Randomly Selected Article or Link

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

Charles Kennedy was presenting a Channel 4 "Thirty Minutes" tonight on "Politics and Power". I can't find it online, so if you missed it (as I missed the first five minutes being suckered in by those other great Liberals trying to rearrange the county in the Madness of King George) all I can find to give you a flavour is the Radio Times write-up:

Charles Kennedy, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, examines the problem he sees as being at the heart of British politics: the way politicians too often sacrifice their principles in the pursuit of power. Speaking about his experiences fighting six general elections, Kennedy compares notes with parliamentary colleagues including Michael Howard, Ian Duncan Smith, Baroness Jay, Norman Tebbit, Baroness Morris and Jonathan Cruddas.

If it wasn't actually intended as a reminder to party members heading off to conference in four weeks or so of what we (were forced to) gave up only eight short months ago, it certainly succeeded in being so for me! Charles came across as we fondly remember - frank, honest and genuine. A real "home boy" still representing the constituency he grew up in. The man who, for all his faults and fumblings at times, managed to woo the electorate with his fireside chattiness.

I missed him setting out the hypothesis, but he diagnosed many of the problems lots of us feel about politics today - disengagement, lack of trust, unwillingness to debate with the public some of the biggest issues - especially at elections times - the concentration on what a tiny number of floating voters in a small number of marginal constituencies think and want to the exclusion of the majority of communities in the country, even the whips system keeping MPs on the party line regardless of what they honestly feel and whether their constituents agree.

He said that reform was necessary. IDS, I think it was, argued that there was no such thing as a General Election nowadays because of targetting marginal seats. Everyone seemed to agree. One problem was that parties did not want to appear to be divided on these hot issues (they chose Europe, nuclear power and Trident, but it could have been any of a whole load of other big issues - environment, drugs and so on), again especially at election times. And it made me wonder - how would it affect my commitment to an election campaign, say, if these big debates were aired and I did stand divided from my party on something that I thought very important.

And as I thought about it, I found that Charles was making the perfect argument for electoral reform, and in particular STV voting. It's a little ironic as I know some Labour electoral reformers felt that Charles was pretty much responsible for us letting the long grass grow around PR as an issue at a time when they could have built a lot of support for reform in their own party if there was pressure from us and the issue kept at the fore.

Under STV you have larger constituencies with several MPs and you get to rank the candidates individually in order of preference on the ballot paper. Say Oxfordshire could be one instead of six constituencies, returning six MPs altogether. In order to get yourself a better chance of being elected than your party colleagues you've got to make a name for yourself, differentiate yourself a little from them. So you might be generally a Tory voter, but are strongly pro-Europe, so you can get to choose the Tory candidates who are least anti-Eruope and maybe throw in a vote for a more free-market Lib Dem as better than the more Eurosceptic Tory candidates.

So it would give the candidates a reason to highlight their individual issues where they differ from the predominant party line, an excuse for when the whips try to berate them for voting honestly on those issues when the pressures are on to vote with the lobby fodder. In short, more open, honest and public debate, a closer approximation to the overall political preferences in the nation as a whole and no safe seats to abandon to concentrate on targeted marginal constituency.

A great pity then that Charles did not take the opportunity to prescribe that remedy. But I do hope to see more of him, soon. Not just the party, but the British political scene is the poorer for his not being as big a part of it as he was. And I say that as someone who put him sixth (if at all even possibly) in my preferences when he was first elected.

I was pleasantly surprised today to see that on the southern regional slot on the Politics Show on BBC1 they had an article looking at how the Lib Dems would introduce Land Value Tax - portraying it indeed as a "silver bullet" (Paul, and the BBC, have a great deal more confidence than I have in this respect!). Cllr Paul Bizzell of Vale of White Horse, where they carried out a paper based exercise nearly two years ago now into how it would affect an area of about a ward to the west of Oxford city, was explaining it, and did quite a good job - as he should!

