The beginning, not the end of the road...

It recently occurred to LibertyCat and I that we had completely failed to blog about the much discussed e-petition on road pricing and Tony Blair's subsequent letter to the signatories. I started blogging about the Social Market Foundation's February paper on road pricing [click to download], and Mr Ladyman's speech at that event. Then it occurred to me... why road pricing?

Vehicle Excise Duty and petrol duty already take into account the emissions of the vehicle and the distance travelled. This approach has problems - petrol tax is unfair to the rural poor and VED discriminates against people who own high emissions vehicles and barely use them. However, the importance of these groups is probably underestimated. Only 20% of the UK population live in rural areas and less than 5% in very sparsely populated rural areas. In addition, people who own and rarely use high emissions cars will pay less in fuel tax than those who use them for their daily commute.

So why road pricing? The SMF report justifies this as follows:

Traditionally taxation mechanisms, such as the fuel tax and the vehicle excise duty (VED), have been the main levers used to constrain growth in traffic levels and emissions. Yet these have had a limited impact. Despite a rise in the real price of
petrol since 1990, road traffic increased by 14% between 1990 and 2000 and is predicted to rise another 25% by 2010. In addition, road transport’s share of total UK carbon emissions is set to rise by just under a third by 2010...

...The limited impact of the fuel tax and VED in reducing traffic and emissions may in part be due to the fact that, despite the real rise in petrol prices, the costs of motoring have fallen relative to the costs of public transport and to the level of average earnings...

...As car travel has become relatively cheap compared to both earnings and alternative modes of transport, more and more people have chosen to travel by car.

Although fuel duty is a form of distance-based road pricing, its primary effect has actually been to encourage fuel efficiency rather than reduce car use...

... There is little political appetite for further increases in fuel duty - which has not risen with inflation since the fuel duty escalator was abandoned in the 1999 Pre-Budget Report. This is unsurprising given public attitudes...

..Since the necessary increases in fuel duty to reduce congestion are unlikely, road pricing is the only feasible alternative mechanism to help motorists face the full cost of their road journeys.

To summarise this long passage "The government are too scared of men in lorries to put up fuel tax enough to change behaviour. So they're going to go for a really complicated, expensive computer system [an approach that has been so much of a success in the past]. This may involve funky futuristic black boxes and satellites, or they may just try scaling up the London congestion charging system from around 42 sq km (double the previous area of 21 sq km ) right across the 244820 sq km of the United Kingdom. Bear in mind that the London system is one of the largest and most complicated congestion charging systems in the world".

This doesn't seem a particularly strong argument for road pricing.

Why YouTube attack ads will not work

I noticed that this post on Lib Dem Voice was in the top five posts on LibDemBlogs. So I think a response is in order.

Essentially, Rob Fenwick's argument is that internet TV sites like 18 Doughty Street and the rather more famous YouTube allow people to circumvent the laws against political adverts on TV, opening the way to US-style attack ads and all the bad consequences they entail. I am not worried, because internet TV is fundamentally a poor medium for distributing political attack ads.

Political adverts (whether attack videos, FOCUS leaflets, or billboards) are designed for rapid, gut-level appeal to floating voters with an effective mental age of about 14. People who look for information about politics on the internet are typically educated people with strong political views. A politically aware person who sees the Livingstone ad Fenwick is complaining about will not be surprised by the contents - we all knew that Ken was into self-publicity, Commie-hugging and tax-raising when we elected him. The people who the ad might persuade are the people who voted for him because he was a loveable cheeky chappie who promised to sort the busses out.

The difference between a TV ad and a website is that the TV ad interrupts a TV programme and is seen by everyone watching the programme, whereas a website is only seen by people who positively seek it out. The people choosing to watch 18 Doughty Street are almost entirely either Tories looking to have their prejudices confirmed or Tory-haters working out whether to point and laugh or cry foul. Neither will have their political views changed by a 2-minute attack ad.

The best Christmas present...

Is the good ship ID cards sinking below the waves? The headline in the online edition of the Telegraph this morning describes the costs and fines the government is suggesting for the ID cards scheme.

These are £30 to:

• Replace lost or stolen cards
• Change the name on an ID card after marriage

A fine up to £1,000 for:

• Failing to update the card with a new address or details
• Failing to return the card of a dead relative

John Reid (probably with acute embarrassment) admitted that this would adversely affect students since all ID card holders would be asked for "all current alternative addresses". Students typically change their term-time address at least once a year. Recent graduates would also be affected - also a group who frequently relocate.

