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I nodded off quite early last night so it seems all the hoopla was only just beginning. I was evidently not so unconscious as I thought, for I had had a nightmare about everyone rushing outside to see this Davis chap ride past on his high, ever so high, horse (a strange beast, for it had white bits where you would normally expect black and black bits where you would normally expect white) whilst waving their 28th day release papers and union flag bunting, and hailing him as potentially the greatest liberal Home Secretary the country's never had.

And then, half through my snoozing state, I sort of heard a bloke called McKenzie muttering something about Rupert Murdoch paying for him to stand against the arch-liberal Ricky Dickie Davey Davis in a by-election. Mr "28 days is enough" Davis might well be wondering what he's let himself in for - perhaps a real Conservative candidate who supports that party's membership's opinion that "14 days or fewer" was plenty when he himself voted against the Magna Carta a couple of years back.

And looking around, I see more praise heaped on. I see the Libertarian Alliance backing him unconditionally . I see the Libertarian Party inviting him to join them . I hear neo-con Conservatives saying they never, ever, ever, no really never for a second, supported 42 days, ever. That 42 was just a placeholder they had used to try to work out what question the government were trying to answer at the time.

Of course, the Libertarian Party is also playing a bit of politics here (and I think they should - to get some publicity if nothing else). They could of course do with a high profile "liberal" like Davis like a hole in the head right now. The Libertarian Alliance makes it clear they take a very different position on almost everything else Dicky D has ever said on crime and punishment. You can't adopt someone like that who would undoubtedly be seen as a flag-carrier with his wildly illiberal views on all sorts of personal and social liberal issues where the state should, to any half-decent liberal or libertarian, just butt out.

Furthermore, Davis's resignation may be an extraordinary event, but frankly it is a stunt. There's nothing him being re-elected in his own constituency can do to give him a different mandate on this particular issue. Indeed it only has downsides from what I can see. He will not be steering the Tory revolt against the bill in the House of Lords, and he could end up not very convincingly re-elected (either because there is no contest and nobody bothers to vote or, if there is a contest, someone makes gains against him).

If I were a party strategist, personally, I would stand the best candidate one can find against him. The most liberal or libertarian we can find, and make this an issue of what sort of freedom do you want - his, the freedom of 28 days is okay even if that too breaches all the ancient rights he is now trying to defend and no other personal freedoms on issues like drugs and sexuality, or real freedom where the government gets out of as many aspects of our lives as possible.

The man is a politician for God's sake. He's been in that place for two decades now. Politicians, especially entrenched ones like Davis, are the problem, not part of the solution, If he is the nation's new champion of liberty, the day I look for another homeland has just drawn closer.

Okay, so it's not the snappiest of campaign slogans, and it will probably attract the interest of oh, maybe about four people on the entire planet, but Oxford City Council needs some direction, and I happen to be available, as they say, to put in my tuppence worth. The council was plunged yesterday into a quandary over its political complexion when Labour unsurprisingly held onto a byelection seat in Hinksey Park ward making them formally the largest party group on the council.

First, a declaration of interest - I am of course a Liberal Demcorat member and have friends in the council group and on the executive board. And whilst I have every confidence in them to make the best job of some difficult portfolios I simply don't believe that the arrangement that has obtained at the Town Hall since the May elections is the best thing either for the Liberal Democrats or for the city as a whole.

Oxford City Council is seen as a basket case and has been for some time. I heard it again this week from a county council officer. And there are even more intense financial pressures ahead regardless of political control such as funding "decent" homes, decent leisure services, bringing down the cost to the city of homelessness as well as massively improving what ought to be core functions such as council tax collection rates are overdue and extremely urgent.

This isn't the time or the place to go into apportioning blame. Like the county council before it, the city council has had nobody in overall control politically for six years now and in that period it has seen effectively four chief executives, three housing chief officers and three planning chief officers. At the beginning of this period of political uncertainty came the challenges of Labour's local government "modernisation agenda" which meant that not only were the old familiar days of majority government gone, but that whoever did govern had to do it on new and uncertain terms.

The new emphasis the government wanted to see on "partnership working" in local governance is a particularly difficult one, I suspect, to realise here in Oxford where the civil authority is really a minnow compared with the influence in the city and the world of its very raison d'etre, the university - the City Council is never going to be quite in charge with that elephant in the bed! But be honest, who has even heard of the Oxford Strategic Partnership* let alone found any way of engaging with this no doubt august and sincere body? Whilst we have a resident population not much greater than, say the Isle of Wight, our history as the foremost place of learning, invention and discovery on the planet (well - I love the place, I wouldn't want you to think I was doing Oxford down in any way just because I have a bee on about the political situation in the city!) puts immense pressures on us. Thinking again about the Isle of Wight it's probably the equivalent of having Cowes Week every day of the year (and still having a monarch and court in residence too come to think if it!).

