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The BBC reports that in the US an ex-defence adviser attacks Bush:

[Richard] Perle says in hindsight he would not have backed invasion

It seems to me that this was one of those neo-cons specially brought in to sell the war against all the evidence. Three days before elections too! That's gratitude for you.

Dan Paskins takes me to task for moaning about Labour's tactics against me when they put out that "scurrilous" leaflet while others, including he says the Lib Dems, are doing just as negative things in their leaflets. I should treat it, he says, as an opportunity to debate those issues if I feel so strongly about them and accept that, in such a debate, I might win over some people, or at least their respect for making the case rather than whining.

He provides an example that, in our East Oxford wide tabloid, we ran an article asking whether Andrew Smith, Oxford East's constituency's New Labour MP, was the biggest hypocrite in town for his duplicitous stance on post office closures. He says that as an issue, that too was beyond the remit of the City Council and therefore, by one of my "rules" of discourse not something that should be mentioned in the context of those elections.

Set aside for the moment a leaflet I saw for Hinksey Park ward with a priceless (literally!) picture of Andrew, the Labour council candidate and A N Other hugging a pillar box pledging to keep Grandpont Post Office open. Even if they hadn't made it a campaign issue of their own, economic well-being is, according to their own government, part of the remit of any local authority. The other four districts in Oxfordshire have pledged to fight the closures and to support communities that are affected if they fail in that fight. Already considerable time and effort had gone in, not, it has to be said, much on the part of the city council, as much as by the various bodies that help social enterprises in the county, to keeping Iffley Village Shop and Post Office going after previous owners decided to stop running it. But clearly the campaign issue for Grandpont and Mr Smith's own actions in supporting the closures in parliament are at odds. They made it a campaign issue even if it wasn't. The person in the photos objecting to the closures voted in favour of them when he had the chance. That seems materially different from my case.

Then there's the question as to whether one should simply debate what is thrown at you to debate, or object to it. Well, I don't for one minute believe that putting out a leaflet on the last weekend of the campaign, distorting my views by selective quoting, is an invitation to a debate. After all, I know some Labour lackey had collected the quotes some weeks previously - I saw them trawling through my drug posts in the week commencing 7th April - if they wanted a debate, there would have been time. It was also notable that they did not put out the said leaflet in the part of the ward that might have been expected to be most interested in such a debate, in the halls of residence (though they didn't put anything round the halls of residence to be fair, in their apparent attempt to disenfranchise a quarter of their electorate by not engaging with them).  Yes, let's have such a debate. It is all too rare in this country to be able to have a reasoned debate about drugs policy. And stunts like this leaflet prove why.

Dan thinks my position is significantly different from that of my party. It is not. The party concluded that the current system of criminal enforcement was often if not always ineffectual and counter productive, failing to minimize harm and continuing to put users and others into the realms of the brutal organized crime networks supplying these substances. The main difference really between my position and the party position is the action I would take to remedy that - legalize, regulate and tax - whereas the party still feels that legalizing would not be an option even if it wanted to promote that as policy because of international obligations. As their leaflet nearly managed to get right, whilst not strictly legalizing, policy is that people whose only crime is possession of small amounts of any drugs for personal use will not be impriisoned, usually leading them to further addiction and contact with drugs.  Honest reporting of my opinion would of course also have said that I believe legalize, regulate and tax is the way to stop drugs getting into the hands of children, for example, which was obviously not even explained to former councillor Standingford when asking for her opinion who went off on one about protecting and educating children about drugs.

No, let's face it, I have a moral right in law to object to my work (this blog) being chopped up into sentences and rearranged out of context to create a derivative work whose sole intention, the evidence suggests, was to bring into question my character or reputation. I will argue that doing so (creating a derivative work against copyright rules) amounts to making a false statement of fact about an opponent (the same cannot be said of claiming, correctly, that Andrew Smith is "supporting post offices" in Labour leaflets, but voting for their closures in Hansard, or indeed in Dan's case that a vote for the Labour Party is support for the party that has recently taken us into several illegal wars). I say again, it is this sort of stunt that puts people off indulging in meaningful progressive debate about what is a significant issue in our world, even if not one that I have any power to do anything about whether elected to the city council or not.

I say supporters of prohibition are accessories to the gangland and drug related deaths that happen at home and abroad as a result of the criminal underworld in which the drugs trade operates with justification. Such moral turpitude on the part of those that would shirk that debate or use the difference of opinion for a little electoral gain is shameful, frankly. It's uncomfortable I'm sure, but call a spade a spade - Labour traded those deaths, past and future, for a few extra votes.

Earlier this year the big fuss about cannabis was research that purported to show that it *caused* mental health problems. Or, more specifically, that amongst those people with a predisposition to schizophrenia and other serious mental health problems it somehow lit the fuse that was already prepared.

Then recently the same statistical evidence used to justify this claim was re-examined by another group of researchers who found a more plausible explanation was that people with such mental health problems actually tend to try to self-medicate as their illness progresses. So use of cannabis is the effect, not the cause, of those mental health problems.

Now the Independent reports that 50% of drug addicts and alcoholics (the same thing of course!) have mental health problems for which the drinking or addiction is often an attempt to self medicate and that many are being misdiagnosed because practitioners see the symptom, not the cause - the addiction, not the pre-existing mental illness.

