After an excellent lunch on Sunday 22nd May 1977 a top secret meeting took place at Chequers. Present were the Prime Minister and First Lord of the Admiralty James Callaghan, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Dennis Healey and the Industry Secretary Eric Varley. There was only one item on the agenda: the British Leyland Affair. Shock and horror! Fleet Street were reporting that the firm used slush funds, bribes and back-handers to obtain export orders. People think they have facts but it is only crisis chatter.

A classic government cover-up ensued...replete with lies in the House of Commons, denunciations of the press and a conveniently discovered forged letter amidst the avalanche of true documents. An everyday story of government folks...except for two little footnotes. One other person was invited to the meeting. Not the Defence Secretary or the Attorney General but the Secretary of State for Energy Tony Benn. Why? And all of a sudden out of the blue the Daily Mail resurrects the story today in a double-page spread. Why? It was probably just a coincidence that on the same day The Guardian front-paged a new attack on George Galloway.

The UN Security Council has fifteen members. This year’s five subservient members up for their second term are Argentina, Denmark, Greece, Japan and Tanzania. The new kids with their heads on the block are Congo, Ghana, Peru, Quatar and Slovakia. These are elected by the General Assembly for two-year terms. The five permanent members are the five biggest gun-runners in the world: Britain, China, France, Russia and the USA.

Last Friday Kirkpatrick Sale wrote to me wondering how actions to make local government local could come out of the September conference. In passing he also asked what a forum on shops was about. I addressed Kirk’s question today in a response to a memo from John Papworth. Here is what I said about shops.

The conference needs to talk about fair trading, just pricing and food miles. The food and groceries provision and infrastructure needed by our villages, towns and cities 25 years hence is the real issue. If we can get some agreement on that, we can talk intelligently about the transition to this new world after the demise of Big Oil. Supermarkets and their role over the next ten years might then be sensibly discussed in this broader context. That’s quite a lot of meaning to put into a four-letter word like shop. Here are some thoughts on food futures.

Parachuting in organic food from Germany to line the pockets of the pension funds investing in Tesco and Sainsbury makes some sense in the short term but could be counterproductive in the long-term for countries adopting the type of town & country strategy that I favour. This twin strategy works like this.

The First World looks rather like the Third World with three distinct food sectors: organic, chemical and parachute. Rationing organic produce by price is the wrong answer. Ralph Borsodi was closer in the 1930s with his insistence on production for use. Locally and organically grown produce should be eaten by people living in the surrounding countryside. And why not throw in some social engineering incentives to reverse the urban-rural balance and encourage a flight back to the country. I take the French view about agricultural subsidies. The principle is fine. The problem is with the structures doling out and raking in the dosh. Who? Whom?

The Distributists were on the right track a hundred years ago with their agenda for land and money. The gift of five acres and a cow to every man on his eighteenth birthday would also do wonders for smallholding in England and Wales. There are plenty of available five-acre plots. They are just in all the wrong hands. Putting smallholders back on our National Trust and Ministry of War land would be a good start in England.

This rural approach would have the effect of challenging the towns and cities to come up with their own plans. Ken Livingstone’s answer for London would be interesting. They need to replace a supermarket distributed diet of chemical and parachute food with Fidel Castro's Havana Solution. People everywhere should be talking about how to eat well in their particular local corner of an increasingly crowded world.

From this discussion good ideas would emerge. Let’s slap custom duties on food moving across a parish boundary...on a sliding scale based on the distance the food has travelled. Parish league tables for food miles? Toll gates were not very popular last time around. They served the wrong people. Let them work for producers instead of merchants...for locality not outside interests. My school had its own farm. Why not every school?

Google has broken through The Great Firewall of China...but at a price. We bloggers must follow Samuel Pepys example and write in code. No mention of the Balai Mama or the Dalun Bong. And we must never suggest that paramilitary police shot protesters in the village of Bongzhou last month or massacred thousands of young citizens in Tinderbox Square in 1989. We must also be careful what we say about the next Chinese Civil War. There is no truth in the rumour that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council are furiously arming both sides. After all the breakaway Chinese province of Paiwan doesn’t really exist does it?