But to be fair to the services available, I had not yet tried the journey from my new home to my old work. My new home is only a two minute walk from the railway station and Legal & General in Hove is a pacy fifteen minutes walk. So the combined journey time, with the fifteen minutes on the train itself, is about half an hour. This compares very favourably with the rush hour journey time by car (because, of course, of the lack of public investment in viable roads from Shoreham past Chichester).

So, in future, if it weren’t for the frankly bizarre prohibitive cost, I would be more than keen on using this alternative. Actually, I’ll have to again tomorrow as my car remains at the garage.

On the cost, I still need to have it explained to me. How can it possibly cost more to transport many passengers than to transport one? And if you can share your car not only is the cost halved instantly, but it also becomes even more competitive. The do-gooder socialist environmentalists wish to correct this imbalance by charging car drivers more for the privilege of moving about their own country by private means (where do-gooder socialist environmentalists could, without too much squinting, be replaced with the single word “facists”).

As a short exercise, here is a comparison of the costs:

1. Private car: 13 pence per mile (if through town) or 10 pence per mile (if using the A27 trunk road which I do). This is a total of £1.20 for the 9.2 mile journey.
2. Train: £3.10 in each direction (ignoring spurious discounts if you choose to use the train every day)

Even if we add the 48 pence per day of road tax (which presumably exceeds expenditure on roads these days) the car remains a cheaper option. And if we removed the imbalance caused by fuel duty the car would be nearly a half cheaper again.

But why? How do economies of scale not come into play here? The train was full and the train in front of it was full too (I had to watch it pass as it does not stop here in Lancing) so the passengers on the train were not subsidising empty seats. The train uses electricity which everyone knows is created relatively efficiently (much more efficiently than burning a small amount of petroleum under the bonnet of several hundred vehicles) and, to cap it all, the train companies are largely subsidised by Her Majesty’s wealth-suppressor (sorry, the tax man).

So, someone, tell me why!

Well today, Ken exploits and supports poor socialists. Buying fuel from a democracy ought to be a good thing, but all economists agree that a stable developing economy needs a strong principled stance on the absolute that is, and should be, property ownership.

Don’t.

The G-Wiz crash test at only 30mph is horrendous: see it here.

If you’re worried about the environment, worry about yourself first.

But then he went on to explain the clear-blue water between the Conservatives and Labour. Something that I believe my party should have done long ago:

… the targets and directives, the reorganisations, schemes and initiatives. Direct government intervention has been brought – with the best of intentions, though often with notable lack of success – to bear on schools and hospitals, police officers and neighbourhoods, local authorities and universities. The State has been seen as the source of enlightened social action, just as it was once seen as the source of enlightened economic action.

The explanation leaves plenty of wiggle-room but I summarise it thus:

• Brown would like to use the profits of taxation (gained from a free-market, not nationalised industries) to attempt to provide those remaining public services that consensus appears to have decided should be provided by the State.
• Cameron (and so Osborn only by implication bizarrely) would like to use the profits of taxation to provide a framework within which charities and industry can provide public services.

I understand why the first couple of commenters (Andy Wigmore and Peter Gooderham at the time of writing) find this difficult to follow, but the fact that they’re not willing to try shows the reason style-over-substance rules supreme in modern England.

But back to the point, what is the fundamental difference between the Cameron and Brown positions as I have illustrated them? It seems to me that the difference is that the State, while involved, does not do the providing directly — the provision is outsourced.

If that is the case, then what has changed? Conservatives have always been about privatisation. If we’re to help provide services in a new way, isn’t this just gloss? Have we really decided that the party should no longer even debate the need for state-provided refuse collection? Could the remaining public services not be better provided by a private company entirely free from state intervention?

It occurred to me today, coincidentally, how much state-licensing and intervention in public transport is the cause of its lack of take-up. Environmentalists have been decrying us evil car drivers since they decided that the being green allowed their socialism to survive. But I wonder if they have considered the counter-argument?

