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Probably the incident that set my mind against the war in Iraq was a day I watched Colin Powell have a stand up row with Hans Blix in the Security Council chamber. Hans Blix, for all I know a public servant who had few if any vested interest in anything other than peace, the great commission of the UN, was explaining how Saddam's ability to create weaponised bioldogical or chemical weapons had been virtually destroyed and that the constituent ingredients he may have had his hands on ten years previously would by then be next to useless.

In reply, Colon Peril insisted in some detail that Saddam had mobile weapons plants and the huge extent of the international threat he now posed. This despite himself having gone before the world just two short years previously alongside Ms Rice to explain that Saddam had no capability in 2001 even to project conventional force against his regional neighbours let alone produce biological or chemical weapons.

It sticks in my mind because it was an ugly and, frankly, undignified display by the old soldier. Blix had years of UN inspections on the ground to back up his calculations and Powell had, well, dodgy dossiers and bluster. One might have suspected at the time that Powell was putting his thin arguments almost under protest to fit the agenda.

So, it is with some grave concern that I read today:

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | US Iran report branded dishonest:

The UN nuclear watchdog has protested to the US government over a report on Iran's nuclear programme, calling it "erroneous" and "misleading".
In a leaked letter, the IAEA said a congressional report contained serious distortions of the agency's own findings on Iran's nuclear activity.

The IAEA also took "strong exception" to claims made over the removal of a senior safeguards inspector.

Apparently you can read the congressional report here and the UN letter here. I haven't done so yet, but the story is enough to give me the heebie-geebies. I have no doubt that we have to be wary of Iran's intentions, though on balance personally I do believe at the moment they are for civil nuclear technology. But one wonders whether the Great Satan has learned anything out of the shambles in Iraq and how they got there through what now seem like a tissue of lies and distortions.

Technorati Tags: christian right, imperialism, islam, religious wars

...is that it always seems that the first steps towards it, the first things to be cut away from the protectionism ridden form of capitalism we have now, hurt the small person more than the big person. If the "average Joe" (and no, it's just a phrase, not meant for you Joe O or Joe T!) cannot see the benefits to them of peeling away layers of protectionism and bureaucracy why would they support removing the state's comfort blanket?

Much of what we remember about Thatcher era attempts to roll back the economic power of the state, for example, centers around mining and industrial communities with their "hearts ripped out" and of the "haves" becoming the "have mores" through privatisation whilst those often for whom the state industry had been the economic lifeline were cut off. Or of the rise of the oligarchs in Russia, leeching off the common property of the people of that country in the form of its natural wealth.

Which is why economic liberals must strive to show that the root cause of the grossest inequalities we see in the world around us is that the rich and powerful are, as often as not, made so and maintained by protectionism and monopoly. Then when we act, unlike in the Thatcher era, we must be clear that each step we take strikes directly at that privilege and produces a perceptible incremental and preferably material rather than hypothetical benefit to those whom the existence of that privilege has hitherto harmed.

Our Liberal forebears knew this, hence the urgency with which they attempted to go about radical change, attacking monopoly and protectionist created wealth, in the People's Budget. It must be equally obvious with hindsight that the failure to drive through the most radical of those proposals left the way open for the Labour party to sneak in and push socialist, statist, coercive rather than liberal means to what they claimed were the same ends. Those means we now know have failed and continue to fail wherever they are tried. And not only that but they do not have the saving grace of freeing people from that other gross dependency on the state and the political establishment.

This is the main task for our shared liberal future - and it looks like 70% of us might just agree.

Thanks to Liberal conspiracy for highlighting protectionist amendments being sneaked into the Telecoms directive which MEPs will decide on tomorrow:

The amendments basically set the scene for forcing ISPs to monitor all their customers' traffic to catch them sharing copyrighted material on the web and to cut customers off if they keep doing it.

Over in the comments on Matt Wardman's blog posting the other day I suggested that this whole surveillance obsession smacks of "we do it because we can". Why should one's electronic communications, voice or data, be any more permissible to be snooped on than any other communication - snail mail, face to face or similar. Just because we can. For a variety of reasons electronic communications leave traces, and traces can always be tracked, but why should they be?

It is true that we need to have a debate about intellectual property and how, or indeed whether, it should be enforced in an era of global instant communication. It appears that the artists tend to be ahead of their production companies in exploring how to use the massive marketing opportunity that is the internet, such as recent experiments in releasing music for free, or on honesty box terms, on the web. But of course it is the media corporations and production companies that are lobbying for this sort of protectionist measure. The debate needs to be held much more widely than that though, and not snuck through where these measures were explicitly removed from the directive last time the European Parliament discussed it.

I have written to Sharon Bowles and Emma Nicholson. I suggest everyone take a look at the details of these amendments and give some thought to writing also to any of their MEPs. It is being debated tomorrow, so act fast!

I very fundamentally believe that the internet in particular is seen as a threat by both governments and corporations who feel they are not able to control it. For me, it is the greatest advance in people communicating with people and eventually needing far less "government" to broker their international relationships or trans-national corporations to broker their trade. But for it to bring about the vast benefits of voluntary co-operation amongst individuals around the world it needs to find its own rules, not have them imposed by those very bodies that are scared of it!

