Love and Liberty

A Government position is newly vacant this evening: and for the first time, it’s explicit that only liars* need apply. For Labour Government Ministers, of course, the requirement to lie is only implicit.

This case is very simple. Chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs Professor David Nutt told the truth, and was exasperated with Labour Government Ministers lying about their findings. The last Home Secretary said the carefully considered scientific evidence didn’t matter: cannabis was more harmful than tobacco and alcohol because, er, she said so, fingers in ears, lalala I am not listening to you.

Yesterday, Professor Nutt made it clear that she had not told the truth (and who’d have thought, when Jacqui Spliff was such a model of probity she, er, had to resign for being a crook and made the most grudging unpology about it?).

Today Alan Johnson, the current Home Secretary, sacked him (and who’d have thought that Alan Johnson would make a nakedly lying political point when he knows the evidence is completely against him?).

So, it’s official: under Labour, telling the truth is now a sackable offence.

It’s the obvious joke, but you know who the nuts are here.

Obsessive Ideology Over Evidence and Bossing Everyone About – the Labour Way

The evidence has piled up by the decade and the sackload. Cannabis does some harm; it does nothing like the harm it’s made out to; it does nothing like the harm legal drugs tobacco and alcohol do. But this Labour Government can’t even keep to the – brace yourself – lone liberal twitch by David Blunkett. They’re so desperate to sound ‘tough’ that their policies bear no relation at all to reality. Again and again. When Professor Nutt said that you’re more likely to die horse-riding than taking cannabis or ecstasy, to wails of horror from Labour hypocrites, he was simply looking at the facts of risk. Yet even that’s not really comparing like with like: unlike Professor Nutt, I support legalisation, which would enable proper quality checks (as well as destroying the criminal trade) – no-one gets on a horse, trots half-way along the path, then finds the ‘horse’ collapsing under them because they suddenly discover the beast is in fact half-gerbil.

One of my key memories about the harm caused by illegal drugs came about a decade ago. I left home one afternoon just after hysterical national news headlines about a single tragic death allegedly caused by ecstasy (whether the drug itself, or the impurities allowed in because it’s illegal and can’t be regulated)… And arrived at my Grandad’s a couple of hours later, to see a minor headline in his local paper that another single tragic death had come about because of an allergy to nuts (not to be confused with the Labour Government’s allergy to the truth, of which an inability to tolerate Nutts is merely a symptom). Guess which substance causes far, far more deaths, to an almost complete lack of media interest? Yep – the one you buy safely in the shops, not dangerously on street corners. Another win for prohibition.

On Radio 4’s PM programme tonight, Professor Nutt has just said that:

“This is about the difference between evidence and policy… Everything I’ve done has been evidence-based.
“…Gordon Brown made a series of irrational statements that cannabis is lethal, which of course it isn’t.”

Asked about the Labour Government refusing to take his former committee’s advice on cannabis and ecstasy, because they weren’t interested in any evidence, just in making a political point that he described as Luddism, the interviewer mouthed the meaningless tabloid platitude that these were the “controversial” drugs:

“They’re only controversial if you want them to be controversial – the Government’s views have, they’ve said, had nothing to do with science… I am not prepared to mislead the public about the harm caused by drugs.”

Good for him, and good luck to whoever next gets the job – it had better pay well, because by definition they’ll have to kiss their scientific reputation goodbye to take their position as official Labour Government Liar.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to calm down by eating a large amount of chocolate cake. Bad news: it doesn’t have any dope in it. Good news: it does have lots of chocolate in it. That was once banned as a dangerous, addictive drug by a nutty Westminster Government bent on scarifiying the populace too, you know.

If No-one Agrees With Alan Johnson, Will He Have To Sack the Whole Country?**

I’ve added rather more updates than usual below, as a lot of people seem to have something to say (none of them ‘The Home Secretary was right’). Even ultra-loyalist former Labour minister Lord Falconer said Mr Johnson was wrong on Any Questions.

Starting half an hour later: posts already popping up worth reading from Dr Mark Pack and Duncan Stott (who ironically shares a name with a drug enforcement officer from Doctor Who).

And yay for Liberal Democrat Shadow Secretary Chris Huhne in the 7 O’Clock headlines for calling the sacking “disgraceful”:

“What is the point of having independent scientific advice if you’re going to sack the person who’s giving it to you? You may as well have a committee of tabloid newspaper editors advising you on drugs policy.”

Incredibly, the Tories have gone along word for word with the Labour Government.

Continuing the next morning, Mr Mark Reckons has kindly linked to me in a thoughtful post which also has an interesting set of comments. He’s also called attention to the Tories’ ludicrous knee-jerk photocopy of Labour authoritarianism in a far more memorable way than I did above.

Liberal Vision has also linked to me, encapsulating the spirit of my post in a far more memorable headline. Again, I’m just not tabloidy enough. One of the British Medical Journal’s bloggers doesn’t link to me, but finishes on a particularly appropriate request from his friend Kate. You might also glance at Darrell, Jonathan and Jennie.



*Or pot-heads, ironically, as only someone with a distinctly loose grip on reality would believe in the Government’s policy.


**Fortunately for Mr Johnson, he does turn out to have the support of: the Conservative Party; spin-poisoner columnist Amanda Platell; and the Daily Mail, the paper that spits on much-loved dead people and refuses to apologise. And, er, that’s it.

Unfortunately, these are the handful of hate-filled obsessive ideologues who are running the country, whatever the sensible majority of us think.

Labels: Chocolate, Drugs, Labour, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Newspapers, Radio, Stupid Ideas

This year’s New Adventures include Lawrence Miles’ debut, Christmas on a Rational Planet; Happy Endings’ comedy wedding; Just War’s Nazi occupation; and a tragedy’s aftermath in Bad Therapy. Other Doctors appear in Sylv-Peter crossover Cold Fusion, Tom’s witty The English Way of Death and Billy’s fabulous The Plotters and nightmarish The Man in the Velvet Mask. Paul McGann stars in a one-off TV movie – and Russell T Davies writes his first Doctor Who…

Doctor Who: The New Adventures – Damaged Goods

“At the far end of the street, hostile armed men came to the party, and twenty minutes passed.”

A bloody, brilliant book, set on an ’80s estate haunted by past and future: Christmas, motherhood, ancient Time Lord wars; Roz’s destiny, and elements surging to TV a decade later. Be careful what you wish for, and even more so, what you try to return…


Of all the New Adventures that aren’t available as eBooks – sadly the vast majority of them – this one’s the most surprising. Perhaps Russell thinks this dark tale of drugs, despair and bargained children too disturbing, or perhaps the peppering of its ideas all across the Twenty-First Century series would just spoil too many surprises, from Rose right through to The Next Doctor? Either way, it’s another one you have to find second-hand, I’m afraid.


And once again back on the ‘real’ date, today is probably – well, I was three and a bit – the thirty-fourth anniversary of my seeing my first Doctor Who episode. I’m so glad I did.

Labels: Books, Doctor Who, Drugs, Gay, New Adventures, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Paul McGann, Personal, Peter Davison, Reviews, Sylvester McCoy, Tom Baker, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?, William Hartnell

My sexy, charismatic, wise (well, after a few shorts, anyway) friend Mr Costigan Quist writes today of the Labour Government’s latest puritanical sallies back into the progressive-conservative don’t-do-what-you-want-it’s-not-good-for-you brigades of a century ago. Occasional drinking is, they suggest, exactly on a par with helpless drug addiction, and it’s just as harmful for your child to see you with a glass of wine in your hand once a week as it is a glass syringe once an hour. Is it bollocks. Good timing, though, with debates raging on how libertarian Liberals should be, and at the seventy-fifth anniversary of prohibition’s scrapping.

If you saunter over to Mr Quist’s Himmelgarten Café this morning for a tipple, then, you’ll find something rather hard to swallow: Costigan thoroughly fisks a report for the Department for Children, Schools and Families (shortly to be renamed the Department for All-Purpose Reasons to Boss You About) that takes a pathological approach to any drinking at all, attacking any views other than their own in increasingly hysterical terms.

Labour – The Party That Likes To Say ‘Don’t Do That’

New Labour was born with a streak of bossiness. I remember back in 1995 calling Mr Blair a “Social and Christian Democrat” and predicting that, as they’d given up on socialist pretensions to muck about with the economy, their controlling instincts would now turn to bossing people about in their personal lives. For several years, this tendency fought with what, in retrospect, now look like a few more liberal instincts – though the moralising forbidders were almost always on top. These days, as they’re trying to rediscover the joy of ordering the economy about (but not actually sure what to do with it), most of the Labour Government’s day-to-day initiatives remain an ever-increasingly shrill and ambitious wish-list of control over people’s everyday lives and choices, even when everyone involved is consenting, simply because they think a couple of people in government know better than 60-odd million other people I could mention if I tripped over another discarded Labour Government data stick in the street.

