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I had just got in from dinner with Chris Huhne tonight, and settled down to write about it, and one of those college rites of passage teen angst films came on called "The Rules of Attraction". I have never seen it, and still haven't really, because just as they got to a bit about a frat brother, or whatever it is they call them, being so drunk he had all his friends worried he might have taken something else, or that he might not make it through the night because he wouldn't wake up, a girl from the flat upstairs called down to say that they were worried about their flatmate who had been out with the hockey team initiation pub-crawl and was semi-conscious in the flat.

An hour or so and an ambulance visit later (I always feel a bit iffy about calling out an ambulance for what is so obviously alcohol related but decided not to risk the alternatives since last time I tried to call the on call night doctor service by the time they had phoned me back to say call an ambulance in a previous incident the person had stopped breathing and was pretty close to death from a sub-arachnoid haaemorrage) up come the credits at the end of the film...

"Any similarity to actual learning establishments, students or situations is entirely coincidental"

I don't think I believe in coincidences! But I do believe that alcohol is one of the most deadly, frequently abused and much underestimated drugs. The effects can be hideous and frightening to onlookers. And I have no doubt at all that if he had strayed onto some of the more popular illicit substances, in an ideal world of freedom of choice with regulation on the basis of minimising harm and informing that choice, he would not be in anything like the state he is currently in.

But at least he's in bed, and with someone to watch him for a couple of hours. And I earnestly hope that nobody suffered a heart attack and died waiting for the two ambulances that had to come to deal with two separate incidents of alcohol madness onsite tonight in the space of quarter of an hour.

UPDATE: At least the chap in my block was accompanied home by his female flatmate (who had been called and asked to collect him by his male drinking buddies so far as I can work out!) and had someone to look after him. I now gather that in the other incident the person, who was not even a resident of ours but from that other ramshackle place in town that prides itself on big brains addled with cheap booze from outlets called "JCRs", was simply rolled into what passed for a "recovery position" and left in the quad, unconscious. The ambulance took him away.

...who seems as appalled as I am at the relish with which our party has taken to banning a four hundred year old "pleasure": Forceful and Moderate: Smoked out....

Now, I accept the public health arguments, and I accept in particular (as a member of UNISON how could I not) the arguments about the dangers to staff. Yet still there are ways round having to illiberally ban something. Many people take on jobs that have risks to their health or personal safety. Health and Safety legislation tries to get employers to minimise those risks in most cases (for example with protective gear) but in some cases, when all that's done and risks still remain, employees can command a premium.

If 80% of people really want to eat and drink in smoke free places this is plenty incentive for the industry to give them that option. Since more than 20% of people smoke anyway (and it's higher amongst the young adult population), isn't there a good chance that only those who do would be prepared to work, for more money if possible, in an establishment that permits smoking - I know almost everyone in my SU bar are smokers - they get extra breaks!

As a party we have, or had at least, policy in our "abolish regulation" stuff to replace the national minimum wage with a more flexible arrangement negotiated and enforced thropugh trade and workers associations on a region by region basis so it could reflect the costs of living in different places. We could add into this premiums for working in smokey bars perhaps. A real liberal response to this would be to try to level the playing field in favour of the workers, not outlaw something (especially something that is still so very, even if inexplicably, commonplace).

Incidentally, does anyone know how this affects hotel bedrooms? I have a get around in my mind already. Small hotel, bedroom suites rented by the hour with more settees and tables than beds, room service delivering booze. Get the picture? The wealthy can get round anything.

Yes, I'm still meant to be on internet silence, but Linux and various bits of software have me stumped for a while until I get some help from the mailing lists, so I thought I'd cast my mind over the implications of the court case this week that resulted in a jury deciding that it was okay to commit a crime in order to prevent what the perpetrators believed would be a greater harm in the future. The case in point was that they had committed (and admitted) criminal damage by climbing a chimney at a Kent power station with the intent of scrawling graffiti on it in protest at its pollution record and plans to expand the facility, which, their oh so clever advocate declared would cause more and more widespread damage to people and property through the global warming it would contribute to.

Now, some of the more unthinking environmentalists might see this as a great victory. A court recognized that global warming was such an imminent threat to life and property that it was justifiable to commit brazen thuggery leading to criminal damage on anything that allegedly contributed to that global warming. Yay!?

Nay! I have two problems with this.

First is the acceptance, apparently by both judge and jury (and so, you may think, all "reasonable people"), not just that anthropogenic climate change is a fact but also such a grave threat that it justifies individuals taking the law into their own hands. To my mind this is still a matter in the political arena. Not only are there still, and perhaps growing, voices of dissent on the very premise of the debate; that mankind is responsible for such a change that it is a threat to the planet's very future. But also about what to do about it and when. A power station after all merely supplies a demand. Is the power generator guilty or the consumer making those demands? It is more dangerous to disrupt existing dwindling supplies before we have worked out how to replace them with cleaner affordable technologies? If the threat from global warming is real, so presumably is the threat of harm through disrupted power supplies.

Second is how this operates as a precedent in other, possibly more serious cases - although I heard someone saying that this decision will not be treated as forming a precedent, I'm not clear how that can be prevented. It is okay to murder an abortionist in order to stop the immediate harm to others he or she will cause? That threat, after all, is far more immediate and traceable to an individual than the effects of a single coal power station amongst all the coal fired power stations and other "climate vandals". We're starting to get not only into the realms of Philip K Dick's pre-crime but vigilante prevention of what individuals claim may be a pre-crime. This is hardly the basis for the rule of law.

