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Given that it was the courts that ordered that even roadside GATSOs had to be painted yellow so they were visible from afar, how do Essex police think this will be ruled legal:

At £1000 an hour, as the Taxpayers' Alliance points out, this is an extremely expensive speed camera!

Hot on the heels of discussions about banning possession of BSDM material as discussed by Stephen Tall comes news that a charity is called for a ban on pro-suicide websites:

Suicide is a major cause of death in young men

The government should make it illegal for internet sites to incite or advise people on how to commit suicide, a charity says.

Papyrus, set up to tackle young suicide, said the risk posed by pro-suicide websites was not being taken seriously enough.

The charity said the 1961 Suicide Act should be amended to make it illegal to publish such material on the web.

The government said it was looking at how rules could be tightened.

At the moment, the law says it is illegal to aid, abet, counsel, procure or incite someone to commit suicide, but to be successfully prosecuted the individual has to have knowledge and participated in the suicide.

The charity said it was aware of nearly 20 internet-related suicides cases in the UK in the last five years.

Oh dear. At least the Home Office spokesperson quoted said it would not be possible as many sites were hosted abroad. But this apparent trend towards demanding censorship of this that and the other is naive and dangerous.

Suicide is tragic. My then best friend killed himself while away at university twelve years ago. Because, it transpired, he feared that he would not make a good lawyer and let his family down. And guess what, we hadn't heard of the web back then. "20 internet related suicide cases" - all very sad, but actually, how on earth do you work that out. There are lots of legitimate medical sites as well that someone might use in the process of working out how to kill oneself. Are these to be banned "just in case" as well?

I'll bet those same sites that have allegedly aided and abetted suicides have also prevented a fair number as people talk about their problems, hook up with others in the similar situations and so on. Suicide, I am assured, is rarely a rational act. Some would say that philosophically it is the most irrational act as we are preprogrammed to be survivors.

People will always find information from other sources. A quick glance at the top few of the "I want to kill myself" search they claim yields about 5 million pages (I get nearly 29 million incidentally) seems to suggest that most are cries for help. And I've seen such cries in action on the web where the person has been "talked down" and gone on to sort themselves out. I rather think you can't have one without the other. If the information wasn't there you'd likely not have people asking for help and being talked out of it. The very top returned site on Google is, as you might expect, the Samaritans.

Censorship is not the answer, and in particular on the web will lead to dangerous consequences for civil liberties as every pressure group gets in on the act about their particular issue.

One of the reasons I am so enthusiastic about Chris Huhne in his bid for the Lib Dem leadership is precisely because he is something new. Obviously there is the fact that he's only been in the hothouse of the Westminster "bubble" for such a short time, and that he would be the first party leader to have served in a parliament we, as Lib Dem, put a lot of store by in the form of the European Parliament, but if you have read my ramblings much you will also know I am keen on what some might call "unorthodox" economics.

Little has been made of the fact that Chris is, currently, President of Lib Dems ALTER (Action for Land-value Tax and Economic Reform). Personally I cannot categorically say that this means he supports Land Value Taxation with the same enthusiasm as most of us in ALTER do, or whether it is just that he is prepared to sponsor pluralism in economic debate, but that pluralism is, in my opinion, key to our producing a new political and economic "narrative" for the twenty-first century that will enable us better to face the challenges of globalisation, international development, the ageing population and pensions crisis, growing wealth disparities and all the rest. Certainly his rhetoric of shifting the tax burden away from incomes and onto resource use is redolent of ALTER's own "Tax Shift Now!" campaign slogan.

Since the "victory" of the monetarists, especially through the likes of Milton Friedman's influence in Reaganomics and Thatcherite neo-liberalism, there has been an apparent unwritten rule in British, and world, politics that the base economic assumptions of monetarism may not under any circumstances be challenged, despite the obvious inequalities that continue to afflict the world that neo-liberalism was purported to have the ability to resolve. We are in many ways in deeper economic crises than we ever have been. Despite a proliferation of the trappings of wealth, the least advantaged are stuck often below the lowest rung - those who question the very notion of "relative poverty" need to get out into communities that are struggling to pay their way and bearing a disproportionate share of the burden of the debt we create in order to keep economies functioning.

This has led to a real poverty in political discourse, where our main parties, including the Lib Dems, spend most of their time trying to persuade us that they are the best deck-chair attendants for the Titanic as it approaches the ice-bergs of climate change, the resurgence of China and India as global economic forces, the ageing populations in the west and the appalling disparities that mark out the rich world from the poor world - where one quarter of one percent of the world's population control as much of the planet's wealth as the other 99.75% put together.