The Labour Government often tries to hide its bossiness, whether as a health measure or a ‘crackdown’ (because those are always bound to be good), and while I used to think they were just pathetically desperate to cuddle the Daily Mail (a ‘disgust reaction’ is of course a very bad reason to oppose anything in politics but, well, Eeewww), after more than a decade it’s quite obvious that they mean it. Mr Brown sincerely believes that anyone not in (Labour Government-approved) work is a moral degenerate and so naturally punishes the old, the sick, the parents or the increasing army of those who can’t find jobs after he’s trashed the economy; many of his underlings betray similarly fanatical zealotry against many ways in which people consentingly enjoy themselves, but try to bring in harshly bossy legislation in stages and recruit armies of form-fillers and curtain-twitchers, so they don’t have to defend their outright prohibitionist instincts.

We won’t actually completely ban smoking, say the Labour Government… But we know it’ll be good for you if we stop you doing it in as many particular places as we can think of, even if everyone there consents. We won’t actually completely ban prostitution, say the Labour Government… But we know it’ll be good for you if we conflate utterly different statistics to justify making it virtually illegal for any man to pay for sex with a woman (because all prostitutes are women and all clients are men, at least in Labour Government Ministers’ reality-detached minds)… We won’t actually completely ban alcohol, say the Labour Government… But we know it’ll be good for you if we found ways to manage it slice by salami slice. And so on.

Liberals Say “Fuck Off To the Daily Mail”

The fact that many of the newly invented ‘crimes’ that Labour use the law to crusade against as gross moral turpitude are introduced in an incremental fashion so that each stage can be spun as reasonable, or that many of them are only indulged in by a minority – or that only a minority will admit to them – and that they can whip up tabloid hysteria against Nasty Things (Except On Our Pages) means that Liberal politicians are too hesitant to oppose them with the resounding “Fuck right off!” that they deserve. It’s sadly true that the Liberal Democrats have a sizeable minority of ‘ban nasty things for people’s own good’ mentality, but certainly much more unfortunately true that a large body of Liberal Democrats have no interest in banning things, say live and let live, but aren’t willing to stick their necks out for something that isn’t very important, doesn’t affect many people, and is very unpopular anyway.

I’ve said for a long time now, and feel much more free to say out now I’m no longer on the Federal Policy Committee, that the Liberal Democrats should announce a presumption against any new bans on anything, and make a much bigger noise each time the Labour Government gets bossy. I know we do it on occasion, and sometimes very well, including making a start on what nonsenses we’d repeal in a Freedom Law, but it’s far from an across-the-board line. It’s certainly never a campaigning issue, except on rare occasions where we can say it’s about money – such as ID cards – or doing something nasty to ‘nice’ people – such as holding the DNA of innocent people and kids because, hell, they’re bound to be guilty eventually. People ought to know, instinctively, that the Liberal Democrats are against people being bossed about, and for people being able to do what they want as long as they don’t harm others, whether people are nice or nasty. At the moment, I doubt a lot of even our elected representatives know that, and I’d be hard-put to point out solid policies to make it clear (when we were all writing the 2001 Manifesto, for example, it was fairly straightforward to come up with a ‘Green Action’ point on every page, but there were big arguments on coming up with even the most anodyne points to fill equivalent freedom boxes – partly because our policies were so threadbare on freedom directly, and partly because people disagreed with delivering it).

One example of the party’s occasionally mind-boggling timidity that remains close to my heart was when, some years ago, I wrote a letter to a newspaper expressing my frustration and disbelief at the media hagiography of Tony Martin. I pointed out that calling him a “hero” for shooting an unarmed man who was running away in the back was not a definition of “hero” I would be comfortable ever teaching a child, and that just because he was found sufficiently mentally disturbed that he wasn’t legally a murderer wouldn’t have stopped what he did being a murder if he’d been in full possession of his faculties. I signed myself as Vice-Chair of the Liberal Democrat Federal Policy Committee, which indeed I was. I was called into Cowley Street and read the riot act, and told in no uncertain times that I was not to mention I was Vice-Chair of the Policy Committee if I wanted to say anything so wildly contentious, and that people had been ringing up and threatening to resign their memberships because of me (and to think a decade earlier that was only happening because I wanted to legalise drugs and abolish the Queen, rather than say something really radical like ‘murder is bad’). I know, I know, I’m against bans and all that, but – on the one hand this, on the other hand that – I do draw the line at murder, which I know makes me a dangerous Liberal to many insane frothing right-wing bigots, as long as it’s the wrong kind of murder. As I’ve said so often before, the law should focus on whether actions are right or wrong and what harm is done by them, not on making moral judgments about whether people are nice people or nasty people.

Liberals must stand up against the Labour Government / Daily Mail axis of bossiness. The Liberal Democrats should shout that we will stop government meddling in things that are nobody’s business but your own. That it’s government’s place to stop bullying, not to be the biggest bully of the lot. That the government and that hysterical, reactionary rags do not know best for you; that you know what’s best for you, because everyone’s best is different. We should state as a policy principle that people can do whatever they like, as long as they don’t hurt others, and as long as they give their informed consent. So, naturally, all sorts of things should have to wait until you’re an adult and can make an informed decision – but it’s not the job of one set of adults with power to order all the adults in the country to conform to their whims. The very idea of ‘victimless crime’ should be an abhorrence: if there’s no victim, there shouldn’t be a sodding crime. And rather than running piecemeal to paper over each of the Labour Government’s insane bits of bossiness, depending on what time of day it is and what our own spokesperson’s whim is, we should leave people in no doubt what our presumption is.

Years ago, I suggested the slogan “Liberal Democrats: the party that says sex is all right”; I came up with it again last week during a lively debate on expressing what the Liberal Democrats stand for in a sentence. I then suggested, again slightly tongue-in-cheek but still getting the point over better than most of the others, “Liberal Democrats. For people and things the Daily Mail doesn’t like” or “For government by the Daily Mail, vote for the other two. To tell the Daily Mail to f*** off, vote Lib Dem.” It may not cover everything but, perhaps tellingly, people seemed much more energised by that than by my (completely ignored) attempt to put ‘freedom to live your own life’ into on-the-doorstep language.

Because Prohibition Went So Well Last Time

Of course, politicians who claim to be progressives but who are in fact deeply socially conservative have been here before, always under the rallying cry of ‘We will improve you, because we know best for you’. Most infamously, a huge coalition of ‘progressives’ and social conservatives, with plenty of religion – though, as ever, they arranged both for people they didn’t like to be victimised and for the law to have a socking great get-out for religion itself, just like modern churches’ vicious bigotry and discrimination while wailing that anyone who hurts their feet when they kick them is persecuting them – and ‘we know what’s best for working people’ stirred in for good measure, managed to get prohibition of alcohol into the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

It was a disaster of epic proportions.

Last Friday, then, was the seventy-fifth anniversary of the repeal of prohibition through yet another amendment to the US Constitution, after all the people who charged into it were forced shame-facedly to admit that it had been utterly counter-productive. Those amendments are incredibly hard to deliver, but the fact that prohibition incredibly made it to the heart of US federal law tells you a lot about how bans can work. The letter of them passes because, although a large minority of people may be criminalised, and the majority may well not give a damn, moralising political and media hysteria can bully so many people into silence that opposition is too intimidated to stop it. But then the ban is a disaster in practice, because otherwise law-abiding people find ways round it – which means a jackpot for gangsters, no quality control, and that such a patently absurd law brings the whole of the Rule of Law into disrepute. Just because you can browbeat people into acquiescence, that’s not a good basis for law (and note that I’m not even going into one about how the law shouldn’t be used by genuine majorities to bash minorities, or I’d be here all day).

Prohibition is the criminals’ best friend. And the more popular the thing that’s prohibited is, the better. Governments can get away with banning small, little-practiced activities that they have no business banning; but if they ban something that a large section of the population does, prohibition is shown up as the massive absurdity that it is. Let me count just a few of the ways. From the government side, they have to expend massive extra law enforcement resources, at exactly the same time as people lose faith in a crazy law and the government loses its tax revenues, too. If the argument for banning something was that it’s associated with health problems, then that’s a disaster, too. Doing something illegal means people are far less likely to seek medical advice. Doing something illegal that most people know to be relatively harmless means that they’re much less likely to take seriously government warnings about something that may be much more harmful. And, while legal substances or activities can be subject to government quality control and health and safety inspection, the more illegal it is, the more slipshod and dangerous it can be with impunity. And, best of all, prohibition takes something that would be practised with a degree of openness and safety and gives every penny of the money to crooks who have it in their interests to keep it hidden and have very little interest in safety. Prohibition gets ordinary, law-abiding people into contact with crooks, undermines respect for the law, stops them being safe, and lets international and local gangsters all laugh all the way to the bank. It’s the biggest boost for crime on the entire planet.

