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Anyone not already outraged by the treatment meted out by the military, both British and American on our citizens from Tipton should have been watching:

The Road To Guantanamo: - Channel 4's new drama from multi award-winning film director Michael Winterbottom – The Road to Guantanamo – created huge international impact and won the prestigious Silver Bear for Direction for Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross in competition at The 56th Berlin International Film Festival.

...tonight.

You can say all you want about the necessity to do certain pretty nasty things in time of war, about rules of evidence not functioning properly in a foreign country you are trying to subdue, and who knows whether the lads from Tipton are telling the God's honest truth (though personally I am more inclined to believe them than all the FUD that comes out of the security services), but it seems to me that heads should roll for their treatment and that of others still in GTMO and other members of the gulag archipelago.

Impeaching Blair is too good for him. I hope he's watching and can still say what he said to Parky last week about conscience and being judged by history and his God.

Not the sort of image I wanted over dinner:

“The Conservatives are half right and half wrong.

“They are right when they admit that fifty years of social engineering by Conservative and Labour Governments have been a miserable failure. We have been taxed. We have been subsidised. We have been regulated. We have been endlessly preached at. And, after two generations of all this, we have, as a nation, been made neither happier nor more virtuous. There is more illegitimacy, more divorce, more drunkenness, more crime.

“But the Conservatives are wrong when they believe that the harms of social engineering can be cured by different social engineering.

“Above all, this Report shows the usual Tory obsession with sex. These people seem to believe that, without laws to restrain us, most people would be copulating in the street. This is probably true for some Conservative politicians. Most ordinary people, however, are naturally inclined to join in stable, heterosexual unions and to produce children. Some people are not inclined to this, and libertarians respect their choice. But most people are so inclined. They do not need to be bribed with their own money into getting married. They do not need “help” from politicians."

The trouble is, I do find Sean Gabb to be quite intemperate and obnoxious when presenting his arguments, and I'm not clear how this helps the message. I too am an "angry not-so-young man" as far as government interference in our lives goes but I hope I keep my language at least temperate! The question is, how is a libertarian supposed to put libertarian policies into effect except by winning the power to do so in the first place?

Technorati Tags: conservatives, libertarianism

Now I'm not normally one for the line that for every nuisance we need a new law, but with fireworks I'm perilously close to calling for a complete ban.

I cannot imagine any circumstances in which letting off an explosive charge, however much fun it might be for those doing it or watching the spectacle, does not harm another. I suppose if, like the Barclay brothers, you own a private island out o sight and sound from any other inhabitants then maybe.

But for the rest of us, pets and children get scared - I know several dogs that turn frankly neurotic if they hear just one from miles away, and if they are out on a walk they scarper and risk being knocked down if you can't catch them before they reach the road. Tonight I've lost four hours' sleep because some bastard let one off near my window and I woke up like I was living in Baghdad or somewhere to find that several more were being let off, including one that set fire to a waste bin into which it had been thrown. Presumably the perptrator had no real idea as to whether it would simply start a fire or blow the bloody doors off and maim someone with them.

Despite what I thought were some tightening up of the regulations about when it was permissible, or anti-social, to let them off, this past week has seen several in Oxford at one, two, three and even as today four in the morning. And they are next to impossible to police - it only takes one to wake everyone up for miles around and the chances of pinpointing where it came from unless you are very quick and very local are zilch.

Maybe it is time only to allow licensed displays to even purchase any but the most innocuous "flash and fizz" type ones. Why does anyone think it is their right to hurl explosives that make loud noises into the air over our heads at any time of the day or night?

A friend, and former council colleague then defector, some of you will know who I mean but I won't name him, got the news early this week that his mother, in Glasgow, had been taken into hospital having been lain at home for the best part of a month not feeling well but doing little about it. Anyway, without going into too many details said friend is not really working full time at the moment and not claiming benefit - because of the irregular work he does for the local TA and ACF. THis is about enough to keep him in bed and board but without anything left over for "shocks" like having to travel to Glasgow from Oxford in a hurry.

Last night I booked him a train ticket for next Wednesday after his next ACF session, paid for with my debit card, and to be collected at Oxford station. At that far off it was £95 return. But this morning he got a call to say she might not last the weekend so we had to try and make some rearrangements for today. So first, trying to cancel the original ticket I found it wasn't possible online because it was an overnight service and had a reservation automatically applied. The cancellation has cost me a tenner as well. Then looking for a new ticket for today we concluded the only deal was to take a standard single, which was itself £85 (because he did not know precisely now when he was going to come back and so an open return was going to be pretty expensive.

Still, again, since I was the one booking it, I had to accompany him to the station to collect the ticket so that I could insert my debit card. And we had to wait for two hours to be able to collect it after the booking was made. So, getting to the station too early to be out before the time limit on the short stay car park I had to park in the long stay. The fee is £4.50 if you use something called "RingGo" and £6.00 if you only have cash. The process of paying via RingGo was quite stressfulm even for a techie like me, requiring some code off the platform (so I was lucky the man let me, the non-passenger, onto the platform to get the code which changes every hour. The instructions on how to pay seemed only to be back at the car park so having collected that code number I had to return to find out how to do it and then go through a most complicated automated system which has now, with no specific authority from me, got my mobile number linked to my car registration number. There was nobody at the car park checking, and no ticket either for the car window or the exit from the car park, so I presume it is monitored by ANPR.

So, it seems that if you are not very well off, don't have a credit or debit card, and need to travel quite quickly, you must be faced with a ticket that would be about 50% higher than even the extortionate "supasava" online and 50% extra on the car park. And this is supposed to be encouraging use of public transport? What a joke!

He texted me after about ten minutes on the train to say that it was like sardines in a tin.

