Has The Big Lizard Finally Lost It?

(Or..."Shock!!! Horror!!! Might the Lib-Dems possibly have done something useful after all???")

If Rupert Murdoch had actually delivered on his end of the deal, and secured a full parliamentary majority for the Conservatives in May 2010, would the exposure of the phone hacking scandal, Leveson, the select committee, or any of this #omnimegashitstormclusterfuck ever have happened?

Or is there an alternate universe out there where the News Corp takeover of BSkyB became a done deal, with only a minimum of fuss?

That time around, it turned out it was The Sun wot didn’t won it. They did more than enough to scupper any hopes Gordon Brown may have had for re-election, but not quite enough to convince people that Cameron was anything like the change they needed. So we ended up with this bizarre bastardised hybrid of Tory and Whig, which was almost immediately nailed right on the head with the cheeky nickname it’s been known by ever since, the ConDem coalition.

It seems a very long time ago now, that Vince Cable screamed “Banzaiiiii” and declared his Kamikaze-war on Murdoch’s plans to take over the remainder of BskyB, got comprehensively hosed down with machine gun fire from his own party and their coalition partners alike, and disappeared barely to be heard of again.

It does, however, appear that he might’ve been right about that “nuclear option.”

By now it should be obvious, with yet more nails hammered into multifarious coffins by the Commons Culture Media and Sport Committee report today, that anyone as prepared to hand a virtual UK broadcasting monopoly to someone so unfit to run a major international company, as Jeremy Hunt and David Cameron apparently were, is also totally unfit to be running the country!

This is the story that just keeps getting bigger.

Where will it end?

Could this really bring down the government?

Please, please, PLEASE do not take this in any way shape or form to be an endorsement of the Liberal Democrats by the way, because it isn’t!

They’ve done fuck all in the face of an unprecedented and unmandated attack on the social institutions of this country. Tuition fees, Education Maintenance Allowance, housing benefits, Disability Living Allowance, legal-aid, employment rights, civil-liberties, granny tax, pasty tax, the privatisation of the NHS and every other asset that is being stripped away from us and sold off, by the upper-class equivalent of the people who steal the lead off your roof, the copper pipes out of your central heating system and probably your kidneys too, if you were unfortunate enough to get drunk with them in a bar in Manila. They have sold their own voters out for a sniff of political power, and are quite probably going to disappear off the political map by the next election as a result, and justifiably so.

There have been many champions in this crusade against the Murdoch media empire, and its hold over successive British governments, including the Guardian’s Nick Davies and Labour MP Tom Watson, but for me it was Vince Cable who played the Liberal Democrats one and only wild-card, lit the blue touch paper, and got blown sky-high in the process.

So it would be nice to say that the Fib-Dems haven't been as completely useless at mitigating the worst excesses of the Conservatives as it may otherwise seem, but unfortunately that's probably just a little bit far fetched. The fact of it is that Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is fast starting to look a little like huge chunky road-kill splattered all over the headlines, because they finally slipped up, and failed to deliver the outright majority David Cameron would need to do everything that Rupert wanted, or perhaps needed, him to do.

Maybe it was because he never did quite get the hang of the social media thing, maybe it was because he put his newspapers behind a pay-wall, when you can read practically any other newspaper in the world online for free, maybe it was because the integrity of his brand was already starting to look a little, lets be honest, threadbare.

Or perhaps the challenge of getting a majority of us to believe that Cameron and his Etonian millionaire goons really were fit to run the country, was just a little bit too much, even for Rupert.

Whatever it was, Murdoch has lost it, and hopefully he's going to take this government down with him.

Well done Tunisia, I hope that next spring is Our Spring

I would like to begin my first blog in quite some time, by wholeheartedly congratulating the people of Tunisia, on their first free elections in at least 40 years. The election took place on Sunday, with 90% of those registered to vote turning out and queuing for hours to do so, freely, fairly, and without the involvement of men with guns telling people how to vote.

In results just announced this afternoon, the moderate islamist party Ennehda took 41.47% of the vote to secure 90 out of 217 seats in the assembly established to appoint a president, form a caretaker government and rewrite the constitution, following the peaceful revolution against the regime of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, which kick-started the "Arab Spring", earlier this year. Second and third places respectively were taken by The Congress for the Republic party founded by human rights activist Monsef Marzouki and The Democratic Forum for Labour and Freedoms led by Mustafa Ben Jaafar. Ennehda leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, said today "We will continue this revolution to realise its aims of a Tunisia that is free, independent, and developing in which the rights of God, the prophet, women, men, the religious and the non-religious are assured, because Tunisia is for everyone."