The only thing that is clear is that the electorate of Oxford are not convinced by any of the parties' pitches enough to trust them to take on these challenges alone. It is no secret I don't think that had I been elected in May I would not have favoured the Liberal Democrat group trying to go it alone in a minority single party administration. In the first instance I would have been wary of a Labour group seemingly wanting to step back from their part in the responsibility for the city's current plight. In a situation where any time between now and the next set of elections a single other party could decide they've had enough and unilaterally make life very difficult for the Lib Dems I would be wanting to step back and force Labour to accept some of that responsibility.

When I lost in 2002 and began to get involved in single issue type voluntary activities where basically everyone was there with a common purpose, such as Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts, I at one stage thought of setting up a new and different political "party" - codenamed the Co-operative Commonwealth of Oxfordshire(!) - that people of all parties and none could sign up to that would effectively bind them to working for the interests of Oxford and Oxfordshire above any consideration of existing party affiliation. This is what needs to happen now. And the council (mostly through the councillors) needs to promote this model of consensus - putting Oxford first - and finding ways of tapping into the enormous potential and goodwill of the residents of Oxford to assist them.

As a Liberal Democrat I believe we have always had a high regard for localism and devolution, that decisions should be taken as closely to the people that are affected by those decisions as possible, and involving them as much as possible, and that as much sovereignty as possible belongs with individuals and families whose lives should be facilitated rather than circumscribed by any collective government necessary. And our second mantra is that where representative government structures are necessary, they should as fairly and proportionally as possible represent the opinions of the citizens expressed at the ballot box.

Whilst we're not going to get the latter any time soon, because they target hard and locally we do have two minority political parties that help keep other shades of opinion at the table and prevent a one or two party state (and of course leave us more likely to have no overall control), the former, more and deeper devolution, has more recently become the mantra of Labour's Department of Communities and Local Government. So with the Greens plainly pleased with their fiefdom of the St Clement's Soviet, the IWCA frequently focussing on local issues so much it seems that they eschew "whole Oxford" type council activities as irrelevant to their electorates' priorities, and now Labour being fed the double devolution line from the very top in spite of their more local (and probably more ideologically honest) reservations, there is a perfect opportunity for both devolution and consensus.

All parties at the Town Hall need to be sure that they have elected leaderships committed to working together, the inevitable compromise, and engaging in debate without party prejudices. Put as much out to Area Committees as possible. Let areas select the bulk of the executive and hold them accountable for taking collective responsibility - it seems a fair way of creating a multi-party executive that has to function together for the good of their constituent areas. With each area having an executive member, even those things that are normally reserved to the executive could be devolved by allowing the area executive member to make decisions on the spot based on the deliberations of the area committee and public participation (I would make the areas parishes too in the longer run so they can have tax varying powers).

And get rid of bits that the city council does not need to do or is not best suited to doing. Personally, I'd see the two biggest of these as leisure centres and housing ownership and management. Both are services to a small minority of Oxford residents. Those Oxford residents that do use them, either as swimmers or tenants, are hopelessly outvoted at the ballot box. Yet they pay enough to be able to demand a first class service. A Community Land Trust/Community Gateway approach to housing could see massive investment in public sector housing and at the same time make it more democratic by giving the real control to the neighbourhoods and communities of residents that make up the estates. An Open Capital Leisure Partnership could deliver first class facilities again with more control ceded to the users themselves. The best advert for good leisure centres is when the users/owners encourage their friends to join and participate.

Just these two would remove two of the biggest financial headaches from the council which is clearly struggling with far more mundane problems like collecting taxes, getting planning decisions processed and paying benefits on time. There are others - an enlarged and more democratic, membership based OX1 or similar could take over the running of the council's city centre property assets in another Open Capital Partnership to help ensure diversity and quality in the city centre, for example.

There are many ways out of this situation. The councillors have a duty to take the one that will be best for Oxford's residents and not for political advancement. To pretend that a council performing as badly as Oxford City is ready for any more responsibility before they sort out even how to operate together in a situation like they have at present is pure fantasy. What needs to emerge is a slimmed down council that brokers deals between devolved areas and partners delivering services. Who's going to take up this particular gauntlet?

* It might help give the impression that the Oxford Strategic Partnership actually did anything if the web page of their steering committee did not include a county council "deputy leader" who has not been deputy leader for 16 months, a city council "leader" who stepped down from the council in May and as chair a police commander that was promoted out of St Aldate's over a year ago now!

