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ConservativeHome has done some polling on IDS's recommendations in his social justice report.

In it there's a stark hypocrisy - while 75% agree with the idea of a stricter classification of cannabis, 59%, no doubt out of self interest, disagree with the idea of putting extra money on booze taxes to pay for addiction treatments.

Let's get this right, the drug which creates the most dependency in Britain bar none is alcohol. Apart from tobacco the drug that causes the most deaths in Britain is alcohol. Cannabis, despite so many regular users, does not even register on the deaths list so far as I am aware. Alcohol consistently ranks well ahead of both cannabis and LSD and ecstasy in studies of the overall social damage it causes. The most common "gateway drug" to harder drugs is alcohol. The drug most commonly associated with mental illness episodes is...yes, alcohol.

Still, I suppose it tastes nice some of the time, when you can remember it anyway. And 8 million problem drinkers cannot be wrong can they? I wonder how many of them are in the grassroots Tory party?

They need to read Transform's report on how to regulate and reduce drug use without prohibition. Of course the Tories are not the only ones spinning the prohibition lies. But with a toking leader you'd have thought at least the Tories would be willing to have a mature discussion about it. Remind me why anyone with a libertarian bone in their body supports this shower?

Technorati Tags: alcohol, cannabis, conservatives, Dave the chameleon, drugs laws, liberty, prohibition, tories

As many of you will know, tomorrow at noon is the deadline for conference motions for autumn Federal conference. I've been a bit behind the game recently, but would like to submit the following motion. If you are a conference rep and feel you can support this (I'll accept friendly amendments too - via the comments if you like) could I ask you to let me have your details (email address, name, membership number and local constituency) as soon as possible. I need nine more before tomorrow - it is being circulated in other forums as well though.

Unfinished business: the Liberal reform agenda post-1909

Conference celebrates:

1. the recent hundredth anniversary of the development of the old age pension
2. the recent sixtieth anniversary of the birth of the National Health Service

which were the inspiration of Liberal thinkers, economists and politicians, even if not always implemented by Liberal governments.

Conference notes that:

1. in the next few months we will be celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Lloyd-George's 1909 "People's Budget"
2. in the century since then the dominant ideological and political battles have been between socialism and corporate welfarism
3. Liberals have throughout promoted distinctive and superior alternatives such as:
   i. shifting the burden of taxation away from economically productive and beneficial processes such as work and trade and onto the unearned advantage gained through monopoly, externalities and the exploitation of finite natural resources, including land
   Ii. the post-war "ownership for all" policies which emphasized that it was through a more equitable distribution amongst workers of the capital assets they help to create that the problems of poverty are most likely to be defeated
4. many of the problems that Asquith, Lloyd-George, Beveridge and others sought to address appear to be as intractable as ever
5. successive Labour and Conservative governments, through their respective socialist and class warfare or corporate welfare and protectionist policies, have signally failed to address the root causes of inequity and deprivation at home or abroad so begun by our Liberal forebears a century ago.

Conference therefore:

1. reaffirms the superiority of the Liberal tradition of political economy in offering uniquely sustainable mechanisms to address the ongoing root causes of poverty and deprivation whilst allowing the maximum freedom for individuals to pursue their ambitions and achieve their fullest potential on a level playing field.
2. calls on Liberal Democrat policy makers to rediscover if necessary and embrace the still very relevant ideas and policies of that Liberal economic tradition and to work towards the completion of the "work in progress" begun by the Asquith's pioneering government a century ago frustrated by the vested interests that continue hold considerable influence today to the detriment of the majority.

Even if, like me, you have studiously avoided watching any of the Olympic coverage, you will probably have seen the odd medals table on a news program or something. They all show the glorious People's Republic beating the evil Empire and its Poodle into second and third place respectively. But hang on, the host nation is the largest nation on earth by population and, whether or not there has been any cheating, such as using babies in the gymnastics or whatever, the simple fact is that their human resources are vast. So, as a completely meaningless bit of fun, I have compared the medals table (at least those nations who have won golds) with their respective populations.

Looking at it this way, we find Jamaica in first place with tiny Bahrain in second. Georgia beats Russia by a mile. Team GB are down in 15th place, but that is well ahead of Russia (25), the United States (29) and the Glorious People's Fatherland is way down at 45th out of 53 countries who won any gold medals at all.

Eat your pants, China! If they had won just one gold, Taiwan would have beaten you by a country mile!

Here's the full list:

Now, after all the spin, I wonder how many of the Chinese gold medalists are going to have bits amputated by the Glorious Central Committee of the People's Games so that they might also win in the Paralympics?

Not the sort of image I wanted over dinner:

“The Conservatives are half right and half wrong.

“They are right when they admit that fifty years of social engineering by Conservative and Labour Governments have been a miserable failure. We have been taxed. We have been subsidised. We have been regulated. We have been endlessly preached at. And, after two generations of all this, we have, as a nation, been made neither happier nor more virtuous. There is more illegitimacy, more divorce, more drunkenness, more crime.

“But the Conservatives are wrong when they believe that the harms of social engineering can be cured by different social engineering.

