Randomly Selected Article or Link

It's environment week at Oxford Brookes University. On Wednesday evening I took an evening off from campaigning to attend a lecture/discussion led by Bill Dunster, architect of BedZED, Professor (and Lib Dem City Councillor here in Oxford) Sue Roaf, and others entitled "Designs on the Planet".

It was a debate about how we're all facing an energy crisis in the not too distant future and how we need to build our homes, workplaces and communities to survive only on the energy we can generate ourselves as a nation from sustainable resources - something around 10% of the copious energy we fritter away today.

The media is in a frenzy about politicians "going green" by example, or not, with Ming Campbell selling, or not, his Jaguar, Dave Cameron choosing a hybrid Lexus and forcing his environment spokesperson to get rid of the Porsche, how well your local council does on recycling and so on. We have a hose pipe ban about to be extended to teeth cleaning it seems. Soon we will be advised to drink our pee to save water no doubt.

I've said it before, but it bears saying again, if the "mainstream", and especially those who used to be quite eco-sceptical, have seen the (energy efficient) light and are now promoting action to deal with or adapt to climate change, then perhaps the first battle of the "War on Weather" is being won, but the changes that are being suggested vary wildly. The "are you doing your part" sort of message of the politicians - flogging the gas guzzlers and switching off the TV - is, according to Dunster, Roaf and others fiddling while Rome burns.

And their prognosis is, I think it is a fair word to use, cataclysmic, unless we embrace huge changes. Huge, costly (in financial terms) changes.

All of them are missing the point. They are all dealing only in symptoms and adjusting to the effects of something that we can in fact change very little. For many, the damage is already done. We may be able to slow it down. The most benign interpretations may even suggest that we can do things now that will cause changes for the better, in time. But let's face it, the planet is a vast system - talk about how long it takes to turn a supertanker around and multiply it by hundreds, maybe thousands of years.

Yes, as one well known notso-eco-organisation says "every little helps", but it's not addressing the root of the problem. Everyone feels a bit better for doing their bit, I'm sure. But we are fighting a losing battle.

However, there is one system that forces us into the sort of habits that we generally now seem to accept have helped cause the problems on the horizon. A system created by human ingenuity rather than an immutable law of nature. A system that has changed and adapted, often out of all recognition, from time to time as human needs have changed. A system that, unlike gaia, the great mother-ship, whatever you want to call our one and only home planet, can be changed "merely" with an act of political will.

IT'S THE ECONOMY STUPID

I say "merely" because of course there are huge vested interests involved. The 0.25% of the world's population that own more than the other 99.75% put together will of course find a way to survive any impending crisis. It will not be the financial elite that will disappear under the water as it rises over Battery Park or Belgravia but the poor, just as it was with those worst affected by the Boxing Day Tsunami sixteen months ago.

And the not so poor. Just those who, despite years of hard work, saving to buy their dream home, cannot afford simply to up sticks and move to higher ground. In fact, most of us. The same most of us who have begun to recognise that the way we treat the environment has to change. The vast majority. Crucially too, in case you don't think this applies to you, it's the same most of us who are now worried about whether we will be able to retire on a decent pension any time soon, because the reasons are the same.

But this is not an envy-trip. I don't begrudge people who have played the system successfully what they have gained (so long as they have played fair) - it is the system that now needs changing. The rules of the game, as Tony Blair said about another war he's losing.

What we have to ask ourselves now is whether we can afford not to do whatever it takes, to change whatever we can actually change, in the faint hope of changing the prognosis for the planet but in the better hope of being able to survive the changes that may already be inevitable. And the things that are ripe for changing are the man made systems and rules that say, in particular "we, the vast majority, can't afford to..."

So stop fiddling, and take the initiative. The mass movement that's building of concern for our planet and our future, from all shades of the political spectrum can achieve it. Do we want to fry merely for want of looking at other economic models that promise "sustainable abundance"? For fear of upsetting an economic "orthodoxy" that has pushed us into this position. It has served us well, arguably. But it is now, more than anything else, a hinderance and not a help. At least for about 99.75% of us.

"Why should we be beggars with the ballot in our hands?"

