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Since this is about to become a full blown party debate in the Lib Dems, it might be worth highlighting that an online debate has begun today at the Economist.

...on the other hand, the one good thing about the smoking ban is that it brings starkly into the open the fact that the "state" acting in the "best interests" of its citizens can decide and enforce with legislation and criminal penalties what you can and cannot do with your own property. Of course it always has in all sorts of different ways, but at least it's out in the open now.

So we can proceed to Land Value Tax unopposed by those who think it is not right for the state to take some of "your" property wealth yet okay to tell a landlord what he can and cannot allow in his own property...:)

Technorati Tags: land value tax, smoking ban

I see from the Oxford Mail that Oxford City Council are considering saving some money by not contributing to crowd control at Magdalen Bridge on May Day morning next year. Not that it bothers me much either way - all I will want next May Day is to be sure that people who want to vote can safely get to their polling place! And I've never really understood why it ought to be a City Council function to deal with the crowds that congregate, ostensibly at least, to watch (if not hear) the choir of Magdalen College serenade the dawn. But it was this bit that intrigued me...

Magdalen College bursar Mark Blandford-Baker added: "The college is not involved with what happens out on the public highway, so I am not in a position to comment."

A narrow interpretation of their involvement or lack thereof I would have thought. Perhaps then they could play their part by keeping their choir inside that day and see whether it makes any difference to what happens outside?

Well done to Iain Dale on News 24 reviewing the Dead Tree Press tonight. He picked up on the ridiculous story of Andrew Phillips, the Lib Dem peer who wants to start taking things easy at 67 but has run foul of the house rules that say you can never really retire. You can take leave of absence but nobody's quite sure it seems whether that would reduce your party's presence or not and allow an extra place to be allocated next time there were a raft of party appointments.

These are of course the same rules that prevent people like Emma Nicholson from making an open decision about whether to stick with Europe or the Lords under the ban on holding a dual mandate - sitting in a national as well as a European legislatures.

Blair indeed promised to have this particular problem addressed for that very reason - so peers could resign to run for the European Parliament if they wanted to.

Whilst I completely agree with Iain on the necessity to elect the House of Lords, and as soon as possible, it's a bit ironic that the story that prompted it was Andrew Phillips, who takes a contrary line to party policy and would rather see the house remain pretty much wholly appointed as I understand it.

Technorati Tags: electoral reform, house of lords, politics

BBC Scotland reports that Labour in addicts' children plan:

Labour MSP Duncan McNeil has proposed that addicts sign a "social contract", obliging them not to have children until they have beaten their habit.

...which begins to sound like Sweden's infamous eugenics program of sterilising young women they felt oughtn't to have children.

Now, whilst we should of course do everything we can to ensure that we don't inflict on children a home-life from hell, how on earth would withdrawing benefits from women who "slip up" and breach their "contract" and pop out a sprog (and we should always remember that it takes two to make a baby, as I understand it), going to make that resultant child's life any less hellish?

Further, there is the crass assumption that people with addiction problems are bound to be bad parents which listeners to Professor Jo Neale's recent public lecture here at Oxford Brookes University will have learned was an erroneous assumption for the most part. Whilst I did not agree with some of what Jo had to say - most notably that I am firmly in favour of decrminalising, nay legalising and being able to regulate, illicit drugs - she made a poignant case for treating drug users as fully human, deserving of compassion and respect, and acknowledging that the vast majority of them actually crave no more than a "normal life" beyond the drugs.

Labour's invasion of our private lives goes on apace. Pigeon-holing people into convenient categories to make taboos of them. It is, as the Scottish Drugs Forum has apparently described it, "vicious" and "deeply disquieting". We'll take no lectures on public morals from the likes of Prescott and Blair thank you very much.