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One last post on this, not because I care, but because I report "news" in this instance...

It was to be expected I suppose that the events of the past few days would be mentioned in Vince Cable's talk at the Oxford East constituency dinner this evening, and he didn't disappoint.

So for all of those out that are talking of splits in the party and and bad feeling, his message was quite clear.

There are no splits. We are (except perhaps for me) the most united party on the whole issue of Europe. There were differences of opinion over tactics; whether abstaining was going back on a manifesto promise, or rather whether abstaining specifically on the treaty rather than the constitution was going back on such a promise. Some people took that position. Those who resigned the front bench before voting did so with good grace and no rancour towards Nick or anyone else.

He did seem to me to suggest, but I'm sure not say explicitly, that the regrets are over the events of the last couple of weeks as a whole. The profile that by implication Nick has given to this one issue. For me of course, I think that's just the new boy not quite realizing in time he was being set up by the Tory Euro-shambles to take the fall for their own irresponsibility on the issue. And perhaps a regret that Nick was backed into a position in which he felt it was right to make it a three line whip issue.

Cameron has not faced such a media backlash for his massive rebellion because although it was a front bench position to abstain from Bill Cash's amendment, he had not insisted on whipping it - but the rebellion was larger than ours and shows up the Tory incoherence on Europe.

The parliamentary party are only too aware that they have caused headlines for the wrong reasons and are apologetic for that. But todays newspapers...

UPDATE: I see that Dave's already poo-pooed this idea in a Q&A session with Telegraph readers . Is there going to be anything left of this report that will actually make it to party policy by the time it's released on Thursday?

In more of the drip, drip, drip of revelations from the Gummer-Goldsmith "Quality of Life" report the Telegraph today reports that the Tories are to end out-of-town free parking:

Tories to end out-of-town free parking
By Graeme Wilson, Political Correspondent

Shoppers using out-of-town supermarkets would be forced to pay car parking charges under new Conservative proposals to defend the traditional British high street.

Under the plans, councils would be given the power to demand that big supermarkets and other stores on the outskirts of towns charge their customers for parking.

Seeing blue over Tory plans
on out-of-town retail?
Originally uploaded by Alastair Montgomery

The proposals - which are contained in the party's quality of life policy review that will be published on Thursday - are likely to face a backlash from shoppers, who have grown accustomed to free parking at the out-of-town supermarkets and shopping complexes. The 800-page report tries to deflect the inevitable criticism by stressing that the parking charges would be no greater than the amount people would pay in the nearest town centre.

All well and good. Liberal Democrats should note that our own tax proposals already do this in effect. By substituting Site Value Rating (LVT by another name) for the National Non-Domestic Rate (Business Rates by another name) the land occupied by these car parks would become subject to a tax on their land value along with the stores.

This would end the huge benefit out of town stores have over their town centre competitors without the micro-management of the Tory plans to implement a similar thing by imposing parking charges. It would be difficult for them to pass on SVR to customers of their in-town stores because they are competing with in-town neighbours who would not have this added burden and would not have an increase in costs - indeed heir taxes may in fact fall by a little once out-of-town store car parks were also paying tax.

Of course everyone's allowed to change their mind, Keynes style, when the facts change, but looking back to 1997, I seem to remember that it was a Labour manifesto policy to stop the growth of out-of-0town retail (another one they signally failed to achieve of course) which had grown like topsy under the Tory government with their powerful retail backers such as Peter MacLaurin at Tesco, James Gulliver's Argyll Group, Archie Norman's ASDA and so on. Even some of Zac's own fortune is connected with out-of-town retail, when his old man sold Argyll Brands to James Gulliver whose Safeway went on to be an early adopter of the model.

Having established myself as an anarcho-geo-libertarian-mutualist I can't help wondering why is it that many libertarians seem to gravitate towards the Conservative party. A party with less libertarian instincts I can hardly imagine. Whatever their rhetoric on occasion, when they tactically oppose Labour's assaults on peoples' freedoms for example, when it comes down to it they are the archetypal we know best patristic party that is happiest telling the plebs what they can and cannot do, should and should not expect.

They may point to Thatcher's rolling back of the state in the form of privatisation of government owned business assets, but a true Libertarian cannot be happy with reform merely of the economic sphere. Rolling back the state means ending interference in all areas of our lives. Anything else is authoritarian. And so, it is with little surprise that I find this reported in today's Observer:

Tories highlight cannabis dangers in drug blueprint

Jo Revill and Nick Watt
Sunday July 8, 2007
The Observer

The health risks of cannabis are so great that it should now be reclassified as a class B drug, carrying much greater penalties for possession and trafficking, says David Cameron's new blueprint for dealing with Britain's growing addiction problems.

The Tory leader has been convinced by emerging evidence that a strong form of the drug, skunk, is causing an epidemic of mental health disorders. A report being published this week by a Conservative policy commission will confront the issue, recommending an upgrading of the drug to class B, as well as arguing the case for a complete transformation of addiction treatment in Britain.

What utter bollocks. Look, the rush to create ever stronger strains (and actually the evidence is mixed - while people report finding stronger strains the prevalence of those strains is far from clear) mirrors precisely the ever stronger concoctions of alcohol produced under prohibition. If you want to control such production, the best way is to free it up and regulate it lightly. If the problem is primarily with growing brains (and the science here is also mixed as I've mentioned before) then, as with alcohol and tobacco, make it illegal for licensed vendors to sell it to minors. But while all vendors are unlicensed and unregulated there are no controls and it is pot luck, if you pardon the pun, as to whether the authorities catch someone selling to kids.

