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If the world is a more dangerous place, it's as much because of people like Richard Armitage: US threatened to bomb Pakistan as it is because of people like Bin Laden.

I hope personally that we will choose to stand shoulder to shoulder with our Commonwealth brothers and sisters who have provided us with many of our residents and not a few friends and colleagues than a regime that even remotely thinks it's acceptable to make such threats.

Interestingly though, this is a similar phrase to one that was alleged to have been used as an ultimatum to the Taliban themselves, BEFORE 9/11, two months before, when they were stalling in talks over a Unocal pipeline from the central asian republics to the Arabian Sea coast.

If you threaten what to most of us seemed like a basket case state and their friends respond with a 9/11, would you really want to threaten a more sophisticated populous and relatively much more influential military one with nukes, even small ones, like Pakistan?

The Oxford Mail/Times reports today that the New Westgate [shopping centre is..] Vital For City

Confidential documents have revealed that Oxford would suffer serious economic damage if a hash is made of the Westgate redevelopment.

Plans for the £300m scheme to transform the shopping centre are due to be considered by a specially-convened planning committee later this month.

But papers leaked to the Oxford Mail show real concern at the consequences of the project failing.

When I was on the council I was wary of confidential documents that only councillors were supposed to see. If one were leaked there was always an outrage and often a bit of a witch hunt to try to find out who did it if it weren't already obvious. But most of the time, they did not relate to the specific wellbeing of an officer, as perhaps would details of a pay or disciplinary issue, but that much wider catch-all of "protecting commercial confidentiality" for the council's business affairs.

Well bugger that. It sounds to me from what little is in the Oxford Mail report that this is exactly the sort of information that is needed to help inform the public debate about what will be a massive disruption to our city for many years and which we are now led to believe could have more devastating long term efects on not just the city council's finances, in which we all have an over-riding interest since it is our money they are looking after but the general economic wellbeing and vitality of Oxford's city centre.

So. What precisely was confidential about these reports that the Oxford Mail got hold of? Perhaps the cabinet member for a better value Oxford could shed some light?

This project is already contentious. Has been in the air for, what, six years now already and has yet even to get planning permission. Frankly, I'm sceptical about the whole thing still and I hope they don't roll over and accept an application just because it might prove least worst for the city council, but local people have got to have a fully informed debate, which now cannot happen before the planning hearing happens if there really are such far reaching potential consequences for the city.

Yes, it's not a planning matter. they can still give planning consent and then pull out of the contract as landowner, but that is the bit we, the people, need to give a steer to our servants in government on.

Oh dear - they've managed it again. BBC4's "Tory! Tory! Tory!" has inspired me again. And I find myself in awe of some strange political heros. Yes, that's Antony Fisher, Ralph Harris, and Arthur Seldon and John Hoskyns, Keith Joseph and yes...her, the great she-devil herself.

On the face of it, they could not be much further from my political viewpoint. So, was Churchill right about socialist at twenty and conservative at forty being the natural course for man? Have I gone a deep shade of blue? Not on yer nelly I haven't. But the movement that these few, it appears, created, from bunch of crank counter-cultural economists, professional and amateur, to dominance of the world political economic orthodoxy in such a short time was nothing short of revolutionary and truly inspiring.

It gives me hope that it can happen again. That just because people think at the moment land value tax and a debt free money supply are crack-pot ideas it doesn't mean that they will always be. That I have to allow myself twenty years or so to make such an impact.

But there were one or two other interesting things about the program. I noticed a section where they were talking about monetarism and shredding pound notes and so on and in the background they showed an advert being introduced by Gordon Jackson with some cheesy musical singers explaining the principles of monetarism to the Great British Public. "We'll count our blessings if we apply/tight control to our money supply"!

A poll published in Tuesday's Guardian apparently shows that most people feel that we have enough prison places and don't need to build more, and should find other ways of punishing people:

More prisons are not the answer to punishing criminals, says poll | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited:

A Guardian/ICM poll published today overturns the assumption that the public think tough prison sentences are the best way to tackle crime. It shows that a majority of voters think the government should scrap its prison building programme and find other ways to punish criminals.

Politicians in all parties routinely assume that voters think prison works. But 51% of those questioned want the government to find other ways to punish criminals and deter crime.

Of course many are in prison for offenses related to drugs consumption and the crimes many commit to satisfy addictions to substances that are artifically highly priced and because they are an illegal market. This illegal market itself creates more criminals and is the core of organized crime. Legalizing most of these substances would at a stroke enable us to empty the prisons of the hapless and hopeless addicts and enable them to voluntarily seek help knowing that they won't be treated as criminals for doing so, and if they didn't they could always manage their addictions more safely and affordably without resorting to crime to do so. And in the process, we'd free up prison space for real criminals.