Oh, you can say that no court is going to acquit a murderer because they thought they were preventing a bigger crime, but actually we already do. The "reasonable force" defense can be used to justify a death in the process of preventing an immediate threat to others' life. This decision seems to extend the boundaries of "immediate threat" let alone accurate identification of the person causing that immediate threat.  One could, and many do, fight abortion on the basis that the most immediate threat t future generations of humanity is eradicating them before they are born.  If we're going to adopt a principle (and I do) that we have a responsibility of stewardship not to harm future generations' survival on the planet then it would be legitimate for others to argue more forcefully that we have a responsibility to see those future generations actually survive as far as birth!

Anyway, two odd sounding sources provide what I believe are better alternative "precedents" to work from. First, there is a Catholic maxim that it is not legitimate to cause one moral bad, or an act that could foreseeably lead to morally bad consequences in order to prevent another, even near certain, specific bad. It is used mostly about abortion again. It is used to argue that it is not even permissible to abort a new life in order to prevent the death of the mother - often in the circumstances of an ectopic pregnancy for example.

Of course the world's aggressors, including the US and UK, routinely ignore this. They argue that foreseeable "collateral damage" is permissable to remove a dictator, for example. It is not. Terrorising and killing the people of Bagdad in "Shock and Awe", even as "collateral", was morally repugnant, notwithstanding our general agreement that the regime they were trying to punish or remove was also morally repugnant. The results of ignoring of this basic principle are there for us all to see - there can be little doubt now that more people in Iraq have suffered for longer under the oversight of the western occupying forces than it is likely would have happened at the hands of the previous repugnant regime. At least there could have been alternatives that held less potential for further suffering.

But on the environment, the libertarians' respect for the rule of law provides a better alternative to various bearded crusties climbing a chimney and committing vigilante criminal damage. Locke's proviso can be used, for example, to tackle pollution. If you, a power generator or anyone else - a pig farm even, pollute the atmosphere we both have to share, we have the right to legal remedy. Just as much as if you came along and started digging a hole in my prize rose border. Indeed this ought to work better than any political "solution". Protectionism is a political strategy, and even Green politicians will forcibly protect their favourite, in this case, power generation mechanism against legitimate complaint of harm. If planning permission were truly privatised, those affected most would almost certainly do better out of it than they will once the government has removed most of their rights in order to force their political idea of strategic energy infrastructure through.

Yes, we all need power, but left to ourselves we would probably not choose to have a nuclear reactor at the bottom of our garden. But, as they say, everyone has their price. If, collectively, my neighbourhood decided that the compensation on offer was enough when weighed against the costs of electricity or the convenience of not having a long transmission route or any potential danger they'd accept that nuclear reactor. If nobody accepts any price for nuclear, they have to weigh that decision against the potential alternatives. If nobody wants a giant power station, then we perhaps have to accept that we will have to help our neighbours fund micro-generation.

...but will the politicians listen? Somehow, I doubt it!

Since I wrote my piece on gangs and drugs on Saturday I've seen a steady trickle of hits from Google searches about Rhys Jones and I've kept an eye on the search terms and found I was pretty well alone in voicing the opinion that drugs policy plays the biggest part in the gang gun deaths that stalk some of our estates. So it is with some relief that I find Johann Hari is another voice of sanity in today's Independent:

Johann Hari: Tragic victims of a self-defeating policy:

This is the story of two victims of a war that cannot be won and should not be fought. You have heard of the first: Rhys Jones, the 11-year-old in Liverpool who was shot in the neck as he played on his bike. You have not heard of the second: Andres Sauzo, a 24-year-old Mexican man who had his arms, legs and head chain-sawed from his body, and was found rotting in five bin bags scattered across his home town of Zihyatanejo. They are casualties - either direct or indirect - in a war that kills tens of thousands of people a year, and could end tomorrow, if we chose to.

Rhys and Andres were killed because of a political decision by the US government to wage a global "war on drugs", and demand other governments fall into line. When you criminalise a massive and growing industry – some 5 per cent of the world's entire economic activity – it does not go away. It is handed to armed criminal gangs, who flood the streets with guns to secure a slice of the riches.

Aside from also citing Milton Friedman, he goes on rightly to criticize the British political reaction to the events of the past week. I hope some of them are listening, and can hear over the noise of their knees jerking and their bandwagons' creaking...

The scattered proposals tossed out this week to deal with drug gangs are elaborate evasions of the real issue. Banning gang videos on YouTube is barely even a sticking plaster, while the Cameroonian idea that gangs are the rancid afterbirth squeezed out by single parents simply doesn't match with the facts. Denmark has the highest rate of single parenthood in Europe – but it has virtually no gangs, except among recent immigrant communities, who overwhelmingly consist of stable two-parent families.

No: if we want to stop gang culture, we need to take back the industry that makes gangs rich, and give it once again to doctors, pharmacists and off-licenses. Legalizing drugs rips the spine out of gangs. Of course they will try to move into other industries – protection rackets, cigarette smuggling and so on – but these have far lower profit margins. In a legalised economy, the gangs would no longer be the richest kids on the estate, and could barely afford firepower, so the core of their glamour would melt away.

We should be outraged. In my opinion our governments, acting in our name, are knowingly complicit in the suffering and the deaths that all this causes, for little benefit and certainly with no liberal philosophical justification. We should be demanding action now, not only to save future Rhys Joneses, but to save what is estimated at £18bn a year in domestic policing and criminal justice costs alone.