Technorati Tags: community land trusts, lib dems, localism, oxford

Whisky, and other spirits, specially distilled to take their alcohol (the chemical that provides the "high" - well, "low" actually in both cases!) content up from the usual 3-5% of beer to 40% or more, are dangerous.

Non sequitur? Indeed - we all know that you don't drink whisky by the pint by and large. But people still use spirits to get blotto as fast as they can on as little liquid as they can and for those people, yes, it is dangerous. Yet such a FUD mantra (fear, uncertainty and denial) is routinely trotted out by the twenty-first century's New Temperance League in their relentless attacks on other drugs, such as here at the First Post:

Cannabis growing hits a new high (was the pun intended I wonder?)

The plant most popular with illicit farmers is actually skunk, a hybrid cannabis plant specially bred to be more potent: whereas standard cannabis contains about one to five per cent of THC (tetrahydro- cannabinol - the chemical that provides the "high"), skunk can contain as much as 30 per cent THC, making it dangerous.

And yes, of course, like whisky when drunk by the pint it could be dangerous. Now of course, with the benefit of regulation, we know exactly what the alcohol content is of every alcoholic drink that is sold (except that scrumpy stuff that is still brewing when it hits your stomach!). But cannabis users do tend to know how to dose themselves - and you don't, indeed physically can't in most cases, sit there and smoke yourself comatose like people do with booze. Unlike with alcohol, there usually comes a point at which your body actually cannot take any more well before you're actually semi-conscious - you're "toked out" in the lingo - and you cannot for love nor money force yourself past that point, often even having to stub out a joint halfway through, so it seems much more self regulating than strong alcohol is where you can down a bottle of the stuff and pass out a few minutes later.

But all this FUD reminds me of the Untouchables and prohibition in the US. Of course in an underground market people produced the strongest most rancid hooch they could, because shipping bulk tankers of lite beer around the country was just not on. Prohibition didn't work then, so why do we think it should work now? And just like back then, there are other very real dangers - in cultivating the stronger stuff, in making it quickly and covertly, they use hydroponics with all sorts of chemicals that stick around after the plants are harvested. So not only are you consuming artificially strong stuff, but chemically tainted stuff as well. Double bad!

And thinking about strength of drugs they are fighting a losing battle on most of them - did you know, for example, that it is possible to concentrate the active ingredients of heroin to such an extent that you could pass around enough supply for an addict to live off for a month if he knew how to dilute it again properly under a postage stamp? How are you supposed to stop that sort of concentration getting past the authorities?

Conrad Russell suggested that when a law has a significant amount of the population either disregarding it or contemptuous of it, it has become de facto a bad law. The numbers of people that now appear to be involved in cannabis cultivation suggests this is now the case here if it wasn't already.

The best, nay the only way, to deal with this is to legalize and regulate it, and bugger the Temperance League ladies. Make sure that, as with tobacco and alcohol, everyone knows precisely how much of the active ingredient they are taking and then leave it up to individuals to decide whether they want a quick snifter of the strong stuff, or an evening's socializing with the old tongue loosener.

Technorati Tags: prohibition, liberty, drugs laws

I hate the G8, there's no doubt. I find the whole idea a nauseating display of mankind's folly that a few people with power can do more or less anything, from manipulating the world's climate to holding in their grasp the lives of billions whose lot in life those leaders of the industrialised nations can barely comprehend, let alone decree how to change.

It epitomizes to me why nation states are vile, unnatural divisions of humanity and the planet which, frankly, seem to have more to do with protecting the wealth of the few and patronizing the poverty of the many on this earth. Their leaders pose, Atlas-like, for photo-calls after their vacuous pronouncements, like some cabal of gallactic princelings in some dystopian Sci-Fi vision of a future inter-stellar imperial court.

Yet I'm no crusty protester you'll find scaling fences at Gleneagles or taking a bullet in Genoa complaining that these neo-cons and neo-liberals want to sell our world to the most hated capitalist profiteer. Oh no. Business, amongst other examples of voluntary human co-operation, has a huge part to play in addressing the needs of everyone on the planet. If only it could all be carried out on a billiard-table-level playing field.

And this is the greatest power these eight chattering onanists have - they could, if they chose, level that playing field tomorrow, or at least leave Japan this week having agreed to do so. But they don't want that, do they. because they also represent the businesses already raping the planet and its people by dint of playing on a skewed field.

They make me puke when I think of them, quite literally. I am nauseous writing this to be honest. I do not believe there are eight people on the planet, in fact not 2008 nor yet even 200,000,008 endowed with the wisdom of gods and strength of titans who could do any better at securing the future of this planet than the possibility oif billions of us being able to communicate and co-operate directly among ourselves.