Taking him on his word, those are sentiments that should indeed be praised, and I have little doubt that he will be held to them. Protests against the results of the election have already ocurred in the town where the revolution started, and if you ask me that is only to be expected. We're talking about a new republic in a country where any form of political expression was illegal, until the mass mobilisation of people onto the streets brought down a dictatorial regime and inspired further uprisings in Egypt, in Libya and arguably New York, London, and dozens of other cities around the world where the 99% movement is taking hold.

These are people who know the power of protest, if they weren't still protesting, I would probably say there was something wrong!

There is obviously much that can still go wrong, but secular liberals do not seem afraid that there is much danger of an islamic dictatorship taking hold, Ennadhi will have no choice but to work closely with the other parties to form a coalition, and is pledged to deliver a new constituion for Tunisia within the next 12 months.

These events do seem to have been overshadowed by the bloodshed in neighbouring Libya, but the remarkable achievements of the Tunisian people so far should not be dismissed. If they pull this off, they will have set an example that the whole world can follow. Regimes that are corrupt, anti-democratic and tyrannical can be overthrown without widespread conflict and NATO bombing raids, the 99% can take the power away from the 1% just by getting out onto the streets and refusing to go home until things change.

Protest is a powerful thing. The surprising thing is not that there are people camped out in our city streets right now demonstrating against greed, and inequity, pollution, war mongering and control of our governments by a tiny minority, when we read that the average salary for the director of an FTSE 100 company increased by 49% this year (and 55% last year), whereas wages for the average worker have not even kept up with rises in inflation, the surprising thing is that there aren't ten thousand times as many people out there as there are.

It is going to be a cold winter for #OccupyWallSt, #OccupyLSX and all the rest, but next spring could be Our Spring!

Phone Hacking: I Can Understand The Outrage, But Not The Sense Of Shock

or

Apocalypse NOTW

Two years ago today, the British newspaper The Guardian broke the story that journalists at the Murdoch owned tabloid, the News Of The World, had been illegally hacking into the voicemail messages of celebrities, politicians, and who knows who else.

Well two years down the line we are beginning to have an understanding of exactly who else was being hacked, as well as the high profile political figures, the British Royal Family, sports stars and TV personalities, they were also stalking the voicemails of murdered school girl Milly Dowler, the victims and loved ones of the 7/7 London terrorist attacks and the families of British service personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Police are now finally, FINALLY, investigating allegations that more than 4000 people had their phones hacked in what could be the biggest invasion of privacy in media history.

This scandal which had been bubbling quietly in the background for years, erupted into a force 10 shit-storm against the backdrop of the takeover of BSkyB by Murdoch's News Corporation, which already owns 39% percent of Britain's largest pay-to-view television station and has just been given the green-light by Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt to take 100% control. On top of his 100% stake in the Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The News Of The World and publishers Harper Collins, this gives Murdoch a staggering amount of influence over the British media and the decision to allow the takeover has been received with incredulity by pretty much everyone outside Murdoch's sphere of influence, most notably The Guardian's Nick Davies, Labour MP Tom Watson and actor Hugh Grant.

This has already been described as the British Watergate, and truly exposes the insidious grip Murdoch's corrupt media empire has on our political establishment, and just how far those tendrils of control actually run. They certainly run deep into the Metropolitan Police, who appear to have done everything they could to slow down and mismanage the investigation they were supposed to be conducting into the News Of The World's activities, whilst their officers accepted over a hundred thousand pounds in bribes from the NOTW.

They appear to run even deeper into 10 Downing Street, Rebekah Brooks, who was the editor of the NOTW at the time and is now chief executive of News International, has been described as a close personal friend of Prime Minister David Cameron, whilst Andy Coulson, who succeeded Brooks as NOTW editor and was forced to resign in 2007 following the conviction of one of his journalists for phone hacking, immediately went on to become the Conservative Party's Director of Communications, a post he held through the 2010 General Election and into government, right up to 2011, when he was once again forced to resign over the phone hacking scandal.

Yesterday News Corp announced that this Sunday's edition of the NOTW, already the target of a hugely popular boycott campaign that has seen many companies remove their advertising from the "newspaper", would be its last, widely seen as further attempt to cover-up what their paper was doing and distract attention away from the BSkyB takeover, and this morning Andy Coulson has been arrested on allegations surrounding corruption and phone hacking.

"Kaboom!" Twitterbomb!

Right, that's enough of what I know, lets take a deep breath, poke that dangerously engorged spleen with a sharp stick and see what I think...