It is fact that cannabis can be a sociable drug. It is fact that cannabis can be a soothing drug for all sorts of ills, from stress to MS and arthritic pain. Indeed only on Friday there was a case of a grandmother effectively being allowed by the courts to continue to use cannabis as pain relief. But the silly side of the law means she cannot cultivate it for her own use, so she has to go to a criminal to get hold of it by definition.

The drugs laws in this country are a mess. And no party seems really to want to grasp the nettle and look at how individual freedoms to do what one wants with one's own body and mind, where it does little or no harm to anyone else, can be combined with protecting the truly vulnerable. Yes, addictions kill. But they mainly kill because the market in addictive things is so often criminal and the vulnerable are open to the worst kind of exploitation. Therefore I say that the authoritarian state, with regard to addictive substances at least, is complicit in those deaths. And by extension, the party that imposes more prohibition are murderers.

They can change the language if they like - the Tories say the phrase "war on drugs" is outdated and doesn't convey what they want to achieve - but returning to ever more criminal sanctions will harm more people, and will do the law itself a disservice by continuing a charade that everyone knows is upheld more in the breach than the observance. If you ever want to even imagine you might get the vote of this anarcho-geo-libertarian-mutualist, Cameron, you're going to have to do a lot btter than this knee-jerk classic moral panic nonsense.

Technorati Tags: tories, conservatives, Dave the chameleon, libertarianism, cannabis, drugs laws

This month it will be ten years since I made a decision that would change my life. I joined a political party for the first time. Naturally it was the Liberal Democrats. Why naturally? Well I had been brought up in a Scottish non-conformist family all of whom had always, at least as far as I can remember of family discussions, voted Liberal. At least in my grandparents' day the Conservatives in Scotland were the party of the Kirk and the middle classes and Labour the party that the Papist working class were told to vote for by their bishops. So both sets of grandparents, Gospel Hall Brethren, had voted for that nice Mr Grimond.

Having been educated privately, however, mostly as a result of being predominantly either ex-patriate or just plain itinerant in my childhood, we were drilled not to vote Labour, because they would, obviously, close our beloved schools. And I certainly couldn't vote Tory in 1987 or 1992 in Birmingham, Edgbaston for that wicked old bat Jill Knight, sponsor of section 28 and staunch supporter of abandoning free eye and dental checks - an issue which was probably and somewhat surprisingly the first in my voting life which moved me to write to my MP (setting aside my eleven year old self writing to a lady called Shirley who was education secretary to complain about the punishments meted out - like not being allowed tuck - at the private prep school I attended!).

I instinctively wanted less government interference in our lives and choices. It's maybe hard to imagine for someone not affected by such seemingly arbitrary rules, but for someone growing up gay to feel that you're very being is somehow illegal, second class, it can be a powerful motivator (I'll never really understand gay Tories to be honest).

But that's not to say that my support for the Lib Dems was just a protest against the others. The issue that I remember most that clinched my vote though was a peculiarly wonkish one - PR. It had seemed to me during my teens that the sort of majorities enjoyed by the Tories under Thatcher were bad for politics and bad for the country. I had a sense that it didn't really matter what the policy agenda of different parties was so long as they didn't have an inbuilt monopoly on power and that dissenting voices had a fair shout in government. I had always been keen on devolution for Scotland also - I was always less convinced about the Principality for some reason! And this too seemed like Liberal policies. And personality wise, I just liked Paddy, as my parents had liked both the Davids, though especially David Steel, and my grandparents had liked Jo.

The demise of the ship-building industry that had given one grandfather his livelihood and the destruction of the coal (and steel) industry that had given the other his appalled me, as did the virtual civil war that caused, but I'm not entirely sure that I connected it with "government" so much as a general decline in heavy industry as other world industrial powers came on-stream - the era of Kobe Steel and Korean supertankers. I worked on the stock exchange through most of the period of the big privatizations and though I somehow instinctively liked the idea of widening asset ownership, I could see in the way that people cheated the system (at least in spirit) to get share allotments and then sell them for a quick buck that this great asset give-away was not necessarily the way to achieve that. Nor were taxes a huge issue. The poll tax had made me angry, but otherwise, whilst it was nice that they were falling, somehow I knew that death and taxes were inevitable and that they could go up or down all they liked and you'd still end up paying them.

Ultimately, even had I thought about voting for anyone else, the sleaze stories of the Major government repelled me and I could not quite trust Labour, riven as it had been through my formative years with the Militant battle. I had felt encouraged when the "Gang of Four" left Labour, believing that this was a chance to reinvigorate three party politics and break the duopoly of Labour-Tory dominance. I could probably have voted for a party led by John Smith, but never got the opportunity. It seemed to me however that New Labour had an innate artificiality about it. And this was reinforced when, during the 1997 election, I wrote to Millbank asking them about specific commitments on gay equality and was told there were none - manifesto commitments that is.

 I'm sure the celebration that followed Tony Blair's entry to Number 10 was genuine, if you were a Labour supporter, even at that point a broad left Labour supporter who may have hoped that "The Project" was a mechanism for getting into power that would be relaxed afterwards, but for me it seemed like insufferable arrogance. And so it was that in the September of 1997, I took a leap into the unknown and decided to put my money where my vote was and join the Liberal Democrats. I felt I didn't want to do anything else at first than be an armchair member, so I decided to make my subs the equivalent of a "recommended annual" subscription every month naively thinking that this would prevent me having to actually do anything, or at least allow me smugly to refuse to do anything! Eighteen months later - fifteen of which I had not engaged in any party activity locally - I was a City Councillor! And from a relative political bystander, it was suddenly a huge part of my life.

Next: Ten years; left, right but always liberal.