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"I feel frustrated. I feel the whole mode of modern British Government, Whitehall and Westminster, is in a profound way counterproductive."

So says Andrew Phillips, as he would want to be known, and we should listen. Personally, I would add anti-democratic, dysfunctional, depressing and, more than anything else, increasingly unnecessary. He goes on to say:

"We have politicians and civil servants who have done nothing outside parliament. All they are fit for is passing new sky blue laws."

In a century we have swapped one ruling class for another, plutocracy for psephocracy if you will, where careerist spinmeisters will do anything to attract a vote at the expense of ideological debate. But more ominously this puts personality ahead of principle. The winners in this battle delude themselves that they have a mandate for almost anything that pops into their little heads as if they and only they are capable of governing.

Modern British government (perhaps western government as a whole) is like a mediaeval papacy (complete with a corrupt curia and all that papal bull crap!) and we need to rekindle the political equivalent of the reformation's "priesthood of all believers" or the enlightenment's rejection of a higher power altogether for whose favours we need some intercessor to mediate. We need to foster a belief in all citizens' right to self-governance before anything else, the sovereignty of the individual over the state.

The beast that is the state is increasingly only able to sustain itself against its own people by ever more coercion. Globalization threatens to empower the individual to the detriment of the state. Individuals and voluntary associations are more than ever before able to form communities not restricted by geography, to operate in markets once only accessible through intermediaries, to choose where to live, work, play, shop and pay taxes or not, none of which need be in the same jurisdiction.

We need to deconstruct the state, slay that beast. To reconstitute government as something to which we voluntarily cede only those functions that we cannot arrange for ourselves or in our communities, geographical or otherwise. To communicate, learn from and learn respect for those other basically decent individuals and associations of individuals oppressed by a world of states that seek to aggregate power to a ruling few. An age of co-operative individualism. Individuals seem, largely, to be able to make more friends than enemies, states more enemies than friends. We no longer need those states to network on our behalf when we can do it for ourselves.

My one regret about Andrew Phillips is that, having recognized some of the problems, he finds himself too tired to stay and try to change them. But we all run out of puff some time. Those who agree with him need to carry on that fight with ever more urgency.

Not surprisingly there's a reasonably well informed debate going on on Starkey's Last Word with Howard Marks on the show, Fraser Nelson from the Spectator - "I'm normally of a libertarian leaning but..." (you either are or you aren't IMHO) - has brought up some hackneyed cliches -

The illicit drugs market is not like the smuggling of tobacco:

He was worried that if you made drugs legal and controlled you would still have a huge amount of black market product like the fact that one in four packets of cigarettes are smuggled. The point is is that for the main part the smuggled tobacco products are legally produced and controlled, they're just avoiding the tax on them. If you could buy quality controlled Heroin from Beyer (who hold the trademark on the name incidentally) in small measured doses quality controlled and as "safe" as can be made, why would you ever go back to buying the Vim (sorry, Cif) cut crap sold out of the back of white BMWs? Even if you did have smuggled stuff to get round any tax measures imposed by government, it would be of the same quality as the legally sold and taxed stuff or they would not be able to sell it.

They've tried legalization in Alaska/Netherlands/Switzerland/wherever and it didn't work:

Erm, no, they didn't. They made possession and use a lesser or no offense, but acting alone in the world they could not get into the supply side and start controlling the quality and availability of supply. They practiced "tolerance" rather than full blown legalization with all the structures of the market opened up. It still did not make it socially acceptable to be a drug user and seek help for it when you needed it.

We're an island, it ought to be easy to cut off the supply:

Wrong. Especially with "harder" drugs. Such is the technology available to concentrate and then dilute drugs, especially heroin, that you can fit enough to supply an addict for a whole month under a postage stamp. How on earth are we supposed to police that? You don't have to ship it around in multi-billion dollar bundles on board someone's Falmouth registered yacht. The more we clamp down the more people work on the concentration technologies and the only thing that is likely to result is that people who don't know how to dilute properly will die.

After last night praising the way they do things in the US, with my example from Arlington, VA of how in local government it seems Americans are encouraged to innovate and compete one with another, we heard on Thursday in another one of these league tables in the UK that Oxford City Council gives 'poor value for money':

OXFORD has been revealed as one of the poorest value-for-money district councils in the country.

Oh dear! This is not a criticism from me of the current incumbents in the corridors of power at the Town Hall, nor actually of the previous ones necessarily either. It just seems that for as long as I can remember the City Council has swerved between basket-case and financial disaster scene.

Clearly the mechanisms available for achieving change are completely inadequate. When I was on the council the big idea was "zero base budgeting". Worthy initiatives and spending patterns and cross departmental transfers had grown into a complete mess over time so that realistically you couldn't tell what one particular service actually costs. I don't know how much of that has actually been done - I hear occasionally of one department or other going through a "thorough budget review". But they don't seem to have made much of an overall impact - certainly not on what we the citizens have to pay!

The buzzword bingo phrase of choice when I was there was "thinking out of the box" but that didn't seem to do much good either. Or maybe more accurately the box is so hemmed in by diktat from Whitehall that whatever they think has already been thought before and blocked.