I think that over the last 30 or so years Rupert Murdoch, through his ever growing stranglehold on the British media, has presented a strong anti-democratic force in British politics. From Thatcher's use of the police to break the strikes in the Wapping Dispute of 1986, via 1992's "It was The Sun won won it" headline the day after the General Election, to the defection from Conservative to Tony Blair's New Labour prior to the 1997 General Election and the inevitable defection back to the Conservative Party, when Gordon Brown replaced Blair as Labour leader in 2007, Rupert Murdoch's editors have predicted and preempted changes of government so reliably one really has to wonder; does he change sides because he knows which party is going to win, or does the party in question win because Rupert Murdoch has changed sides? It is certainly fair to say that no political party has won a General Election in this country without the backing of Murdoch's media empire since about 1979, and you really have to wonder what a political party may be willing to promise in order to secure that support.

Is it worth pointing out at this stage that despite making billions of pounds in the UK over the last few decades, Rupert Murdoch has paid roughly, rounding-down, absolutely fuck all in tax?

In return for absolute unwavering support for the party in power, he has been allowed to get away with murder.

Figuratively speaking of course.

Probably.

Murdoch has notoriously exacted a great deal of personal control over his newspapers editorial content, his agenda is unflinchingly right wing, pro-war, pro-big business, pro-tax cuts for the rich, pro-Israel, pro-apartheid, anti-feminist, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-trade union, anti-NHS, anti-BBC, anti-welfare state and most certainly anti-anything that might restrict how much of the British media he is allowed to own. His newspapers bombard us with coverage of how disgraceful it is that one footballer or another has cheated on his wife, yes, the News Of The World that bastion of family values and morality that happily plasters half naked women across half its pages every week. His papers fill us to the point of obesity with tawdry scandal, celebrity drivel and sport, whilst downplaying anything of real note that can not be twisted to serve his own agenda. They make up the most vile rumours about people and hungrily leap upon the most thuggish of moral panics, feeding upon the pain and misery of the people whose stories they report, and whose causes they they claim to champion.

Abused children, terror victims and dead soldiers.

How can a newspaper claim to support "Help For Heroes" when they were amongst the loudest cheerleader for an illegal invasion and an unjust war that has killed hundreds of British service men and women? This for me was one reason why it was particularly satisfying to see the British Legion pull its advertising from this week News Of The World. If Rupert Murdoch was any more of a villain he would have to move News International's headquarters to a secret location on a tropical island, underneath a volcano, and conduct all television interviews whilst stroking a white cat.

One question that springs to mind is why is everyone so surprised to learn the lengths at which these tabloid grave-robbers will go to, in order to stir the pot of scandal or outrage? We know they have been caught raking through peoples dust-bins and tapping private conversations before.

Their choice of victims whose privacy they invaded is also unsurprising, their red-tops in particular have always capitalised on tragedy and disaster, both public and personal in order to sell their papers, why is anyone shocked that they would erase voice mail messages from the telephone of a teenage girl missing from home, in order to glean fresh tid-bits for their scandal-sheet from the new messages that could then be left. Why is anyone surprised that they would give Milly Dowler's family false hope that she was still alive? Misery and anger have been their bread and butter for years. Why is anyone surprised that they would shut down the News Of The World and put hundreds of employees out of work but refuse to fire Rebekah Brooks, in a move described on Twitter as being like a surgeon cutting away all the healthy tissue in order to save the cancer. Murdoch's reputation for having nothing but contempt for his staff goes back a long, long way.

And finally, why is anyone surprised that our politicians in government and opposition, with a tiny number of notable exceptions, have done absolutely nothing to oppose him until now? Or why the Metropolitan Police sat on their hands for so many years? Rupert Murdoch was the second person to enter 10 Downing Street after David Cameron was elected as Prime Minister in May 2010. Ed Miliband was at a party thrown by Rupert Murdoch two weeks ago and has admitted he made no criticism, and raised none of the issues he is raising now. Between the Times, The Sun and the News Of The World, Murdoch has long been able to destroy the career of virtually anyone he chooses to turn his dogs loose on, and who knows what he knows about whom, after years of secret phone hacking? Senior politicians and police officers have been described as "terrified" of Murdoch's influence. If Glenn Mulcaine did uncover anything of genuine public interest from phone hacking, not sleazy gossip or stolen moments of private anguish, but something of actual political importance that the people had a right to know, the chances are that it would have never seen the light of day, if it could instead be be kept aside to increase Murdoch's influence over British politicians.

Perhaps we are at the point now where the NOTW has become so toxic that nothing he could now reveal about them can possibly be worse than the effect of continuing to publicly defend it?

Or perhaps not, because despite everything that has been said and despite a petition signed by over a 150,000 people in 72 hours, David Cameron is still refusing to freeze the News Corp takeover of BSkyB.

Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have been absolutely marvelous at showing exactly how outraged the British public is about all of this, and I really hope we manage to keep up the pressure and insist on full and timely public judicial enquiries, that heads will roll and this story does not get kicked into the long grass to be ignored until after the next election. The pressure on advertisers to withdraw from the NOTW came from the public campaign for a boycott, that is a tactic which can be extended to the rest of the Murdoch empire, we should boycott The Sun, The Times, Sky Sports, the fucking lot, and when The Sun on Sunday inevitably rears its ugly head as the newest sphincter in the Murdoch news-arse, we should boycott that too.

And if we dont, if Murdoch is allowed to get that much closer to a monopoly of the British media, I am sure that David Cameron, Jeremy Hunt and the rest of them will certainly reap their rewards.

Do You Want Fries With Your Bilderberger?

The BBC chose to mark this weeks 59th meeting of the Bilderberg Group , held in St Moritz this year, with a magazine article asking "Why do people believe in Cabals?"

On the one hand this could be interpreted as the usual dismissive pat-piece, striving to label anyone with an interest in what is going on behind the closed doors of the conference centre as a conspiracy theory fantasist, either wide-eyed and credulous half-wits filled with fevered speculation, or fanatically frothing at the mouth with barely concealed anti-Semitic hatred and paranoia.

On the other hand you might chose to read the article, which was the only actual reference to the Bilderberg meeting I could find on the entire BBC news site, as a cunningly concealed satire, parodying itself and answering its own rhetorical question with the unspoken answer: "perhaps people believe in cabals because groups like Bilderberg insist on meeting every year without publishing an agenda, confirming exactly who was in attendance or what was decided upon, and without letting any representatives from the global news media inside to have a look!"

The Bilderberg Group have been meeting since 1954 but it is only in the last ten years or so that it has passed out of the realm of myth and become something that, although still secret, is publicly acknowledged to exist outside the seedy web pages of the conspiracists. The journalist Jon Ronson was the first to introduce me to the topic, with his excellent book "Them: Adventures with Extremists" (Picador 2001), and the rise of the bloggosphere and the alternative media have done much to raise Bilderberg up into slightly more mainstream discourse. Charlie Skelton of The Guardian has been reporting back this week, ankle deep in muddy water, on what snippets of information he can glean by camping-out outside the conference centre in Switzerland.

A full "official" list of this years attendees was published here, but as ever there have been surprise last minute guests, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Anders Rasmussen, the Secretary General of NATO. As you can see the list includes our own George Osborne, attending in his official capacity as Chancellor of the Exchequer, once again rubbing shoulders with Lord Mandelson, although not aboard a Russian oligarch's yacht this time.

So the man in charge of the British economy has met with high ranking politicians from Europe and the US, with heads of state and top members of international organisations like the European Council, and with senior members of half the major banks and corporations in the western world, during the biggest financial crisis in world history, against the backdrop of widespread revolution in the Arab Spring, and we are supposed to believe that they were not in fact doing business?

It is vaguely possible, I suppose, that all those hugely powerful and influential men and women were gathered together in one place just for some kind of rich-fuckers jamboree, to eat big dinners, drink nice wine, maybe have a sauna and enquire politely after each others families, golf handicaps or if they are going anywhere nice on holiday this year. Game of "bingo" anyone? It is also possible, however, that they were meeting in absolute privacy, to discuss and make decisions on matters of vital global importance, completely outside the scrutiny of the media, and without having to report any of it back to the people who voted them into their positions of power and influence in the first place, whether they be the electorate of one nation state or another, or the shareholders of an international corporation.

Personally, I do not think it is even remotely possible for so many of that calibre of people to gather together in one place without talking "shop", and when the "shop" in question includes some of the most powerful governmental and economic institutions on the planet, Bilderberg meetings highlight a fundamental flaw in our concept of democracy. We elect people to make decisions for us, and we should expect those people to make those decisions in light of what we want, of what is in our best interests and, most importantly, in an open and transparent way so that we can properly judge what they are doing and whose interests they are actually representing. When our elected leaders, the people who set our social, economic and military policies meet in secret with the representatives of the wealthiest people on Earth, you can not help but worry that it is a bad day for democracy.

Realistically, the news media should be going absolutely mental over their exclusion from the conference. If 140 of the worlds foremost footballers and pop stars were meeting together in the same hotel for a weekend, the place would be an all singing, all dancing, three-ring media feeding frenzy; the G20 and G8 summits are huge events in the global media calendar with embedded journos, live interviews and press releases galore, but Bilderberg is almost completely dismissed by the mass-media, and anyone with the temerity to wonder what exactly they are up to in there is treated as if they have just donned a turquoise track-suit and claimed to be the son of god-head.

