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So, Saddam is likely to die at the end of a rope.

"As you watch your TV pictures of the march, ponder this: if there are 500,000 on that march, that is still less than the number of people whose deaths Saddam has been responsible for.

"If there are one million, that is still less than the number of people who died in the wars he started."

Tony Blair, 15th February 2003, Glasgow.

Presumably the other 499,852 or so deaths are to be "taken into consideration" as they say. Much as I abhor utterly judicial killing of any sort, anywhere, death is a way of life in Iraq, as much now as it was back then, and it seems futile to bleat about the wrongs of the death penalty when so many in that country apparently see it as the only way to achieve justice and our main ally revels in state sponsored killing in his own country.

However, I cannot help feeling that there remain so many unanswered questions about Saddam's period in power, and in particular the involvement of his former western allies:

These questions will now likely remain forever unanswered, and our involvement and guilt in the injustices of Saddam's regime will never be brought to justice. While we may not have achieved victory in Iraq, we have already gained the victor's privilege of rewriting the history of it. Aren't you glad to be British!

See, clubland's popular wisdom strikes again. Apparently boffins have confirmed that Ketamine, which the moral panic whipping Cassandras of the anti-drugs world denounce loudly as "horse tranquilizer", can relieve the symptoms of depression within minutes or hours, rather than the days and weeks that current anti-depressant drugs can take.

The relief from symptoms can apparently also last a whole week, so one dose (probably on a Saturday night during a particularly manic episode brought on by bad music and the proximity of smelly lumps jiggling bottles of alco-pop at you) will last all week.

But, they say "the drug’s hallucinogenic side effects mean it is unlikely to be prescribed to patients". Oh. Why bother? It's enough to make one depressed all over again.

My advice...buy a small share in a racehorse and get to know the vet.

Whatever next? MDMA relieving the pressure of social situations for the chronically shy? Home Office staff handing out Soma with passports? You never know.

Technorati Tags: drugs laws

Spotted an interesting piece on BBC News tonight about Liverpool:

All very interesting. In 1793 there were some banking collapses in London and an important bank in Liverpool went bust as a consequence. There was literally not enough cash about to oil the wheels, or perhaps rather fill the sails, of the burgeoning trade of the city. The council went to ask for a loan from the Bank of England but it was refused. So it took more radical action. They petitioned for a local Act of Parliament "...to enable thee Common Council of the Town of Liverpool in the Coutnty of Lancaster on behalf of and on account of the Corporation of the said Town to issue negotiable notes for a limited time and to a limited amount."

For two years the city issued its own currency on the creditworthiness of the city and its citizens and traders, until the financial storms rocking the global trade of which Liverpool was emerging as the centre calmed down.

So I figured I would restart blogging with some feedback on what turned out to be an excellent South Central Regional Liberal Democrats' conference on Saturday here at Oxford Brookes University. Given that I see the place every day my motivation to get there in time for nine-thirty speeches on a Saturday morning was not great, and I actually arrived a few minutes into the first keynote speech by Evan Harris.

Some in the party and elsewhere give Evan a hard time I hear, but I have a lot of time for him. I get the impression he works his proverbials off in his constituency and has a penchant for minority interests which suits me. But listening to him on Saturday and then later hearing Vince Cable they between them seem to epitomize what one might call the "old" Lib Dems - leftist, statist, more interventionist - and the "emerging" Lib Dems - more liberal in every sense.

Evan restated his support for the fifty pence tax rate and bemoaned the federal conference at which it was removed from party policy, Vince emphasized that the new tax policy, trying to focus, as Churchill said, on not just "how much have you got" but also on "how did you get it", was in fact the most redistributive set of tax policies on the table from any party.

Harris's main point, as I understand it, was that the fifty pence tax rate sent a signal, even if it did not in fact promise to raise terribly much, that we were prepared to take more from the highest earners if need be to lift the poorest out poverty. It is a simple message to be sure, and easier to communicate than the "new" idea that we should be more carefully targeting tax on externalities and unearned privilege, but not one that adds to the progressiveness of the overall tax system one iota.

But Evan is exactly the sort of person we want to attract to our book the ALTER executive are putting together to launch centenary celebrations of the 1909 People's Budget. We want to show him how rigourously applying what we have been calling the "liberal economic tradition" will in fact raise the lot of the poorest by increasing the returns to labour, by rooting out corporate welfare, and by allowing genuine competition to bring down the cost and increase the quality of all sorts of goods and services some take for granted are best delivered by the state. In short that there need be no dichotomy between "social" and "economic" liberalism.