Social Security spending is going to overtake the country’s Income Tax receipts this year. Worse still, soon servicing Brown’s debt is going to cost us more than we spend on education.

It’s this ignorance of the ‘opportunity cost’ of money taken from the private sector and individuals by the Government that continues to baffle and amaze me. I’ve said before myself, the Government now spends more in a year than the entire wage earners of Britain earn combined. If you think about it, that sort of figure – over 700 billion – is the equivilant of 28 million private sector jobs. That’s 700,000,000,000 divided into the average wage of £25k. 28 million jobs. More new jobs than there’s people in the country to do them.

Yet it actually buys us a mere 5 million public sector jobs.  And the biggest reason given for protecting Government spending? It’ll cost jobs. Ha. Good one. What… wait? You’re serious? This is really happening?

If this is winning, I’d hate to know what losing feels like.

The resignation of Cllr Diane Park from the Lib Dem Party in Halifax has left a vacancy for a ‘prospective parliamentary candidate’ or, ‘wannabe MP.’ For one brief moment I considered going for it… then the sledgehammer of reality smashed me back down to earth.

Amongst the many reasons why I would make a terrible PPC my personal favourite is this blog. Oh, it’ll take a day or so, but any campaign run by me could be derailed very quickly by finding a few choice quotes. Charlotte Gore wants to axe the welfare state! Charlotte Gore wants to cut spending! Charlotte Gore is pro Business and anti Union! Charlotte Gore wants to legalise drugs! Charlotte Gore thinks the BNP should be allowed on television! That’s just the start of it. There’s enough in this blog to kill any political career one hundred times over.

Then there’s standing for a party currently in 3rd place in a Tory target seat, in a town that’s pretty much in love with the BNP and has, according to Acorn data, about 500 people that would be classed as typical lib dem voters. Hmm. Then there’s the challenge of getting 20,000 people to vote for you in a year’s time. I did some rough maths and worked out I’d need to be pursuading something like 65 a day. I’d need to raise buckets of money and dazzle and beguile lots of people into delivering leaflets for me. I’d need to keep getting in the local paper, too.

Finally, it has to be said, my campaigning skills are terrible and my ability to connect with ‘normal people’ is non-existent. In another world, weirdos like me would get plonked into a safe seat somewhere and told to keep my gob shut for the duration. That’s how democracy works.

So stand? I think not. It’s not for me, this life of trying to appeal to ‘people’. If I did, I’d write a letter and deliver it to every single house in the consituency. The letter would go like this:

Dear Halifax,

I’m looking for someone. It might be you. It might be someone you know. This is someone who’s sick of politicians and sick of mainstream politics. That’s most of us these days, and who could blame us?

The person I’m looking for gets angry that the Government takes £10 billion pounds – more than twice as much as the once mighty HBOS ever earnt before tax – from cigarette duties alone. They get furious that £30 worth of petrol includes £20 of tax… and for what? This person feels ill when they discover the Government is now spending more than the entire British population takes home in wages, and they ask: For what? Where is the money going?

This person looks around and sees a country brought to its knees, surviving only on loans from the rest of the world. This person knows that Halifax’s biggest employer is the council, and it makes this person angry to think that a town that was at the very heart of the industrial revolution could be sunk so low as to survive only on scraps from the Government table. This person thinks we should be better than this.

But that’s not all. The person I’m looking for looks around and sees a country where trainspotters – of all people – are arrested under anti-terrorism laws and where it has become illegal to take photographs of the police. They see a Government determined to censor the internet, to monitor their emails and internet use. They see more and more rules and laws telling people how they should live and behave: Don’t eat. Don’t smoke. Don’t drink. Don’t drive. Don’t say this. Don’t say that. Don’t vote for them. This person thinks Governments are supposed to be servants of the people, not the other way around.

If you see this person, will you pass on a message? I’d be very grateful. The message is this: “You are missed. Please come back.”

Yours Sincerely,

Charlotte Gore

Which, in a nutshell, is exactly why I’ll never be a PPC. You can’t put out something like that without looking like a nutter. Better to publish a smiley picture of yourself, with your name in big bold letters and the slogan, “ONLY THE LIB DEMS CAN WIN HERE” with “CHARLOTTE GORE: WORKING HARD FOR HALIFAX” and leaving it at that. Yes, that’s how you win elections.

Consider me preemptively quit.

Since the 60s at least, there’s been a strand of liberalism that’s been closely linked with collectivism – our curse, if you like, and the source of the movement’s irrelevance in modern politics.

