Chris Huhne

Huhne on Drugs - "I wuz wrong" says Jock

Jock — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 14:28:06 +0000

Much to my surprise, Chris Huhne has in fact commented on the story I linked to earlier today about Brown and Smith preparing to over-rule any recommendation from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs if they do not recommend castrating and hanging cannabis users on the spot
.

Of course it doesn't actually say a great deal - not even reiterate our own very good policy on the issue - but it's a welcome intervention. I do take issue with this bit though:

"The advisory council must take on board the increasing reports of the mental health effects of high strength cannabis, but ministers must be guided by the science and the evidence as assessed by the council."

If there is an actual causal link, which nothing has proven so far as I am aware yet (repeating it often enough does not make it true), and "high strength" (which is also not well defined, nor how much of the market is such high strength ccannabis) then legalisation is still probably the best way to counter that. Further prohibition will inevitably lead to people facing tougher penalties producing and using stronger stuff and more adulterated stuff to maximize their profit and minimize their risks.

Think prohibition and the nasty alcohol and illegally ddistilled overproof hooch that resulted from it. read more »

"Ecstasy safer than aspirin"

Jock — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 14:07:30 +0000

Or at least it might be if we didn't have to buy it from backstreet chemists with as much skill and customer concern as a Chinese-American toy manufacturer:

The legalisation of all drugs is "inevitable", according to the Chief Constable of North Wales.

Richard Brunstrom, who has campaigned for drugs like heroin to be made legal, says he believes the move towards decriminalisation is "10 years away."
...

"I think that the legalisation and subsequent regulation of proscribed drugs is now inevitable, and I think it's ten years away, not ten months away." (I'd prefer the latter of course!)

He went on: "It has already happened in for instance Portugal, a full member of the European Union, decriminalised under the existing international treaties.
...

"We're still causing something like £20bn worth of damage to our society every year," he said.

"More than half of all recorded crime is caused by people feeding a drugs habit.

"The government wants evidence-based policy; the evidence is very clear that prohibition doesn't work, it can't work, an enforcement-led strategy is making things worse, not better."

...

"Ecstasy is a remarkably safe substance - it's far safer than aspirin," he said.

"If you look at the government's own research into deaths you'll find that ecstasy, by comparison to many other substances - legal and illegal - it is comparably a safe substance."

Come on Chris Huhne, support this guy please! read more »

Finally, a ballot paper, and a moan at the world!

Jock — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 06:18:28 +0000

Well, I was getting a bit worried. Royal Mail never seem to deliver to my door, and despite a great big notice to the contrary continue to deliver my mail to the adjoining student flat to which I have no access. So only last night, when the students next door decided presumably to have a bit of a clear out, did I get my leadership ballot paper, together with a final demand to have my flu jab on 15th November, two months of Prospect magazine, my Co-op dividend vouchers (too late I think now to have my divvie turned over to the Community Fund), and the calling notice for the Headington and Marston Lib Dem branch AGM on 28th November (so my apologies are too late, but rest assured as candidate for Headington Hill and Northway next year I'm not completely disinterested in the local branch!). Grrr! read more »

Kamm on Huhne's Nukes

Jock — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 18:42:05 +0000

For some reason I have Oliver Kamm's blog in my daily reading list. I have no idea why - I don't like his style, his politics or his opinions most of the time, but today he has a go at Chris Huhne about that nuclear issue. He says, at the end, that he's "doubtful that the Lib Dem contenders have thought much about this issue beyond their internal party positioning, and I wouldn't trust them anywhere near this country's security policies."

I think that's just wrong. Kamm picks on one word in Huhne's article on Trident..."independent". He says that the Trident system is independent to us - that we bought it once and for all from the Yanks (and saved a whole load of money because we did buy existing technology from elsewhere) and could use it independently. I disagree - I think we are dependent on the Yanks for maintaining the missile system - only the launch platforms, our nuclear submarine fleet, are ours.

Now all of this is a slight side-show. At the moment I cannot conceive of a situation in which the UK might be tempted to initiate an independent, unilateral launch of ICBMs. But if we did, and it was over a cause the Yanks did not agree with us on, would we find that "our" missile system was truly independent? I don't know, but for me all this misses the basic point, and one that Kamm simply sweeps under the carpet. Chris wants, if we can't negotiate multilateral complete disarmament, a different system because the threats today are different. Kamm seems to suggest that buying a system for the next forty years makes such a question irrelevant - the old threats may have returned in that time so we'd be back to needing a system like Trident.

