretty significant place for so much of my formative life. But the days when a boy from Hull had to deny his city and support Leeds if he wanted to support a top flight football team are over. I still managed to feel a little glow of pride on hearing that Hull City FC had made it into the premiership!

New at 1909, how the People's Budget was intended to change the whole ethos of tax, asking not merely "how much have you got?" but also "how did you get it?" and giving us ideas just as pertinent today for differentiating between people's justified wealth and wealth gained by exploiting the common wealth and the needs of others.

For balance, and because I am personally quite ambivalent about which direction monetary policy takes, there is an alternative to having a state run money supply. One that I believe Hayek speculated, and which in any case is steadily coming to pass.

Completely privatize money supply.

If just 3% of our money is actually created as base money, what's the point? After all, national currencies are irrelevant in the modern world aren't they? A defining attribute of a national currency is that it circulates in one territory mainly. It therefore acts as a restriction on globalization because it encourages us to trade with counterparties that share that common currency. And if controlling it is already quite a dificult balancing act for central banks, why bother at all?

Mervyn King himself recognizes this. At a conference of Central Bankers at Jackson Hole in the US in 1999 he speculated that the rise of the internet and the globalization of communications and information could render national currencies obsolete. Already 25% of global trade does not involve national currencies at all, but various forms of barter - France built power stations in Brazil I think it was in return for oil for example.

Anduntil now, such barter was really only worth doing on a grand scale like that or on a tiny scale between people you trusted because you knew them. But interpersonal communications, facilitated by the internet, and the ability of people to form their own communities separate from the geographical location they happen to reside in means that we could easily be entering a world in which all the information was there at our fingertips to be able to decide what we will pay whom for what and in what type of currency.

Already we do it to an extent without thinking. If we have more than one credit card we make a quick almost subconscious calculation of how much we will have to pay for something and when if we use one card rather than another. If we take it one step further, we join an internet community like Second Life, the fastest growing economy inn the world I am told, with its own, convertible, currency. Participants in Second Life already decide amongst themselves when they put something up for sale whether they want paid in US dollars or the local Linden dollars, or whether they will be open to negotiation as to what they get paid in.

Hayek merely saw banks competing to create their own currencies - you would choose which one to use depending on various factors - well managed backs would have a stable backing for their currency and minimize the risk of a collapse by prudent management. If there was too much of one bank's currency in circulation it would become devalued and markets would make sure it levelled out in time through people choosing to use other banks' currencies.

But now, potentially, we can deal in all sorts of "currencies" - even of our own making. And the more we get around the global arena the more people will trust our bona fides as creditworthy.

There is a catch. For all that this should appeal to those economic liberals that championed monetarism under Thatcher, they reject it because, as goes the argument over the Euro, if the state doesn't have control of its own money supply, it loses all economic sovereignty. Well, yes. it would. But that's the point, if we want a global economy with a level playing field, the protectionist nature of national currencies does in fact have to disappear.

So, if you want some control, any control, as a nation state, then we have to take more control of our money supply as mentioned in my previous opus. If we want truly free global trade that would truly lift the fortunes of the worst off on the planet, we have to abandon that pretense and go for privately created currencies appropriate for each transaction and the central bank is redundant. The technology nearly exists now to enable us to manage multiple currencies every day of our lives. Some people effectively already do - there was a fad if you remember for choosing Euro denominated mortgages. Well soon that flexibility could be available for the purchase of your morning paper.

But if we carry on with the buggers muddle of state sponsored but commercially created monetary systems, we will end up blindly handing all our economic sovereignty over without having a say in the matter. I give it five years, a decade at the most. We need to think about it now.

I've just spent a fantastic weekend in the hallowed halls of the National Liberal Club at the annual Libertarian Alliance conference. If, like me, you see yourself as more of a theoretical policy wonk doing the background stuff of coming up with ideas, rather than the rather more practical work of debating actual proposals and then selling them on the doorstep, this was the perfect sort of a conference. A little like spending an entire party conference in the various fringe events where hand picked speakers with great ideas to sell challenge the little gray cells rather than in the sort of "win or lose" arguments over specific policy proposals of the main conference debates.