Maybe I'm engaged in a bit of wistful thinking here, but since this scheme has more floors/flaws than Taipei 101 in both aims and implementation, then Gordon Brown (or whoever - wouldn't wish to speculate) may eventually be tempted to use the FT's suggestion for an escape route:

John Reid, the home secretary, axed plans to build a huge new computer system to hold the biometric data, such as fingerprint records, that will underpin the new cards. The government will instead use existing systems for national insurance, asylum and passport databases...

...the change of approach could also offer Gordon Brown an escape route, should he become prime minister and opt to scrap or scale back ID cards. “It doesn’t close off an ID card scheme,” ... “But it lets the government proceed with two things it really cares about – e-border controls and an identity management system that will let citizens do e-business more easily with government – while allowing a successor to Tony Blair to drop or significantly amend the ID cards project if that’s what they want to do.”

Perhaps ID cards in their current incarnation will eventually generate far more light than heat. Surely everyone's best Christmas present... [except the government's]

This is why politicians lie, or how saving the NHS caused the Iraq war

Money should be 'no object' for NHS, says public

Morons.

The public are particularly stupid when you take into account that they are the same public that told the Taxpayers Alliance that the second largest problem (after crime) facing the UK was excessive taxes.

Nothing is "regardless of cost". If your own mother needed life-saving treatment, you might say that you would pay up "regardless of cost", but you can afford to say that because you don't have the kind of money the government does. For most individuals, "regardless of cost" means "as long as it doesn't cost more than a few hundred thousand pounds", because if it cost a few million they wouldn't be able to afford it.

Even if we are only talking about a half-million pound treatment, how many of the following would you prepared to do to pay for your mother's treatment?

• Sell your house?
• Take your child out of university?
• Get your electricity cut off?
• Sell your kidneys?

For extra credit, what if the treatment only had a 10% chance of success?

If any of those answers are "no", then you wouldn't provide healthcare for your own mother regardless of cost. So why should the rest of us?

Actually, it gets worse than this. If their children's lives were at stake, most people would go through with some of the shocking money-raisers on my list. If their own lives were at stake, they would probably stop at selling the house. For an elderly parent, people spending their own money tend to give up on prolonging life relatively early and spend the money on palliative care instead. Do that in the NHS and you get hauled over the coals for age discrimination.

Nevertheless, 71% of the electorate think that the NHS should be funded regardless of cost. Because the NHS plays the same role in British politics as God does in American politics, this means that politicians have to pretend to believe it too, or else we get drummed out of office for atheism. But we can't actually believe it, because it is such a damnfool thing to believe.

Politicians in power have to make decisions about what the government will and won't pay for out of a limited budget - just like you do when Mum gets ill and the NHS won't pay for treatment. But we have to lie about it, because the voters make us. And if you have to lie to get ahead, then the profession of politics attracts talented liars - just like Tony Blair.

Tony Blair got where he is because he told the electorate lies about tax and spending in 1997. If he didn't have the lying skills to tell those lies with total sincerity while still being trusted as a "pretty straight kind of guy" then he wouldn't have been elected. If he was the sort of person whose mother had told him not to lie, he wouldn't have been able to do it. Successful politicians are people who are prepared to tell the electorate a little white lie, over and over again, with no visible signs of guilt. People who don't feel guilty about telling little white lies are going to start telling slightly bigger lies. If they are talented liars, they will get away with it. Eventually they will tell some real whoppers. Things like these:

• That Iraq had weapons of mass destruction
• That a major aim of the Iraq war was to bring democracy to the Iraqis
• That the Iraqis would appreciate this, and shower us with flowers
• That the Bush administration wasn't a bunch of clueless numpties

So how can we fight back as non-lying politicians? In the short term, we can't. What the electorate want, the electorate will get. And the electorate want someone who whispers sweet nothings about saving the NHS "regardless of cost" without actually raising taxes or spending any money. What they get is someone who can lie shamelessly, and it just so happens that the current liar-in-chief finds lying about weapons of mass destruction far more fun than lying about budgets.

In the long term, we can do two things. Firstly, challenge motherhood-and-apple-pie lies. When Gordon Brown gets up and says that he will provide free childcare for everyone, ask him how he is going to pay for it, and keep asking. When David Cameron says he can cut taxes without cutting services by getting rid of "waste and inefficiency", we should point and laugh. Then point out that our policies are fully costed and audited by the IFS, and the other parties' aren't. Unfortunately, this kind of negative-but-accurate campaigning is going to lower public trust in politics even further.

