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So, Dave's been at the Googleplex trying to give an inspiring vision of what the internet can do for us, and especially our relationship with government. I imagine that if the fun-loving boffins at Google made up the audience they will have been yawningly underwhelmed or resorting to bouncing their hyper-activity stress balls off the video screens.

It's a bit of ironic timing though, after last week's debacle over Labour stealing the Tories' or more accurately the Lib Dem's policy clothing, as my speech writers are just putting the finishing touches to the second of my pieces on Revolutionary Liberalism covering a much bolder image of how technology is about to turn our entire way of life on its head in new and exciting ways that twenty-first century politicians are going to have to work with.

The duckies guarding Google from politicians
Originally uploaded by Yodel Anecdotal

Far, far greater change is afoot than simply providing national statistics to end users and citizens so they can chose and make policy in a more informed way, like the challenges of the end of money as we know it, a whole new way of working in the knowledge economy and in international commerce. A world in which the Googles, Verizons and UPSes will be the moderators and media of global trade rather than governments, where the webs of trust that nation states have established to provide the function of guarantors in worldwide business are rent asunder.

A world that has implications for all public services, creating a new era of interpersonal trust and co-operation moved by the power of market information in individuals' hands unencumbered by the protectionism of states and politicians. An era that will have the power, because it will be people based, to usurp the role of international credit markets, so 'dis-credited' in the past few weeks. And it is the geeks in Dave's audience today, not the politicians, who will be leading the way.

Cameron is right about one aspect - politicians have got to learn to back off, for if they don't do so voluntarily and in co-operation with this new world, they will be ignominiously cast aside, redundant - but I will believe that he himself is ready for that challenge when he makes policy to prove it. Some of the greatest steps in concentration of power to Whitehall and Westminster are, after all, only a couple of decades old, coinciding with the growth of the information economy in the late eighties.

Just floating an idea prompted slightly by a throw-away comment at the Not-the-first-hustings on Saturday about the dark days of the dual leadership of the two Davids...

Why not have two leaders? Many people have commented that Chris is good on policy and strategy and Nick on presentation. On a personal level I find Chris has the sort of presence that would lend itself to armchair conversations persuading groups of our ideas (not unlike CK) and Nick the big platform speaker. We need both roles. And I still think that one weak area for Nick is economic/fiscal policy where Chris outshines most others and, whilst any new leader will be ably assisted in this area by Chris and Vince, fiscal policy in particular is going to be absolutely top of the agenda for a while to come so would benefit from being within the leadership.

Granita isn't quite the right analogy of course, as there it was about succession. But out of it came Gordon Brown the strategist and Tony Blair the front man. And, whether we like them or not, it was quite a successful double-act. Maybe we could have a double act too. I think the era of the two Davids was hampered by the fact that we weren't quite one party and they were still jostling for the upper hand. Now we are matured as a single party (and even attracting some like Michael Meadowcroft back into the fold) maybe we would have the ability to pull it off nowadays.

As James Graham and I note there is a big job of work to be done to bring the wider party into the policy making process and strategic direction of the party. One leader could specialize on that and the other on selling the results to the wider world.

Just a week into the ban on smoking in enclosed "public" places, there has been much coverage of Conservative plans to increase the tax on alcohol to discourage "binge drinkers" - an idea which, if memory serves, was mooted late last year by the government itself anyway. I like to think that it was such a crazy idea then that it contributed to Ms Hewitt's removal from the health brief.

But on both issues, on health grounds at least for the participants (if not the passive smokers and people beaten up by drunks), surely the best answer is a complete ban? Both are drugs. Alcohol in particular can be served up as a very powerful concoction, ten or more times more powerful than the cider I used to get hold of at school. In study after study when respected organizations look at the wider social effects of different drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, they have upheld the "Blakemore/Nutt hierarchy of harms" which puts alcohol fifth, tobacco ninth, both ahead of cannabis at eleventh and ecstasy way down at nineteenth out of twenty one substances they evaluated. You can read the whole reasoning in the RSA report - and don't pretend to tell me that the RSA is looking at archeological pot finds from the Bullingdon Club of the eighties as we are perhaps led to believe, they are looking at today's market in drugs.