Yes, since going to Lib Dem conferences over the past few years, I have found the latter enjoyable, I don't think I've been on the winning side of a controversial debate yet, but this sort of event is where, I think, policies are incubated and born out of ideas presented by people with brains the size of several planets each or you gain the intellectual ammunition with which to turn that losing streak in policy debates into winning arguments.

I've come away from it with both many new acquaintances, a reading list that will probably take me till doomsday to get through and enough controversial ideas to keep my many sceptical Lib Dem friends arguing till, oh, next year's LA conference. I shall work up several ideas into blog posts of their own in the forthcoming weeks and months but to start with I thought I'd give a quick overview of the sessions and speakers. All the sessions were being filmed and will eventually appear on the LA website to refer to so if I fail miserably to pass the essential detail on, you'll be able to watch the originals should you wish...

Session 1 - The Defeat of of Aging: Our Ultimate Freedom? by Dr Aubrey de Gray
Session 2 - Future Shock: Three Perspectives on Freedom in the Twenty First Century with James Panton, Sean Gabb and Martin Summers
Session 3 - "The Global Rise of Private Education for the Poor: A Libertarian Perspective" by James Stansfield
Session 4 - Future Imperfect: Tech Revolutions That Might Happen and Their Consequences by David Friedman

Session 1 - The Defeat of of Aging: Our Ultimate Freedom? by Dr Aubrey de Gray

Aubrey is a fun, and at times controversial, biologist at Cambridge University working on the science of "fixing" the aging process. There are, apparently, two conventional approaches to dealing with the problems of aging. Basically, at the moment, from the moment we are created we start storing up the means of our own death. The very processes that keep us alive, metabolism, causes damage in our cells and throughout our bodies. That damage builds up until the body can no longer prevent it becoming one of the many illnesses associated with aging and that eventually, if we are not killed first by an external event, it will kill us. Globally, 100,000 out of the 150,000 people who die each day die of these conditions, which can be and usually are extremely unpleasant, often very painful and upsetting both for the sufferers and those who witness it - loved ones and carers.

One "school" of dealing with aging, "geriatrics" focuses on trying to prevent that damage becoming pathology ie developing the illnesses that will kill us. But it is ultimately futile. It is not repairing or removing the damage, just holding back the time it takes to become dangerous to us. And we cannot do that indefinitely.

The other traditional approach, "gerontology", focusses on trying to stop metabolism creating the damage in the first place. It sounds more promising, until you realise how little we actually know about metabolism. There is just so much that we cannot yet understand enough to prevent it causing damage, and therefore eventually pathology.

But there is a third, emerging approach that focuses on maintenance. De Gray made the analogy of a car - if you maintain it rigourously you can make it last more or less forever. And so this approach to aging focuses on repairing and eradicating the damage and maintaining cells. Repairing the damage means it does not build up enough to become pathology. As science, mostly microbiology, is constantly evolving, the types of damage we can repair increase. And because we are acting on the observable damage, there are a finite number of types of damage to focus on. We can see the damage metabolism creates much better than we understand the processes that lead to the damage.

De Gray and his team believe that at a very conservative estimate of the rate of development of the techniques required to repair various types of damage (some are easier, some still distant dreams of course) within 42 years we could have the ability to extend life by thirty years by repairing half of the types of damage we observe. So the current assumption is that the first person who will be able to live to 150 years old is already alive today and people currently in their thirties may be in time to have their lives extended by about thirty years over heir current life expectancy.

But as we move forward and discover mechanisms to deal with more types of damage, so we can repeat the "full body service" and begin to extend life out beyond the 150 years, indeed almost indefinitely. Again, given the rate of discovery, De Gray calculates that the first person to be able to live to 1,000 years will only be twenty years younger than the first person that will live to 150.

Such a prospect of course raises all sorts of issues, ethical, cost, policy and so on. But De Gray's conclusion was that given the amount of suffering that aging causes, and the costs to society of dealing with that suffering, we should not be put off from pursuing it. If, eventually, we have to answer some of the more difficult questions - what will the world's population look like if we can live effectively forever, and should we create ways in which someone can choose to end their otherwise perfectly healthy lives, that's something for the future.

And the cost of developing these techniques would appear to be minimal compared with even the cost of health care currently just in the UK. You can find out more, and importantly about how to help, financially and otherwise, at the "Methuselah Foundation" website.