So we have to try and change how the electorate thinks. Most of the "white lies" politicians have to tell are to do with spending priorities. We need to treat questions about spending priorities as questions about priorities, and not about right and wrong, or who has religion and who doesn't. There isn't a fundamental right to government-funded healthcare - and there can't be, because that would imply a government duty to pay for it, and sometimes the government can't or shouldn't pay. Anyone who uses the language of fundamental rights when talking about spending priorities in the NHS is (a) lying, and (b) teaching the electorate to expect other politicians to lie. We also need to stop pretending that there are vast pools of untapped cash like "cutting waste and inefficiency" or "taxing the rich". Large, centralised organisations will always be wasteful and inefficient. If the rich are overtaxed, they won't bother getting rich.

The idea that decisions about priorities are just that is not difficult. Every family has to skimp on things that are important to them in order to be able to spend the money on something even more important. Unlike the other parties, Liberal Democrats can probably get away with saying so. The defining ideology of the Labour party is about spending priorities. The defining ideology of all successful centre-right parties is also based on financial priorities. The defining ideology of the Liberal Democrats is based around controlling power, and upholding real human rights. The right to free speech is not like the "right" to free healthcare. It exists (or should do) in the poorest societies just as much as the richest. Many people devoted their lives to the struggle for human rights. Others gave their lives in that struggle. That is what "regardless of cost" really means.

Secure? Come off it!

This article in the Spectator (free registration required, will disappear behind subscription wall at some point) points to the Information Commissioner's report on "blagging" for personal data.

Basically, you can buy non-sensitive (but nevertheless confidential) data like ex-directory phone numbers for less than a hundred quid, and highly sensitive data like police records for at most a few hundred. As well as stalkers and estranged spouses, customers for these services include debt collectors, insurance companies, and journalists.

Frankly, I'm not surprised. An organisation like DVLA is about bureaucratic efficiency, not keeping personal data confidential. So it doesn't keep data very confidential. To do that, you need a culture that takes data protection seriously - I am a lot less worried about MI5 keeping a file on me than the local council doing the same thing, because MI5 isn't going to sell the file to a muckraking journalist without direct orders from Downing Street. Doctors and banks also understand this kind of thing.

This makes the governments plans to share information across the government very dangerous indeed. There are three reasons why information-sharing makes this kind of crime more dangerous.

1) Any given breach of security will yield more information. I can get a non-public address, a date of birth, and a national insurance number from a single hit on the national ID register, rather than having to blag three different government agencies.

2) A culture which believes that data sharing is the right thing to do is not one which values data protection. When "Mr Wooley from the Department of Administrative Affairs" phones up the Child Support Agency to ask them how much child support John Major is paying Edwina Currie, then telling him what he wants to know is a shining example of joined up government. Except that "Mr Wooley" is actually working for the Daily Mirror. (He could still be working for the Daily Mirror even as a real DAA employee - junior civil servants are badly paid and therefor easy to bribe.)

3) If data is shared between government officials, then it is only as secure as the lowest common denominator. This is particularly worrying with children's medical records - which Ruth Kelly wants to be shared with other government bodies dealing with children as part of her super-duper child protection database. A database which more than 300,000 petty officials will have access to.

Basically, if the government can't keep sensitive personal data secure - and they can't if everyone in the government has access to it - they shouldn't store it in such vast quantities. But this takes the biscuit. The government knows that the press can (and does) pay crooks to dig dirt on celebrities. They know that the child database will be about as secure as all the other databases that the crooks get their data from. They are even prepared to do something about it. And yet they still think that children of mere mortals should have sensitive personal information conveniently aggregated for the crooks' viewing pleasure.

When you have your fifteen minutes of fame, expect the journalist who contacts you to know your full name, national insurance number, and daughter's favourite icecream flavour. It doesn't mean that they are working for the mafia - it just means that they paid £500 or so for extra background on the story.

Or we could scrap ID cards, scrap 1984-for-kids, and get the Information Commissioner to explain the principles of data protection to Tony Blair and Ruth Kelly.

Why Cameron can't win

While not front-page news, the Taxpayer Alliance poll does tell us something about why the Tories can't win elections.

Tax cuts are important. Voters like tax cuts. Throughout history, centre-right parties have won elections by promising to cut taxes. This is the one centre-right talking point that someone like Blair can't steal - because the core purpose of the Labour Party is to "invest" money in public services.