Still, it’s a good job that we all learnt our lessons from the United States seventy-five years ago and that, say, no drugs less harmful and addictive than alcohol are massive money-spinners now for international crime.

Oh.

In Which Alex Meanders Down Memory Lane, Surprisingly Without the Aid of Getting Off His Face

And, at last, back to the drinks table where I started. Though I’ll drink a lot more of the non-alcoholic stuff to fuel a colossal series of raids on the buffet, I’m happy to have a glass of champagne at a wedding, wine at a do, or embarrass friends hideously by asking for a chocolate liqueur instead of something butch in a bar… But, those aside, I rarely drink. I never have, despite worrying my parents as a child when a report came back to them from a Sunday School class in which all the kids were asked what their favourite food and drink were: I answered “wine and cheese,” despite not particularly liking cheese and not being in any position to tell whether I liked wine. The odd thing is, when the other kids were saying things like chocolate, chips, burgers or beans on toast (all of which I still prefer to wine or cheese to this day, admittedly), I was the only one who was impeccably Biblical – King David had cheese, you know, and he never did anything dodgy, did he (not that was mentioned in Sunday School, anyway), and the Bible’s tanked up with wine from end to end. But, no, I was the one who got it in the neck. I suspect it wasn’t about the cheese. Thank goodness they were strict Baptists rather than Methodists, or they’d have chucked me out many years earlier than they actually did. So why this particular eccentricity? Well, because I was reading Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks, in which the Doctor binges on both at taxpayers’ expense and hypocritically has a go at a leading diplomat for keeping a well-stocked larder, as he empties it. So, with the Doctor a more vivid role model to me even than that bloke who arranged to have the husband of the woman he fancied cut to pieces or that bloke who turns non-alcoholic party beverages into highly intoxicating ones, each of whom Sunday School tried to persuade me was better, it was only natural that I should testify out of allegiance rather than taste. If I’d been five or so years older and seen the story on TV, of course, I might have seen the two lead characters and been put off by their whine and cheesiness.

I suspect I never got into the habit of drinking much in part because I once helped ‘serve’ drinks at my Dad’s office party, sometime before the age of ten, was fascinated by all the buttons to push, pushed them (being an experimentative child) and made myself very ill. It’ll also be because I didn’t like the taste of much of it when all my friends were throwing surreptitious parties in their parents’ absence, and was sufficiently non-conformist that I didn’t see the point in either pretending to enjoy it or in ‘acquiring’ the taste. Oh, and because I was gay and – difficult as it is to believe now – was wary enough of betraying that secret that I didn’t want to lose control. If they’d done alcopops back then and I’d had a boyfriend (sniff), maybe I’d have done more than experimented with getting drunk a couple of times and not thinking much of it.

Hmm, something I’ve not thought about for about eighteen years: when I was at Sixth Form, I’m sure I went away for the weekend with some sort of temperance society. I don’t remember much of it, except that it was pretty countryside, and I viewed it very much as weekend away with a friend of mine, with all the temperance propaganda washing straight over me. It certainly didn’t turn my friend Tom into a raging campaigner: I’m fairly sure he only got the non-alcoholic freebie because it came through the religious studies people, and he was their mate. It absolutely wasn’t because he was a total abstainer. He picked me to come along partly as a mate and partly because I tended not to drink and could therefore attend the freebie with a straighter face than he could, and possibly act as cover if he sidled off to the pub. I often found myself in that position: because I couldn’t be arsed about drinking, friends would get me to go down the offy and buy them whatever they wanted. It wasn’t that I looked older, particularly, but that I didn’t care, so I didn’t give off those waves of teenage desperation. Well, not about booze, anyway.

I did once land a friend in trouble when being the presentable, non-drinking one; he’d been knocking it back at a church youth social (yes, all right, two different churches every Sunday and Catholic comps meant masses of religion in my misspent youth), so I was prodded forward in the early hours as a demonstration of sobriety to impress the ferocious aunt he was staying with while he lurked biliously behind me. “Hello!” I cried cheerily. “This is your early warning make-up call.” And just because I tripped over my words ever so slightly, she wouldn’t believe I was sober. Life can be so unfair to teenagers. On the other hand, she looked terribly disappointed when she cruelly cooked a massive fry-up for us in the morning, and I brightly asked for seconds. I like fry-ups. Her nephew couldn’t manage his, for some reason…

At this stage, it would of course undermine Mr Quist’s case as a moderate drinker were I to mention I was at his stag do, so I’ll stop there.

Labels: British Politics, Drugs, FPC, History, Jon Pertwee, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Liberalism, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Personal, Religion, Sex, Stupid Ideas, Utopia

It’s an exciting weekend, isn’t it? Go on, isn’t it? Not just because it’s only ten days to go until the US elections (of which more below); not just because it’s only six days to go until Quantum of Solace opens; not just because tomorrow’s the feast day of Saints Fulk and Quadragesimus… But because tomorrow is our fourteenth anniversary. Richard and I started our celebrations this morning by having an electrician round to replace our bathroom light fitting – ooh, the glamour – and tonight we’re off to see Rory Bremner and the Two Johns. What could be finer? Well, my toothache could go away, but… BBC7’s even scheduled some Doctor Who tomorrow that’s never before been broadcast, which may be in the style of Top Gear but is still quite funny – Graeme Garden guest-stars, and the villain’s exactly who you want it to be.


There’s been a fluorescent tube in our bathroom since long before it became our bathroom, and following its breaking down (after ringing one electrician who laughed and told us it was a deathtrap and what grade of completely different replacement fitting to get, but who after various fiascos never got back to us), we’d recommend Garry Vinning, who was a nice chap, on time, reasonable and admired our view. As a bonus, we survived a fortnight of a lamp on an extension cable and lots of trailing wires from the knackered old fitting without electrocution, though I now no longer have an excuse for shaving the right side of my face so badly.

We had a lovely visitor who didn’t handle our fittings earlier in the week, too – our friend Mr Quist came to stay the night, with much good conversation and exposing each other to things we don’t usually see. For him, for example, there was the extraordinary spectacle of Hugh Grant acting and some 1978 Doctor Who on the big telly; for us, he went on the Internet and showed us some pictures of Beavers. So a good time was had by all.

How Not To Do Not Doing Drugs

Did you hear The News Quiz earlier? It featured one of their greatest ever news story clippings. I missed which paper it had been sent in from, but I found it in the New York Times, and it’s superb. A school has just suspended the least plausible anti-drugs message since Ebeneezer Goode:

“A company has recalled a batch of pencils after a fourth-grade student pointed out an embarrassing message that appeared after he sharpened his pencil.

“The pencils carry the slogan ‘Too Cool to Do Drugs’. But the student noticed that when the pencils are sharpened and get shorter, the message becomes ‘Cool to Do Drugs’, then simply ‘Do Drugs’.”

I want one.

Or perhaps a pencil that says “Do Chocolate”. Preferably one with a filling. I’m easy. Hmm, wonder what could have happened to my teeth?

Let’s hope tonight’s Bremner, Bird and Fortune is as funny, and that we manage to get there. Not only do I have notorious problems leaving the flat, but we laughed this morning as we opened the front door for Mr Vinning and our ticket blew out of the window. Fortunately it was an e-ticket, and our cranky old printer was in a good enough mood to let us print another (so we’ll be setting up for Merlin, which really should have some other name as it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the best-known of British legends, but which must be single-handedly doing more for slash fiction than any other series I can think of)!

Vote McCain / Palin? You Must Be On Drugs

Every day, I mean to write something new about the US election. I’ve become addicted to parsing opinion polls, and to reading Daily Kos and The Daily Dish. But it all moves so quickly and, really, what can you say about Sarah Palin? Well, Betty White said it all, really; we’ve been missing her since she stopped being an occasional character in the fabulous Boston Legal. If I wrote a serious article right now, I’d probably just explode at the sheer loathsomeness of the Republicans’ new low in cynical race-baiting lies, so instead here are some things that have been cheering me up as the volume of messages increases from friends in the States typing with whitened knuckles as they hope another election won’t be stolen.

So, for your delight and delectation:

• A cautionary tale for your kids

• A cautionary tale for your parents (and, bonus, no pencils are involved)

• And simply the best summing-up of Senator McCain’s campaign of lies, venom and negativity you could hope to see.

Just 006 Days ’Til Quantum of Solace (minor spoiler)…
I Should Have Posted This Yesterday, Shouldn’t I?