I assume here the question is whether we want submarine launched long-range Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile nukes. And this is where we diverge. The threat is different. We have the existing system for a particular type of threat - that of massed ranks of opposing missiles targeting our cities and mainland installations where it is a good thing that we have our missiles offshore and moving around, albeit slowly, so that in a Mutually Assured Destruction scenario we can still launch when all our land based facilities are reduced to radioactive rubble. The US can have land based Minuteman missiles because they're on the other side of the planet from what was the main threat - the Soviet Union - and can be sure to be able to fire a few off before the USSR's nukes reach them.

Neither are appropriate for the type of threats we now have. Far more useful to us would be the sort of thing the Greenham peace camp was meant to prevent - nuclear armed cruise type missiles that are far more flexible as to launch platform and scenario, so called tactical nukes. Personally I can't see again a reason why we would use such creatures either. Emerging nuclear states have to have two technological breakthroughs to produce weapons that might threaten us or ours - the nuclear warhead and the long range launch platform. We've seen how claims of Saddam's ability to reach Cyprus were found completely untrue, we know that even North Korea's missiles were far from stable. We're more likely to see terrorist launched nukes come in the shape of a suitcase - ground detonated by timer - which no nukes of our own are going to be able to counter.

I am a unilateralist - no doubt someone whom Mr Kamm thinks a lilly livered coward out of touch with the world and its threats. But even if we cannot persuade the rest of the world to get rid of nukes once and for all at the next round of talks, I think the better deterrence nowadays would be a truly independent, multi-platform, tactical device rather than ICBMs designed for a particular cold war scenario of roughly matched opponents and "push button warfare".

A rare opportunity to disagree with James Graham!

Jock — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 01:04:42 +0000

...it is the economy (stupid), or at least the political economy.

James Graham comes out for Clegg today in his piece at Comment is Free, Ich bin ein Clegghead:

Lesson one from the latest (and hopefully last for a good long while) Liberal Democrat leadership contest is that everything I thought I knew about the candidates was wrong. Chris "master strategist" Huhne has ended up making some appalling tactical blunders, while Nick "great communicator" Clegg, it emerges, can be a bit rubbish on the telly. They both have feet of clay. Despite this, I remain as sure as I was a month ago that both are better potential leaders than either of their two predecessors.

Leaving aside the superficial similarities, what emerges are two very different personalities coming at this campaign at a very different point in their lives and focusing on very different priorities. Huhne invokes Bill Clinton when he states that it's the economy (stupid); Clegg talks about how the economy-focused politics of the 1970s and 80s are now long dead and buried. Huhne talks about devolution, of bringing government closer to people; Clegg talks about empowerment, of giving people more direct control over the public services they use.

It's not his choice I particularly object to, though I disagree with him on that too naturally, but one particular part of the assessment he goes through to arrive at that choice. It's mentioned twice, one of them in the part of his article I quote above, that "the economy-focused politics of the 1970s and 80s are now long dead and buried". This leads to the conclusion, later, that whilst Nick "isn't an economist and notwithstanding his observation that the political debate has largely moved on from such matters" he could "wing it" if he is "surrounded [by] people who can talk with authority on the subject."

See personally I don't think that the focus on the economy in politics should be dead. As I've argued before, I do think the "cosy consensus" between Labour and Tory makes it appear that way - that we are in an era of managerial politics, but that the job of liberals is to put it back on the agenda. Or at least, and it is different, to revive the study and promotion of "political economy". For too long now "economics", the pseudo-science that divorced itself from "political economy" in the nineteenth century, has sought to position itself as a set of inviolable laws, as if they are to society what Newtonian laws are to the universe. That economics somehow trumps politics, is master of the system rather than just a part of the system of how people and resources get on together.

Only a certain amount of politics deals with how things currently are, which is necessarily bound by the parameters of the contemporary economic orthodoxy, because that's how economists tell us the world, markets, property, wealth accumulation and so on works, and that it's inviolable. But the real visionaries are those who can subjugate economics to political principles, who can see ways to change the contemporary orthodoxy to achieve real political priorities. And, whilst I have a healthy skepticism of "schooled" economists, educated with that orthodoxy ingrained into them such that few of them ever dare to challenge it, I believe what we do need is an economist first who can think out of the box, instinctively and be able to defend an unorthodox economic idea spontaneously and with authority.

I think that's what Chris means when he says, as quoted by John Abrams at Liberal Revolution when he asks "Is Chris pitching for the Shadow Chancellors job?"

`Well I think we all have our strong suits, I’m simply saying that my strong suit, clearly having been in those areas is being able to take Gordon Brown on on the Economy, which is going to be dominant issue as Bill Clinton said.`

And I think he's right. Which is why, whatever I may disagree with in the way he has promoted himself as a staunch defender of public provision of public services, I will still be voting for the economist. He may not be as radical as I would like, but neither of them are, but I really think the one with the greater potential for radicalism is the one who stands a chance of understanding how changing the economic rules can feed through into great social change for the better.

Now Clegg prolongs the spat

Jock — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 03:37:02 +0000

Whatever one thinks of the public spat on the Politics Show yesterday, and plenty of bloggers have made their views plain enough, not entirely always to their own credit, I can't help feeling that this is not the cleverest of moves:

BBC NEWS | Politics | Lib Dems consider Clegg complaint:

Senior Liberal Democrat officials are to consider a complaint by leadership contender Nick Clegg over a document describing him as a "calamity". That paper was issued from the camp of leadership rival Chris Huhne. Writing on his website, Mr Huhne "sincerely apologised" and "disassociated himself from it". Mr Clegg's campaign team lodged an official complaint with the party's chief whip and party officials are to decide whether to take further action.

What action could, or should, "party officials" take? Order an apology? It's already been posted, and presumably communicated directly and personally to Nick (if not it should be - a statement on a website is not enough, one to one). What else is there? Disqualify one of only two candidates? Nothing would be more likely to lead to long lasting rancour and recriminations in the party, and I'm not even suggesting it's a possibility, let alone one "party officials" should consider if it were. So if your two potential remedies are either already in process or impossible, that's the time to let it lie, or be seen as not taking it all with good grace.

It seems to me that all an "official complaint" does is prolong the least glorious moment of the contest for another few days - maybe longer, and, on an individual level for Nick, ensure that the phrase "Calamity Clegg" gets more airing than it ever warranted (which was none). One thing is sure, there'll be a "researcher" somewhere tonight learning the hard way that you can never put out a "catchy" title for a press briefing and expect said media not to take such a thing literally as summing up what you think about the subject of the briefing.

The document itself raises some pertinent questions about differences between what Nick has said or written and what others, friends, have apparently said or written on his behalf. Or at least they would be pertinent if a leadership contest was about setting policy, which it is not. But in demanding definitive statements on this or that an issue from either leadership candidate it seems to me that all that is achieved is putting an entrenched position on the record that can then be thrown back at you when the party, sovereign policy making body of course, decides something different somewhere down the line.

One can just imagine the smug Mr Sopel in a few years' time putting it to the Lib Dem leader, whoever that may be, that "you are losing control of your party, aren't you, because when you stood for leader you said that you would be against such and such and here's the party voting for it".

Do I look bovvered? The Blogs are the losers!

Jock — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 01:27:52 +0000

I have to say with a certain smugness that I was out in the pissing rain and blustery icy wind delivering Lib Dem leaflets while our two men in suits were spitting feathers at each other on John Sopel's lunchtime politics show. And reading some of the blog comments on it, especially, though understandably I guess as the "victim" of the briefing document with which Sopel ambushed Huhne, in the Cleggosphere, I was prepared to be confronted with a truly undignified public school spat complete with debaggings and wedgies.

So, having just now watched it, and having already read the document in question as published by the Huhne campaign team, I did think it was a bit of an unedifying spectacle, but really nothing to get so worked up about as to start talking about bringing "the party into disrepute" or "consign him to the backbenches" or even, from someone who has one blog entitled "Chris Almighty" and another called "The Anti-Chris Blog", a comment that electing Chris would see him resign from the party.

Nick is a big boy. He will have to weather a great deal worse if he is leader. Chris is, tonight, a very silly looking boy, he will have to learn from this - though I have to say that for me, on reading the document (far more useful than watching the spat on television) many of the "inconsistencies" set out in it do ring true in the various things I seen written about Nick's position on the relevant issues compared with what he says himself (hence my earlier confusion in the early part of the contest).

The bigger problem for me is that I don't want someone who rules out vouchers, insurance, the break-up of state monopolies or any of these things that Chris criticizes Nick for, and the fact that in his attempts to clarify his position Nick also seems to rule them all out means I have nobody squeezing me in my "comfort zone" in this election. So I am sticking with Chris, because as I have said many times, I believe the future of the party and the country is in adopting an identifiably Liberal political economy and I believe that means having an economist as leader who can instinctively make those arguments when put on the spot.

Personally, and I realise that with this post I am adding, possibly minutely, to this, I reckon it's the Lib Dem blogosphere and their shrill partisan screams bordering on vitriol, who are the real losers in this spat and I am sure the men in suits will have made up with each other very soon. And actually - if they don't make up, neither of them deserve to lead this party!

Chris Huhne, Torygraph, Surveillance State non-story

Jock — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 15:52:11 +0000

I'm not sure whether to tip my hat to Linda Jack for highlighting this non-story or to criticize her for regurgitating excitedly and in the manner of a parrot a scurrilous and unthinking story from the Torygraph that Chris Huhne owns shares in surveillance firm.

By James Kirkup, Political Correspondent
Last Updated: 3:07am GMT 03/11/2007

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat leadership contender who has strongly criticised both supermarkets and the surveillance state, is a major shareholder in a company that supplies "people monitoring" technology to Tesco.

The revelation by The Daily Telegraph of Mr Huhne's links to the country's biggest supermarket may raise questions among party members about his consistency.

Mr Huhne, 53, the party's environment spokesman, owns £250,000 worth of shares in Irisys, a Northamptonshire company that makes thermal imaging technology used to track people as they move.

It's a bit like saying we should criticize the medical use of morphine because some people misuse its close cousin heroin. So far as I can see the criticism of the "surveillance state", criticism which I fully join with , is about being able to snoop on and track identifiable individuals, usually as they go about mundane ordinary lives. This is the heroin, open to abuse and getting worse.

However the company in which Chris owns a significant shareholding, Irisys, does not do this sort of stuff. What it provides is the morphine of the surveillance world - generally beneficial when used properly. It does infra-red surveillance. Individuals cannot be identified*.

Its original application of this technology was to examine structures for stress points - it's the stuff that stops the plane you're traveling falling out of the sky because nobody noticed a hairline crack in the wing, or that keeps oil rigs safe from the stresses of the open sea.

Can you tell who it is yet?
Originally uploaded by carolyne_ej_smith

Used on humans, its thermal imaging technology allows for such helpful things as finding a person buried in rubble in an earthquake zone. More sophisticated applications combining it with computers in various situations would have helped prevent the Hillsborough disaster by preventing too many thermal blobs getting into the enclosed area where all the crushing took place. It helps to prevent unauthorized access to secure areas by one thermal blob "tailgating" someone with a card (it alerts a security guard who goes to take a look presumably) or keeps a count of the number of thermal blobs having entered a building so that if it needs to be evacuated the emergency services can see that everyone who went in is accounted for.

All good stuff I think you would agree. Then there are also applications that simply enhance the experience of the user - Tesco (amongst others) use it to tell how many people are in the store and to open up extra tills so that when they get to the end of their shop they don't have to wait in a queue. Others use it to count "footfall" into a shop or shopping centre to help them provide the optimal layout in the store. One could imagine it being used for example to check how many "thermal blobs" there are at bus stops along a route and decide to put on extra buses.

Of course, just as you can abuse morphine alongside its cousin heroin if you want to, you could couple this technology with CCTV and do actual snooping on identifiable individuals. But it's not what Irisys does. So I reckon Chris is in the clear here, personally. Indeed, by investing in a non-invasive application of modern technology, he is probably more than in the clear - he is on the side of the angels!

All this is readily discoverable from the firm's website. It's just lazy journalism and even lazier parroting of that journalism to peddle that this is some conflict of interest portraying Chris as a secret supporter of the surveillance state.

*There is research going on at the moment that suggests that you can identify an individual solely by their gait and I suppose this could be an issue even with medium resolution infra-red images, but so far as I am aware it's neither proved yet or in production applications. Presumably Irisys, and their shareholders, would take a view on whether this is an area they would want to get into when it is possible and proven. read more »

Huhne manifesto launch

Jock — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 23:20:27 +0000

Hot on the heels of a few moans (by me not least, here ) that Chris Huhne needs to produce something like Nick Clegg's comprehensive "Vision for Britain" document so we can all pick it apart and say how good it is, supporters will have received news that Chris will "launch his manifesto with a keynote speech" on Wednesday at noon.

Well...what is a person to do to celebrate the close of nominations when he's already handed his in days ago?

Clegg-vision, and an apology

Jock — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 01:15:01 +0000

Charlotte Gore mentioned that Nick Clegg has provided us with a 4000 word (I'll take her word for it) treatise on his "Vision for Britain" and so I went in search of this document to have a look. I have to agree with her lament that Chris has, as yet, not produced something similar, though you'll remember my disdain for people with "visions" when actually i want government and politicians to interfere less, but I suppose when you are claiming that your vision actually involves government and politicians interfering less it is forgivable!

