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...and meant to be settled down somewhere in a nest with wife and kids when you see "The perfect gift for Father's Day...Level 42 - The Definitive Collection".

Oh well.

See, some people think I am over the top saying that supporters of drugs prohibition are complicit in the murder of the victims of the illegal drugs trade, but I'm not the only one...

Are you a death enabler?

"If you support drug prohibition policies that make black market drug sales profitable, then you are encouraging violent behavior by criminals and supporting the funding of terrorists. This directly results in the deaths of thousands.

You are a death enabler.

If you support drug war enforcement..."[continues]

...for a few days. As will responding to peoples' comments.

A couple of months ago I bought myself a new great big server and shamefully I have not set it up yet. Since it is priced in dollars and the pound is falling I suppose I ought to get on with it so I can cancel the existing one before it next needs paying!

For anyone interested it will be Debian Etch, running Xen virtualization, to give me a Zimbra virtual server for email and collaboration, a web server for my various projects and then back end servers for databases and user data.

I really need to redesign the blog, and in the process move it to my new domain jockcoats.me and upgrade to Drupal 6.

Additionally, a number of projects have been languishing waiting for this shift to the new bigger server:

OX3Online - a project to produce a community portal for the Headington area of Oxford

LiberalALTERnative.org to accompany the book on economic liberalism I am co-editing with members of the Lib Dems ALTER executive

OxfordBloggers.net - an aggregator a little like LibDemBlogs to link together as many bloggers writing in or about Oxford

OSEF.org.uk - a new site for Oxfordshire Social Enterprise Forum which we intend to relaunch in November's enterprise week

...and my latest wheeze...

f5c.org - "Freedom's Fifth Column" to provide a space in which libertarians (especially those hiding within existing non-libertarian parties) can write, pseudonymously if necessary, to try and show how libertarian and anarchist ideology can work through most existing parties to achieve our freedoms.

Lots to do! But don't worry, the suspension of blogging is only in order to give me a few days while I am off work this week to get the server up and running - these other projects have to work alongside my own writing...:)

There's this extraordinary debate going on (well actually the comments are closed) on ConservativeHome about a piece by a chappie called Tony Makara who is advocating a protectionist trade policy the likes of which has not been seen in the UK for a generation:

Anthony Makara: Britain imports too much

Over the last weeks I've read much about the subject of welfare reform. The arguments about incapacity benefit and workfare. However all these strategies for welfare reform fail to answer one fundamental question. How are we going to get people into work? I believe all the proposed plans for welfare reform will fail because they do not tell us how we are to create the one million plus jobs needed to end welfare dependency. This is because the British economy no longer produces the jobs that the unemployed need. Lets face it, a person is either in work or they are on benefit, it really is that simple, the answer to unemployment is to create jobs. [From ConservativeHome's Platform: Anthony Makara: Britain imports too much]

The outrage in the comments is interesting. We all know the Tories made a seismic shift in the mid-late seventies in embracing what they liked to call "free trade". Of course, without radical tariff eradication and resolute policing of monopoly and cartel, there is no truly free trade. But what is interesting is that this was the debate over which Winston Churchill first left the Tories at the turn of the twentieth century and joined the free trade Liberals.

You see, for forty years, free trade was a policy of the "left" (indeed much longer if we go back to the Radicals and the Corn Laws debates), a key plank of trying to increase the returns to labour and in reducing the cost of necessities to make the average working person better off, either through higher wages or through lower prices (they have the same effects). It was Philip Snowden, the Labour chancellor of the exchequer, who wrote in a foreword to a new edition of Henry George's book of the same name "Protection or Free Trade" that...

"Each new generation has in a large measure to re-learn the truths which its ancestors established by discussion and practical experience. Free Traders have been so confident in the fundamental soundness of their faith and in the security of the system, that they have neglected to keep the rising generation well grounded in the principles of the faith."

He was writing in response to the Tories' re-adoption of a protectionist stance in the face of the beginnings of the Great Depression.

I have no doubt that most Tories today believe in something called "free trade". I don't believe that most of them actually realise how far away we are from it and what steps will be necessary to get there. But I am sure myself that if we get there, we will all benefit. As Snowden also wrote, "Protection is the foster-mother of monopoly, and monopoly in all its forms...is the robbery of the community for the benefit of private interests" (you can see why Tories would like the idea!).

It is worth mentioning that the Lib Dems have a consultation paper out on the UK Response to Globalization. Go respond - we must resist any attempts at introducing protectionist policies.