We’re terribly excited, and our Elephant is quite beside himself. And after the last movie, we’ve got a pretty shrewd ghost of an idea what the villains behind the whole thing might involve. With it even being released on Halloween, you don’t have to look in the TAROT cards to anticipate some sort of Shade, or Phantom, or Ectoplasm, or Chimera, or Trace, or Revenant, or… or… (reaches for thesaurus) Eidolon… Hang on. I’ve just read what it says on the card. Quasi-Autonomous… That can’t be right, surely?

But to keep you from exploding with excitement, and to keep me from gritting my inflamed molars because the film opens the day after my birthday, you can listen to the proper title theme and watch a rather striking Bond-related musical interlude that, strangely, makes me look much more warmly on both a Bond theme and a decidedly non-Bond movie, neither of which were quite as good as I expected…

Labels: American Politics, Blogs, Drugs, James Bond, Personal, Richard, Top Tips

Yet another expert independent report proves that drugs prohibition is a complete waste of police time. Independent reports on Pope’s denominational leanings and ursine arboreal defecatory locations to follow.

In other news, even a Government-selected panel has recommended that innocent people shouldn’t be treated as criminals by having intimate body samples held by the police (or distributed on free CDs with the Hate Mail on Sunday thanks to the latest Home Office clerical error).

The Labour Government responds to the Citizens’ Inquiry: ‘We know where you live’.

Labels: Drugs, Labour, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own

Some people might think that the week before election day is a bit of a daft time for a bunch of bureaucrats to go witch-hunting within their own party, and many might think that it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing Liberal Democrats do. But Stoke Lib Dems appear to have confused themselves with the Labour Party and suspended Liberal Democrat (Libertarian) Councillor Gavin Webb for being – gasp! – a Libertarian Liberal Democrat. Tristan, Alex (happy birthday!) and Julian have beaten me to blogging about it, but today it sounds like Gavin needs character references. Even from me.

I have a heavy cold at the mo and am feeling very grotty, self-medicating heavily with Lemsip and chocolate cake, so I may be woozy and have grasped the wrong end of the stick. But it appears that Gavin has been suspended from the party not for any misconduct, but for shooting his mouth off with views that everyone’s known he’s been espousing for years anyway. Libertarian propositions that seem to have been especial causes of frumpy opprobrium include his support for legalising prostitution, all drugs, firearms, and drink-driving so long as no-one is injured. I’m probably going to be accused of wanting to keep Gavin in the party only to make myself look moderate, as I agree with him on only about, ooh, one and a half of those, but though I disagree with plenty of his views I really can’t see that any of them are offensively illiberal (though possibly impractical). Quite the reverse.

About fifteen years ago, the first time I was ever in a minority of one on the Federal Policy Committee was when I wanted to pass unamended the party’s very libertarian policy paper on prostitution, which so appalled the rest of the FPC that it was called back to three successive meetings for watering-down before it was allowed near conference. Despite that, you might like to consider that while Gavin may be in a minority of active politicians on that issue, he’s in line with what the expert opinion said would be most effective – and that, the only time the party voted on the issue, even the watered-down paper could still be roughly described as legalising prostitution. So it may be an old policy, but it’s still the people who disagree with Gavin who are out of step with the Liberal Democrats. As far as drugs go, half a dozen years ago we voted to legalise cannabis – eventually – and I spoke in favour of that (after a hum-dinger of a row on FPC, though not quite as much as we used to have under Paddy), though like Lib Dem policy I’m more on the fence over hard drugs, for all sorts of reasons. And there’s certainly room for a wide range of views in the Liberal Democrats there. On firearms and drink-driving, I can see Gavin’s point but I think it’s daft in practice – my rule of thumb is that if a crime’s victimless, it shouldn’t be a crime… But I think Gavin and I have different ideas of ‘victimless’. I’d say that a ‘crime’ that wouldn’t normally injure someone else and that’s with informed consent shouldn’t be a crime at all, just because other people disapprove of it; but if someone’s reckless and very likely to do someone actual harm and they don’t have any option to consent to it, I’d still be dubious about it if by chance injury was avoided. I suppose my dividing line for saying something shouldn’t be a crime would be something like ‘victimless by definition’, then, rather than ‘victimless by luck’.

The good side of this is that it’s stirring up debate about what we stand for, and about the limits of law; the bad side is that I’d have assumed we all stand for free speech, and that people can say what they like quite comfortably in the party as long as they don’t oppose the party’s fundamental principles. Well, Gavin’s fundamental principle appears to be ‘not banning things’ – something with which I have a great deal of sympathy – and taking responsibility for yourself. I’ve scoured through the Preamble to the Liberal Democrat Constitution, and he doesn’t appear to be contradicting it at all. Is it perhaps that he’s a bit embarrassing to his fellow councillors who want to just sound safely like everyone else in the run-up to election times? Because I can understand that feeling, it’s only human, but if so then they’re the ones that the party’s principles would frown at. Is it because he’s called a BNP councillor a fascist? I’ve looked at that pesky Preamble again, and I’ve missed the bit that says being truthful but uncouth is A Bad Thing.

Gavin’s ‘crime’ appears to be ‘Being A Bit Gobby’ (perhaps, your honour, he might protest at that and enter a plea of ‘A Lot Gobby’). It may not win him friends, but it sounds like a Liberal. What’s his accusers’ excuse?

Now let’s get past all this silliness and remember that, with the odd hiccup, Liberal Democrats tend to encourage people to make up their own minds, Labour order people what to do, and Tories… Well, under the current regime, Tories dither for a few days and then do whatever the newspapers tell them will be most popular. We’re better than that, so why not stop holding up shocked mittens at a Liberal being Liberal and go out and beat the other two?


Update: if I wasn’t feeling so knurdly, I’d have realised that the perfect punning title for this post would be “Webb of Sin”. So count yourself lucky that I missed that!

Labels: Drugs, FPC, Ideas, Liberal Democrats, Liberalism, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Stupid Ideas, The Golden Dozen

Cocaine-abuser and Conservative candidate Boris Johnson got himself into a stupor on drugs this week on the BBC Asian Network. Mr Johnson, who I assume is no longer a cocaine binger or aiding and abetting fraudsters to commit GBH, was spin-doctoring that he was the best person to stand up for law and order in London when he was asked whether a former police officer might be a better choice than a former criminal. So he attacked Brian Paddick’s record but, er, instantly had to admit he was completely wrong. You can listen to him lying and then backtracking here.



Mr Johnson would probably be safer if he left crime alone as an issue, given that he’s the most prominent of the wealthy Tory cocaine generation in boasting about his exploits, but he might have had more credibility if he’d at least used the old cliché ‘Set a thief to catch a thief’ rather than just saying any old rubbish and hoping no-one knew about his record. Hoping no-one remembered what he’d been up to when saying anyone who isn’t a rich Conservative should have the law come down on them like a ton of bricks was stupid enough; attacking a hugely successful former police officer was stupider still; but making things up about Brian Paddick’s record while Brian was sitting in the studio next to him and could instantly get him bang to rights takes a really special level of idiocy. If you weren’t sure that a leading Conservative politician couldn’t possibly be breaking the law while saying people should be locked up for doing what he’s doing, you’d think the most likely explanation was that Mr Johnson was just off his face on drugs again, wouldn’t you?

Now, here’s an issue where I disagree with Brian Paddick. The Liberal Democrat London Mayoral candidate is quite a lot less liberal about drug use than I am, and I’ve disagreed with him about it to his face. But there’s common ground – which is that both of us want to get the gangsters who push drugs off the streets. My own view and that of most scientific professionals is that cannabis is not harmless, but is a similar level of risk to alcohol and tobacco. Because of that, I would legalise cannabis, which is the only way to regulate its quality and stop criminals making their money out of it. Brian is at the other end of the sensible spectrum on this – he didn’t support changing the law on cannabis, but still recognised that the problem was the dealers, not the users, and rather than wasting police time on people going after small amounts went after the dealers. It worked. What both my preferred policy and the one that Brian put into practice have in common is that they’re common-sense ways of tackling the gangsters.

Mr Johnson, on the other hand, talks tough about drugs, calls for people who did what he did to be locked up (but doesn’t volunteer for it himself), and attacks people like Brian who know – and have delivered – what they’re talking about. He just wants to waste police time on going after the very large minority of the population who’ve taken illegal drugs but aren’t wealthy enough to get away with it, rather than being interested in common-sense solutions that actually tackle the drugs trade.

Just to refresh your memory, Brian Paddick and Boris Johnson are both famous for stories about their drug-taking that have been printed in newspapers.

• In Brian’s case, the story was that he’d taken a soft drug, cannabis, and the story was completely made up. Which means Brian’s name was completely cleared and he received a hefty libel settlement.