I do think Chris needs to produce something of this sort, given the relatively few electors who are going to get to hear and question the two candidates in person at hustings around the country, and Nick's document has certainly cleared up one or two things about his position statement that I had erroneously interpreted from his speech at Newbury last weekend.

So to the apology...several times Nick refers to protectionism as a bad thing in his "Vision", so I take it as read that he is in fact against protectionism as he sees it anyway (which I suspect will always be different from how a mutualist or libertarian sees it) and am happy to be corrected for suggesting otherwise in my post last week.

But neither do I find anything much in Nick's vision statement that moves me "outside my comfort zone". Nor the timetable terribly ambitious. Others may feel that ten years to break "stifling deadlock of two-party politics in Britain ... for good" is just realistic, while I dream of radical liberalism recapturing the same levels of imagination as 1906. Nick points the way, in the form of the issues he picks out, but not, perhaps, the truly radical liberal solutions that could really ignite a fire in people:

"How to counter the epidemic of powerlessness that has left people bewildered by giantism in both the public and private sectors;"

Today's "giantism" was 1906's protectionism. The liberals then offered free trade and captured the mood. That same debate needs to be reopened today. If we are not going to join what Nick calls the "‘Sat-Nav’ politics we are seeing today" we must boldly go, "balls out" as a friend of mine says, with a manifesto that is, to all intents and purposes, "do or die" next time round and not flinch when the others try to portray us as quite mad!

I don't want to fisk the whole "vision" and I do think there is plenty of good stuff in there, but there are a few markers I would put down that really don't, I think, challenge that comfort zone:

"We need to set some ground rules here: our universal public services must be free to use and accessible to all. But beyond that, I want us to think afresh about how they should be funded and delivered."

Why should we assume any government provided services ought to be "universal" and "free" or indeed "publicly" provided? I believe what we should be aiming for in order to "extend opportunity" is "financial independence" for all. We should be aiming to provide people with a basic income as of right that allows them to make choices for themselves and their children, for liberalism must, if anything, be about trusting people to make the right choices if they only had the means to do so.

State monopolies are only needed because other (ie private) monopolies and the (state and multi-national) protectionism that maintain them skew the distribution of the national income towards the already haves. And local state monopolies are not greatly better than a national state monopoly, be it in health, education or anything else - it may increase accountability but it doesn't necessarily increase personal freedom to dissent from the general consensus and choose an alternative. Break those other monopolies and protections, using their surplus "profit" to fund a dividend to all citizens, and you achieve that "financial freedom" and "freedom to choose".

For example, if we "want to see funding for the poorest state school pupils rise to private school levels, not one day, but straight away" then why not let that money be used to buy places at private schools? Why not let St Paul's or Westminster Schools open "branches" in Peckham or Brent, or City of London School in Tower Hamlets? Well maybe not them, per se, because they tend to be aggressively selective on ability also, but there are plenty of private schools in which parents put their faith and cash to add extra value to less able children too. With Land Value Tax you'd soon see these currently deprived areas becoming the haven for "smart money" anyway, pulling up their economic fortunes as people want to trim their land tax bills move there and spend their money there.

Anyway, as I say, there is much that's good in Nick's "vision" and he finishes with a flourish with which I reckon we can all agree:

So my message to my party is a very simple one: trust your instincts and stay true to your beliefs. The politics of the 21st century will increasingly be played out on liberal territory. And we will have home advantage.

Our liberalism is instinctive. It cannot be faked.

Empowering individuals, extending opportunity, balancing security and liberty, protecting the environment, engaging with the world – these are causes which we have espoused for years, but which we must now champion in new ways, with renewed leadership and vigour.

I do still think that we can be even more ballsy though and aim to turn the electoral landscape around, 1906-like, as a result:

Some argue that the best the Liberal Democrats can hope for is third place and a toe hold in government if we’re lucky.

That surely cannot be our aim.

Third place is not good enough. Not good enough for me, for the party or for Britain.

In a time of real political change and shifting public opinion I believe we must be much more ambitious.

If we can address the concerns of the British people and the challenges facing our country, then the next big shift of opinion will be towards Liberalism.

The demands facing us require ambition, verve and self confidence. That is what I promise to bring to the leadership of the Liberal Democrats.

Too right; would it be too much to work towards being enough of a power in 2009 to force the "Spin Twins" to work with each other against the Liberal Democrats as their opposition and win for liberal Britain a few short years after that?