If a bus company could be started by you or I tomorrow, by buying a bus, painting a number on the front and perhaps dropping some leaflets through local doors, how many more entrpreneurs would try? How many more bus-routes would there be servicing those routes that people actually want?

A local bus company started a trial service recently but only provided the service (from a suburb to a railway station) in the morning. The trial found that people did not use the service (because they couldn’t get home) so the route was abandoned. But if you or I had our own bus company, would we not put more effort in? Providing a service at each end of the likely user’s day?

Transport is one of those key areas which is ignored as a purely old-fashioned econocentric debate. Let’s have that debate!

Quentin Langley, in his comment, puts it best so I will leave the final thought to him:

I believe Milton Friedman said — and I paraphrase — that he won all the economic arguments and lost all the political arguments. That is an important addition to the paradigm shifts that Oliver Letwin is discussing. It is true that free-market ideas have triumphed in the economic debate: but they remain, largely, unimplemented. The size of the state over the past 30 years or so has varied from around 38% to around 43% and is currently at the top end of that range. I would hope the Conservatives can develop an agenda to bring that down, at least to the bottom end of that range, and preferably well below. Otherwise, the intellectual triumph has been for nought.

Quentin Langley, Woking, UK

- I believe in an English Parliament. The UK is currently made up of four countries, three of whom have devolution. This means that MPs elected by Scottish or Welsh constituents are in positions of power in areas that affect England only and it also means that Scottish MPs can vote on matters that affect England only. English Votes on English Matters, the Conservative Party policy, just won’t work and there’ll shortly be a Critique available to buy from the CEP’s website explaining in great detail, why.

- I believe in privatisation. Competition means lower prices for customers and more efficient operation of the services they provide.

- I believe that immigration has eroded the cultural uniformity of the UK — this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, this is just an observation. I believe that a moratorium on immigration for a short period to allow the immigration that has been recently to “bed-in”. I know just one conscientious, hard-working patriot who wishes to remain in this country — most of us can see that a better life can be had in Japan, the US, Canada, Australia or Jamaica. Allowing emmigration in reasonably large numbers is reducing the quality of Britain’s brain-pool and is, sadly, the ultimate expression of democratic failure.

- Following on from the last point, the cost of living in England is too high. I believe this can be resolved with some radical amendments to the provision of public services. Council houses, for example, should be there, not to provide cheap rent to those who are underpaid by their private-sector employers — they should be there as a safety net for those who, through no fault of their own, lose their homes. Why, for example, are asylum seekers and those who get themselves pregnant (when unable to support a family) given a home while those who lose their home to a fire are made to live in a dirty, noisy Bed and Breakfast? Some friends of friends of mine have recently had to start bringing up a child in a B&B following a house fire — where’s the sense in that? The market in private rentals is currently skewed by the cheap (read: taxpayer subsidised) rentals paid for by Council Tax payers.

- Following on from the last point, the cost of food is too high due to the Common Agricultural Policy. We live next to a region of Earth capable of feeding us with ease. The US creates more than its fair share of food prduce, but aside from them, we should be at the fore-front. New Zealand has shown us how it should be done.

- I believe that there is such a thing as global warming, but I don’t believe that humans are as much to blame as state-control socialists would like us to believe. Tell a lie often enough and it is likely to stick. At the risk of sounding like an ‘Intelligent Design’ advocate in a different argument, there is too little understood about the planet’s climate to extrapolate meaningful information from the heating of the climate. The reason, for example, for ice ages is poorly understood. That we are currently in an uncharacterically cool period in Earth’s history and that we are due for a radical heating should make us pause to think.

- Further, on the environment, there are some really important things we should be worrying about more. Recycling of metal and plastic should be our number one concern — there’s only so much of either and if we start to run out, particularly of oil, we’re in for some major upheaval. Global warming is, if avoidable, very expensive to avoid — surely we’re better off trying to provide sanitation, security and food and water to the Third World than trying to ensure that a desert doesn’t expand a few hundred miles? If the cost of keeping the desert small is so exceedingly high that we could have fed the Third World, is it irresponsible to waste the money?