I must point out that I do not think it is physically possible for any one group to secretly "control the world" in the way that the most rampant of conspiracy theories suggest, I would even go so far as to suggest it is wishful thinking on their part, that they somehow find more comfort in the idea of someone evil being in control, than they do in the frightening possibility that no-one is actually in control.

On the other hand, the idea that various groups with common interests may align with each other in an ATTEMPT control the world, or at least to exert enough influence over it to ensure they stay ahead of all the other groups who also wish to control the world, feels like simple common sense to me, and Bilderberg looks very much like the Annual General Meeting of one such group. If Bilderberg genuinely is a harmless social club, that in no way works to subvert the democratic process of decision making, then all they have to do to dispel the "myth" that they are in some way an elite cabal ruling us in secret, and setting policy that suits their interests rather than the interests of vote casting masses, is open their doors to full public scrutiny.

Or at least publish the minutes.

And until they do I will continue to feel absolutely zero embarrassment in suspecting they are up to no good.

The drug laws don't work, they just make it worse...

The Global Commission on Drug Policy; which includes such noted hippy ne'er-do-wells as Kofi Annan (former UN Secretary General), Ernesto Zedillo (former President of Mexico), Fernando Henrique Cardoso (former President of Brazil), Cesar Gaviria (former President of Colombia), Paul Volker (ex Chairman of the US Federal Reserve), George Papandreou (President of Greece) and Sir Richard Branson (billionaire entrepreneur), has reported that the "War on Drugs" has failed, calling for certain drugs to be decriminalised and for an end to the practice of treating drug users as criminals.

They argue that despite the many billions of dollars spent and countless lives lost on the global fight against the drugs trade, the use of opiates has increased by 35%, cocaine by 27% and cannabis by 8.5% worldwide between 1998 and 2008, claiming that:

"Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem, and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won,"

With no small amount of irony, the report also marks the 40th anniversary of the United Kingdom's Misuse of Drugs Act (1971), against which the national drugs charity Release have launched a new campaign with an open letter to Prime Minister David Cameron, published in today's Guardian (02/06/11). The letter, signed by Bob Ainsworth (former Drugs Minister), Paul Whitehouse, Francis Wilkinson and Tom Lloyd (former Chief Constables), Sir Geoffrey Bindman QC, and celebrities including Dame Judi Dench, Julie Christie, Mike Leigh and Sting, points out that current drug policy is doing more harm than good and calls for an immediate and transparent review.

Now to me, this was obvious even before I graduated in criminology back in the late 1990s, although as a teenage student at the time my opinions were perhaps more selfishly motivated than they are today.

Put simply, if the point of drugs legislation is to control the supply and prevent the use of mind-altering substances, they have blatantly, incontrovertibly, failed. Drugs have never been more readily available, never been cheaper and more people are taking them than ever before. Demand for them is increasing year on year, as are the negative consequences of their use upon individuals and society at large, and the enormous financial costs of tackling a problem with a policy which clearly does not understand it, and legislation that simply is not fit for the purpose of dealing with it.

First of all, I want you to set aside any questions on the moral rights and wrongs of drug use/abuse, as they are not really that relevant here. Let us deal in practicalities...

If you are anti-drugs, what that normally means is that you are opposed to the negative consequences of drug use upon yourself, your family and the society that you live in. You do not want drug dealers on your streets, trying to sell them to your kids. You do not want people stealing from you to fund their habit. You do not want disease being spread around. You do not want to have to step over the dessicated corpses of overdosed addicts on your way to work in the morning. You do not want to have to spend so much tax-money enforcing laws that are not doing anything to eliminate these negative consequences. You may even have concerns about the effects of western drug use in other countries, the abuse of the peasant farmers who grow them and the poverty they live in, the environmental damage of processing the raw ingredients, the global organised crime syndicates making trillions of pounds on the trade in heroin and cocaine, the brutal and bloody front lines of the war against drugs in countries like Mexico and Afghanistan, where violent conflict between gangs and authorities kills thousands of people every year.

If you are pro-drugs, you also want them to be safer, cleaner, and of better and more consistent quality. You may be perfectly law abiding in every single other respect, and concerned that you run the risk of being imprisoned and labelled as a criminal for life every time you smoke a joint. You may feel that if you become addicted to one substance or another, you should be seen as someone with an illness who needs help and treatment, not as some kind of criminal deviant who needs to be punished. In fact you probably share most of the same concerns about the negative effects of drug use as those in the anti-drugs camp.

In short, whether you are pro-drugs or anti-drugs or anywhere in-between, it should be quite apparent that our current approach to controlling drugs just isn't working. We can not eradicate the demand, essentially because so many different types of people want to take so many different kinds of drugs for such a vast array of different reasons. Taking drugs can be dangerous, just like mountain climbing, playing rugby and riding motorbikes can be dangerous, but people still want to take them. In the UK drug possession can get you a large fine or sent to prison for life, but people still want to take them. In other countries drug possession can get you a death sentence, but people still want to take them. In certain cultures the use of intoxicants will result in your immortal soul being condemned to hell for all eternity, and guess what? People in those cultures STILL want to take drugs. In Britain getting off our collective face, one way or another, is practically our national sport. The rich want to drink, smoke and take drugs, the poor want to drink, smoke and take drugs, they always have, and they always will, so forget any idea that we can magically eradicate the demand for drugs in our society.

In the face of such a demand, there will always be enterprising free market capitalist types who are more than happy to meet it. It is impossible to stop them getting into the country, every high profile seizure represents the tiniest tip of a huge pyramid of drugs entering the country, or being home-grown right here. It has proven impossible even to stop drugs getting into the prison system, which suggests that even if you you enforced the most draconian laws and turned the entire country into a prison, you would STILL have a drug problem.

The alternate proposal is that you decriminalise certain drugs, like cannabis and ecstasy altogether, and decriminalise the possession of hard drugs such as crack cocaine and heroin whilst still prohibiting their sale.

So if you are diagnosed as a crack of heroin addict by your doctor, your doctor will provide you with a clean, measured supply of the substance you are addicted to on prescription, whilst monitoring your health, constantly stressing how bad it is for you and making sure every possible treatment programme to help you overcome your addiction is made available. Levels of petty theft, burglary, shop-lifting and robbery would fall as addicts no longer needed to steal to fund their habits. A properly managed policy of decriminalisation would deprive organised crime of an enormously profitable revenue stream and hopefully put them out of business altogether. Soft drugs such as cannabis, available from properly licensed retailers, could be mass produced, heavily taxed and still be priced to undercut the black-market. You stop wasting police time chasing after and prosecuting drug users, giving them more time to catch illegal suppliers, you also stop imprisoning drug users, at huge expense to the public. Cleaner, safer, standardised weights and measures of drugs would reduce the number of overdoses, and as users could be properly educated on the health risks involved and provided with sterile equipment, the risk of infection with HIV and hepatitis would also be dramatically reduced. The burden and the cost of care on the health service, would therefore also be dramatically reduced.

You may think that this would simply result in drugs being more widely available, and in more people taking them? Well take a look around, even in a rich country with some of the most stringent anti-drug laws in the world, drugs are ALREADY widely available, and ANYONE with the inclination and the money to buy them can already get hold of them very easily indeed. I really do believe that a policy that approaches drug use from a health and human rights perspective, rather than a criminal one, will ultimately result in a society with fewer drug addicts and fewer drug abusers. No matter how radical the proposal may sound, and considering that it is simply a return to the drugs-policy we followed in this country up to the mid 1960s, before the drug-problem exploded onto our streets, it really isn't all that radical, it can not realistically cause more harm that the policy we follow at the moment. It will result in less crime, lower costs for our criminal justice and health services, and in healthier, safer drug users who are more far more able to beat their addictions and reintegrate into society.

Returning to the report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy and the Release campaign, it is interesting to note that practically every politician or public figure who has put their signature to it, is an ex-this or a former-that, presidents, chief constables, government ministers, people who were all once in incredibly influential positions ideally placed to really get something done on the issue, but waited until they retired, or were voted out before they actually said anything about it. Why do you think that is?

I have enthusiastically devoured numerous conspiracy theories on the matter of why drugs are "really" illegal, each only slightly more or less entertainingly ludicrous than the next, but one that seems to have a little more substance is the one that Howard Marks settled on in his book Mr Nice. In Britain, and most particularly in the United States of America, and lets face it between the two of us we consume more illegal drugs than the rest of the planet combined, we are still afflicted by some kind of puritanical throwback to the 17th Century which states we must be punished for every single pleasurable experience we enjoy. They clearly couldn't give two shits about the hardships and degradations that people at home and abroad endure because of the trade in and the abuse of drugs, because our policy seems almost deliberately calculated to exacerbate every single one of them, so it must be about the pleasure people get from drugs instead.

There is a large knee-jerk conservative voting block out there in Western Europe and North America, and whether they be on the right or the left of the political spectrum they all seem to hate nothing more than the idea of someone having a better time than they are. So any politician who offers them a policy that will (a) greatly reduce the harm caused to the individual and to society by the use of hard drugs, (b) reduce the burden on the tax payer by not wasting billions on the counterproductive war on drugs, (c) reduce crime, (d) reduce disease transmission and death from drug abuse BUT will also mean that (e) people can use soft or "recreational" drugs more or less to their hearts content... will quickly find themselves facing the political equivalent of being hung, drawn and quartered.