In 2004 in Britain around 106,000 people died from causes related to smoking tobacco, and every other smoker is likely to die because of illness and disease caused by their use of tobacco. There were 8,389 alcohol related deaths. And, while there were 2,598 deaths 'from drug related poisoning' that includes prescribed and over the counter drug misuse, and in fact only 663 were put down to heroin, methadone, cocaine, amphetamine (including ecstasy) and GHB. And, as we know from these studies, the alcohol related deaths are if anything rising not falling.

So clearly the rational response is to ban what are two of the most addictive and dangerous substances we know of. Why would any government wish to be complicit in the licensing for recreational consumption of such killers? But not only that, the Treasury no doubt rubs its hands with glee at the prospect of taking money from these drug addicts and the pushers who supply them, the tobacco and drinks industries. Blood money - that's what it is.

So, which of you competing authoritarian parties is going to bite that bullet? It's populist tinkering nonsense. Something must be done, this is something so let's do this. Let us choose our poison and help make sure our choice is a safe as possible by legalization and regulation of all these substances. Banning them makes their grip stronger. Indeed, as recent evidence on cannabis shows, it makes them stronger.

And I haven't even begun to talk about caffeine, sugar and chocolate. These last two of course contributing to a ticking time bomb of ill-health and early death through obesity related conditions. If you believe people know best and are capable of making their own decisions, let them. Otherwise, do the rational thing and ban all these currently legal killers too and be done with it.

Technorati Tags: alcohol, cannabis, conservatives, drugs laws, liberty, smoking ban

The very observant amongst you will have noticed, I hope, that I've been very quiet for a couple of weeks.  Well, since this marks the anniversary of this Drupal version of my blog, I decided to give it a make-over.  Partly this was prompted by having been nominated in summer for the best designed Lib Dem blog, because the previous "look and feel" was not terribly technically tinkered with standard Drupal theme.  So I wanted to have a play and see what I could achieve "under the bonnet" of Drupal.

So, I've reached the point where I'm into that last 20% of any project that will take 80% of the effort, so I figured I might as well "go live" on the new theme and continue to tinker in the background.  So, things will change a little over the coming days and weeks as I spot things I don't like, but please let me know if there's something not working, or not working as expected.

...shame I'm not waking up to this today:

Lots of things to catch up on over the next few days: my feelings about the new leader and his new team, not least.

You'll notice that the whole idea of static "blogroll" type lists has apparently gone.  All of you to whom I linked are still linked, I just need to go through the various links and tag them with categories and they will then show up in the "related links" slot when you view relevant content on my site.

You'll get the hang of it, I hope! 

Apparently there's a story going around (in another Murdoch rag) that certain "important funders" of the Lib Dems are threatening to withdraw financial support for the party if Simon wins. They say he is "unfit" as a result of his leftward stance and his supposed "dishonesty" about his sexual identity.

I find this pretty nasty stuff. My reaction is "do your worst, we're bigger than the odd individual, whatever you are worth".

That it costs so much to "play at the top table" is one of the worst aspects of modern politics and it seems to me driven by people who want more influence than they warrant in a democracy. Whilst I'm not likely to be voting Simon at number one, this certainly makes me want to put him ahead of Ming in my preferences, and I would be very pleased to see us eschew such undue influences very publicly in an attempt to reposition ourselves in the public eye as the decent party.

I have some respect, moreso than most in the party I suspect, for the "economic liberal" argument, or at least my "unorthodox" economic outlook permits me to find a way in which freedom of economic life can be maximised whilst retaining a strong social safety net democratically run and managed, but if this is the game the main proponents of "economic liberalsim" within the party want to play, they are welcome to take it elsewhere.

As to Muslim members who are supposedly threatening to resign if Simon were to win because of his sexual history, I say to them, if they are any more than a figment of the Sunday Times's imagination (and we already know that the 20 they claim in Birmingham Hodge Hill are absolutely nothing to do with this but inter-Muslim community politics), I don't want to be in the same party as you. And on this I believe I am the liberal. So find a way to accommodate your faith within liberalism or find an illiberal party to support - there are plenty of them.