So, "out with the old" is not a reflection on other candidates' ages - after all, one of the issues that affects the pensions problem is that people now of Ming's age can expect to live another thirty years, certainly plenty of time to see us into government! But what we do need is a new approach, to create for us a distinct political-economic narrative to put us in the vanguard for fighting these challenges unencumbered by the history of ideological vacuum that has marked out British politics the last twenty or thirty years.

For this, Chris is clearly the man for the job. His interest in radical alternatives and his ability to comprehend and present them is unquestioned. Let's forget this argument about where we want to "slot in" to British politics - the overcrowded "centre", the economic "right" or the statist "left" - and take this opportunity to promote a radical vision of "sustainable abundance" and equity that a fair and liberal world should have created decades ago and is still abjectly failing to do.

Apparently the Data Protection Act turned ten years old on Wednesday, according to El Reg. But you'd be forgiven for thinking it never existed, or has been repealed, given all the recent stories of data loss by, of all organizations, the government, and the newer suggestions that all our DNA, phone and internet communications records, should be in a database, forever, and instantly accessible to any accredited official (I won't say "qualified" because I suspect they won't be) with an easily contrived excuse.

Fortunately, the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, stands between the state and its ambition to know everything there is to know about its citizens and what they do, consume, learn and who they associate with. But with such a lax attitude to their own obligations under their own Data Protection laws somehow I doubt Mr Thomas will be heard, let alone listened to.

My attachment to a few home comforts prevents me from becoming a survivalist type, and I am too much of a coward to be a martyr. But I do seriously consider at times whether there is a way to opt out of this inexorable creep of the surveillance state. Emigration? Where would be any better though I wonder? Switzerland maybe, but I doubt they'd have me.

And I just do not understand why so many people, it seems from my view anyway, are able passively to accept this state encroachment into our lives. I know plenty who do not even see it going on. Why on earth is it any more acceptable say, for the state to know about all your telephone calls or emails than it would be, say, to open every posted letter somewhere in the postal system, or, creepier still, have someone follow you so they can check out who you talk to in the street or who you visit? I'm sure there have been times when this ability is exactly the reason why the Royal Mail existed - for intelligence purposes - and with a monopoly too, mind you, though in the popular conscience the Royal Mail, USPS and other national mail services are actually supposed to be trusted guarantors that nobody should tinker with private correspondence with impunity.

Of course, such surveillance of physical media communications or personal movements would be impractical on a mass scale whereas electronic communications tend to leave tracks for all sorts of (usually business) reasons. But "just because we can", just because massive scale monitoring is now feasible and manageable with electronic communications does not mean we should. I have a contract with a phone company, and the data even they keep should be limited to as little, and for as short a time as necessary, as needed to deliver me the service they promised. And indeed, that is core to the principles behind the Data Protection Act.

No doubt they will all say that you can breach those principles "in the national interest" or whatever. But at the very worst, such a situation should be the exception and not the rule, and should be subject at all times to proof of probable cause via judicial oversight. After all, the "national interest" could, and usually will be, what the government of the day decide it is if it is left up to them and their agents. I always have a rueful smile when I recall that for years each part of your annual tax return would be dealt with by a different Inland Revenue clerk so that no one government official would actually know what you earned in total. Can we ever hope to resurrect such a level of government respect for our privacy?

I'm not sure I believe any longer that grand government database and surveillance projects do originate in a genuine desire to do something good. I just think it is an innate trait of government and power to want to have as much information about those over whom they wield power or those on whom they are dependent for power as they possibly can. Acton's dictum is writ large in the creep of the surveillance state: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Information brings, and sustains power.

I linked to this post at the Libertarian Party blog the other day, but if you didn't read it then, please go have a look now. It's a light-hearted look at the inconveniences that could beset the most minor activities in your daily lives if all these supposedly beneficial systems actually come to pass. Forget that "if you've nothing to hide" crap, I challenge anyone to say they would not be severely pissed off with this level of "helpful" surveillance.

Yet all of this need not be the end game, just as I am sure today there are thousands of people trying to find new ways of evading the Chinese national firewall, or make a few phone calls without being billed for them, people will continue to develop ways of keeping one step ahead of the voracious information state. Ultimately, I don't believe that the state can win against the advance of the technology. But there is a danger, if we do not start constitutionally protecting our privacy now, that the state will keep trying on any pretext they can muster, and turn truly tyrannical in their desire to control information flows.

Further to the previous confusion over who is going to stand in for Vince Cable tonight at a Labour fringe event on taxation policy and transport funding it turns out that organisers have managed to get none other than the next leader of the Labour Party, John McDonnell to champion the new Lib Dem tax plans at the event.

Eat your heart out Evan!