That, I think, is why no matter how good an idea it is, no currently serving politician will ever put their name to it for fear of it immediately ending their career.

Which, when you get down to it, is a bit of a fucking tragedy.

I Think I've Raptured Something...

There is this theory about something called a self fulfilling prophesy.

The idea goes that if someone believes a predicted event will happen strongly, fervently, enough, they can actually make it happen just through the unconscious influence their belief has upon their behaviour. A parallel can perhaps be drawn here with the placebo, and nocebo effects, and with the concept of learned helplessness, but they are all a little too dry and rational for my tastes this morning...

So lets talk about the end of the world!

An octogenarian evangelical preacher from the USA has calculated that today, Saturday 21st May, will witness Judgement Day. The happy day when the Lord Jeebers will return and lift the chosen, bodily, up into heaven in the Rapture, there to look down on all the worthless sinners, left behind to suffer the time of tribulations before the end of the world. It's supposed to happen sometime this evening just after Dr Who, which is disappointing as its a two-parter and looks quite good.

The rational humanists of the world have been falling all over themselves, laughing their arses off about it all week, but worryingly, there are actually a vast number of people who not only believe it's going to happen, they actually want it to happen. In a 2004 article for the Guardian newspaper, George Monbiot reported that between 12 and 18% of the US electorate belong to churches which preach the rapture as fact. It's what they've all been waiting for, the day they will be swept up to heaven to receive their eternal reward. They want it to happen.

For them, the apocalypse = Winning!

So if enough people want Armageddon strongly enough, and believe it in most zealously, is there actually a danger that they might make it happen? Well, its worth remembering that those guys just had their man in the White House for 8 years and lets face it, they're never that far away from the big red button that says "Nuke em all, and let God sort 'em out!" First of all, however, certain events have to come to pass including, according to the rapture prophesy, a massive religious war in the Middle East and the arrival on earth of the Anti-Christ.

Hmmmmmm, so far so fucked.

I don't believe in the rapture, and pretty much everything else in the book of revelations sounds like the sort of story anyone would come up with, after wandering in the desert for forty days without a hat or adequate sun block, but I have to admit the thought of anyone who holds those beliefs having even the slightest influence on American foreign policy gives me a really bad case of the screaming heebie-jeebies!

So enjoy rapture day, Twitter has already turned it into a global event for us all to share a patronising chuckle over, but for as long as there is a large supply of the kind of people who spent the week looking around for atheists to care for their pets after they've been carried up, to sit amongst the angels and have a good laugh at all the suffering down on earth, the end of the world is surely not something we should stop worrying about altogether.

As an interesting sidenote, I scanned through quite a few news sites for references to today as the beginning of the end. Admittedly I did not find a whole lot on any of the more reputable news agencies, just a joking article here or there about how crazy the religious right can be or how annoyingly sarcastic those pesky atheists can get.

But I still found more references to it than I did to the tens of thousands of people currently camped out in the centre of the Spanish capital Madrid, protesting against their governments planned public spending cuts, and emergency laws banning legal forms of protest that the Spanish government brought in to prevent them.

It's a funny old world isn't it?

Old Money, New Money, No Money

Well, Alternative Voting appears to have crashed and burned out of this months referendum, so lets have a look at the idea of political parties and see where the 70% "No" vote to electoral reform leaves us. First, we need to take a quick ramble through history.

Once upon a time, all wealth and power was derived from the ownership of land, and we had a simple "one man, one vote" political system.

That man was the king, he owned all the land, and he had the vote.

When King John had his run in at Runnymede in 1215, I believe that the feudal baron's who forced him to sign Magna Carta, a charter limiting his powers and protecting their own privileges, where the first political party in our history to represent the interests of the people. Well... the interests of people with wealth, power and noble lineage anyway, and we remained as a one party state for the better part of half a millennium.

Over the following centuries, people developed new ways of generating wealth that didn't stem from the ownership of land, sheep and peasants. Advanced manufacturing techniques created new goods to be traded, shipbuilding and navigation technology gradually opened the whole world up as a market in which goods could be bought and sold, and a new class of people came into being. They had wealth, and they had some power, they may not have been the scions of aristocratic bloodlines but quite frankly, they didn't care. This created a division in the political classes of Britain that ultimately led to "the divine right of kings" taking a bit of a tumble, along with Charles the First's head, in March 1649 during the English Civil War. In the aftermath of revolution and restoration, Britain emerged as a two party state.