Session 2 - Future Shock: Three Perspectives on Freedom in the Twenty First Century with James Panton, Sean Gabb and Martin Summers

I'm rather afraid that my relying on memory rather than taking copious notes will not do this session justice and it will be best to get the full picture from the recording of the session when it comes online. The speakers focussed on the many new ways in which our freedoms are being attacked and compromised, but more importantly on our apparent willingness to allow it to happen and unwillingness to protest against it. Even though theoretically, in a democracy, we are, sheep like in most cases, simply obeying and finding reasons to excuse the actions of those who would curtail our freedoms.

As I say, watch the video when it comes out.

After a very pleasant lunch with Tristan in the fascinating Ship & Shovell Pub just up the road in Craven Passage I'm afraid I was a few minutes late for the start of the session after lunch, "The Global Rise of Private Education for the Poor: A Libertarian Perspective" by James Stansfield , and decided to sit it out rather than disturb the room clattering in late, so both you and I will need to wait for the video! Or, there's a very good synopsis courtesy of the Oxford Libertarian Society blog .

Session 4 - Future Imperfect: Tech Revolutions That Might Happen and Their Consequences by David Friedman

Then came one of the great highlights of the whole weekend, a hugely entertaining session of futurology and technological ideas by David Friedman, son of Milton and Rose, and professor of Law at Santa Clara University. I just cannot do this fast paced entertaining session the justice it deserves in a few lines. It was based on the ideas in his new book, Future Imperfect, which you can get at Amazon, or if you are too mean, or just plain penurious, he has put it all online.

He covered areas I will probably blog about individually (when I have read the book), including privacy technology, law enforcement technology and how to get around it, reproductive technology (think Gattaca) and, most indelibly etched in my mind, nano technology. The main thought I came away with out of a myriad of interesting possibilities was "should we actually be worried about climate change if, within a few decades, we will have produced nanobots and artificial intelligence such that we will have obsoleted the human race!" - as Friedman put it, turned us into gerbils in the laboratories or even the Matrix, of self-aware super intelligent 'droids.

I chose to miss out the final, additional session of the day to meet up with Lib Dem activist from Ealing Toran Shaw for a drink before we all went into the dinner, but I will definately want to watch the video of the session and the Libertarian Alliance DVD on the subject of "The Great British Road Pricing Debate: Free Market Incrementalism or Just More State Control?" which is obviously currently a hugely important policy issue that has caused a lot of debate within the Lib Dems.

And so ended the main business of day one. I shall return to cover the very sociable dinner and day two, including such controversial issues as Hans-Hermann Hoppe on the idea of the "Private Law society" and Guy Herbert from NO2ID soon.

As our Lib Dem Tax Commission prepares to promote its policy paper in advance of Conference, where members will have to debate and vote on adopting what are really quite complex policy issues, and the Tories are getting the evidence together for their own tax policy group, William Norton helpfully outlined a "ten point briefing on tax policy" at ConservativeHome today.

It hasn't generated as much interest as the Bow Group suggestions from yesterday but it's equally important for the questions it seems to ask of policy movers and shakers when they are considering tax direction and what can be sold to the electorate. It charts the history of Tory tax pledges since the mid-seventies and the sort of promises that have been successful and the circumstances in which they can be successfully delivered.

For the Lib Dems, I think the most pertinent section lists the various Tory manifesto pledges during Mrs Thatcher's period in office. What surprised me was that when we think of that Tory government we have been conditioned to think of cuts, in tax and spending, in "selling off the silver" and yet the specific promises in those manifestos are so short, so light on detail that they're worth quoting here:

• 1979 Conservative Manifesto: “We shall cut income tax at all levels …and reduce tax bureaucracy. It is especially important to cut the absurdly high marginal rates of tax both at the bottom and top of the income scale….Raising tax thresholds will let the low-paid out of the tax net altogether…The top rate of income tax should be cut to the European average and the higher tax bands widened.” It was made quite clear that this would be paid for by an extension to VAT. More space was devoted to trade union reform.
• 1983 Conservative Manifesto: “Further improvements in allowances and lower rates of income tax remain a high priority, together with measures to reduce the poverty and unemployment traps.”
• 1987 Conservative Manifesto: “In the next Parliament: We aim to reduce the burden of taxation. In particular, we will cut income tax still further and reduce the basic rate to 25p in the £ as soon as we prudently can. We will continue the process of tax reform”.
• There was more detail in the 1992 Manifesto, which was only to be expected since the Election immediately followed Norman Lamont’s Budget and it repeated what he had said. For the longer term it promised: “We will make further progress towards a basic Income Tax rate of 20p. We will reduce the share of national income taken by the public sector. We will see the budget return towards balance as the economy recovers.”

