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In response to a recent letter in the Oxford Mail...

I believe Alan Page (1st Feb) is completely wrong on drugs, though I am probably in a minority. Prohibition, especially of something addictive, is mad. It makes criminals of people who literally “cannot help it” once they are hooked.

For most of history humans have used natural based drugs for health, recreation, and even religious rites. In the nineteenth century when both opium and cocaine were legal, the group most likely to indulge were upper class women. They really only became illegal when the lower classes wanted to join the fun, and often on racist grounds at that.

While they were legal and available in controlled, measured, self-administered doses, addicts functioned perfectly well with few adverse health or social effects, unlike those whose poison was or is alcohol.

People get into more risky methods of use, such as injecting, to get the greatest “hit” precisely because they do not know where their next one may come from or when. The worst will use multiple substances to compensate for an irregular supply of their preferred drug.

On the same principle as “good money drives out bad” who would go to the shady man in the darkened windowed BMW to get a supply of unknown quality or strength if your local pharmacist or nightclub were selling regulated doses alongside the beer or cough mixture?

And you can bet respectable companies have plans for that eventuality already in place.

An article on the BBC today about housing and nationalists:

BBC NEWS | Politics | Housing 'key to far right rise':
By Dominic Casciani

Competition for housing is the "frontline" of a battle to prevent the far right's rise, MPs have warned.

Labour MP John Cruddas and Lib Dem Simon Hughes said policymakers had failed to recognise BNP gains were linked to anger over who gets homes.

...reminded me of a scene in "Cathy Come Home" the other night where the women in the hostel are arguing with a black woman that "her type" was getting all the available housing.

Plus ca change...

Good. No election. Well, I'll qualify that a little - the relatively short pain of a three week campaign could have seen friend and former council colleague Steve Goddard give Andrew Smith some unwanted leisure time for Christmas, which would have been fantastic - but I'm pleased we won't have to for now.

There may now be three, four, even five more party conferences in which to whip up a storm of revolutionary liberalism to really wow the electorate with a genuine alternative to the "cosy consensus" which, in my opinion anyway, is not evident right now in our policies. Time to give the FPC some breathing space from the poll obsessed campaign strategists to come up with really radical policies and instruct those strategists to sell them, not be hemmed in by what they say they can and cannot sell.

2009 will see the centenary of Lloyd George's "People's Budget" and we can develop a compelling theme in two years around "Liberal Britain: unfinished business" hijacked as the political landscape has been for a century alternately by the socialism and protectionism of Labour and Conservative governments, now merged into one amorphous mass of interfering statism.

That the hysteria of the past few days can be put down to a Tory announcement of a tax shift amounting to not much more than a half of one per cent of the government budget from the super-rich to the merely very rich just proves the paucity of imagination currently pervading both politicians and public. Ming Campbell has been right in suggesting that there's not a fag paper between the two halves of the statist party led by Brown and Cameron, and the past two weeks have seen nothing to disabuse us of that.

The time for radicalism is now. Radical liberalism. We don't merely want the "people to decide" but for the people to be able to take back power over their own lives. The power that once marked us out as British; dynamic, enterprising and freedom loving but which has been subdued, even nearly killed off perhaps through decades of dependency and government managerialism.

Brian's family has confirmed the funeral arrangements:

2pm Friday 7 September, 2007.

Stonesfield Parish Church, near Witney, Oxford.
(buses are available from Oxford Bus or Rail Station - see attached PDF )

Donations in lieu of flowers to:

Adopt-A-Minefield
Kensington Charity Centre
4th Floor
Charles House
375 Kensington High Street
London, W14 8QH

telephone: 020.7471.5581
fax: 020.7471.5582
web: http://www.landmines.org.uk

Now that he's a private citizen again, Mr Rumsfeld will now have more time for foreign travel, fostering contacts with new allies and maybe saying bye-bye to old ones: