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...but having one to quote does no harm (and why are the Lib Dems remaining silent?):

"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this." Albert Einstein,1921 'My First Impression of the U.S.A.' (quoted in Transform's Report "After the War on Drugs")

If you click on the link to that report you'll see some of the contemporary influential people, even if not quite of the order of Einstein all of them, who have endorsed the report and its ideas, amongst them Simon Jenkins, who, for the second time in two weeks I find myself agreeing with his Sunday Times column on a subject close to my heart. Jenkins points out, as I did earlier in the week, that far from merely demonstrating they are real people who have done things they wished they hadn't but now can we please get on with our jobs, the confessions of now a round dozen I believe cabinet members to having indulged in a little drug taking in their youth...

"have a deeper significance. They indicate hypocrisy on a subject of urgent concern to all parents. Why should their children go to jail when half the cabinet was admitting the same crime. Yet on Friday the reaction at Westminster was one of humour. Drug taking is apparently okay if you can get away with it. Drug taking is okay if you pretend you did not enjoy it, or “experimented”, or affirm it to be “wrong” without quite saying why. Lots of things are wrong without being crimes, which is perhaps why nobody last week mentioned the word crime."

And actually, I am not so sure it is right even to believe what they all say about their past. If Cameron took drugs at Bullingdon Club bashes and similar, it was surely an expression of the disdain for the law that those "born to rule" felt they were untouchable...a deliberate political statement. It doesn't matter that he didn't know he wanted to become politically involved at the time, or so he says (having four generations of ancestors as MPs for nearby Newbury might have at least bumped it up his career options though); the circles in which he moved and the situations in which any such drug use might have occurred were political statements, of a sort.

Cannabis use at Oxford in the sixties, the scale of which was to form a significant element in the debates on law reform such as the Wootton Report, was also something of a political statement in itself. And more recently, it hasn't been drugs interest groups enticing people at Freshers Fairs with drugs, but our own Lib Dem Youth and Students cannabis law reform campaign and its well known and very popular "tear off roach" postcards.

The message has been that if you want to get interested in politics, these little rebellions against "the olds" running our lives are part and parcel of your political career, perhaps even a part of your initiation! Politically minded students in fact, if they indulge at all, probably do so in order to convince themselves and others just how "not wrong" such drugs are and how precisely they can be trusted to make up their own minds about such things without the nannying that Brown and Smith are now putting back on the agenda.

But aside from ascribing motives to the current rash of confessions the thing that really irks me about this whole saga, as a Liberal Democrat, is that we as a party have not said anything about it. The chaterati - Jenkins himself, Janet Street-Porter and Mary Riddell today in three of the four Sunday heavyweights, and at least Deborah Orr on Saturday - have all basically come out against prohibition, presumably much to the chagrin of the neo-puritans in the Tory and Labour camps. And yet our press releases have ranged from half a dozen about by-elections, through concern at new alcohol crime and drink driving figures, to the Olympics, House of Lords reform and diplomatic relations with Russia, but have not once mentioned the fact that we have progressive policy on drugs that chimes with these peddlars of popular opinion and which offers a real alternative to these mealy mouthed po-faced prohibitionist parties.

I have to say, it is part of a weasel-worded approach to liberal issues that we seem to have taken of late. The drugs issue, despite having a briefing paper prepared before the 2005 election, was, if memory serves, one of those subjects, like votes for prisoners and revoking automatic life sentences for murder, that our spokespeople, when challenged, did not robustly defend as liberal policies, relegating some of them to the status of "something our weird way of deciding policy (democratically, at conference) foisted on us but not really manifesto material".

So, as a public service, here are some clips from our policies on drugs, and cannabis in particular (from "Liberal Democrats Policy Briefing 10: Honesty, Realism, Responsibility", January 2005).

On the principles behind the policy:

Liberal Democrats believe the current emphasis on criminal sanctions for users actually makes the problem worse: it exacerbates the adverse consequences of drug use; it brings many young people, who would otherwise be law-abiding, into contact with both the criminal world and the criminal justice system; it undermines more promising strategies for minimising harmful drug use; and it diverts large public resources which could be better employed.

Liberal Democrats believe the time has come to reform the approach to drugs policy, so that there is an intelligent range of responses, with the emphasis on education, treatment for addiction and harm reduction strategies rather than blanket prohibition, but retaining criminal sanctions where justified.

On cannabis specifically:

Liberal Democrats would break the link between cannabis use and organised crime by:

• Maintaining the classification of cannabis as a Class C drug in the short term, but issuing policy guidance that it is not in the public interest to prosecute individuals for possession of cannabis for their own use, cultivation of small numbers of cannabis plants for their own use, or social supply of cannabis.
• Permitting medical use of cannabis derivatives, subject to appropriate pharmaceutical controls and the successful conclusion of clinical trials.
• In the longer term, seeking to put the supply of cannabis on a legal, regulated basis, subject to securing necessary renegotiation of the UN Conventions.

and, more generally:

Liberal Democrats would reform unnecessary and counter productive criminal penalties by:

• Ending the use of imprisonment as a punishment for possession for own use of illegal drugs of any class. Drug addicts should wherever possible be in treatment not in prison – unless they have committed other serious crimes (e.g. robbery to feed a crack cocaine habit) in which case prison must remain an option.
• Re-classifying ecstasy from Class A to Class B to reflect the fact that it is less harmful than heroin and cocaine, but not re-classifying it further unless recommended by the Drugs Commission subject to evidence on long-term health effects.

Hat tip to Tim Worstall for the fun animation!

Now come on, let's get everyone off their post by-election beta-blockers and mogadon and get them engaged in this debate!

Technorati Tags: cannabis, drugs laws, lib dems, liberty, Simon Jenkins

People may be aware that the Lib Dems' Tax and Economic Reform group ALTER have been campaigning against the Kate Barker proposal for taxing the gains made on grant of planning permission, which is likely to be brought forward in this year's Finance Bill alongside the Labour Land Campaign. Though we recently discovered that despite their new found enthusiasm for real Land Value Tax, the influential (amongst Labour types anyway) IPPR think tank was supporting it.

So on the Adam Smith Institute Blog today they come out against it, sensibly, though of course from the perspective of the property development industry who largely don't like the idea of any tax on anything they might see as gain for them:

Development Tax Disaster?

By Mischa Balen in: Development •

At the ASI we have promoted the use of simple and efficient tax systems, so it is with some interest that we have watched the messy new development land tax proposed by the Treasury. Jenny Davey in the Times draws attention to the tax and the opposition it has encountered from the British Property Federation.

The tax will be levied on the rise in price on land for which planning permission has been granted. But the British Property Federation reckons that it could create unnecessary delay in the planning process, as well as reallocating profits from the process to national rather than local projects, and, in addition, could cause '"messy legal disputes" over the process in which the tax is calculated. This is always the result with nebulous calculations: it can be very tricky in a rising market to calculate any increase in land value as a result of development.

But there is one overarching problem which we can foresee with this tax: by increasing taxes on development without a commitment to spend such revenues locally, the government is making it less likely that planning permission will be granted for much needed housing and shops in local communities. At a time when the government is pledging to restore local community government and accountability, it seems strange that this tax should remove "the link between the developer, the development and direct community benefit."

Of course, they do not support, as the economic guru they are named for did, proper, simple, land value tax. But hopefully this will be persuade the Tories (who at least at local government level have come out against PGS) and spell the end for this ill thought out tax on development.

There was a way more important by-election today in Oxford for a seat on Oxford City Council vacated by our own Richard Huzzey who is going off to the "Land of the Free" and the alma mater of the simian one.

Congratulations therefore, to Councillor Mark Mills. I see he will be twenty tomorrow, Friday 13th. So happy birthday as well! Do we have any younger principal authority councillors at the moment?

Particularly pleasing was to see Labour, who put in a whole load of work to try to gain the one seat that would have handed them a Town Hall majority beaten into third, and most especially, the Tories' turncoat left unceremoniously back in fourth again in Oxford city! Well done all round everyone!

Except for the miserable bugger porter wanting to sort the students' mail in New College this morning - I've never been spoken to so rudely by a servant of either university, from Chancellors down to porters, as I got from him this morning!

UPDATE:  My glee is somewhat tempered this morning by the news that the City Council had got the votes wrong on the original notice on their web page and in fact the Tories came second and the Greens fourth.  Oh well, you have a Labour run council and that's what you can excpect...:-)