• In Mr Johnson’s case, the story was that he’d taken a hard drug, cocaine (oh, and cannabis as well), and he admitted the story was completely true. Which means he’s an enormous hypocrite who thinks the law should crack down on people who do what he does… But just not on him and his mates. Because what’s the point of being privileged if you can’t exercise your privileges and get away with things ordinary people can’t?

Still, you shouldn’t be surprised when Mr Johnson breaks the law himself then spins and poses as talking tough about the very laws he breaks. As a copper would put it, he’s got a record as long as your arm.

In other old news, while Brian Paddick was pounding the streets in the 1990s as a highly effective police officer making London safer for people, Boris Johnson was, er, busy giving the address of a journalist who’d exposed an insurance fraudster to, er, that very insurance fraudster so that he could have the journalist beaten up.

Boris Johnson: tough on crimes by ordinary people; tough on people who investigate crime…
…But all in favour of get-of-jail-free cards for rich Tories.

Labels: Conservatives, Corruption, Drugs, London, The Golden Dozen

Today, the London Liberal Democrats announce their shortlist of potential candidates for London Mayor. I don’t know who’s applied, let alone been shortlisted, but there’s a candidate I’m taking a gamble on supporting… Despite not yet having met the guy, and the likelihood that, if shortlisted, he’ll be the only candidate without a long Liberal Democrat record. If all this makes me sound like the worst sort of fact-free blogger going off into fantasyland (and I sometimes am), there’s something remarkable about this potential candidate: he was a senior police officer with an outstanding, liberal, controversial record. He’s Brian Paddick.

Unlike the subjects of my profiles last year – Ming Campbell, Chris Huhne, Simon Hughes and David Laws – I’ve never met Brian Paddick, and I don’t really know what he’s like as a public speaker or his views on a lot of the issues. And it’s quite possible that the shortlist tomorrow will have brilliant candidates I don’t expect; it’ll certainly have Liberal Democrats I know and can, in more ordinary ways, feel more sure of. But I would be gobsmacked if any of them could have anything like the impact on eight million people, from a standing start, that I reckon Mr Paddick can. The two obvious pools of high-profile talent are our London MPs and our GLAMs. Well, after our best-known, best-loved, and probably most hard-working London MP came to grief last time, it’s no surprise that none of our MPs seem to want to do it. And none of our London Assembly Members look to me like they’ve been trying to run for it. Be honest; have any of our GLAMs made such an impact? The only one who did, and now our only MP who’s previously been a member of the London Assembly, is Lynne Featherstone. In some ways, she’d have been the obvious candidate – and, after she was one of the people I hoped in the last year or so might stand for Party President or Deputy Leader, I might have been very torn if the choice had been between her and Brian Paddick… But it isn’t. In fact, when her name came up on a poll of potential candidates on Lib Dem Voice, she suggested people vote for him in the poll instead.

Leave It To Ken and Boris?

Another Liberal Democrat attitude I’ve heard – behind closed doors, perhaps, but it’s what a lot of people are thinking – is that ‘Ken’s going to win anyway, and whoever we stand will get outspent, drowned out and pushed out, so why humiliate ourselves?’ Well, there are three answers to that. First, if we abandoned every campaign in which the smart money would be on us coming a glorious third, we’d have packed up and gone home… Oh, at least thirty years before I was born! And we’ve been on pretty much a constant up since then (NB: I had very little to do with it, though). This is the biggest directly elected job in the country, and we would be mad not to stand. The second, after sheer bloody-mindedness / finding that where we work, we often win despite the odds (take your pick), is that if we don’t choose someone for ourselves, as well as admitting we don’t matter (‘cheers for that,’ says every Lib Dem candidate actually standing anywhere), it invites the question every day until the Mayoral election: ‘So, are you backing Labour, or the Tories?’ The last answer is the most important, and it’s to do with why we bother standing even at those times when we feel it’s a lost cause. I live in London, along with eight million other people across 32 boroughs. And if you want to leave all of us to the Ken and Boris Show, you can f*** off!

Ken Livingstone has achieved quite a bit, of which the Congestion Charge is the most obvious example. But he’s also a bullying egomaniac who puts the Labour Party ahead of Londoners, and Ken Livingstone ahead of the Labour Party. Pretending our GLAMs can hold him to account is, I’m afraid, a pipe dream. He doesn’t believe in accountability, openness or letting anyone else have a say, and the typically control-freak, top-down system Labour devised gives him the thumbs-up for that. Of the 26 people making up the Greater London Authority, one has about 90% of the power concentrated in him or her. It’s not how I’d have designed it, but unfortunately, the Mayor is the bit of the GLA that really matters.

In the last Mayoral election, our candidate was Simon Hughes. Previously, Susan Kramer had run an excellent campaign from a starting point of total obscurity, and nearly beat Frank Dobson, puppet candidate for the smaller split of the Labour Party. Simon was well-known, well-liked, passionate, charismatic… And finished on 15%, just 3% ahead of Susan despite a much greater profile and a much greater growth in our opinion poll ratings between the two elections. So what went wrong? A radical, anti-establishment MP failed against two anti-establishment-seeming politicians from two bigger parties supported by more vested interests. The fact that Simon is more genuinely anti-establishment than either didn’t cut it; he’d have done far better against bland machine politicians, but even Labour and the Tories weren’t stupid enough to try that. He was squeezed into oblivion, and the world’s blandest manifesto didn’t help. That’s why I breathed a sigh of relief when the possibility of Lembit Öpik receded. Like Simon, I know him, I like him, I admire his work and I even sometimes agree with him. But he’s an MP for the middle of Wales, and if what Londoners really want is a carpetbagger who’s funny on Have I Got News For You, sorry, Lembit, but Boris Johnson is a bit closer to London, a bit funnier, and a bit better-known. So where else do we find a ‘name’ that can put up a fight so as not to get squeezed out?

Not Your Typical ‘Celeb’

The answer is to field a candidate whose background is outside politics. Now, ‘celebrity’ candidates often seem like booster rockets that run the risk of exploding shortly after take-off. The SDP by-election bandwagon piled up at Darlington when its TV presenter candidate couldn’t answer questions without a teleprompter. David Icke became as big a millstone to the Green Party as he was once an asset. And UKIP had the misfortune not just of Joan Collins endorsing them, then announcing she had nothing to do with them, but of Robert Kilroy-Silk, the unthinking man’s David Owen. Thankfully, unlike all of those people, Brian Paddick would be a well-known candidate who’s not an actor or presenter, but who’s actually achieved something. And, unlike a lot of ‘stunt casting’ options, he’s unlikely to fall apart under pressure; he’s already taken more questioning and had a tougher media ride than almost any other Liberal Democrat could have nightmares about, from his policing strategies, to his private life, to speaking daily for the Met at televised press briefings after the London bombings on the 7th of July 2005. Will he go ‘off-message’? He’s got a history of it, and thank goodness for that. Will he disagree with the Party on some issues? Almost certainly. But if we wanted candidates who’d stick absolutely to the party line, we wouldn’t have selected Simon Hughes last time. I can’t promise, then, that Mr Paddick won’t go off the rails. But that’s not a promise that can ever be made of any politician – even, in some cases, the most terminally dull.

The other big drawback to someone in Mr Paddick’s position is that he feels like an interloper. Liberal Democrats don’t like people who parachute in and declare themselves the messiah, still less the sense that the high-ups are trying to push him on us. So there are bound to be Lib Dems who’ll oppose him not on his own qualities, record or proposals, but on principle. I might have joined them, but I did a little bit of research to see how comfortable I’d feel with him (isn’t Wikipedia wonderful?). And, though he’d sounded pretty liberal from all I’d heard about him before, what I’ve read has convinced me more than many long-term Liberal Democrats do that he’s a conviction Liberal.

A Conviction Liberal (excuse the pun)

You will not be surprised to learn that my moment of epiphany came with Mr Paddick’s statement that had him most demonised (out of many things) by gutter press like The Sun and the Daily Hate Mail. They read his infamous post on Urban75 and decided he was their enemy; I read it and decided he was not just liberal, but my kind of Liberal:

“The concept of anarchism has always appealed to me. The idea of the innate goodness of the individual that is corrupted by society or the system. It is a theoretical argument but I am not sure everyone would behave well if there were no laws and no system.

“"Do as you will but harm none" is the principle that I try to work to, within the constraints placed upon me. I have the freedom of my own conscience to the extent of the priorities I place on what I and my officers do. Does smoking small amounts of cannabis harm anyone else other than the smoker? I do not think so. Can I, as a police officer not enforce the law and get away with it. Probably not. So I introduce a pilot scheme where we do not arrest people for cannabis in Lambeth.

“I do not treat all of anything as criminals - all protestors, all black people, all straight people (!) I try to treat each individual as an individual.

“I admire anyone who passionately believes in their cause and I will defend their right to promote that cause provided they "harm none".”

A lot of that philosophy is something I’ve said almost in the same words. Compare it to John Stuart Mill; compare it to the Liberal MP who said

“A Liberal is an anarchist by instinct and a constitutionalist by necessity.”

Brian Paddick believes in individual freedom, and can articulate that belief. He believes everyone should be free to live their own lives and fulfil their own potential, without infringing the rights of others. That’s pretty much the core of what Liberalism is about.

Mr Paddick as a candidate might even make the Liberal Democrats hold our heads up over some issues the party’s been afraid of. We’re nervous on crime, because too many of us don’t see how we can sound Liberal and populist at the same time. The Party’s Leadership remains critically scared about drugs policy, and having such a high-profile candidate who’ll inevitably be asked about it might make them make up their minds. And, after twenty years of being the party with the best record by a mile on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights getting forced half-back into the closet by embarrassment by the badly handled outings of Simon Hughes and Mark Oaten last year, having an out and proud gay man as candidate for such a crucial post would do us a power of good (social historians of gay people in the British public view may marvel that he’s a distant relation of Hugh Paddick of Julian and Sandy fame). He’s fought off enough homophobic attacks from inside the police and the braying tabloids that, if a couple of Lib Dems feel stupidly uncomfortable or join a certain blogging ex-member in making up bigoted claims of a “gay mafia”, I doubt he’ll even break step. And more than in any other party, the overwhelming majority of Liberal Democrats will back him to the hilt on that.

Mr Paddick’s candidacy would carry certain inherent Liberal messages – gay-friendly, pro-liberalisation on drugs – but his most important qualification is his record in the Metropolitan Police. A Liberal approach to crime is more likely to work than knee-jerk authoritarian solutions, and his innovative, intelligent work helped prove it. The old Liberal Democrat election slogan ‘A record of action, a promise of more’ can rarely have been more true.

By the time Brian Paddick retired from the police in May, he was Deputy Assistant Commissioner in the Met. He was a sergeant on the front line during the 1981 Brixton riot, proof of the need for community policing, and rose through the CID and eventually to Commander in charge of policing in Brixton, where he pioneered new ways of policing by consent. Famously, he instructed his officers just to give on-the-spot warnings for cannabis possession rather than arrest or charge people, no longer wasting police time on victimless crime and allowing the police to tackle real crime, with the bonus of far greater community support. Despite massive attacks on him, the Government eventually followed his lead by reclassifying cannabis (something on which they’ve been trying to backtrack ever since). Despite all the controversy, that make him one of the best-known and best-loved police officers in the country, with one of the best records.

Can he win? It’ll be astoundingly difficult. If there’s one thing we should have learned from Simon’s campaign, it’s that we’ll never win merely by being everyone’s second choice. Brian Paddick is not the cuddly, fluffy, inoffensive candidate. Some people will hate him. After such a high-profile career, many people already do. But wouldn’t it be a relief to field a candidate who’s actually done something, rather than just talked about it?

In a recent interview with the Mail on Sunday – which shows quite a bit of chutzpah – he outlined some of his ideas for what he could now do for London:

“Nobody else putting themselves forward as Mayor knows more about the issue of law and order than I do…

“I shall never be afraid of adopting a radical solution if it’s fully thought through, if it’s workable, affordable and gets the right result.”

Such solutions from him might include using technology to improve the timing of buses, or making the Congestion Charge could be much more sophisticated. I look forward to seeing more of what he has to say.

So that’s why I want Brian Paddick to be the Liberal Democrat candidate for Mayor of London. A practical approach; a personal record; a strong philosophical base. There’s no doubt he’s a gamble. But some gambles are worth taking.

Labels: British Politics, Drugs, Gay, Liberal Democrats, Liberalism, London, The Golden Dozen

There’s nothing better to wake up to in the morning than The Today Programme. Not because it’s any good, but because the exasperating rubbish they spout gets me properly awake and raring to have a go. This morning saw a particularly silly example of their usual editorial stance, where the programme adopts a tone that is either vociferously in favour or vociferously against something and implies that to hold any other opinion would be sheer insanity. Today, Today thought it was both entirely ludicrous and completely reasonable to ban things, without spotting the minor flaw in holding both positions simultaneously.

After the opening headlines of today’s tragedy in Iraq, the lead story was a follow-up to the dreadful killing of a man by a group of youths, in which the Chief Constable of Cheshire has made the knee-jerk reaction that the legal age of consent for alcohol should be raised to 21. You can see it on the BBC website, illustrated with not at all misleading pictures of gentlemen apparently rather younger than the 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds who the Chief Constable wishes to waste his force’s time by criminalising. During the course of the day, the BBC has at least improved its English from the initial caption that

“The chief constable called for the legal drinking age to be raise,”

though, so that’s an improvement (perhaps the early morning typist was still a bit hung-over). The BBC has adopted a Daily Mail / Labour-esque line that all young people fall into the category either of ‘angel’ or ‘devil’, that there is nothing wrong with younger adults being given less money, fewer freedoms, more responsibilities and judged not on the basis of how their actions harm other people but arbitrarily by their tastes in music, clothing or recreational drugs. Well, despite the editorial line you may have heard this morning, I blame the killers rather than everyone in their age group, still less advocate prohibition as the panacea it has never proven to be in practice.

You might think, then, that The Today Programme gave out strong signals in its news agenda this morning that banning things because a few people had a problem was absolutely the right thing to do. And they did. So it would be ludicrous, wouldn’t it, for them also to adopt the editorial line at the same time that only some insane busybody would start banning things because a few people had a problem. But they did that, too.

Yesterday morning, there had been an item about, as far as I recall (‘Listen Again’ is very patchy when you have steam-powered dial-up), balloon animals being banned at children’s parties for fear of latex allergies. There was maximum sneerage at this absurd state of affairs, and again this morning when – it all having been blamed on “health and safety” – someone representing a health and safety officers’ professional organisation came on to deny that his lot had anything to do with it. We were treated to Jim Naughtie pouring scorn on the decision, and the official saying that, yes, this was absolutely wrong, and wasn’t it awful that his members always got the blame for such things, constantly citing what he called the problem of “Bonkers Conkers”. Obviously, two people fighting to let loose their invective by proving in ever more wild terms how much they agreed with each other wasn’t the most illuminating of interviews, however much I agreed with them.

Aside from the bizarreness of clearly facing both ways along their arbitrary, binary editorial position, the problem with the BBC doing the Daily Mail is that they’re so bad at it. Richard and I both goggled at the wireless when Mr Naughtie blithely announced that this was “health and safety gone mad” and that everyone had used the phrase: no, the well-known cliché he was reaching for and which a Hate Mail hack would have known by heart is “political correctness gone mad” (UK Google results for the former number 1,040, while for the latter it’s 34,100, and that seems astoundingly low), while people attacking this sort of thing usually use the term “compensation culture” (59,400, and jackpot). But perhaps I’ve been too kind by merely labelling the BBC’s two-facedness as bizarre. No, it’s actively harmful, and symptomatic of how the whole thing works, just as the health and safety official’s wish to deny everything is.

Who actually does all this banning? Well, New ‘New Laws Every Day’ Labour love it, of course, but for once it’s not all the government’s fault. No, it’s a vicious circle, in which no one takes responsibility. Look at the Daily Mail, which this morning screams for alcohol to be banned for people younger than its readership, but which will no doubt tomorrow be back to saying that calls for something it approves of (should there be such a thing) to be banned is “political correctness gone mad”, with exactly the same binary stupidity displayed by its Little Sir Echo Mr Naughtie this morning. Then there are officials, the well-meaning kind who genuinely believe all – or some – adults must be treated like children, and the probably more common kind who are fearful that they’ll be sued should anything unpleasant happen to anyone, ever. And then there are the companies that make a packet out of doing the suing, who advertise with nice-looking young women on the television, and the people who then ring Ambulance-Chasers Direct because, let’s face it, they want some free money and don’t care who pays for it.

The thing is, I just don’t like banning things. So railing against all this appeals to both the social Liberal and the economic Liberal sides of my invective. The stereotype of a social Liberal thinks everything’s the fault of heartless, rapacious big businesses who hurt everyone else in their scramble for cash. The stereotype of an economic Liberal thinks everything’s the fault of well-meaning do-gooders with no concept of reality who want to stop anyone doing anything ‘for our own good’. Well, the villains here include both. Hurrah for all Liberals!