County Council leader, Conservative Keith Mitchell was the "anti-LVT" interviewee, castigating it as a "left wing tax" that is designed to blight our beautiful country and to redistribute wealth - something, he said, that "we are not all in agreement with". So I've fired off a nice letter to Kaiser Keith:

Keith,

Much as I respect your views I think you should perhaps investigate the history of Land Value Tax's supporters:

Adam Smith:

"Both ground-rents and the ordinary rent of land are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own. Though a part of this revenue should be taken from him in order to defray the expenses of the state, no discouragement will thereby be given to any sort of industry. ...Ground-rents, and the ordinary rent of land, are therefore, perhaps, the species of revenue which can best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed upon them.

"Ground rents seem in this respect a more proper subject of peculiar taxation than even the ordinary rent of land. ...Ground-rents, so far as they exceed the ordinary rent of land, are altogether owing to the good government of the sovereign. ...Nothing can be more reasonable than that a fund which owes its existence to the good government of the stae should be taxed peculiarly, or should contribute something more than the greater part of other funds towards the support of that government."

Milton Friedman:

"There's a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise -- and yet we need taxes. ...So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago."

William F Buckley:

"It's mostly because I'm beaten down by my right-wing theorists and intellectual friends. They always find something wrong with the Single-Tax idea. What I'm talking about Mr. Lamb is Henry George who said there is infinite capacity to increase capital and to increase labor, but none to increase land, and since wealth is a function of how they play against each other, land should be thought of as common property. The effect of this would be that if you have a parking lot and the Empire State Building next to it, the tax on the parking lot should be the same as the tax on the Empire State Building, because you shouldn't encourage land speculation. Anyway I've run into tons of situations were I think the Single-Tax theory would be applicable. We should remember also this about Henry George, he was sort of co-opted by the socialists in the 20s and the 30s, but he was not one at all. Alfred J. Nock's book on him makes that plain. Plus, also, he believes in only that tax. He believes in zero income tax."

And not least that greatest son of Oxfordshire, Winston Churchill (albeit a Liberal at the time):

"I have made speeches by the yard on the subject of land value taxation, and you know what a supporter I am of that policy.

"It is quite true that the land monopoly is not the only monopoly which exists, but it is by far the greatest of monopolies -- it is a perpetual monopoly, and it is the mother of all forms of monopoly.

"Nothing is more amusing than to watch the efforts of our monopolist opponents to prove that other forms of property and increment are exactly the same, and are similar in all respects to the unearned increment in land."

Henry George was himself no socialist. Remember that the aim of us "single taxers" is to abolish all taxes on incomes, capital, profit that arise from human effort and hard work. It is unashamedly classically liberal and owes far more to the work of people whom the "right", and especially the libertarian right, would now look on as their predecessors than the "left" would - people like John Locke, David Ricardo, Malthus.

It is possibly a common fate of a good idea that it gets rubbished by all-comers who don't understand it. Georgists are castigated by the "right" as dangerous socialists, even communists, and by the left as loony neo-liberals. We must be doing something right!

It's worth noting that one of the biggest current proponents of LVT in print, Fred Harrison, has been published on it by the IEA, hardly some left-wing think tank. Though I suppose within your own party it is the looney left Bow Group who are promoting the idea, after a fashion.

Sincerely,

Jock

Following the revelation of yet more utter incompetence in government data handling the BBC asks...

Well, I posited a suggestion ten years ago now when I was on the Lib Dems' Civil Liberties Policy Working Group. At the time ID cards were but an evil glint in Liar, Liar, Tony Bliar's eyes but there was a clear feeling that they were pushing in that direction. But it was mainly in response to issues such as Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and government wanting more and more surreptitious access to data already held about us and our activities.

My suggestion was that if government felt the need to keep all this data on us, the very least they could do would be to put us in charge of how and when it was accessed. We could all have an encryption key - it need not even be supplied by government - you could purchase one perhaps from Thawte or someone like that if, when, you decided you could not trust the government.