The most important issues that voters answering a right-wing push poll come up with are crime, school violence (i.e. crime), the effects of the benefits system (i.e. crime), and taxes. Despite the sound and fury it generates, crime is not a partisan issue. All three parties accept the basic principles of common-sense crime policy: that crime is bad; that crime is caused by criminals, who are bad; that prison is a very expensive way of keeping bad people off the streets; and that policing can prevent crime, which is good. Talking about the other pet issues of social conservatives is a vote-loser (the median voter may agree with the Tories about Europe, but thinks that only wierdos talk about it all the time). So all a right-wing party has left is tax cuts.

The British Conservative Party can't credibly promise tax cuts. The poll confirms that nobody would believe them. And they can't change this perception by talking about how they would pay for tax cuts, because that would mean proposing to cut the good stuff the government does.

There is no earthly point in a centre-right party that does not propose tax cuts. Electing a metrosexual icon as your party leader isn't going to help - particularly if he is the former spin doctor of one of the country's great tax-increasing Chancellors.

I would call them cretins, but I suspect they know exactly what they are doing

An "independent" lobby group calling itself the Taxpayer Alliance has commissioned a poll with some results which the major media found bizzarely newsworthy.

The Sunday Times headline is typical: "10 million want to quit overtaxed UK." Darell Huff provides some sensible questions to ask a lying statistic, so let's have a look.

Who says so?
The Taxpayer Alliance. Do they sound unbiased to you? We all know how easy it is to skew a one-off poll by asking biased questions. Would an advocay organisation really waste money commissioning an honest opinion poll when they could get better press coverage with a push poll?

How do they know?
By asking people if they have ever considered emigrating, towards the end of a poll in which they rile them up against this country and its political institutions by asking a lot of questions about how awful politicians are. Even if the poll wasn't bad, I fully expect that a lot of people have had idle speculations about leaving the country - I know I have. 6% of the population have plans to leave the country, according to this poll. Excluding immigrants returning home, only about one third of 1% actually will in any given year. (ONS data here, see table 1.3 for outflow by citizenship)

Did someone change the subject?
Yes. 80% of the population think taxes are too high. Thank you Captain Obvious - nobody likes paying taxes, although they will happily hound you out of office if you don't give them the schools, hospitals, roads etc. that these taxes are paying for. And 6% decide to emigrate, then don't. But these facts don't have to be connected, and almost certainly aren't - most emigrants head for similarly overtaxed countries with better weather (and an awful lot of them are retired or semi-retired, so tax is less of an issue).

So the emigration figure is bogus. The other results of the poll aren't exactly newsworthy - people think that politicians are liars (wow!), that Tony Blair is a smarmy git (double wow!), and that the public services need to be more efficient (no - really?).

So why the hell does the Sunday Times consider this front-page news?

See what I mean?

I can't get my blood worked up about this, but in fact it goes to the heart of what is wrong with the British political system. Femme-de-Resistance has told me to produce more short, snarky posts, so regard this as the short, snarky version of my long post about the POWER inquiry.

The school dinners at my local school are lousy. In a sensible political system, this has a sensible solution
1) I get together a group of concerned parents.
2) We contact our ward councillor, who has plenty of time to deal with constituents.
3) Our ward councillor raises the issue with the council.
4) The council improves school food, and raises local tax to pay for it.
5) If they don't, you vote them out.

In fact, the fastest way to improve the food in your local school is
1) Be a major TV personality, because national politicians are too busy to bother with issues that aren't on TV.
2) Make a TV programme about how awful school food is.
3) Persuade the Secretary of State for Education, who is an extremely busy person with personal responsbility for the education of millions of children, to take a personal interest in school dinners.
4) In order to cover up the fact that decisions about menus are being made by a national political figure on the basis of a TV programme, the Secretary of State sets up a School Food Trust to make reccomendations.
5) The School Food Trust spends several months deliberating, while its unelected crony members get paid £20,000 a year for 1 day a week's work.
6) The School Food Trust produces a doorstop glossy report (with tens of thousands of pounds spent on graphic design) and spends even more public money shopping it to the media.
7) The Secretary of State makes an announcement that she is implementing the reccomendations of the doorstop report, with another accompanying media circus.
8) Schools are no longer allowed to have vending machines or tuckshops. This is considered preferable to improving the quality of food, becuase it is more eyecatching in the press.
9) Every headteacher in the country has to reorganise their school food provision, regardless of whether it is appropriate to their local circumstances or not.
10) The standard of main meals either does or does not improve, depending on factors beyond your control.
11) If the food in your local school is still not good enough, rinse and repeat.
12) Every 4-5 years, you get to vote for the man who appoints the Secretary of State. But you probably voted on grounds other than school food, because you can't even tell if the bad food in your local school is the fault of a woman in Whitehall anyway.