I may not agree with everything John Stuart Mill ever said – what’s the point of a Liberal who entirely agrees with another Liberal? – but my instincts are ever likely to side with him over Roy Hattersley, and even when there are things I disapprove of or which are bad for me, I’d need a far, far stronger reason to ban them than just bleating that I don’t like what someone else is doing or that I don’t have the courage to take responsibility for my own mistakes. Drinking isn’t one of my regular vices, despite Richard’s parents’ fortieth anniversary bash, but I strolled over to my local supermarket earlier today to buy a bottle, just to stick some Vs up at the headlines. And, gosh! A little red light came on so I was challenged to make sure I looked over 21 (I do, and yes, it’s been quite a few years since anyone took a second look). So if someone of 16 gets sold booze, it’s not the fault of lax laws, but greedy suppliers. I have quite a few allergies – though not latex, fortunately for one of my regular vices – but I don’t feel the urge to ban things to make life easier for me. I don’t approve of the smoking ban, though it’s helpful to my asthma. I’m allergic to dogs, but I’d do nothing to outlaw them. It might be very helpful indeed if the government banned household dust, and sent a team round to vacuum every trace of it from under me to spare my allergic reaction. But no, they’d only send an inspector round to fine me because I don’t clean the flat thoroughly enough, and that wouldn’t stop me coughing, would it? And pretty much any kind of food can make me ill, but I know that certain kinds are much more likely to make me more unwell than others. But I still eat them from time to time, and the results aren’t something I’d sue the manufacturer for or that I’d want to campaign for a ban on so I won’t be tempted and no-one else can enjoy it – it’s simply an ill-effect that I know is largely my own fault.

So when bandwagon-jumping politicians, fear-stoking journalists, fearful safety officials, ambulance-chasing lawyers, anxious parents, authoritarian police officers and greedy citizens all say ‘It’s not my fault, guv,’ look at them askance. I can’t quite decide whether it’s ironic or appropriate that people who want to stop anyone being able to take responsibility for their own actions keep dodging responsibility for wanting to do so. Still, not my responsibility, is it?

The item on the balloons, incidentally, was followed by an item that regularly prompts an allergic reaction – the so-called Thought For the Day. So when I heard that the speaker was director “…of the thinktank Ecclesia,” I considered suing them for the dangerous lack of health advice: ‘Warning: may not contain real thoughts’.

Labels: British Politics, Drugs, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Radio, Stupid Ideas, The Golden Dozen, The Today Programme

You may have heard about Lord Laidlaw, a Conservative peer and donor who’s said to be the second richest person in Scotland and – gasp! – a tax exile. The BBC reports that, three years after agreeing to become a UK resident to gain a peerage, he still hasn’t done it. The Lords’ Appointments Commission will “name and shame him in a forthcoming review” (so what’s this morning’s leak news?), but the Today Programme said they’re otherwise “powerless”. I know what you’d expect me to say: ‘Tory donor, filthy rich, tax exile, cash for honours, scandal, holds up shocked mittens’. Actually, it’s not quite that simple. My biggest problem is not with Lord Laidlaw, but with Lords’ Appointments Commission.

I don’t approve of peerages, with donations or without. I was delighted last month when the House of Commons voted to replace the whole bunch with people who can be elected and held to account – though, unaccountably, the Lords didn’t agree. But despite Lord Laidlaw sounding, in a one-line summary, like one of the dodgier members of a wholly dodgy House, I’m wary of reports that throw everything at one individual. In part, it’s because that distracts attention from the need to throw out the lot of them and replace them with people we can choose to throw out, or not, on a regular basis. In part, it’s because the story contains some elements in his favour.

Obviously, if we’re going to have legislators on the basis of some whim, bung or ancestry rather than because they’ve won an election (sorry to keep banging on, but my dictionary and I have rather old-fashioned notions of what a ‘democracy’ might mean), having a legislator called ‘Laidlaw’ is as good an excuse as any, and better than most – I mean, can you think of a more brilliant name? More seriously, the BBC’s Business Editor reports that Lord Laidlaw has written to the Lords’ Appointments Commission to say that he does still plan to move, but that personal reasons have delayed it. Well, I can understand that; I’m quite attached to our flat and wouldn’t want to be forced to move from that either, though tragically it’s not worth £700-odd million, and involves us already paying taxes. And, very much in his favour, he’s said he intends gradually to give away his vast personal fortune to charity. Knowing little about him except for this story, that makes him sound rather a good egg, major donor to the Tories or not. Against him, there’s the fact that he told the BBC’s Business Editor “I have made it a rule never to speak to journalists.” Well, I suppose being a snooty git who considers any enquiries from the people they rule over to be the height of impertinence comes with the job, too (see ‘objections to House of Lords, general’, above).

So if Lord Laidlaw is a laudable philanthropist who simply has an unfortunate record of giving some of his largesse to deeply undeserving causes, what’s my real problem? It’s with this report, swallowed wholesale by journalists, that all the Lords’ Appointments Commission can do is “name and shame” tax exile peers they’ve previously rubber-stamped, and that they’re brave, noble individuals who are “powerless” to take real action such as, say, revoking a peerage. Well, aside from their being there as an artificial life-support for the concept of government by patronage, I have no sympathy whatsoever for their sanctimonious bleatings today. Their cowardly leaking that they’d like to revoke Lord Laidlaw’s peerage if they only could is shameful. The fact is, they were not powerless when it mattered – just incompetent. The Commission had all the power they needed to prevent a tax exile from becoming a peer. They could have heard his evidence that he intended to move at some point, and answered: ‘Fine. And six months after you’ve done so, provide us with the evidence you’ve settled here and we will give you your peerage.’ But they didn’t bother. This cowardly, lazy and incompetent bunch are now saying – out of the corners of their mouths, as of course their “review” remains “forthcoming” – that it’s all someone else’s fault. No, it’s not. It’s theirs, and rather than criticise someone else, they should be apologising for giving him the nod in the first place when it was their duty to have stopped him. Just as all but about 0.0001% of the tens of millions of us in Britain have no say on the Lords themselves, we have no say on this small group of people who are supposed to choose whether our potential lawmakers are ‘worthy’. Today more than ever, it’s clear they need holding to account, too.

In other news, the ‘war on drugs’ (immensely tasteless, with all the real wars about) has completely failed, as drug use remains high and a major source of criminality. Well, goodness me, bless my muffins, who’d have thought, I don’t Adam and Eve it, etc. Expect the Labour Government to sound just as faux-shocked as their Lords’ Appointments Commission as they rush round to blame everyone else but themselves and ask for new powers with which to waste police time instead of getting to the root of the problem. As long as drugs have an effect on people, people will take them. And as long as they remain illegal, criminals will take those people’s money. Like ‘Who gave the go-ahead to a tax exile peer,’ this is not rocket science.

Labels: British Politics, Conservatives, Drugs, Republic

I ask ‘How much…?’ rather than ‘Does…?’ because the ‘hate’ is obvious. It’s their mission: to hate and pour bile over anyone not four-square on Planet Mail, and to terrify all those who actually agree with them (I often think Mail-readers must be like ghost train addicts, loving to shriek in pretend horror at illusory threats). This weekend, though, the Mail and Mail On Sunday seem to have mounted a co-ordinated attack on the Conservative Leader. They’ve dug up evidence of his drug-taking (gasp!) and reported in embarrassing detail his failed attempts to persuade Liberal Democrat MPs to defect (shock!). Hat-tips to Jonathan Calder and Peter at Liberal Review.

But what has Mr Cameron done to deserve this double-barrelled attack? He’s a a ‘nice young man’ who’s been well brought-up in a very wealthy Conservative family in the home counties, and is now a Tory Leader who can supply ‘nice young family’ pictures for their supplements. The trouble is, he’s also the Tory Leader who’s been making the most naked appeals to people outside the Mail’s twitchy-curtained definition of ‘proper’ people. He’s a traitor to Mail-ism, and what could be more worthy of their bile? It doesn’t help that Mr Cameron is making less headway than all these ‘changes’ promised, something the Evening Standard (coincidentally, part of guess which newspaper group?) last week reported Edward Leigh fulminating on. The hate-fuelled outpourings of the Mail and Mr Leigh may indeed be thoroughly off-putting to all those outside their enclave, but I think they just can’t help themselves. ‘Nice… Nice… Nice…’ they chant, unconvincingly. ‘HATE!’ Whoops, it just slipped out, but they feel so much better for it.

Naturally, the ‘story’ here that’s grabbed all the attention is the personal one about Mr Cameron – people from proper Daily Mail families, of course, never do drugs (did they not watch The Line of Beauty? Ah, of course; it was all fine in that until anyone told the papers, too). But despite the ‘news’ of Mr Cameron’s drug-fuelled escapades at Eton receiving virtually continuous coverage on News 24 yesterday and still causing a feeding frenzy today, I suspect it will wind up no-one who isn’t already on the Edward Leigh / Daily Mail axis of being wound up by Mr Cameron’s touchy-feeliness anyway – though m’learned friend Mr Calder may be right that the word ‘Eton’ receiving round-the-clock coverage may hurt him, surely not what the Mail had in mind – and, after all his carefully-crafted lines on cocaine during the leadership election, it can come as a surprise to no-one.