“Above all, this Report shows the usual Tory obsession with sex. These people seem to believe that, without laws to restrain us, most people would be copulating in the street. This is probably true for some Conservative politicians. Most ordinary people, however, are naturally inclined to join in stable, heterosexual unions and to produce children. Some people are not inclined to this, and libertarians respect their choice. But most people are so inclined. They do not need to be bribed with their own money into getting married. They do not need “help” from politicians."

The trouble is, I do find Sean Gabb to be quite intemperate and obnoxious when presenting his arguments, and I'm not clear how this helps the message. I too am an "angry not-so-young man" as far as government interference in our lives goes but I hope I keep my language at least temperate! The question is, how is a libertarian supposed to put libertarian policies into effect except by winning the power to do so in the first place?

Technorati Tags: conservatives, libertarianism

This posting has been a very long time in the making. In fact, as is usual, I've been more than normally ponderous about our political system since the local elections and it has prevented me doing anything else. I wanted to be careful about what I say, lest I be seen simply as having sour grapes at having lost - but I hope you will see that far from it, I am hopeful of achieving more, and for others moreover, outside the formal government structure than inside it.

I have fallen out of love with democracy; at least the corrupt, broken, power-hungry, centralizing, suffocating, nanny state, infantilizing political game we seem to have wandered into at some point.

Whether it's Labour's desperation to beat me that made them put out a leaflet that can only have been intended to damage my personal standing and reputation negligible though it may be already, the various tit-for-tat accusations that ran right through the Crewe by-election and the London mayoral elections, Westminster's divorce from the rest of the country as regards how much they get to spend of our money feathering their personal nests and how much we should know about it, it stinks.

I was watching again the "Open Minds" interview with Milton Friedman the other day and when it was put to him, as in J S Mill's formulation, that democratic government is the way in which we put good, ungreedy and unselfish people in charge to prevent bad, greedy and selfish people from taking over his response was simple: "government is an institution whereby the people with the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men get into the position of controlling them".

And who can argue, in the system we now have. The prize is enormous. Whoever lies his or her way to number 10 has the prospect of controlling nearly half of our entire national income. The mechanism of getting the top jobs is a sham - none of them in my opinion are competent to claim more wisdom than sixty million others of us that makes them able to take such a responsibility and they're only ever elected by a few thousand of those sixty million. Even in local government, tied up as it may be in red tape and Whitehall edicts, still the unscrupulous seem to make it to the top - look at Oxford Labour's own little lotacracy.

Tony Blair seemed to think he was virtually messianic, and now he believes apparently that he can solve all the world's problems now that he is no longer encumbered with such a small salary as the UK Prime Minister and the petty problems of Britain. But it doesn't matter who it is, Blair may have brought it to a head but neither Brown, Cameron, Clegg, Blair or whoever else may come next, has the capacity or competence to decide so much for so many.

And I don't think that I can suffer under this system much longer. If I was a young Muslim I'd probably be rounded up and accused of being "radicalised". Well I am radicalised. Radicalised and angry. It's a good job they've imposed a ban on unauthorized demonstrations outside of parliament, else I would hire a bunch of JCBs and lead a crowd to dismantle the Palace of Westminster stone by stone and cast its occupants into the river and hope they all wash up somewhere halfway up the Amazon where they would not be found for half a millennium - well actually I probably wouldn't, because I don't have that sort of courage, but I curse Guy Fawkes for having failed his opportunity!

In the local elections, nearly 70% of people did not vote. Even in generals, nearly 40% didn't vote last time. The Libertarian Party believes that this is a vast pool of voters who would readily switch to their, and my, image of a new Britain, with renewed freedoms and less state intervention. But I'm a Liberal, if not especially a Democrat, and my party is one of the three larger parties the LPUK blames for the lack of imagination in political discourse that has created this situation. And indeed, our regular flirtations with vaguely socialist redistribution policies rather than liberal level playing field policies, do seem to make us bed-pals with the two conservative parties trying to maintain their duopoly. Do I have to make that leap into the unknown of the Libertarian Party in order to have some hope for change? Or can I pursue change, with a reasonable hope of getting it, through a party so deeply embedded in the political "game" as the Lib Dems?

In 1745 David Hume suggested that one day we may come to the conclusion that our current system of government needs complete overhaul. I for one have reached that point. And David Hume's prescription in the "Idea of the Perfect Commonwealth" seems to me to be vastly superior to the decrepit institutions and structures we currently have to endure. I'm not sure any of the current setup is salvageable. That current setup is coercive, corrupt and centralized. It is now clear, more than ever before, as Rousseau said, "The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament."

ID cards, the surveillance state, the lost war on drugs, the uneven playing field allowing monopolization and exploitation, drinking on the tube, detention without charge, foreign wars in support of oil hungry allies, petty bureaucrats spying on our every move, raiding our bins, taxing us through the nose. Is this what J S Mill was suggesting? Our parliamentary system was created in times when communications were difficult. Yet even then they took less power to themselves than now, when we are all a phone call or internet connection away from forging links with millions of other individuals on this planet.

The time has come for mutualism instead of representative government. People getting together either locally or in geographically dispersed interest groups focussing on particular problems in those communities. Refusing to accept that all the answers can come from a clunking fist in London or his puppets in the Town Hall.

But how do we do that, without turning spin into revolution?