Self-government

This is absurd.

Basically, a bunch of unelected lackeys (incidentally, given that they are a government body, why is their preferred internet domain a .co.uk?) accountable only to London's Scottish colonial rulers have decided that the elected mayor of London has to spend a month on gardening league, to punish him for insulting a journalist.

Nobody voted for the Standards Board for England - they were appointed by the Lord Chancellor, Charlie Falconer.

Nobody voted for Charlie Falconer, he was appointed (and ennobled) by Tony Blair.

Nobody in London voted for Tony Blair because he represents a constituency in County Durham.

685,541 Londoners voted for Ken Livingstone as their mayor. We did so knowing that he was the kind of person who insults journalists. If we later decide that this was a mistake, we can vote him out.

I can just about see the case for a body to deal with corrupt local officials, although I am assured by the Councillors I know that the eminently non-partisan police, Crown Prosecution Service, and Courts are quite up to the job and that the Standards Board is unnecessary. The only body to punish rude local officials should be the electorate.

Why I am not blogging about Hamas

I don't really give a damn about the Palestinian elections. Israel is a country of 6.3 million people with no important natural resources or strategic significance. Palestine doesn't have accurate census data, but the best guess is that 2.5 million people live in the occupied territories. In the wider scheme of things, the Israel-Palestine conflict is about as important as the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, or the conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers.

Yes, the Israelis are occupying Arab land in violation of international law. Yes, the Palestinians blow up babies on busses. Yes, both sides abuse human rights. None of this is unusual in global terms. Stupid people, mainly American Christian fundamentalists and Arab Muslim fundamentalists, have taken sides in a way which makes achieving peace a lot harder. The rest of the world seems to have piled in as a way of proving how earnest they are in support for or opposition to the American foreign policy. If you look at who is running street-level campaings on foreign policy, you would think that the situation in Israel is the most important issue facing humanity.

Those who are paid to make foreign policy have to care what stupid people think about unimportant issues. I don't. I think we should butt out of Israeli and Palestinian business (subject to the normal provisions about selling arms to both sides being the act of ethical weasels but something the British Foreign Office will probably try anyway, even if you tell them not to) in the same way we butt out of other small unimportant countries' business.

On political judgement

So the Scum have found proof that Simon Hughes is less than completely straight. Count me unsurprised - it has been pretty well-known among active Liberal Democrats that he was bi since before I joined the Party in 1997. For the Scum, homosexuality is sufficient to condemn him - although fortunately this is unlikely to affect any election results, since this particular rag is trusted by the public even less than politicians.

All the other papers have, of course, jumped on the story because sex sells. Unfortunately, they need a non-homophobic excuse for printing scuttlebut about a politician's private life. The least lame attempt comes from large numbers of Lib-Dem hating lefties such as these Guardian newsblog commentators. They tell us that Simon ran a homophobic campaign against Peter Tatchell in the Bermondsey by-election. This is still pretty lame, because he didn't. The infamous "straight choice" leaflet did not describe Simon as a straight choice, it described the election as a straight choice between Tatchell and Simon - an implicit squeeze against the "Real Labour" candidate John O'Grady (who was responsible for most of the homophobia). On the other hand, it isn't that lame, because it's easy enough to falsely claim that Simon ran a homphobic campaign and rely on the fact that the public won't understand the facts.

For those who aren't prepared to lie, they are left with the standard lame trick used to nail politicians in sex scandals - the "it's not the sex, it's the lying about the sex" line. Unfortunately, Simon didn't lie either. He has never claimed to be straight, never gone campaigning with his wife and kids, never made sexuality an issue in his political career beyond being the unwitting beneficiary of a homophobic campaign run by other people. Fortunately for the muckrakers, he had however just denied being gay in an interview. While he isn't gay, he is bisexual.

This isn't actually a lie. Simon is a lawyer, and knows this. It isn't even particularly Clintonian - gay has a definite meaning, and Simon is not gay. But nevertheless I cringed when I heard that he denied being gay. What people want from their politicians is honesty, not legalistic truth. Simon's denial was (deliberately) misleading, and was therefore a political misjudgement for which he is now paying the price. Had he given the correct answer of "I'm not married, so it's my business who I sleep with." then the speculation that inevitably surrounds a single man in his 50's would have continued. But there wouldn't have been a story the respectable papers could print about the outing.