More and more recently I hear or read people saying that Tony Blair's ten years in power has generated in them a deep distrust and even loathing of politics and politicians. Through sleaze, spin, wars, a vast growth in the reach and size of the state - most of which appears to many to have gone straight into the pockets of corporate bosses and shareholders, he has produced a far more powerful advertisement for the possible benefits of a minimal state than many who have tried to explain it academically through their writings.

Even now, in his political retirement, with his vulgar rush to pick up lucrative jobs where he could use his rent-seeking influence to further the very fat-cat industries he pledged to attack in 1997, he still generates much loathing. Forget the Lisbon Treaty or EU Constitution, I'm ready to campaign for an "out" vote in an "in or out" referendum should Tony Blair get anywhere close to becoming the first permanent EU president.

And from behind the portcullis I don't believe that the current crop of party leaders are rising to the real challenge of Blair's legacy. In fact, ostrich like, I feel they view it as merely a series of mistakes that can be put right by more government, just of a different political hue, when in reality the message of Blair's premiership is clear:

Government is moribund, inherently corrupt, a necessary evil for a particular point of human development. A point that has been passed and government can do no more except fight for its own existence as if it has a right to exist regardless of and separate from the desires and needs of the people it seeks to govern. This infantilizing of the people (indeed we even call it the "nanny state" in tacit recognition of that infantilization) needs to be brought to an end.

I was at some training last week on dealing with "Difficult, Disturbing and Dangerous Behaviour". In an aside about the nature of psychopathy the trainer, himself a clinical psychiatrist, suggested that perhaps politicians are in fact psychopaths. It got me looking up the definition of a psychopath. Judge for yourself how many of these criteria Tony Blair meets:

Personally, I make it at least half of them.

Just a week into the ban on smoking in enclosed "public" places, there has been much coverage of Conservative plans to increase the tax on alcohol to discourage "binge drinkers" - an idea which, if memory serves, was mooted late last year by the government itself anyway. I like to think that it was such a crazy idea then that it contributed to Ms Hewitt's removal from the health brief.

But on both issues, on health grounds at least for the participants (if not the passive smokers and people beaten up by drunks), surely the best answer is a complete ban? Both are drugs. Alcohol in particular can be served up as a very powerful concoction, ten or more times more powerful than the cider I used to get hold of at school. In study after study when respected organizations look at the wider social effects of different drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, they have upheld the "Blakemore/Nutt hierarchy of harms" which puts alcohol fifth, tobacco ninth, both ahead of cannabis at eleventh and ecstasy way down at nineteenth out of twenty one substances they evaluated. You can read the whole reasoning in the RSA report - and don't pretend to tell me that the RSA is looking at archeological pot finds from the Bullingdon Club of the eighties as we are perhaps led to believe, they are looking at today's market in drugs.

In 2004 in Britain around 106,000 people died from causes related to smoking tobacco, and every other smoker is likely to die because of illness and disease caused by their use of tobacco. There were 8,389 alcohol related deaths. And, while there were 2,598 deaths 'from drug related poisoning' that includes prescribed and over the counter drug misuse, and in fact only 663 were put down to heroin, methadone, cocaine, amphetamine (including ecstasy) and GHB. And, as we know from these studies, the alcohol related deaths are if anything rising not falling.

So clearly the rational response is to ban what are two of the most addictive and dangerous substances we know of. Why would any government wish to be complicit in the licensing for recreational consumption of such killers? But not only that, the Treasury no doubt rubs its hands with glee at the prospect of taking money from these drug addicts and the pushers who supply them, the tobacco and drinks industries. Blood money - that's what it is.

So, which of you competing authoritarian parties is going to bite that bullet? It's populist tinkering nonsense. Something must be done, this is something so let's do this. Let us choose our poison and help make sure our choice is a safe as possible by legalization and regulation of all these substances. Banning them makes their grip stronger. Indeed, as recent evidence on cannabis shows, it makes them stronger.

And I haven't even begun to talk about caffeine, sugar and chocolate. These last two of course contributing to a ticking time bomb of ill-health and early death through obesity related conditions. If you believe people know best and are capable of making their own decisions, let them. Otherwise, do the rational thing and ban all these currently legal killers too and be done with it.

Technorati Tags: alcohol, cannabis, conservatives, drugs laws, liberty, smoking ban