At the top of my front page you will find what must be one of my favourite quotes from any politician, in this case the truly radical, Richard Cobden:

"Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less." 150 years later, like infants only learning to crawl, we still rely on those protectionist, egotistical, smugly self-important governments despite the evidence that they cannot and will not deliver on their promises.

Whilst I certainly do not agree with all their policies, I find the idea of SimPol, in which we use modern communications technology to get ordinary people throughout the world, in diverse and distant countries, to voice together our aspirations and make those same sort of global changes on a consensual and co-operative basis.

Y I H8 G8.

There's been lots of discussion about whether Lib Dems should support state funded schooling via institutions that have a religious guiding philosophy, let's put it that way, since Nick Clegg, self-proclaimed atheist, seemed to offer such schooling support recently (see the links at the bottom for the discussion elsewhere).

Some caveats here. I was brought up in quite a religious family. All my grandparents were "Gospel Hall Brethren"; a small Scottish anti-clerical sect. My family were frequently ex-patriates in Africa. The first school I really remember was in Nairobi. I don't remember it being "faith based" but looking at its website now I see it was scarily so - they even quote "spare the rod and spoil the child" and so on! Though I don't remember having chapel or any other kind of worship.

When we returned to the UK I got a scholarship to a Woodard prep school and thence to a Woodard public school. Nathaniel Woodard was a nineteenth century Church of England clergyman who established a network of relatively low cost boarding schools aimed at educating the sons (and daughters to his credit) of other clergy and professional middle classes. They both had a strong religious tradition. I was in the choir at both. Listen to Carols from Kings and I've done every treble and tenor solo on the entire disc (and I was better at it!).

About the time of my O levels I eschewed religion and became an atheist. Though missing chapel was not an option, it was just one of those social occasions that public schools like to go in for. And I never stopped enjoying the music and ceremony. Ten years and a long story later, I became a Catholic, and nearly joined the religious community at a well known top Catholic public school and monastery. Whilst what some of you may call "indoctrination" was more obvious there - my Anglican school had one priest, this one had nearly a hundred at its disposal - in fact it tended to take a discursive tone. I remain a Catholic, though their recent admissions policy has hardened my attitude towards them a little - still, I suppose that's what forgiveness is all about!

Anyway, back to the point. Nearly all the schooling available in this country before the 20th century was established by religious charities and with a religious ethos. We cannot just write it all off completely. But when we say "religious ethos" we're not talking Madrassas here. And I actually think that you can't really be a "good atheist" unless you've first heard what it is you're objecting to!

However there's one point about the current arrangements I feel I need to defend. People have been saying that one answer is to ensure that even faith schools must have an open admissions policy within their catchment. The catch, if you pardon the pun, is that these institutions do not really have a catchment area in the same sense as other state schools. The churches put in their relatively small amount of funding in order to provide a facility for all their members in a given area.

For example, in Oxford we used to have a joint Anglican-Catholic school. Upon reorganization a few years ago that was closed and the Catholics decided that since there wasn't an alternative in the whole of Oxfordshire they would go it alone. But their calculation of what they could put in is based on serving the needs of all the Catholics in Oxfordshire, or this part of the Archdiocese at least. I don't think you can have it both ways - you cannot insist on them taking all comers locally and serve the needs of all their adherents in a bigger area.

What will be quite interesting is next year the Anglicans, who decided that they could not justify another school on their own in Oxford, will become the lead partners in a new "academy" in the city - replacing a supposedly "failing" secular state school. They have vowed that no faith based selection will be permitted, which begs the question why they want to be the lead partner. But whatever their reasons, they will, like other schools they sponsor, have the ability to appoint people to the governing body. In fact, unlike their existing non-academy schools, they will have more autonomy, and yet it will not be a "faith based school" in the sense others are talking about.

Still. Of course for me the answer is easy. If the state did not actually deliver education using our money, it wouldn't be a problem, would it? No doubt there would again be some religious charities offering low cost or free education (though nothing like there once was owing to the relative impoverishment of the churches since the 19th century) but also people would have a greater choice of education for their children and not be reliant on whatever happened to be there provided by the state. What we need to do is not to provide education itself, but to ensure that people have the financial wherewithal to make those choices.

Anyway, I think the point is that I don't think it's done me any harm. In fact it may have made it easier for me to understand what I was doing when avowing myself an atheist to have a grounding in what I was deciding not to believe in. Chapel services were of course an overt sign of that religiosity, but were in fact social occasions when more fun was had seeing how much you could get away with in terms of whispering, mangling hymns and generally messing about. And if education was a genuine choice and we were not coerced into paying for others' faiths to have a special privilege at public expense, why worry too much?