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Here's another thing about the Conservative party and their tenuous claimed link with the Co-operative Movement. It is no coincidence that the international rainbow flag for peace is also the international co-operative movement's flag. Nor that it was the Co-operative Womens' Guild that instituted the idea of wearing white poppies to promote peace instead of red ones that commemorated the "glorious dead". It is axiomatic that the Co-operative Movement strives for peace - the very phrase "Peace and Co-operation" encapsulates the ethos.

So, will Dave be wearing red, for the more traditionally Conservative Remembrance of War, or white for the traditional Co-operative Promotion of Peace? I think we can probably predict pretty well which it will be, don't you?

Spliff -> Psychosis -> Delusions

QED. I sincerely apologize for ever doubting it. Clearly there are some in whom cannabis creates delusions that they can sort the world out.

The ability to talk bollocks late into the night is important for politicians too though.

UPDATE: The BBC has been mulling over whether such revelations actually matter. They (and others ) seem to be implying that so long as people got up to such hijinx before they became "respectable politicians" what they got up to is probably of no issue now.

But actually, on an issue like this it does indeed matter. They are, if you like, living proof that one can indulge a little and not screw up your life entirely (unless one takes the line, as I am increasingly wont to do, that being a politician by definition is screwing up at least others' lives and probably not doing justice to the politician's own talents other than for meddling).

The moral panic crowd want us to believe that getting involved with drugs of any kind is going to outlaw you forever, probably harm you physically and mentally, and leave you on the scrapheap of life. Clearly this is not the case. And the stench of hypocrisy hangs around such people who now tell us that what did no harm to them is something we cannot possibly make up our own mind about.

Technorati Tags: cannabis, drugs laws, Jacqui Smith

Good. No election. Well, I'll qualify that a little - the relatively short pain of a three week campaign could have seen friend and former council colleague Steve Goddard give Andrew Smith some unwanted leisure time for Christmas, which would have been fantastic - but I'm pleased we won't have to for now.

There may now be three, four, even five more party conferences in which to whip up a storm of revolutionary liberalism to really wow the electorate with a genuine alternative to the "cosy consensus" which, in my opinion anyway, is not evident right now in our policies. Time to give the FPC some breathing space from the poll obsessed campaign strategists to come up with really radical policies and instruct those strategists to sell them, not be hemmed in by what they say they can and cannot sell.

2009 will see the centenary of Lloyd George's "People's Budget" and we can develop a compelling theme in two years around "Liberal Britain: unfinished business" hijacked as the political landscape has been for a century alternately by the socialism and protectionism of Labour and Conservative governments, now merged into one amorphous mass of interfering statism.

That the hysteria of the past few days can be put down to a Tory announcement of a tax shift amounting to not much more than a half of one per cent of the government budget from the super-rich to the merely very rich just proves the paucity of imagination currently pervading both politicians and public. Ming Campbell has been right in suggesting that there's not a fag paper between the two halves of the statist party led by Brown and Cameron, and the past two weeks have seen nothing to disabuse us of that.

The time for radicalism is now. Radical liberalism. We don't merely want the "people to decide" but for the people to be able to take back power over their own lives. The power that once marked us out as British; dynamic, enterprising and freedom loving but which has been subdued, even nearly killed off perhaps through decades of dependency and government managerialism.

They've been talking about poverty in Glasgow for a long time. They've been into land reform as well. Not just the work of Mary Barbour and the Glasgow Women's Housing Association and rent strikes during the first war, but at the turn of the twentieth century Glasgow was also the de facto HQ in Britain of the Single Tax movement, those followers of Henry George's idea of taxing land values. The poverty in the city was legendary, and it was it seems often used as an example by either side in the land tax debates almost exactly a century ago.

Here's a response from Winston Churchill in the House of Commons to the leader of the opposition, Arthur Balfour's attempts to rubbish the idea:

One hundred years ago, the Liberal Party could have begun to eradicate Glasgow's poverty once and for all. How sad that a hundred years later Glasgow East continues to shine mostly as an example of those same problems we could have solved all those years ago. What benefit has the political game been to them in all those years? What good the franchise? What good socialism? Or the vested interests of the Tories' friends? BBC News tonight suggested that this might be the most important by-election in thirty years. Maybe for the first time in a century someone could once again explain how they are going to make life really better for the constituency's long suffering inhabitants. And then make it happen.