...but having one to quote does no harm (and why are the Lib Dems remaining silent?):

"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this." Albert Einstein,1921 'My First Impression of the U.S.A.' (quoted in Transform's Report "After the War on Drugs")

If you click on the link to that report you'll see some of the contemporary influential people, even if not quite of the order of Einstein all of them, who have endorsed the report and its ideas, amongst them Simon Jenkins, who, for the second time in two weeks I find myself agreeing with his Sunday Times column on a subject close to my heart. Jenkins points out, as I did earlier in the week, that far from merely demonstrating they are real people who have done things they wished they hadn't but now can we please get on with our jobs, the confessions of now a round dozen I believe cabinet members to having indulged in a little drug taking in their youth...

"have a deeper significance. They indicate hypocrisy on a subject of urgent concern to all parents. Why should their children go to jail when half the cabinet was admitting the same crime. Yet on Friday the reaction at Westminster was one of humour. Drug taking is apparently okay if you can get away with it. Drug taking is okay if you pretend you did not enjoy it, or “experimented”, or affirm it to be “wrong” without quite saying why. Lots of things are wrong without being crimes, which is perhaps why nobody last week mentioned the word crime."

And actually, I am not so sure it is right even to believe what they all say about their past. If Cameron took drugs at Bullingdon Club bashes and similar, it was surely an expression of the disdain for the law that those "born to rule" felt they were untouchable...a deliberate political statement. It doesn't matter that he didn't know he wanted to become politically involved at the time, or so he says (having four generations of ancestors as MPs for nearby Newbury might have at least bumped it up his career options though); the circles in which he moved and the situations in which any such drug use might have occurred were political statements, of a sort.

Cannabis use at Oxford in the sixties, the scale of which was to form a significant element in the debates on law reform such as the Wootton Report, was also something of a political statement in itself. And more recently, it hasn't been drugs interest groups enticing people at Freshers Fairs with drugs, but our own Lib Dem Youth and Students cannabis law reform campaign and its well known and very popular "tear off roach" postcards.

The message has been that if you want to get interested in politics, these little rebellions against "the olds" running our lives are part and parcel of your political career, perhaps even a part of your initiation! Politically minded students in fact, if they indulge at all, probably do so in order to convince themselves and others just how "not wrong" such drugs are and how precisely they can be trusted to make up their own minds about such things without the nannying that Brown and Smith are now putting back on the agenda.

But aside from ascribing motives to the current rash of confessions the thing that really irks me about this whole saga, as a Liberal Democrat, is that we as a party have not said anything about it. The chaterati - Jenkins himself, Janet Street-Porter and Mary Riddell today in three of the four Sunday heavyweights, and at least Deborah Orr on Saturday - have all basically come out against prohibition, presumably much to the chagrin of the neo-puritans in the Tory and Labour camps. And yet our press releases have ranged from half a dozen about by-elections, through concern at new alcohol crime and drink driving figures, to the Olympics, House of Lords reform and diplomatic relations with Russia, but have not once mentioned the fact that we have progressive policy on drugs that chimes with these peddlars of popular opinion and which offers a real alternative to these mealy mouthed po-faced prohibitionist parties.

I have to say, it is part of a weasel-worded approach to liberal issues that we seem to have taken of late. The drugs issue, despite having a briefing paper prepared before the 2005 election, was, if memory serves, one of those subjects, like votes for prisoners and revoking automatic life sentences for murder, that our spokespeople, when challenged, did not robustly defend as liberal policies, relegating some of them to the status of "something our weird way of deciding policy (democratically, at conference) foisted on us but not really manifesto material".

So, as a public service, here are some clips from our policies on drugs, and cannabis in particular (from "Liberal Democrats Policy Briefing 10: Honesty, Realism, Responsibility", January 2005).

On the principles behind the policy:

Liberal Democrats believe the current emphasis on criminal sanctions for users actually makes the problem worse: it exacerbates the adverse consequences of drug use; it brings many young people, who would otherwise be law-abiding, into contact with both the criminal world and the criminal justice system; it undermines more promising strategies for minimising harmful drug use; and it diverts large public resources which could be better employed.

Liberal Democrats believe the time has come to reform the approach to drugs policy, so that there is an intelligent range of responses, with the emphasis on education, treatment for addiction and harm reduction strategies rather than blanket prohibition, but retaining criminal sanctions where justified.

On cannabis specifically:

Liberal Democrats would break the link between cannabis use and organised crime by:

• Maintaining the classification of cannabis as a Class C drug in the short term, but issuing policy guidance that it is not in the public interest to prosecute individuals for possession of cannabis for their own use, cultivation of small numbers of cannabis plants for their own use, or social supply of cannabis.
• Permitting medical use of cannabis derivatives, subject to appropriate pharmaceutical controls and the successful conclusion of clinical trials.
• In the longer term, seeking to put the supply of cannabis on a legal, regulated basis, subject to securing necessary renegotiation of the UN Conventions.

and, more generally:

Liberal Democrats would reform unnecessary and counter productive criminal penalties by:

• Ending the use of imprisonment as a punishment for possession for own use of illegal drugs of any class. Drug addicts should wherever possible be in treatment not in prison – unless they have committed other serious crimes (e.g. robbery to feed a crack cocaine habit) in which case prison must remain an option.
• Re-classifying ecstasy from Class A to Class B to reflect the fact that it is less harmful than heroin and cocaine, but not re-classifying it further unless recommended by the Drugs Commission subject to evidence on long-term health effects.

Hat tip to Tim Worstall for the fun animation!

Now come on, let's get everyone off their post by-election beta-blockers and mogadon and get them engaged in this debate!

Technorati Tags: cannabis, drugs laws, lib dems, liberty, Simon Jenkins