- Among us pramatists, the future of the UK is one of an Islamic country (ONS). If we had a constitution, the country may still be unrecognisable within a short period. If the constituents of George Galloway re-elect him at the next election, we must question (a) their wisdom and, (b) their belief in the rule of law. I am strongly in favour of free speech but that relies on the majority of people sharing my belief in freedom. If the comments Galloway made about murdering Tony Blair go electorally unpunished, what hope of that? The solution is a limit on further immigration until the local populace has managed to distance itself from the actions of those Islamists in the Middle East and east to Pakistan who believe that a woman is there to make more men (hat-tip to CJ Cregg) and any attempts to rise above their station should result in a beating.

- I believe in the right to free protest and freedom from protestor harrasment. The animal rights protestors have a valid point, but their methods are ruining people’s lives and livelihoods. We must protect people from violent protest…

- At the same time, peaceful protest must be allowed. Walter Wolfgang, Brian Haw and Charlotte Denis are the thin edge of a very dangerous wedge.

- I can see the benefits of a database that lists all the country’s people, but that should not be a new database, it should be a concatenating checking mechanism attached to the government’s existing databases. The government, currently, has no meaningful way of linking that chap who paid for road tax, with the same man who is claiming he cannot provide CSA payments to his ex-wife and children; the government is incapable, currently, of linking that person who requested a disabled parking permit with that person who should be receiving disability-related tax-relief but who isn’t currently claiming it. Yes, there is a need. But an ID card database is not the answer — this is a further expression of a government who, through their own incompetence, shifts the burden of effort away from the state and toward the individual in an ironic and exact mirror of its simultaneous power-grab as it takes more and more free choices away from people (pension compulsion as a key example).

- I believe that the NHS has a place to play in a humane country — nobody should be made to pay for a bandage if they honestly cannot afford it. This, of course, should be provided by charity, but in the 1950s the whole mechanism for providing this was dismantled. Now that we have the NHS we must work to improve it. A key to this is to encourage people to invest in private health provision. There needs to some sort of incentive to going private.

- Anyone who declines a job they are physically capable of performing while claiming unemployment benefit should not lose a proportion, as is currently the case, they should, after a reasonable time, lose all their benefits. Unemployment benefit should be there to provide for those who cannot find a job, not as an alternative lifestyle choice. Some people, I have spoken to, say “I’ve paid tax for XX years, they owe me some time off.” I do not owe you that.

- Children born outside of a permanent relationship (one where both parents are living together at the time of conception) should be supported by the payment of vouchers — having a child must not be an alternative way of getting independence from your parents.

- Tax should be cut. And cut hard. Paying, as we do currently, approximately 50% of our wages in tax is not the way to make a successful country.

- Infrastructure must be expanded urgently. If I were a US business looking to start a European branch, I would seriously consider locating in Germany or the Netherlands just because the infrastructure there is up to scrutiny. If you want to have a meeting with people around the country, you don’t want to have to budget for excruciating fuel costs (which are, sadly, in place across the EU), as well as congestion, Congestion charging, water restrictions and crowded trains. A business that wishes to start in Brighton (as I live nearby) has to contend with a crowded A23 (road) to London, a railway network which is unable to provide seats to even two stations-worth of passengers and which costs a small fortune; it has to contend with sky-high land and property costs, sky-high costs, basically. It also has to contend with an increasingly uneducated populace…

- Education is not being provided to our young people. Universities, apparently, are now so expensive that graduates must pay for them all the while Chemistry, Engineering and Physics departments close and tax does not reduce. Children are being stabbed in schools. There are very few cases, so far, but that ubiquity of knives is bizarre and must be stopped. Educate children.

- Finally, for now, state-funding of political parties must never be allowed. What is wrong, for example, with saying to the parties that there is an absolute maximum that any single person/organisation can donate to a party — a level playing field without my taxes going to fund the SNP and Labour Party (let alone Respect and BNP, which are in their own class of vile)?

Before departing see where they are on Google Earth.