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So, I gave in, and went at had a look at the Number 10 petition site. Well, I was one of the early adopters of the first attempt just after 1997, to set up a Number 10 discussion board, in the days when the interweb ran like a lump of tangled wet string.

So, having signed a few petitions - don't implement ID cards, legalize cannabis and other usual suspects, I decided to try my hand at creating one. It's not been approved yet, and you can be sure I will publish the signature page details if it is, but, in "pre-release form" one might say, here it is:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Abolish the
Department of Communities and Local Government and allow local
people to decide in consultation with the local representatives
they elect to do the job how best to run their localities

And in the "further information" box, this:

Local government has been subject to far too much tinkering,
target setting and control by central government for decades.
If government is by the consent of the governed then surely
that consent, for local affairs, is given in elections to local
councillors. Instead of handing down a menu from on high of
how local government will be permitted to operate, allow real
innovation and local consultation to decide how to run and fund
their local communities.

Keep your eyes open for it and go sign it if it tickles your fancy.

Technorati Tags: localism, politics, electoral reform

Charles Kennedy was presenting a Channel 4 "Thirty Minutes" tonight on "Politics and Power". I can't find it online, so if you missed it (as I missed the first five minutes being suckered in by those other great Liberals trying to rearrange the county in the Madness of King George) all I can find to give you a flavour is the Radio Times write-up:

Charles Kennedy, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, examines the problem he sees as being at the heart of British politics: the way politicians too often sacrifice their principles in the pursuit of power. Speaking about his experiences fighting six general elections, Kennedy compares notes with parliamentary colleagues including Michael Howard, Ian Duncan Smith, Baroness Jay, Norman Tebbit, Baroness Morris and Jonathan Cruddas.

If it wasn't actually intended as a reminder to party members heading off to conference in four weeks or so of what we (were forced to) gave up only eight short months ago, it certainly succeeded in being so for me! Charles came across as we fondly remember - frank, honest and genuine. A real "home boy" still representing the constituency he grew up in. The man who, for all his faults and fumblings at times, managed to woo the electorate with his fireside chattiness.

I missed him setting out the hypothesis, but he diagnosed many of the problems lots of us feel about politics today - disengagement, lack of trust, unwillingness to debate with the public some of the biggest issues - especially at elections times - the concentration on what a tiny number of floating voters in a small number of marginal constituencies think and want to the exclusion of the majority of communities in the country, even the whips system keeping MPs on the party line regardless of what they honestly feel and whether their constituents agree.

He said that reform was necessary. IDS, I think it was, argued that there was no such thing as a General Election nowadays because of targetting marginal seats. Everyone seemed to agree. One problem was that parties did not want to appear to be divided on these hot issues (they chose Europe, nuclear power and Trident, but it could have been any of a whole load of other big issues - environment, drugs and so on), again especially at election times. And it made me wonder - how would it affect my commitment to an election campaign, say, if these big debates were aired and I did stand divided from my party on something that I thought very important.

And as I thought about it, I found that Charles was making the perfect argument for electoral reform, and in particular STV voting. It's a little ironic as I know some Labour electoral reformers felt that Charles was pretty much responsible for us letting the long grass grow around PR as an issue at a time when they could have built a lot of support for reform in their own party if there was pressure from us and the issue kept at the fore.

Under STV you have larger constituencies with several MPs and you get to rank the candidates individually in order of preference on the ballot paper. Say Oxfordshire could be one instead of six constituencies, returning six MPs altogether. In order to get yourself a better chance of being elected than your party colleagues you've got to make a name for yourself, differentiate yourself a little from them. So you might be generally a Tory voter, but are strongly pro-Europe, so you can get to choose the Tory candidates who are least anti-Eruope and maybe throw in a vote for a more free-market Lib Dem as better than the more Eurosceptic Tory candidates.

So it would give the candidates a reason to highlight their individual issues where they differ from the predominant party line, an excuse for when the whips try to berate them for voting honestly on those issues when the pressures are on to vote with the lobby fodder. In short, more open, honest and public debate, a closer approximation to the overall political preferences in the nation as a whole and no safe seats to abandon to concentrate on targeted marginal constituency.

A great pity then that Charles did not take the opportunity to prescribe that remedy. But I do hope to see more of him, soon. Not just the party, but the British political scene is the poorer for his not being as big a part of it as he was. And I say that as someone who put him sixth (if at all even possibly) in my preferences when he was first elected.

I believe Michael Brown, the now infamous "largest Lib Dem donor ever", is every bit the "muppet" he called the party apparatchiks, and would personally not hopefully have accepted that money had I been in a position to do so. But if I had to choose between someone who may have swindled a small number of millionnaires out of some of their probably not all ethically gained loot and a Cameron donor accused of 'repugnant' business practices, I would choose Robin Hood over reputedly Rach rentier anyday.