And all that for ninety quid and it would take eight hours if everything went smoothly. I know all about the fixed, annual costs of driving, like my tax and so on, and actually I don't do much mileage a year anyway, so driving up there would have been cheaper at the point of use (I would have got there on two tanks at the most and with two of us in the car that would have been less than half the train price) and helped me justify my annual fixed costs in any case. And when I went looking for a plane ticket for him yesteray I gave up because I could not find a single ticket under £93.

Bonkers. Bonkers and discriminatory. Oh, and why on earth do two type of first class ticket vary by as much as £200 quid for the same (single!) journey - one was £250 or something and another £450. Just what is that about?

Health seems to have become the theme of the day in the Lib Dem leadership debate, at least amongst bloggers (John Dixon's "A Radical Writes" here, and Tristan's "Liberty Alone" here as examples). The two candidates themselves have both now produced manifestos of sorts with Chris Huhne (page 9) promoting "the principle of universal access on the basis of need" and Nick Clegg earlier (despite John Dixon's interpretation otherwise) setting down the principle that "our universal public services must be free to use and accessible to all".

Both have admirable reasons for wanting to retain this universality and free access; that if we choose any other paradigm the poorest will miss out by not being able to afford to pay in a non-free system. But, as I've said about education, and more recently touched on in my piece about protectionism last week to me this seems, if you pardon the terrible health-related analogy, merely a sticking plaster. The ideal revolutionary liberal position surely would be to ensure that everyone had the financial wherewithal to participate properly in a market system and then to trust them to make their own choices.

On the day that the Marmot report into diet and cancer appeared, and whilst acknowledging that he said that his commission was still to deal with policy recommendations, one can be fairly certain that they are not going to recommend that the government, local or national, takes control of what dietary choices people are allowed to make. And yet our knowledge increases all the time that such choices are likely at least as important to our health outcomes as the treatment we may receive once we are ill. So why do we not do the same for illness care when all the evidence suggests that despite £110bn a year public expenditure, we are still the "sick man of Europe"?

Surgeons operating
Originally uploaded by el Reino

The NHS was, I believe, a fantastic idea at the time, in the context of the war on the five wants. In a near bankrupt nation post-war it was also clearly in the national interest to try to use economies of scale and national bargaining to ensure that you could provide a basic level of universal service to all. But let's face it, right now it is a gigantic protection racket, the mother of them all if you ask me. We also heard today that the average GP salary is now at £110,000 - a ten per cent rise in the second year of their new contracts - and yet the Department of Health today has said that 1200 British medical graduates are unlikely to get training places in the UK this year. So there's almost certainly an economic rent arising from the triple protectionism of the NHS, the GMC and the BMA.

Hopefully at least this and the national bargaining for other staff would end with localization so that those parts of the country where it is difficult (read near impossible) to live on a Grade D nurse's salary can offer decent packages, but I haven't even touched on the protectionism of NICE, NHS drugs contracts, the drugs patenting system as a whole and the stifling bureaucracy surrounding anything innovative by way of ways of treating and so on.

None of this is to say that the "private sector" is necessarily the best solution in all areas. I'm against monopoly and public protectionism, not public service per se - after all the nature of the hippocratic oath is dedication to a public service. And the worst of all worlds could be one in which there's a certain amount of public funding up for grabs by private operators who have no incentive to innovate and be really efficient - that's simply transferring the protectionism to shareholders.

No, the problem is really one of how to ensure that everyone would have the ability to pay for their choice of provider. And I return to the Citizen's Income and the systemic economic imbalances that concentrate unearned wealth, or more correctly the wealth created by the community as a whole rather than by an individual's or firm's own innovation, investment and labour. I'm not a good one to talk on health issues - the last psychiatrist I saw reckoned my attitude to my developing diabetes was one of the "slow suicide". But I'll bet if I was faced with a bigger insurance premium or buying more fruit and veg instead of eating crap, I'd probably plump for the healthier lifestyle to minimize my insurance. Redistribute the common wealth properly to everyone as is our birthright and we have these choices.

Just look at Nuffield Hospitals Group right now - it's buying up private gym firms like Cannons (effectively turning private companies into social enterprises of course). Why would it be doing that? Because BUPA really wants its members to live healthily, not to call on them when they're in a preventable medical condition. I'm also sure that insurance firms are likely to be better, with safeguards against abuse, at sifting out bad clinicians; it's in their interests to do so. Their actuaries will be poring over doctors' success and failure rates to ensure they're not granting accreditation to people whose patients inexplicably drop like flies, or who routinely over-diagnose or over-prescribe. Nor would they be likely to allow their members to spend a single night in a hospital where they're more likely to come out with a worse illness with attendant higher costs, if they come out at all.

One model I've looked at, for example, would see a GP as a "personal health adviser" who advises their clients through the maze of choosing lifestyles, treatments, clinicians and therapies that will be efficient and varied. I'd like to see surgical firms organized more like barristers' chambers with large national firms specializing in different clinical areas ready to hot-foot it to a treatment centre several hours away at the drop of a hat to do an op in their specialism rather than a patient wait on a list for the local, perhaps only semi-specialist to have a free spot in a tight general surgery list. You could have a choice of a large general hospital sized treatment centre thirty miles away in the local city, or a ten bed rural town cottage hospital with one theatre with the same surgeon prepared to visit either for the right fee but with different approaches to aftercare based on different needs of patients and families.

Sure, there's still a role for some kind of local democratic input - most especially in procuring facilities and staff for emergency medicine, but even their funding options could be varied - with some able to provide that by engaging local charitable resources, others perhaps by raising a local tax of some kind, perhaps even through planning obligations, who knows. But one thing is certain: these options and innovations are unlikely to appear when the system is riddled with protectionism and political game-play.