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If you ask me, smoking was an integral part of the First World War. As John Reid alluded to when he was in charge of the nation's health, a "one small pleasure" people who were about to die got.

Songs - "While you've a lucifer to light you fag...", sayings - "unlucky third light" (never light three cigarettes with one match - the sniper spots you on one, aims on two and kills the "third light"), show how important smoking was. We can't just eradicate its place even if we want to eradicate the habit.

So it seems pretty silly that English Heritage would want to remove all smoking from re-enactment scenes:

All smoke-free on the western front from Guardian Unlimited: News blog:

After yesterday's reports that broadcasters are cutting scenes from Tom and Jerry cartoons for crimes against clean air, we can reveal that English Heritage has been similarly censorious in releasing images of first world war soldiers, the famous Tommies in the trenches, having a cigarette.

ConservativeHome has done some polling on IDS's recommendations in his social justice report.

In it there's a stark hypocrisy - while 75% agree with the idea of a stricter classification of cannabis, 59%, no doubt out of self interest, disagree with the idea of putting extra money on booze taxes to pay for addiction treatments.

Let's get this right, the drug which creates the most dependency in Britain bar none is alcohol. Apart from tobacco the drug that causes the most deaths in Britain is alcohol. Cannabis, despite so many regular users, does not even register on the deaths list so far as I am aware. Alcohol consistently ranks well ahead of both cannabis and LSD and ecstasy in studies of the overall social damage it causes. The most common "gateway drug" to harder drugs is alcohol. The drug most commonly associated with mental illness episodes is...yes, alcohol.

Still, I suppose it tastes nice some of the time, when you can remember it anyway. And 8 million problem drinkers cannot be wrong can they? I wonder how many of them are in the grassroots Tory party?

They need to read Transform's report on how to regulate and reduce drug use without prohibition. Of course the Tories are not the only ones spinning the prohibition lies. But with a toking leader you'd have thought at least the Tories would be willing to have a mature discussion about it. Remind me why anyone with a libertarian bone in their body supports this shower?

Technorati Tags: alcohol, cannabis, conservatives, Dave the chameleon, drugs laws, liberty, prohibition, tories

The future of diplomacy?

BBC NEWS | Scotland | Glasgow and West | Primary school wins 'blog' award:

A primary school has won an award for its innovative international links with schools over the internet.

Staff and children at Woodhill Primary School in Bishopbriggs have set up blogs on subjects including French language and healthy lifestyles.

Technorati Tags: internet

Did anyone see "Tory! Tory! Tory!" last night on BBC4? Fascinating, and challenging. I've often agreed with things from the Institute of Economic Affairs, as they have always seemed to be on the correct side of Libertarian to me. And indeed recently they published a very good pamphlet promoting Land Value Tax by a chap called Fred Harrison which definitely got me excited! But I had no idea that they were quite as instrumental as last night's program portrayed in the "creation" of Thatcherism.

It turns out I am a monetarist. And that I rather expect that there's a big difference between Hayek's and Friedman's monetarism and what became diluted and corrupted by governments, including Thatcher's and Reagan's. Just as there is between Keynes's exhortation for governments to ensure the sufficiency of effective demand (enough money in the system to consume the products of that economy) and the application of that by governments of the fifties to seventies in the UK spending money like water to satisfy labour demands and the like.

Though these two economic "camps" are portrayed often as diametrically opposed, I'm not so sure they are now. I always thought that Keynes wanted restraint in government money creation, such that over time it would be hovering around the capacity of the economy. Exceeding that capacity over a prolonged period would indeed be inflationary and he knew it. So you either need to be careful about how much you want to spend into the economy or find a mechanism to regulate it so you can withdraw some if things overheat.

On the other hand the monetarists' political acolytes have also got it horribly wrong. They have never really restrained money supply, just privatised it. Sure, there are only about £50bn in notes and coins circulating in the UK economy, but well over a trillion pounds of debt created money simply willed into existence by the banking system. It is kept approximately in synch with economic activity through varying interest rates, but it's always increasing - have a look at "M4" money supply. Remember how the Tories kept abandoning one or other monetary measures because they could never hold them properly in check - it was because they were doing so "second hand" as it were, via interest rates, and not by some agency directly manipulating the amount of real money in circulation.

How do we know they got it wrong? Well Friedman himself has consistently railed against "fiat money". He has recognised for a long time that this money created by private debt, as most (97%) of ours is, is itself inflationary. And nowadays he acknowledges that he was, in any case, too prescriptive about money supply - presumably acknowledging there is some room for over or under-shooting the monetary base depending on circumstances so long as they line up with economic activity in the longer term.

But the biggest thing I took away from last night's program was that it all started with a small group of outsiders prepared to put twenty odd years into the development of the theory and lobbying for it. How influential were Friedman and Hayek before all this? I don't know - I'm not clear on the timeline. I'm not likely to be getting a Nobel Economics prize any time soon for sure - you tend to have to be an economist for that.

But if we can reconcile Keynes and Friedman (if not, quite, Hayek), promote the careful replacement of fiat money with harder money (if not a return to the sort of specie money Friedman advocates) created for our benefit and not as private debt, and promote a system, such as land value tax, to act as a pressure release if one is needed, we can produce a radical economics that promotes sustainable development, levels many commercial and social playing fields (because it takes the extraordinary power of money creation away from private interests) and solves some of the pressing problems of highly indebted poor countries, the demographic time bomb in the west and the resultant pensions crisis, and reduce the need for a headlong rush for growth just to pay off our debts.

And then I saw this and realised that I cannot be a Tory, just yet anyway.

When I started this blogging lark, I chose Blogger mainly as a way of getting a blog up quickly with as little effort and learning as possible in order to support Chris Huhne for Lib Dem party leader. I'd always intended when possible to move my blog to my own URL here at www.jockcoats.org.uk and my own server and software I could play with.

Since I went and bought another server, and set up a personal site using www.jockcoats.org.uk when I was running for election as university governor (which I've won, by the way thank you for asking, but more on that later no doubt) and since my Blogspot address got hijcaked rather embarrassingly by someone redirecting to a pretty explicit gay porn website at the weekend, I've decided to carry out that move now.

So I grabbed back my Blogspot address and redirect it to here, but if you are reading this and link to my blog at http://jockcoats.blogspot.com/ in your blogrolls and so on, maybe you could change that over to http://www.jockcoats.org.uk/ as soon as you can be bothered. I'm still getting used to the software, so things will probably change quite a lot over the next few days. For information, I'm using Drupal, and its blogapi module to allow me to continue posting through ecto.

Technorati Tags: blogging