I mean really, how could we even dream that the party of the landlord was changing its spots? Prove us wrong please, G&D! You could start by adopting Land Value Tax to prove your donors don't have policy influence...☺

Mind you, I am led to believe that some of Oxford's supposedly ghastlier rentier landlords are regular donors to the local Labour party so maybe making money out of the misery of the poor and the generosity of the taxpayer in supporting them does not indicate party alignment these days.

Technorati Tags: conservatives, lib dems, sleaze, tories

Having established myself as an anarcho-geo-libertarian-mutualist I can't help wondering why is it that many libertarians seem to gravitate towards the Conservative party. A party with less libertarian instincts I can hardly imagine. Whatever their rhetoric on occasion, when they tactically oppose Labour's assaults on peoples' freedoms for example, when it comes down to it they are the archetypal we know best patristic party that is happiest telling the plebs what they can and cannot do, should and should not expect.

They may point to Thatcher's rolling back of the state in the form of privatisation of government owned business assets, but a true Libertarian cannot be happy with reform merely of the economic sphere. Rolling back the state means ending interference in all areas of our lives. Anything else is authoritarian. And so, it is with little surprise that I find this reported in today's Observer:

Tories highlight cannabis dangers in drug blueprint

Jo Revill and Nick Watt
Sunday July 8, 2007
The Observer

The health risks of cannabis are so great that it should now be reclassified as a class B drug, carrying much greater penalties for possession and trafficking, says David Cameron's new blueprint for dealing with Britain's growing addiction problems.

The Tory leader has been convinced by emerging evidence that a strong form of the drug, skunk, is causing an epidemic of mental health disorders. A report being published this week by a Conservative policy commission will confront the issue, recommending an upgrading of the drug to class B, as well as arguing the case for a complete transformation of addiction treatment in Britain.

What utter bollocks. Look, the rush to create ever stronger strains (and actually the evidence is mixed - while people report finding stronger strains the prevalence of those strains is far from clear) mirrors precisely the ever stronger concoctions of alcohol produced under prohibition. If you want to control such production, the best way is to free it up and regulate it lightly. If the problem is primarily with growing brains (and the science here is also mixed as I've mentioned before) then, as with alcohol and tobacco, make it illegal for licensed vendors to sell it to minors. But while all vendors are unlicensed and unregulated there are no controls and it is pot luck, if you pardon the pun, as to whether the authorities catch someone selling to kids.

It is fact that cannabis can be a sociable drug. It is fact that cannabis can be a soothing drug for all sorts of ills, from stress to MS and arthritic pain. Indeed only on Friday there was a case of a grandmother effectively being allowed by the courts to continue to use cannabis as pain relief. But the silly side of the law means she cannot cultivate it for her own use, so she has to go to a criminal to get hold of it by definition.

The drugs laws in this country are a mess. And no party seems really to want to grasp the nettle and look at how individual freedoms to do what one wants with one's own body and mind, where it does little or no harm to anyone else, can be combined with protecting the truly vulnerable. Yes, addictions kill. But they mainly kill because the market in addictive things is so often criminal and the vulnerable are open to the worst kind of exploitation. Therefore I say that the authoritarian state, with regard to addictive substances at least, is complicit in those deaths. And by extension, the party that imposes more prohibition are murderers.

They can change the language if they like - the Tories say the phrase "war on drugs" is outdated and doesn't convey what they want to achieve - but returning to ever more criminal sanctions will harm more people, and will do the law itself a disservice by continuing a charade that everyone knows is upheld more in the breach than the observance. If you ever want to even imagine you might get the vote of this anarcho-geo-libertarian-mutualist, Cameron, you're going to have to do a lot btter than this knee-jerk classic moral panic nonsense.

Technorati Tags: tories, conservatives, Dave the chameleon, libertarianism, cannabis, drugs laws

Spotted this at the Adam Smith Institute blog:

The future of rubbish:

So I was pleased to learn of a new, private collection service called Bin & Gone in Yorkshire, which apparently charges £90 a year to ensure householders get a weekly collection, and has bought its own refuse truck to do so. Meanwhile a friend in Hampshire tells me that a body in Romsey also plans a private alternative to the local authority's service (or lack of it), and are putting out flyers to gauge the market. The service "will be provided at minimal cost and include the supply of free dustbin and peddle bin liners as well as a free bin washing service" - rather better than the council's grudging effort.

Of course, a number of local authorities already contract out their refuse collection to private companies. But under this system, householders pay directly for the service they choose, rather than pay for a service they have no choice about, through local taxes. The new trend might be modest at present: but it does show that one of the local authorities' key services can in fact be done better, and more satisfactorily for customers, by private enterprise. Makes you wonder what we pay Council Tax for.

Keep up! There was a discussion about this way back in August last year after an IPPR report on rubbish. I blogged about it and it even got picked up by the Guardian.

Technorati Tags: taxation, waste wars