How will this affect Simon's leadership chances? In my view, a major lapse of judgement should be held against a candidate. We need a talented politician who knows when not to leave hostages to tabloid fortune. On the other hand, it isn't a resignation issue. Mark Oaten unfortunately had to go because he had become a national laughing stock. (Within the Party he was a laughing stock before the rent boy story broke, but that's a different matter). Simon Hughes is just a politician who was outed as gay. He is still perfectly capable of doing his job.

The real divide in the Liberal Democrats - not between left and right.

Press coverage of the leadership election is already focussing on the "split" in the Party between "social liberals"/the Beveridge group/paid shills for the public-sector unions and "economic liberals"/the Orange Book crowd/people who belong in Cameron's Tory party. The choice of candidates will fits the pattern nicely, with Simple Simon on the left, Mark the Muppet on the right, Ming the Merciless in the centre, and Chris "Who"ne as the dark horse that everyone wants to avoid. Plus we have four very different personalities, so when the media stop talking about the left/right split, they can talk about personalities in a last ditch attempt to avoid mentioning Liberalism.

In fact, the left-right division is insignificant, at least with regard to values and policies - it is a bit more significant viz-a-viz presentation and tactics. Young, Free and Liberal was written by authors from all political tendencies within the Party. The only section that was controversial within the authorial team was the one on foreign policy. There is a disagreement about how to reform public services, but when Chris Huhne produced a detailed compromise in 2002, both sides were happy to support it.

There is a more serious split in the Party, which causes genuinely bad blood and allegations that people should find another party. That is the split between those who think Liberalism is important and those who do not. Those of us who take our Liberalism seriously tend to think about it, write about it, discuss it, and ultimately produce policies based on it. Sometimes these policies are unpopular with the Daily Mail - we don't care. We believe that the purpose of a Liberal Party is to offer the electorate a Liberal alternative - something the other parties are unable to do, but which is and always will be sorely needed. If they want a government that is in the business of telling people what to do, they should vote for one of the illiberal parties.

There is another faction in the Liberal Democrats, which doesn't see Liberalism as important, except for the bit about empowering local government. This group sees the unique selling point of the Liberal Democrats as our distinctive style of local campaigning, based on talking to individual voters, finding out what they want, and promising them it. They choose their policies based on how they look when explained in half an A4 side of 14 point type on a FOCUS leaflet. Policies which sound bad on the doorstep get dropped, or at least kept well hidden. The Liberal Democrats seek to appeal to everyone, because everyone benefits if the dog-muck is removed promptly from the pavements.

Both Hughes and Oaten are from the focus-freak faction. Oaten is a particularly interesting case, because he understands the consequences of extending "community politics" (which has very little in common with the radical democratic proposals made in the old ALDC pamphlet The Theory and Practice of Community Politics) nationally and wants to do it anyway. Arguably, Kennedy leans towards this view as well. Simon Hughes is at least an instinctive Liberal, but he isn't someone who sees Liberalism as especially important, or spends much time thinking about it when he could be delivering leaflets instead.

Menzies Campbell, on the other hand, is a committed Liberal - a "gut Liberal" in the words of David Howarth in the Guardian. Chris Huhne is one of the parties foremost intellectuals, who has written various book-length Liberal screeds. There is no shortage of intellectuals and Liberals on either wing of the party: think Holmes and Webb on the left, or Cable and Laws on the right. But they are not standing: we are faced with a choice between Hughes, Oaten, Campbell and Huhne. That means that we can't vote for an intellectual and settle the left-right question with one vote, but then nobody inside the Party really believes in left and right anyway.

The logical extension of community politics to the national level is some form of Blairite populism. The heavily-spun press release replaces Focus and the focus group replaces door-to-door contact, but those are only necessary compromises to take into account the fact that Mark Oaten can't knock on every door in the country the way a hard-working councillor can knock on every door in their ward. Given that what the voters say they want is all-too-often based on that morning's Scum, it will all-too-often lead to illiberal policies. We have seen this already- the LDYS forums have chewed out local campaigners acting like (illiberal) local campaigners despite holding national office on several occasions, notably over housing and drinking. We need a leader who will discourage this tendency. With the current crop of candidates, that means a choice between Menzies Campbell and Chris Huhne.