On the one hand you had the Tories, the successors of the Cavaliers who sided with the king during the war and, arguably, the descendants of the feudal baron's who imposed Magna Carta. They represented the upper class.

On the other hand you had the Whigs, the political offspring of the Roundheads; the merchants, dissidents and non-conformists who had sided with parliament against the king. They represented the middle class.

At that point, the first past the post electoral system pretty much made sense, and British politics remained a two horse race over another two hundred and fifty years of more or less radical social change.

There followed an Enlightenment, a scientific revolution, an agricultural revolution and then an industrial revolution. Also an American one and a French one too.

By the 19th century, England was the heart of a military-industrial super-power, capitalism had replaced feudalism but little else had really changed, other than in name, the Whigs having mutated into the Liberal Party at some point along the way. Some of the the middle classes had grown as rich and powerful as the nobility on manufacturing and export, on international finance and on the slave trade, whilst the peasants, who had moved to the towns and cities when the agricultural revolution threw them off the land, had transformed into the industrial working class.

They still went off to die in the nation's wars of conquest and empire. They still lived in abject poverty and squalor, working 18 hours a day, six and a half days a week, from the age of 5 upwards in dangerous and back-breaking conditions. If they lost their job and became destitute there was the work-house, if they became too elderly or infirm to work, there was death in the gutter. The difference was that whilst it had been extremely difficult to organise large numbers of illiterate peasants who were scattered across the length and breadth of the English countryside, the industrial working classes were all crammed together in the towns and had much stronger social networks, some of them could even read and write! They could be organised by the factory gate, in the pubs and in the streets, messages could be spread between them very effectively and they could be quickly gathered together in huge numbers.

They protested, they rioted, they went on strike and, in due course, the got the vote.

If the Tories were the party of "Old Money", and the Liberals were the party of "New Money", then the Labour Party, founded to represent the newly emancipated working class, were the party of "No Money".

Dragging ourselves back to the 21st century, kicking and screaming into the post New Labour years, we should be starting to realise that our current electoral system does not take account of the plurality of interest groups within our society. It encourages a bi-polar split between parties that represent old money, and new money, Tony Blair and co having started the cannibalisation of the Liberal Democrat vote that David Cameron's Conservatives, still very much the decedents of those civil war Cavaliers, are now completing with great gusto. We are becoming once again a two party state, with the Liberal Democrats having been virtually subsumed by their Conservative coalition partners and the Labour Party rushing into the vacuum created in the centre.

There is now much talk of creating something called Blue Labour, of the labour party adopting more conservative policies and moving to the right on social issues, in an attempt to win the votes of the "squeezed middle classes" and win back the votes of working class votes alienated by issues such as immigration and crime. Support for this idea of a cross-class consensus, comes from the way the super-rich of the upper class keep getting richer and more economically distanced from middle class workers, even when you include doctors, solicitors, teachers, civil servants and directors of small to medium enterprises.

With the rejection of electoral reform, even if AV was a pathetic little compromise, I suspect that a collapse back to a two party system is now inevitable and the Liberal Democrats will no longer exist by the time of the next General Election, with one party, the Conservatives, to represent the interests of the wealthiest elite, and another, Blue Labour, to represent those of the ordinarily well off. In effect we will be transforming our political landscape into something similar to that in place in the United States, with the Republicans on the right, the Democrats in the middle, and no one at all on the left.

One of my biggest fears about this is the prioritisation by Tories, Lib Dem's and Blue Labour alike of social mobility over social equality. By putting the emphasis on a system that values the ability to move up the social scale over the eradication of differences between different points on the social scale, we set in stone the idea that there will always be the working poor.

The people who do all the dirty, menial, laborious, boring, unglamourous jobs, with the longest and most antisocial hours, that pay minimum wage with minimum paid holidays, no sick pay, pension or benefits, where you end up with no savings, pension or property, broken down and old way before you reach a retirement age that keeps being moved upwards. The people who are more likely to get heart disease and more likely to get cancer, who get the worst health care and die the youngest, who are more likely to be the victims of crime and are more likely to go to prison. They are the most likely to be hit with long term unemployment and they live in neighbourhoods where their kids have a choice between a school that is failing and a school that has failed, and the one that is failing is already full up. They are not "doleys" or "scroungers", they are the people who work hard but ultimately do not get a better quality of life than they would have if they had been on state benefits all their lives. And without free education, the chances of their children ever having anything more than them are rapidly diminishing.

So personally I am opposed to two party-ism, and opposed to Blue Labour. I favour a Proportional Representation electoral system, and a society with a multitude of political parties that are free to represent the interests of everyone in society, not just of the people with the money, whether it be old or new.