The distinction is of course crucial...

The former research tells us that some natural substances that mankind has used apparently for as long as human history are the cause of terrible illnesses, parents blame the drugs and the drug dealers for their tragically damaged, sometimes terminally, children and the "war on drugs" has a powerful propaganda weapon.

The latter says that these drugs seem to offer some kind of relief for an often undiagnosed condition. Perhaps even that the medical wisdom of the ancients was quite sound. And that the "war on drugs" is possibly little more than a classic moral panic that has been doing more harm than good for the best part of a century.

I know which side I am on. The "war on drugs" leaves more casualties than the drugs themselves. It is that that is immoral. Way beyond the harm that a user of a properly regulated, non-criminal underworld market would suffer.

Oh dear, another pontifical pronouncement condemns me to hell, it seems:

Vatican condemns Amnesty over abortion

By Malcolm Moore
Last Updated: 2:18am BST 14/06/2007

The Vatican has ordered all Catholic organisations and individuals to stop giving money to Amnesty International in protest at the human rights organisation's stance on abortion.

Amnesty, which previously had been neutral on the subject, said in April that countries that had laws making abortion illegal should drop them because tough anti-abortion penalties led to a high proportion of backstreet terminations. Mexico City has recently passed a law decriminalising abortion.

Cardinal Renato Martino, the head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and one of the Vatican's most senior prelates, said in an interview with the National Catholic Register: "The inevitable consequence [of Amnesty's decision] will be the end of all financing from Catholic organisations and individual Catholics."

Well, not this Catholic, I can assure you. I have a feeling that on the day of judgement the fact that I tried to do my best by my fellow human beings by fighting the forces of oppression and torture via what seems to be the most respected international organization on that particular playing field will stand me in quite good stead. I don't support abortion, but nor do I support coercion. And, let's face it, the line Amnesty has taken on abortion deals mainly with the most traumatic situations, such as women who are put in that position by evil acts in the first place like rape (often institutionalized as a means of torture) - and on those even the most hard-core anti-abortionists' opinions tend to wobble and fragment a bit.

Indeed, my membership of Amnesty helps to assuage my conscience that I am also a member of a body, in the Roman Catholic Church that has, over centuries, been amongst the most egregious supra-national torturers, via crusades, conquistadores, forced conversions, bloody Mary, the Holy Office and, more recently, tacit at least support for some of the most oppressive regimes simply because they are Catholic regimes.

It was Charles Kennedy I think who stood up at a party conference one year as leader and suggested that if there was one organization all Liberal democrats should also be a member of it was Amnesty.  I agree, and I hope he still does, as a Catholic and a senior Liberal Democrat, whatever this meddling priest wants to tell us. 

There's this extraordinary debate going on (well actually the comments are closed) on ConservativeHome about a piece by a chappie called Tony Makara who is advocating a protectionist trade policy the likes of which has not been seen in the UK for a generation:

Anthony Makara: Britain imports too much

Over the last weeks I've read much about the subject of welfare reform. The arguments about incapacity benefit and workfare. However all these strategies for welfare reform fail to answer one fundamental question. How are we going to get people into work? I believe all the proposed plans for welfare reform will fail because they do not tell us how we are to create the one million plus jobs needed to end welfare dependency. This is because the British economy no longer produces the jobs that the unemployed need. Lets face it, a person is either in work or they are on benefit, it really is that simple, the answer to unemployment is to create jobs. [From ConservativeHome's Platform: Anthony Makara: Britain imports too much]

The outrage in the comments is interesting. We all know the Tories made a seismic shift in the mid-late seventies in embracing what they liked to call "free trade". Of course, without radical tariff eradication and resolute policing of monopoly and cartel, there is no truly free trade. But what is interesting is that this was the debate over which Winston Churchill first left the Tories at the turn of the twentieth century and joined the free trade Liberals.

You see, for forty years, free trade was a policy of the "left" (indeed much longer if we go back to the Radicals and the Corn Laws debates), a key plank of trying to increase the returns to labour and in reducing the cost of necessities to make the average working person better off, either through higher wages or through lower prices (they have the same effects). It was Philip Snowden, the Labour chancellor of the exchequer, who wrote in a foreword to a new edition of Henry George's book of the same name "Protection or Free Trade" that...

"Each new generation has in a large measure to re-learn the truths which its ancestors established by discussion and practical experience. Free Traders have been so confident in the fundamental soundness of their faith and in the security of the system, that they have neglected to keep the rising generation well grounded in the principles of the faith."

He was writing in response to the Tories' re-adoption of a protectionist stance in the face of the beginnings of the Great Depression.

I have no doubt that most Tories today believe in something called "free trade". I don't believe that most of them actually realise how far away we are from it and what steps will be necessary to get there. But I am sure myself that if we get there, we will all benefit. As Snowden also wrote, "Protection is the foster-mother of monopoly, and monopoly in all its forms...is the robbery of the community for the benefit of private interests" (you can see why Tories would like the idea!).

It is worth mentioning that the Lib Dems have a consultation paper out on the UK Response to Globalization. Go respond - we must resist any attempts at introducing protectionist policies.