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Pandora reports that...

A senior Vatican insider discloses that the Prime Minister's other half, a devout Roman Catholic, has been discreetly approached about joining the prestigious Pontifical Academy Of Social Sciences, to sit as one of its resident academicians, advising the church on social and legal issues.

I am not one for such patronage usually, perhaps especially for Cherie Blair with all her public gaffes and overinflated opinion of the role of Prime Minister's spouse, but given some of the cases she has argued for, I find it quite surprising that the Vatican might consider her for such a post, and if she really is offered it, she should take it, as long as she vows to promote some of the liberal and equalities causes she has done. Could it signify some softening on the part of the Vatican on social issues like divorce, homosexuality, gender equality and so on?

Thanks to James Robertson for pointing me to this site in response to a call for fresh thinking on how to fund the EU after 2008. I'll no doubt return to this in the future but for now just have a look. How we can finance the EU and get a dividend back.

Technorati Tags: EU, monetary reform

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.

...and supports it, in Tim Worstall: Selling the Spectrum:

Along with David Curry, and recently also a publication from the Institute of Economic Affairs - "Wheels of Fortune" by Fred Harrison - conservatives are beginning to wake up to the potential benefits of Land Value Tax. An idea whose time is coming at last? We can hope!

There's often talk about the "younger generation" who have only ever known Tony Blair in charge in their political memories. Well, in a way that applies to me too. Of course at forty, I have more political memories than that (including writing, at age 11, to someone called Williams who was in charge of schools at the time, or so I thought, to complain about the discipline regime at my private preparatory school!), but I only really got involved in party politics after the 1997 General Election.

So far as I am aware my family had always voted Liberal. They were part of that Scottish cohort who were not in the Kirk (Tory party at prayer) and were not Catholic (who it was always said were instructed by their bishops to vote Labour), but Gospel Hall Brethren and so in that non-conformist set that gravitated in Scotland to the Liberals.

But, at public school, self interest put me off ever wanting to vote Labour (who would, we were all told, close down private schools) and, whilst my early career in the City was unashamedly inspired by the Thatcherite loads-a-money era, I could not stomach voting for a party that treated me as a gay man as inferior (don't argue with me here, they did, and as recent opinion polling amongst their members shows still do at heart). I had the great misfortune, at my second voting General Election, to live in the constituency of that odious woman woman Jill, now Baroness, Knight, author of the hated Section 28.

Despite all the promise of equality from Labour, I actually contacted Millbank during the 1997 campaign, the first in which I had gone so far as to actually read party manifestos, to ask whether Labour party policy of repeal of section 28 and equalisation of the age of consent were specific first term promises and was told they were not. So that settled me on joining the Lib Dems. And for a year and a half I was just that, a "sleeping" member, paying my dues (albeit at the rate of the minimum annual subscription per month in order to salve my conscience at not actually doing anything active!).

Whilst there was a certain feeling of relief that Labour had routed what had become a moribund and corrupt government, and some smiles at the "New Labour, New Britain" agenda, little did I know that the reign of Tony Blair would lead me to a deep loathing of national politics, the notion of the nation state even and crucially the role of an individual claiming to "lead" and "speak for" an entire nation of sixty million different opinions. The size of that first, and indeed second, majority, silenced real political debate as surely as a one party state would have done. Only the House of Lords, which I loathe as an institution, seemed willing and capable of opposing anything, and their days were numbered.

I am hard pressed to name anything I think Blair has done in his ten years that was done voluntarily and with good grace and for the better. Age of Consent and Section 28 were both changed in the end, but reluctantly, after European Court intervention in the case of the former and after unnecessary delay in the case of the latter. Devolution for Scotland and Wales was good, but in reality all but predated Blair in the form of the Scottish Constitutional Convention. Wealth inequality has been up and down, the Big Brother state has moved on apace, there feels like there has been just as much massaging of figures, and certainly more spin than ever before, and little if any feeling of a real ideology behind it all. I've never felt before that politics was merely a cynical exercise in winning elections to perpetuate one's own power at almost any cost.

At the same time I have flirted with Trots, and then "seen the cat", respectively looking for the small government option - either anarchist in the former case or "geo-libertarian" once I had had my eyes opened, precisely because, like nobody else before him, the smarmy, spinning, unassailable man at number ten had put me off government entirely. Two books that kicked off that search for a personal ideology are "An Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism (Intelligent Person's Guide Series)" (Conrad Russell) and "The Grip of Death: A Study of Modern Money, Debt Slavery and Destructive Economics" (Michael Rowbotham). And now not even the Lib Dems can adequately express my radicalism for economic and constitutional reform, to end protectionist monopoly and elected dictatorship respectively.

So it's good bye and good riddance Mr Blair. I'd rather you didn't take any international man of mystery jobs that would mean me continuing to see your smarmy git face on my television or newspapers ever again. In fact, maybe you'd consider going to Mars for a while. Thank goodness nothing, not even conversion to Rome, can bring you a plenary indulgence any more, and there remains a chance that you will be brought before some authority you might recognize at some point in your future, to answer for your actions.

Technorati Tags: political obituary, tony blair