Liberalism as liberty without property rights blurs the line with communitarian and collectivist thought very easily. The idea of a ‘liberal left’ in this context is fairly intuitive.

The idea that people – say, for example, a few thousand hippies – should have the right to have a peace and love festival wherever the hell they like? That’s liberty without property rights. So the concept of ‘a liberal’ became someone that believed in this sort of ideal.

Let’s now consider the opposite – property rights without liberty. Your stuff is yours, but you’re not free to decide what to do with it. So you own your field, but even if you want to rent it out to a bunch of hippies for a peace and love festival, you’re not allowed. But, see, this is a totally nonsensical position – if you’re not actually free to decide what to do with your money or your property then you don’t, in fact, have property rights – nor do you really have liberty.

So herein lies the crux of my own political obsession: personal liberty and economic liberty – libery and property rights, together – are inseperable and, seemingly counter-intuitively deliver actual equality under the law. Anything else – anything else – is your ‘liberty’ at the expense of someone elses.

Somewhere between the two – limited liberty and limited property rights – we find the modern political consensus, quibbling over really rather insignificant issues. And, depressingly, it’s not going to change under the Tories. Tory libertarians are as screwed up as I am.

When the Tories are in, the sort of energy we’re seeing in opposition to Labour will dissipate (goodbye Tories, goodbye Anyone But Labour types), yet the fundamental issues that motivate people like me to write about the world we’ve made for ourselves won’t be changing.

To win liberty and property rights, to create a genuinely liberal Britain? It’s going to take not just opposition to an odiously incompetent Government but an actual positive demand for change in that direction. You know, that sort of epic, ‘one person in 100 million once every 4 generations can pull it off’ sort of challenge. You know… impossible, in other words.

I think it’s time for classical liberals and libertarians to begin planning for the post-Labour era, to avoid the inevitable stagnation and inertia that will come from a change of Government. The temptation will be to relax, to breathe a sigh of relief at the end of Labour – I think, actually, that’s when it’s going to get really hard. It’s one thing to be against an unpopular Government – quite another going against a popular one.

I’m not normally all that interested in Formula 1 car racing, but the announcement yesterday that 8 of the top teams intend to go off and start their own racing championship has attracted my interest.

The issue? A budget cap. In the interest of trying to limit a financial ‘arms race’ F1 wants to set a budget cap of £40 million. That’s certainly an interesting competition in its own right – the test will become how far you can stretch that £40 million. The problem is that 8 of the teams aren’t interested in these new rules. They’re willing to take their chances on an uncapped budget, even if that means their opponents could theoretically spend double.

See, F1, if it’s nothing else, is supposed to be the biggest, fastest and most advanced racing sport in the world. That’s why the budget cap is such a problem: A budget cap immediately opens up the prospect that there could be a better championship somewhere else, one where the only limit is imagination, ingenuity and skill.

The new league will have unlimited budgets and teams like Ferrari, McClaren, Brawn GP. They’ll be able to set their own rules about what their new cars are to be like. They get to keep their drivers, and so Big Name teams and Big Name drivers together with Faster, Better Cars means this new league will end up being the Premiership of Motor Racing, while F1 will suffer the same fate as the old First Division. That 40 million budget cap is going to look excessive once the haemorrhage of sponsorship and television rights begins.

As I write there’s a goon over at BSkyB looking in their Vault Of Infinite Money planning to secure the rights to this new championship.

F1 are confident they can back-fill the teams that are leaving, especially with the budget cap. We may well see our first our Skoda Formula 1 car. Can’t wait.  It seems that barring a miracle this is the end of F1 as the pinnacle of motor sports, and for what? Socialist Versus Capitalist racing? I know which one I’d put my money into.

UPDATE: Caron Lindsay, the Lib Dem’s resident F1 expert, has this much more detailed and informed analysis of what’s going on

I’m just so incredibly desperate to break the writer’s block I’m going to keep a jokey promise I made to Debi Linton a week ago. The promise was to write about mug bonding. You know, the phenomenon where a mug – which is at the end of the day is nothing more than an inanimate receptacle  – ends up becoming something precious and personal. Why do we bond with mugs in this way? Why is there such an appalling taboo against using other people’s mugs? I mean, if it’s clean it’s clean… is there some Darwinian advantage to establishing a bond of trust with our beloved day to day crockery?

So I present to you my 3 favourite mugs and 2 mugs I just refuse to drink out of. I really am that stuck for things to write about. Please, please, please don’t waste your time reading this.

Update: I’m at work so I’m going to steal a few minutes to add this:

You all know this is heading towards me selling mugs don’t you?