Two encryption keys would be required any time any bureaucrat or official decided they wanted to take a peek at any data the government held identifying you as the subject. A bit like a "nuclear key" where you need two people to turn the key for anything to work, the official would have their own key which would identify them as the person trying to access the data and check they were authorized to do so, and they would have to be in contact with the data subject, you, and, like a bank call centre does when they phone you would have to authenticate they were dealing with the real you by getting you to enter some of your PIN or similar before they'd get access.

Every government database system that held any data on individuals could have to go through an annual independent audit to ensure there was no inbuilt mechanism for bypassing such a security measure or, for example, copying data en masse with personal identifiers in. The system could be extended, voluntarily, to any organization that holds personal data - such as banks - if they felt it was more effective than creating their own, and the whole principle could be embedded in Data Protection legislation (not that the presence of Data Protection legislation stops the government currently breaking their own laws).

Remember, it's not so very long ago that when you submitted your tax return each part of it, or schedule, would be dealt with by a different official so that no one person could actually gain a picture of what you were worth. We need to return to that culture. Modern technology is great stuff, or it can be. But at the moment the culture seems to be to assume that systems ought to be intrusive rather than actively looking for ways as part of systems specifications to maintain the benefits of fast modern communications and data (for there are many) whilst not being intrusive. Witness the debate about road pricing - "eye in the sky spies" or "black box" systems that don't need to transfer data about your movements, only about your overall journey for the purpose of billing.

Would it grind government to a halt? Perhaps, though in saying that the former tax regime was entirely paper based and so much more troublesome and it didn't exactly collapse then and banks and other large data processing organizations use similar technology and still operate reasonably efficiently. Would government grinding to a halt be a terribly bad thing in any case I wonder?

But, whether the data is about criminals, child benefit recipients or recruits to the armed forces, this current government has proven itself utterly incapable of managing data, or perhaps just contemptuous of our rights. Personally, I doubt any other party's government would be doing much better - contempt for the citizen is embedded in Whitehall and Westminster, but Straw and Smith should resign over this latest data loss immediately. Resign and be tried as any data controller be would with such brazen data losses under their watch. Enough is enough. These bastards need to get out of our lives, or perhaps some day we will collectively decide we need to make them butt out, forcibly.

UPDATE:  My boss just pointed me to this article in Computer Weekly about Lib Dems calling for data commissioners to protect data about the public.  I'm not sure it's anywhere near adequate.  The liberal response should be, of course, to reduce the quantities of data first by being ruthless about who needs to store any data about us, but I can't see a data commissioner, even one for every database, will be any more effective than the current DPA regime of a responsible Data Owner who can be prosecuted for failure to comply with the act.  Clealry government departments need to be held responsible in the courts, with individuals answerable, just as they are in other organizations.  And at the top of the tree comes the minister concerned.  It is not technology that is at fault but a lax attitude to how that technology should be used that matters.  We need to change the culture such that databases are designed from the bottom up toassume, essentially, that the data subject is the one who by default has access not the data owners.

...well, briefly and involuntarily. There's a Land Value Tax and Transportation policy fringe at the Labour conference tonight hosted by the Professional Land Reform Group of which I am a member, or at least I think I am - they might not think so as I've never had my subscription acknowledged (you know the kind of organisation - we have lots of them in the party!).

Amongst the speakers were to have been Vince Cable and Steve Norris, but Vince cancelled at short notice today, so I was asked to step in. How ironic it would have been me trying to belt up the only toll motorway in the country to get to a panel discussion about transport policy and land tax (especially since I was at school with one of the farmers who must have made a mint out of the toll road as well!).

But alas, what we thought was on at 8pm turns out to be 6.30pm, and without some form of ballistic transport I don't think I could have made that. So the excellent Peter Reilly from ALTER is going to go instead. But it was kind of nice to be asked to step in for Vince...:)

Oh well, maybe next time. I'm not so sure I would have been the best advocate for our new tax policies anyway!

Technorati Tags: land value tax, lib dems, tax shifting, taxation