Now sure, we all know that there must have been much work done behind the scenes, many figures checked and double-checked and the feasibility of different methods and time-scales for doing each of these studied in depth. But if it were today, someone like the Institute for Fiscal Studies would be straight on the story at the first whiff of a policy popping out to check whether the sums add up, seemingly to the penny.

Indeed we often deride politicians who suggest that they want to see the "books" properly when coming to power before risking making specific proposals for implementing such ideas. But it's common sense isn't it. Opposition parties do not have access to the whole of the Whitehall machine. Why should they be expected to know in advance whether their policies are absolutely solid? Gordon Brown is in power and changes the rules every so often to magic up some adjusted statistic, what chance those who cannot change the rules unilaterally?

And remember, in 1979 the Tories were also promoting what to many seemed a fanciful but far reaching shift in economic focus - from Keynesian state support for the economy to concentration at all costs on tight money supply control (I seem to remember even as a teenager at the time that their various Chancellors also changed the rules to suit them in this period - changing which monetary aggregates to monitor and the targets that should be applied).

And the public is skeptical too; perhaps - I don't know - more-so now than twenty-odd years ago, or maybe it's just more demanding, more prepared to believe Evan Davies than any politician. Rightly or wrongly we policy wonks seem to think they want all the detail before they can be convinced. And perhaps more crucially that more detail makes it all sound more convincing. And I'm not entirely sure that it does.

Direction rather than detail

So, when we get stuck into our debates up to and at Conference in a few weeks' time we should be thinking about very broad direction and not necessarily the detail of individual measures we might use if in power to get there. It might even help to be that much clearer about direction if we find ourselves having to choose one of the other parties to support after the next election. Parties traveling in the same direction on tax would find it easier to agree on different steps.

Yes, all the wonk work is necessary to give conference in particular and more widely the media and public some sense of how we would implement that direction but is far less important than we wonks would make out. The detail will change for a start, almost every day, every month from the day it is set in stone as "policy" as the economic environment changes. It will change dependent on the successes of implementing other policies should the opportunity arise. And direction, tax philosophy call it, is easier to convey to people than hypothetical examples of what we would have done in the particular circumstances of 17th September 2006.

A concentration on the detail as if it sells itself is what troubled Charles Kennedy that day during the 2005 election when he couldn't quite remember one specific set of variables that in the end really didn't mean much to real people I suspect.

And so...

William Norton finishes by reminding us that "perhaps the most important policy before either stability or tax cuts are sought is to decide how much public spending the country can afford, the items on which you want to spend it, and why."

As Liberal Democrats this is more apt even that for Tories. If we see economic and fiscal policy more as means to particularly desirable public or social ends then we ought to be ready, as we have shown in the past, to change our tax policies and outlooks in response to other policy desirables and external circumstances. Such was the case, for example, with the penny extra for education - we get criticism for dropping it, but dropping it was the right thing to do in acknowledgment that the right amount was now being spent, if not wisely or efficiently, in education, and that we no longer needed to raise more to fund it.

So here's my pitch - we already have a stated direction, from our mini manifesto of 1998 that we should reaffirm:

"[to] create a more sustainable and fairer tax system by shifting taxation onto pollution and resource usage and off people"

And for the detail, decide merely that this will mean:

• progressively lower taxation on incomes, profit and capital, replacing them with
• progressively higher taxes on scarce or depleting natural resources such as land, non-renewable energy, water, clean air of which the abuse hurts us all and of which the stewardship is ultimately a strategic function of us all expressed through the state.

If you believe us land taxers, we would have you believe that this will over time lead to a lower share of national income needing to be taken in taxes (even allowing for the current apparent consensus on higher spending on public services), as they will help stimulate efficiencies in an ever more uncertain market and raise economic prosperity more equally around the country and reduce the need for the massive intra-regional transfers that happen to prop up less prosperous regions.

Paying for what we take and use, not for what we make and save.

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