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So, last night saw the first meeting of the "editorial board" of a new project initially being sponsored by Lib Dems ALTER , the party's only affiliated group focussing solely on radical economic issues, to publish a book of essays, in a similar vein to "The Orange Book" or "Re-inventing the State". We will set out the case that the "Liberal Economic Tradition " holds the key to the permanent eradication of poverty and the freedom to chose one's own path through life.

We hope to publish in time for the end of August this year, which will be the 100th anniversary of the passage through parliament of the Liberal Government's Old Age Pensions Act in 1908, a key landmark in the development of the modern welfare state, and a few weeks after the 60th birthday of the NHS, conceived by Liberal economist, William Beveridge.

It will truly take Liberal Democrats "out of their comfort zone", for many at least, by arguing that much of what we now have, a "state of welfare", started as a set essentially temporary fix-its intended to alleviate the worst poverty while the entrenched privilege caused by state protected monopolies was dismantled through such radical change as land reform and tariff reduction leading to truly free trade. It will promote the idea that this "unfinished business" is just as relevant and important for today's world, paving the way for what banker and author Bernard Lietaer has called "sustainable abundance".

Over the next few weeks we will firm up the range of topics and start looking for people who may wish to contribute an article in each area, hopefully mostly, and perhaps exclusively, from within the Liberal Democrats themselves. We would like it to be a truly collaborative effort with contributions not just from the "great and the good" within the party, but from the many grass-roots members who we believe share some of these ideas .

So, if any of you are interested in contributing something, do please get in touch with your ideas, or a subject area you would be interested in writing about. From time to time I'll keep people up to date on here, but we're also likely to create a "Liberal Alternative" website where we can co-ordinate the effort.

I don't want to be flippant or dismissive about this news:

Cocaine floods the playground: The Times

...because it is very serious in many ways, including many that are not being questioned in this latest bit of moral panic on drugs, but I thought it was an interesting contrast with some of the policies of South American leaders and would be leaders who want to feed coca to school children for the good of their health.

Now, it should be said that, as President Morales of Bolivia claims, himself a former coca farmer, coca is not the same thing as cocaine, just the raw material and one that in its natural state has claims to many therapeutic benefits. In fact I suppose it's rather like castor beans, which can make beneficial castor oil or terrorist weapon ricin depending on what you do to it. And these kids are breaking the law and putting themselves in danger as a result (though less from the drug itself than from the system for policing it and the underworld that controls it as a result).

But we must use these examples as reasons for opening up the debate, increasing peoples' understanding of the issues around controlled drugs.

The Coca-Cola in the schoolyard vending machine we're now so concerned about after Jamie Oliver started its long history as an extract of coca leaf, and now threatens our children's health in its own insidious way. We should not let President Morales and putative president Ollanta Humala of Peru be drowned out by the paranoia of narcotics nutters in Whitehall or Washington. These countries have millennia of experience of beneficial use of coca. If we're going to be a global village, we need to understand them.

And Transform seem to have a less panic driven response.

...let alone enforceable?

A row that has so far been played out in the pages of the august British Medical Journal has suddenly burst out onto the public stage as MPs have found constituents being told they will have to pay for their NHS treatment because they've paid for additional drugs or treatments, for example that the NHS doctor tells them may help but cannot be prescribed by them.

But is the notion that you can be barred from receiving the treatment your tax already pays for even legal? Apply the same argument to education, for example, and parents who pay for a few weeks extra tuition for their child would be forced to pay for the whole of their state school provided main stream education.

And even if it is legal, how is it enforceable? Should someone who buys some nutritional supplement that a friend recommends in addition to prescription drugs for their illness be forced to pay the full costs of their NHS treatment? Or is there some (arbitrarily?) set level - is it okay to buy an extra packet of over the counter drug but not a cancer drug that NICE won't allow you to have on the NHS even if your NHS doctor says it will possibly help over and above what they can do for you? And how do they know? Is it basically down to whether or not a private consultant requests your medical records from the NHS and the person receiving that request has to snitch on you?

Of course I can see there may be cases where it might be legitimate for the NHS to wash their hands of a patient who has paid for some additional or alternative treatment that actually compromises the care the NHS is trying to give that patient. But if it's complimentary to the treatment the NHS are giving, and only unavailable through them because of NICE, or budgets, or rules, that doesn't apply. Indeed, it would probably be saving the NHS money in the longer run - the quicker you are cured, or the more independent you are, because you have supplemented your treatment, the more resources they have to spend on people who cannot pay the extra, surely?

Again, the comparison with private education is interesting - if someone's additional private tutoring has made them better able to cope with their mainstream school classes in some way, the classroom teacher, surely, has more time to spend on others.

And if it's indeed just if it goes against the advice of the NHS,
should anyone who does not apply government sanctioned wisdom on
healthy living be made to pay for all NHS treatment because their
lifestyle is prejudicial to their health in some way? 

Or, perhaps, could it all be a case of corporate welfare - the NHS has "exclusive" deals maybe with drug companies that, say, give them discounts or some other kind of soft benefit even if only their treatment is used for a particular condition and if people opt to go for a competitor's supposedly better treatment the deals all fall apart. The NHS is riddled with protectionism, particularly in its procurement policies. And yes this itself locks out competition and keeps prices high.

The only real answer is that clinicians themselves should be allowed to select and prescribe their own choice of treatment that they think will help that patient get off their hands as soon as possible and let them get on with curing someone else. Surely that's the whole point of the NHS?

And so, having linked, I may as well cite The Daily Pundit who writes about the number of NuTory candidates who were once NuLabour members. But it's not so much their political backgrounds that I want to take issue with - to me the interchangeability of such political favours merely highlights that both parties are really merely sibling subsidiaries of the post-Thatcher Managerial Clique.

No, what I'm more interested in is how a serious political party, claiming to be democrats of some sort, and on the one hand with its leader wanting to hold "public primaries" for some of its candidates, selects its candidates through some sort of appointed committee and without an all-member vote in the consitutency or jurisdiction concerned.

It's not just the successor to Doris that was selected this way, but apparently the Judas Karim for the North West Euro-Parliament list. No wonder the latter thought his chances better with the Tories if he really only needed to butter up a few committee members rather than reach out to the activists and members.