What is the point of having 48 councillors if collectively they cannot make a difference? I'd say Oxford City Council was broke. If it was a corporation it would be in administration, if an individual it would have taken out an Individual Voluntary Arrangement long ago. And, though I don't hold them to blame, I wouldn't be surprised if all its board (ie the councillors) would have been barred from holding directorships. At the very least they have been merely overseeing decline for decades.

Soon, they will have had four "full time" and two "inter-regnum" Chief Executives in seven years. For even the most myopic that has got to be an indication that what they have to work with is so broken that it gives them no satisfaction to continue trying. Grandly they plan an urban extension, an olympic swimming pool, a Town Hall revamp or a unitary authority.

I suggest complete root and branch reform. Let's declare independence or something similarly radical. The council has to look, properly for once (it's been saying it will for many years), at what it needs to do and whether other vehicles could deliver some services more efficiently. Those vehicles may be democratic local structures or they may not be in all cases.

Take leisure facilities. I wonder what proportion of people in the city use the council's leisure facilities that cost us collectively so much - they're run down, dowdy, lack investment and are far eclipsed by some of the private facilities that in some cases cost little or no more to join. Yet every other year everyone gets to vote for who should run them in amongst a package of all sorts of other things more relevant to their comfort living in the city. Why do local authorities run leisure facilities? Well, partly it stems from the days when houses didn't have baths. The Public Health Acts created an obligation to provide public baths. Everything to do with personal hygiene and nothing to do with discretionary leisure spending.

Housing is hardly democratic either. We are always told by the Defend Council Housing campaign that local authority owned housing is the most democratic structure because you can vote to change your ultimate landlord. Well that too is utter tripe. Twenty per cent of the city's housing stock approximately is local authority owned. Those voters cannot outweigh the other 80%. The party that might offer them a better deal cannot win power through their votes alone, or on a manifesto that only deals with housing issues. And now that Westminster, under Labour of all parties, has the end of council housing firmly in its sights, it would be better to work out a more democratic mechanism for managing housing before we are forced to hand over that huge asset to some third party over which we have no say at all.

When Housing Benefit costs so much to administer, it means that all that extra money cannot be going to actually doing something about housing, but into the administration. Six years ago IBM did a deal with Arizona state authorities to handle all their transactions on a fee per transaction basis which cut costs overnight by seventy percent leaving the authorities all that money to spend on real projects. I'm not saying that's the answer here. Just that if you are prepared to look, there are alternatives.

Oxford is one of the wealthiest district councils in the country by asset base. It is shameful that our structures are in the state they are and only radical change - from a blank sheet of paper, is going to make a significant impact in my opinion.

Apparently the Palace of Westminster is exempt from this draconian smoking ban.

Given that the staff already went on strike because they were being treated differently, and worse, than other public servants, I think this is appalling. If it is an argument about protecting workers' health why are they any less worthy of that protection?

Disgraceful. Abolish the lot of them, I say. We can do without Westminster.

Hot on the heels of discussions about banning possession of BSDM material as discussed by Stephen Tall comes news that a charity is called for a ban on pro-suicide websites:

Suicide is a major cause of death in young men

The government should make it illegal for internet sites to incite or advise people on how to commit suicide, a charity says.

Papyrus, set up to tackle young suicide, said the risk posed by pro-suicide websites was not being taken seriously enough.

The charity said the 1961 Suicide Act should be amended to make it illegal to publish such material on the web.

The government said it was looking at how rules could be tightened.

At the moment, the law says it is illegal to aid, abet, counsel, procure or incite someone to commit suicide, but to be successfully prosecuted the individual has to have knowledge and participated in the suicide.

The charity said it was aware of nearly 20 internet-related suicides cases in the UK in the last five years.

Oh dear. At least the Home Office spokesperson quoted said it would not be possible as many sites were hosted abroad. But this apparent trend towards demanding censorship of this that and the other is naive and dangerous.

Suicide is tragic. My then best friend killed himself while away at university twelve years ago. Because, it transpired, he feared that he would not make a good lawyer and let his family down. And guess what, we hadn't heard of the web back then. "20 internet related suicide cases" - all very sad, but actually, how on earth do you work that out. There are lots of legitimate medical sites as well that someone might use in the process of working out how to kill oneself. Are these to be banned "just in case" as well?

I'll bet those same sites that have allegedly aided and abetted suicides have also prevented a fair number as people talk about their problems, hook up with others in the similar situations and so on. Suicide, I am assured, is rarely a rational act. Some would say that philosophically it is the most irrational act as we are preprogrammed to be survivors.

People will always find information from other sources. A quick glance at the top few of the "I want to kill myself" search they claim yields about 5 million pages (I get nearly 29 million incidentally) seems to suggest that most are cries for help. And I've seen such cries in action on the web where the person has been "talked down" and gone on to sort themselves out. I rather think you can't have one without the other. If the information wasn't there you'd likely not have people asking for help and being talked out of it. The very top returned site on Google is, as you might expect, the Samaritans.

Censorship is not the answer, and in particular on the web will lead to dangerous consequences for civil liberties as every pressure group gets in on the act about their particular issue.