Simon Says

Three cheers for Simon Hughes. Let us hope that he will now go to the root of the problem: the sale of council housing. That policy compelled the State to make gifts of significant capital assets to people who were thus enabled to enter the property market ahead of private tenants who had saved for their deposits. And, as part of Thatcher's invention of mass benefit dependency, it created the Housing Benefit racket, which is vastly more expensive than the maintenance of a stock of council housing.

Now, I am a good Chestertonian in this as in most, though not quite all, matters. I would dearly love every household to have a base of real property from which to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State. But within the practicalities of these things, there is also a very strong case that each locality should have a base of real property from which to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty centre.

Already, under the last lot, the powers that be apparently could not distinguish between the respectable working class and the characters from Shameless. So council and housing association tenants were to lose security of tenure so that Shameless characters could be moved in next door to them, or even in place of them. Those in that actual or potential position should contact Simon Hughes without delay.

In fact, there are many areas in which Hughes could and should carve out more than a niche for himself.

Secondly, then, light sentences and lax prison discipline are both expressions of the perfectly well-founded view that large numbers of those convicted, vastly in excess of the numbers that have always existed at any given time, are in fact innocent. We need to return to a free country's minimum requirements for conviction, above all by reversing the erosion of the right to silence and of trial by jury, and by repealing the monstrous provisions for anonymous evidence and for conviction by majority verdict. And we need to return to proper policing. Then we could and should return to proper sentencing, and to proper regimes in prison. But only then. Over to you, Simon Hughes.

Thirdly, the Lib Dems set great store by election, by transparency, and by decision-making at the lowest practicable level. So their new Deputy Leader, Simon Hughes, should put down legislative amendments that would require British Ministers to adopt the show-stopping Empty Chair Policy in the Council of Ministers until such time as it meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard. And the Lib Dems are like Labour in that they, and their predecessor parties, voted against the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies year on year between 1979 and 1997. Those Policies are wildly at variance with any sort of historic Liberal principle, and the CFP hits Lib Dem-voting areas particularly hard. So Hughes should begin a campaign, at the very least to reinstate those mysteriously vanished annual votes, and then to use those votes to demand the abolition of those Policies.

Fourthly, Hughes should also use every parliamentary and other available means to call for a ban on anything paying any of its employees more than ten times what it pays any of its other employees, with the whole public sector functioning as a single entity for this purpose, and with its median wage fixed at the median wage in the private sector, to which manual jobs would no longer be outsourced. The trick with the Conservatives is to make them think that it was their idea.

Fifthly, I much that vein, there is the matter of holding Iain Duncan Smith to the logical conclusion of his position, namely for a unified system of taxation, benefits, pensions, minimum wage legislation and student funding to ensure that no one's tax-free income ever falls below half national median earnings. (This blog has argued for as long as it has existed that there should be a single form of Social Security payment, called simply Social Security, and guaranteeing that minimum income universally.)

Sixthly, there is the need to renationalise the railways, uniquely without compensation in view of the manner of their privatisation. As the basis for a national network of public transport free at the point of use. Including the reversal of bus route and, where possible, rail line closures going back to the 1950s.

Seventhly, prescription charges, eye and dental charges, and hospital car parking charges must be abolished.

Eighthly, the television license fee should be made optional, with as many adults as wished to pay it at any given address free to do so, including those who did not own a television set but who greatly valued, for example, Radio Four. The Trustees would then be elected by and from among the license-payers. Candidates would have to be sufficiently independent to qualify in principle for the remuneration panels of their local authorities. Each license-payer would vote for one, with the top two elected. The electoral areas would be Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and each of the nine English regions. The Chairman would be appointed by the relevant Secretary of State, with the approval of the relevant Select Committee. And the term of office would be four years. You would not need to be a member of the Trust (i.e., a license-payer) to listen to or watch the BBC, just as you do not need to be a member of the National Trust to visit its properties, or a member of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution to be rescued by its boats. That model could certainly be applied to everything from the Press Complaints Commission to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, and arguably even to the Supreme Court, although in that case with only one candidate per region elected and with a vacancy arising only when a sitting member retired or died.

Ninthly, at the same time, we need to ban any person or other interest from owning or controlling more than one national daily newspaper. To ban any person or other interest from owning or controlling more than one national weekly newspaper. To ban any person or other interest from owning or controlling more than one television station. To re-regionalise ITV under a combination of municipal and mutual ownership. And to apply that same model (but with central government replacing local government, subject to very strict parliamentary scrutiny) to Channel Four.

And tenthly, with Norman Baker now a Minister, where is the Coroner's Inquest that has mysteriously never been held into the death of Dr David Kelly? Again, over to you, Simon Hughes.

Those would be a start, anyway.

Of course, all of this should be being done by the Leader of the Labour Party. But there isn't one. And look who is being talked up as the next one.