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I don't really have a lot of time for the Greens in Oxford - their politics that is - as individuals I get on well I think with all of those I know. They go their own way and do their own thing and are rarely to be relied on, as our joint administration in the run up to 2002 on the City Council proved.

But they have a one party crypto-communist state in East Oxford, so there's no meaningful opposition to them on the East Area Committee, at the moment at least. But it is unusually refreshing to see them turn down the offer of an intrusive state run CCTV system on the Cowley Road. I'm not sure about their alternative of bobbies on bikes and (more!) road safety measures on a road that has become a bit of a joke anyway for the way vehicles now have to weave dangerously in and out of the path of buses and pedestrians, but good on them for resisting the encroachment of further state surveillance in the area.

I've never felt unsafe down there, except perhaps on leery Wednesday when the university sports teams are on the drunken prowl, and it is well surveilled naturally by all the people using it at all hours of the day and night - and by bouncers at the pubs and clubs every few yards. So there is no need in my mind for yet more electronic eyes.

Matt Sellwood in Peak Oil claims that:

The fact that only the Green Party is talking about this problem is extremely worrying...politicians of all new parties need to be planning for our 'energy descent'.

Technorati Tags: lib dems, climate change, oxford, greens

...but will the politicians listen? Somehow, I doubt it!

Since I wrote my piece on gangs and drugs on Saturday I've seen a steady trickle of hits from Google searches about Rhys Jones and I've kept an eye on the search terms and found I was pretty well alone in voicing the opinion that drugs policy plays the biggest part in the gang gun deaths that stalk some of our estates. So it is with some relief that I find Johann Hari is another voice of sanity in today's Independent:

Johann Hari: Tragic victims of a self-defeating policy:

This is the story of two victims of a war that cannot be won and should not be fought. You have heard of the first: Rhys Jones, the 11-year-old in Liverpool who was shot in the neck as he played on his bike. You have not heard of the second: Andres Sauzo, a 24-year-old Mexican man who had his arms, legs and head chain-sawed from his body, and was found rotting in five bin bags scattered across his home town of Zihyatanejo. They are casualties - either direct or indirect - in a war that kills tens of thousands of people a year, and could end tomorrow, if we chose to.

Rhys and Andres were killed because of a political decision by the US government to wage a global "war on drugs", and demand other governments fall into line. When you criminalise a massive and growing industry – some 5 per cent of the world's entire economic activity – it does not go away. It is handed to armed criminal gangs, who flood the streets with guns to secure a slice of the riches.

Aside from also citing Milton Friedman, he goes on rightly to criticize the British political reaction to the events of the past week. I hope some of them are listening, and can hear over the noise of their knees jerking and their bandwagons' creaking...

The scattered proposals tossed out this week to deal with drug gangs are elaborate evasions of the real issue. Banning gang videos on YouTube is barely even a sticking plaster, while the Cameroonian idea that gangs are the rancid afterbirth squeezed out by single parents simply doesn't match with the facts. Denmark has the highest rate of single parenthood in Europe – but it has virtually no gangs, except among recent immigrant communities, who overwhelmingly consist of stable two-parent families.

No: if we want to stop gang culture, we need to take back the industry that makes gangs rich, and give it once again to doctors, pharmacists and off-licenses. Legalizing drugs rips the spine out of gangs. Of course they will try to move into other industries – protection rackets, cigarette smuggling and so on – but these have far lower profit margins. In a legalised economy, the gangs would no longer be the richest kids on the estate, and could barely afford firepower, so the core of their glamour would melt away.

We should be outraged. In my opinion our governments, acting in our name, are knowingly complicit in the suffering and the deaths that all this causes, for little benefit and certainly with no liberal philosophical justification. We should be demanding action now, not only to save future Rhys Joneses, but to save what is estimated at £18bn a year in domestic policing and criminal justice costs alone.