I’m not impressed, however, by the Tory line that it doesn’t matter what you do before you enter politics as that can have no bearing on your political career. Aside from all the many politicians who use elements of their life story or life experience to aid their chances – as Mr Cameron does when posing with his family – I don’t recall anyone telling me when I first stood for Parliament that it was the modern equivalent of bathing in the sea at Paphos to restore my virginity. If an MP was suddenly discovered, say, to have committed murder before they became a candidate, would they be able to shrug and make ambiguous answers about how people are allowed to make mistakes but that it has nothing to do with their public life now? I suspect posing as Aphrodite would be a novel and not entirely effective defence with the Director of Public Prosecutions. Bizarrely, the Conservatives’ line means that someone who’s committed a criminal offence, been arrested, found guilty, taken their punishment and been rehabilitated – but with their past criminality a matter of public record – should be in a worse position than someone who successfully covers it up until they become an MP. And in this morning’s TV news bulletins, Mr Cameron has in the same soundbite said that there are private things that should remain private – so if drug use was a matter of private choice for him, why is he in favour of locking up other people for making the same private choice? – and then gone on to mention his family, which is entirely private, except when he uses it in public.

The only tenable reason to say that breaking the law and getting away with it before you become an MP is fine is surely if you believe the law in question is wrong and are vocal in wanting to see it changed, but that corollary seems lost on the Tories who, as ever, wish to have their cake (another dangerous drug, according to some Tory MPs) and eat it. Until they say that young people outside the privileged world of the top Tories should also not be punished for drug-taking, why should we listen to them claiming one rule for themselves and a different rule for others? I’m also curiously unimpressed with the Independent On Sunday for leading with it too (is this the first time a book has been serialised in both the Indy and the Mail? They must each feel dirty); ‘another politician might be a hypocrite if we could pin him down to having a view on anything’ isn’t a story that’ll do much to advance their campaign for legalisation.

Despite all the fun that everyone inevitably has with talking about drugs, the attack story from the Mail with the more slow-burning chance to be damaging is his much-touted campaign for high-level Lib Dem defections. The Tories have been crowing about these for a year as if it’s already happened, and – as Liberal Democrats noticed about our own claims some half-a-dozen years ago – if you have to get your publicity about a defection ‘before it happens’, it isn’t going to. A few minor defectors have been hyped up in the last few months, and it’s suited the news cycle to mention the Lib Dems going to Tories rather than those who’ve gone the other way, but disgruntled councillors, ex-unwinnable-candidates or hangers-on have always switched parties and always will. They’re rarely of much significance, even when some of those who’ve recently left the Conservatives for other parties have lost the Tories control of councils as a result. An MP is quite a different matter, which is why parties are always so eager to parade their scalps. When senior Tory MPs defected to the Liberal Democrats or Labour in the ’90s, large numbers of Labour MPs to the SDP in the ’80s or a Labour MP to the Tories in the ’70s, they were rightly seen as signs of parties in trouble.

Peter Oborne reports the abject failure of the Conservatives’ Treasury spokesperson’s crass attempts to induce Liberal Democrat MPs to defect, apparently by springing an unprompted conversation along the lines of ‘Who could fail to love me?’ ‘Me, for a start,’ which is not perhaps the most tactically brilliant of manouevres:

“Osborne suggested to David Laws, LibDem work and pensions spokesman, that he should consider defecting to the Conservative Party. In return, he would be offered a shadow cabinet job. At this point, Laws politely and thoughtfully explained that he was not a Tory.”

This has to be damaging to George Osborne, both for the reflection on his judgement and for the fact that – the unforgivable sin in the new Tory pitch to win – he failed. While you get the feeling that, whenever he sees Mr Osborne appear on the modern moving television, Mr Oborne feels the need to bark ‘No relation!’ this is also rather bad news for Mr Cameron, reported as having given his personal authority to the approach (evidently, by sending his chief lieutenant). I can’t remember this sort of report appearing as breaking news before, which suggests the Mail really does have it in for them.

Richard suggested to me last night that this could be the first example of a defection that doesn’t take place actively harming the party that was too eager to claim it (at least outside of an episode of Spooks). It makes them look stupid, the approach to Lib Dems is liable to wind up Tory traditionalists, and is damages their claim to be ‘winners’ by providing a conspicuous own goal. Added to that, in the constituencies of Yeovil, Taunton and North Norfolk – all seats that the Tories would be desperate to regain in climbing their mountain to get back into power – Nich Starling rightly points out that the Conservative Leader has now given a fulsome endorsement to the sitting Liberal Democrat MP as preferable to whichever luckless Tory is selected to challenge them.

So why was the Tory Leadership so stupid as to make this move? Of course the benefits to them had David, Jeremy or Norman chosen to defect would be substantial, but wouldn’t it have been more sensible for some more subtle and deniable soundings to have been taken first to see if, you know, there was the remotest patina of interest or dissatisfaction with the party they were already in? After all, it would probably do the Liberal Democrats some good if, say, Ken Clarke and David Milliband were to join, but I suspect that if Vince Cable suddenly turned up in their offices on the spur of the moment and announced, ‘I’ve got a brilliant idea… Why don’t you sit with me!’ the resulting media attention would not be positive for the Lib Dems. The fact that you can’t imagine such a sensible figure making such an utter fool of himself says it all about the two shadow Chancellors.

There are several factors behind this huge misjudgement by Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne (oh, imagine how humiliating it must be if you lived in Tatton, and had exchanged Martin Bell for this shallow creation). The first is that they think, probably based on their life stories before they entered Parliament, that everything will be easy. Mr Cameron became Leader from nowhere, became flavour of the month in the press, and I imagine their overweening self-confidence sees the next general election in the same way. They didn’t bother slowly sounding out their Lib Dem targets because, well, who could possibly resist their charms? And, with their unfounded assumption that they’re coasting to victory, who could possibly not want a ticket to sitting in government with them? Surrounded by ambitious hangers-on eager to drop everything they stand for at the whiff of an opinion poll, they don’t seem to have considered that no-one – outside of a few small-time local politicians in areas where we’ve controlled the council for ages, but there can be precious few of those – has ever joined the Liberal Democrats with the primary aim of advancing their career. Well, not unless they’re exceedingly stupid, and Mr Laws is rather bright.

They look at David Laws in particular, and jump to yet another fallacy. As David “politely and thoughtfully explained” to Mr Osborne, he’s not a Tory. But, surely, he’s a former banker – he looks like ‘one of us,’ they assumed, so he must just have made a mistake and accidentally wandered into the wrong party. Wasn’t it all he needed for that nice Mr Osborne to point this out, and then the scales would drop from his eyes? Actually, no. It’s not the first time that Tories have jumped to this sort of fallacy. Just look at how they howled at David’s predecessor in Yeovil, because decorated army officer Paddy Ashdown should have been a Tory and it was an outrage that he wasn’t. In a mirror image of Labour at the time, they regarded Paddy as a ‘class traitor’. Look at the background of the new Tory elite, with their less confrontational style but much more old-fashioned wealth and privilege than the Tories of the ’80s, and you can see that though nowadays they’re more likely to bribe someone than rage at them, the principle’s the same. Liberals, however, do not come in ready-formed class packages. It’s a shame when some Lib Dems make the same misjudgments about David Laws, but he’s consistently proved that his ideas are Liberal ones. They’re not always the same Liberal ideas I have, but if you can’t see the same philosophical starting point, you haven’t been looking. Either that, or you only looked as far as his suit.

If I had to make a guess about defections in the near future, I’d be very surprised to see any Liberal Democrat MPs moving to the Tories, and almost as surprised if a Labour MP jumped ship. I think the days of predicting Tory defections to Lib Dem are over while Mr Cameron is able to talk up his reassuring fluffy nothingness, and no-one in their right minds would skip to Labour at the moment, surely. With several peers having already crossed from the Tories to UKIP, there’s probably an outside chance of MPs following them… But only an outside chance. The Tories show no sign of becoming any less anti-European in amongst their other fluffy poses, and any MP defecting to UKIP – as opposed to Lords who needn’t face elections – must know they’re likely to be choosing oblivion, particularly as if they’re extreme enough there’s a good chance they’ll get UKIP’s backing anyway. Besides, a lone frothing extremist waving goodbye while shouting about how much the Tories have changed under Mr Cameron would probably do even more to the Conservatives’ electoral chances than they would to those of UKIP. If I were Mr Cameron, I’d think about what I could do to prise away the more unappealing members of my own party as evidence of how safe I’ve become to vote for, rather than show up how meagre my appeal is to those in other parties.

Labels: British Politics, Conservatives, David Laws, Defections, Drugs, Stupid Ideas