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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

Over the years the government's regional governance strategy has been a complete and utter shambles. The Regional Development Agencies are QUANGOs unaccountable to anyone other than within what was then the Department of Local Government, Transport and the Regions. Then a layer of pseudo accountability was added in the form of not directly elected Regional Assemblies(most members were at least appointed by local authorities to which they had themselves been elected). Their attempt to give the regions more "autonomy" by setting up directly elected assemblies foundered at the first attempt in the North East referendum. And justifiably - there was very little additional power being devolved to them and to all intents and purposes they appeared to be designed to accrete more power from lower level tiers of government like counties and districts.

So when they abandoned that idea they decided to replace the half-democratic Regional Assemblies with a minister and parliamentary select committee for each region. So what a surprise to see the results of yesterday's Commons' debate on the establishment of the regional committees. Yup, you guessed it, they have somehow contrived to make a practically undemocratic system somewhat less democratic and accountable.

The government has decided that, unlike with local government or even the half-bakedelected Regional Assemblies, they are going to keep a majority on every committee, irrespective of the proportion of MPs each party holds at Westminster for each individual region. Not only that, but they will allow the importing of MPs from other regions whose constituency responsibilities have nothing to do with the region they are going to be deliberating about.

So, a region in which the party of government holds the fewest number of Westminster seats will have a committee with a majority of members from the governing party scrutinizing the decisions and plans of a minister from that governing party which that region rejected when given the chance.

Democracy eh? Dontcha just love it! Here's the story from the Lib Dem newsfeed:

The Liberal Democrats yesterday accused the Government of abusing the opportunity to provide decent regional accountability by imposing its parliamentary majority on new regional Select Committees, even in areas where they have the fewest MPs. Shadow Leader of the House, Simon Hughes MP, challenged the proposed make up of the new committees in a House of Commons debate, as MPs voted in their favour yesterday. The need for the Committees to reflect voting patterns was, he said, a "central obligation" of devolution and something the Government had "failed to grasp". Simon illustrated the problems with the proposal by highlighting the situation in the south-west region...(read more)

I'm not sure whether to tip my hat to Linda Jack for highlighting this non-story or to criticize her for regurgitating excitedly and in the manner of a parrot a scurrilous and unthinking story from the Torygraph that Chris Huhne owns shares in surveillance firm.

By James Kirkup, Political Correspondent
Last Updated: 3:07am GMT 03/11/2007

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat leadership contender who has strongly criticised both supermarkets and the surveillance state, is a major shareholder in a company that supplies "people monitoring" technology to Tesco.

The revelation by The Daily Telegraph of Mr Huhne's links to the country's biggest supermarket may raise questions among party members about his consistency.

Mr Huhne, 53, the party's environment spokesman, owns £250,000 worth of shares in Irisys, a Northamptonshire company that makes thermal imaging technology used to track people as they move.

It's a bit like saying we should criticize the medical use of morphine because some people misuse its close cousin heroin. So far as I can see the criticism of the "surveillance state", criticism which I fully join with , is about being able to snoop on and track identifiable individuals, usually as they go about mundane ordinary lives. This is the heroin, open to abuse and getting worse.

However the company in which Chris owns a significant shareholding, Irisys, does not do this sort of stuff. What it provides is the morphine of the surveillance world - generally beneficial when used properly. It does infra-red surveillance. Individuals cannot be identified*.

Its original application of this technology was to examine structures for stress points - it's the stuff that stops the plane you're traveling falling out of the sky because nobody noticed a hairline crack in the wing, or that keeps oil rigs safe from the stresses of the open sea.

Can you tell who it is yet?
Originally uploaded by carolyne_ej_smith

Used on humans, its thermal imaging technology allows for such helpful things as finding a person buried in rubble in an earthquake zone. More sophisticated applications combining it with computers in various situations would have helped prevent the Hillsborough disaster by preventing too many thermal blobs getting into the enclosed area where all the crushing took place. It helps to prevent unauthorized access to secure areas by one thermal blob "tailgating" someone with a card (it alerts a security guard who goes to take a look presumably) or keeps a count of the number of thermal blobs having entered a building so that if it needs to be evacuated the emergency services can see that everyone who went in is accounted for.

All good stuff I think you would agree. Then there are also applications that simply enhance the experience of the user - Tesco (amongst others) use it to tell how many people are in the store and to open up extra tills so that when they get to the end of their shop they don't have to wait in a queue. Others use it to count "footfall" into a shop or shopping centre to help them provide the optimal layout in the store. One could imagine it being used for example to check how many "thermal blobs" there are at bus stops along a route and decide to put on extra buses.

Of course, just as you can abuse morphine alongside its cousin heroin if you want to, you could couple this technology with CCTV and do actual snooping on identifiable individuals. But it's not what Irisys does. So I reckon Chris is in the clear here, personally. Indeed, by investing in a non-invasive application of modern technology, he is probably more than in the clear - he is on the side of the angels!

All this is readily discoverable from the firm's website. It's just lazy journalism and even lazier parroting of that journalism to peddle that this is some conflict of interest portraying Chris as a secret supporter of the surveillance state.

*There is research going on at the moment that suggests that you can identify an individual solely by their gait and I suppose this could be an issue even with medium resolution infra-red images, but so far as I am aware it's neither proved yet or in production applications. Presumably Irisys, and their shareholders, would take a view on whether this is an area they would want to get into when it is possible and proven.