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.

Emmanuel Goldstein is Dead...

It was a fantastic week for manufacturers of patriotic novelty souvenir flags, firstly because of the British royal wedding lining the streets of London with a sea of red, white and blue union flags (anyone possessing flags of any other colour having been arrested the previous day, just in case) and then with a surprise last-minute bulk order for the stars and stripes coming in on Monday, following the news that U.S.special forces had found and killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. Yes, a good week for the flag sellers indeed, whether you were waving them, or burning them, they really couldn't care less.

So it was clearly a good week for President Obama too, despite Fox News taking full advantage of what will probably not be their last opportunity to make their favourite "accidentally on purpose" captioning mistake. (see picture).

What isn't so clear, however, is pretty much everything else. I guess that is unsurprising really, considering that the man himself was twisted up inside half the currently active conspiracy theories on the planet, but surely you would expect that the Americans would want to make this one look as above board and by-the-book as possible? Considering they have invaded a couple of countries, killed tens of thousands of people and spent trillions of dollars in the process of supposedly looking for the fucker?

Well, the very first thing I heard about it was that they had killed him and almost immediately dumped his body in the sea. Which sounded mightily convenient to me. I always at least half suspected that Bin Laden had died of kidney failure sometime in early 2001, admittedly making him responsible for releasing more post-humous material that Tupac and Biggie combined but it made a lot more sense than an old man on a dialysis machine running around the Afghan mountains giving US Special Forces the slip.

Things went from curious to curiouser with the news that the pictures of a dead Bin Laden released through the media were actually photoshopped fakes, followed hot on the heels by news that the US would not be releasing any pictures confirming what happened because of the potential for "negative consequences", not that it stopped them from televising Saddam Hussein's last drop. Meanwhile the western worlds media outlets was absolutely on-fire with all kinds of gloating, crowing and sick jokes guaranteed to have the negative consequence of reaffirming to half the planet why the USA is indeed the Great Satan.

The official story seems to have mutated every single time someone has asked a question about it. First it was a mission to capture or kill Bin Laden that met with fierce armed resistance in which the target was shot during a prolonged firefight. Then it transpired that the special forces teams actually met very little armed resistance (one armed guard) and Bin Laden was unarmed when he was gunned down in what may sound quite a lot like an assassination, but wasn't an assassination at all, oh no, not according to the White house.

I have really only just scratched the surface of the convoluted contradictions surrounding what happened on the 2nd of May, and have not even touched upon the ramifications of where Osama was found - not in an underground lair, complete with doomsday device and shark-tank, deep in the Tora Bora mountains, or even in the disputed tribal regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but in a villa in a suburb of Abbotobad, home of the Pakistani equivalent of Sandhurst where their military elite are trained.

To be honest, almost every single aspect of this story stinks!

If Bin Laden had died years ago and this was just an opportunity for President Obama to score a much needed propaganda smackdown, then I am fairly sure that George W Bush would not have failed to take up that opportunity himself, some time before the end of his own administration. If they had captured Bin Laden alive and without a fight, you would think the obvious thing to do would be to put him on trial for the numerous acts of mass murder he has taken credit for - truth, justice, the American way and all that? Or maybe they would want to ask him a few questions about this global terrorist organisation he was apparently the mastermind in direct control of?

So maybe, just maybe someone decided they wanted the best of both worlds?

Did they capture him, and then rather than put him in a position to spill all kinds of inconveniently-juicy-secrets which may potentially have found their way into the press, they only said they had killed him and then spirited him off to some secret prison in a third-world hell-hole, and had the electrodes attached to his testicles before you could say Camp X-Ray? That way they could torture the hell out of him for as long as they wanted and then kill him at their leisure, without all the pesky inconvenience of having to put him on trial and convict him first, or of giving him a burial place that could become a pilgrimage for fanatical nutcases from all over the world.

That sounds like common-sense to me.

I am by no means an apologist for cunts like Osama Bin Laden, but our Governments in the USA, UK and Europe really do try to represent us as "the goodies" in the war against terror, we are supposed to be the the ones fighting for peace, liberty, freedom and democracy. Aren't we supposed to do the right thing? If they had the opportunity to bring him to trial for the things I am pretty certain he did, such as the murder of 3000 people on September 11th 2001, then surely that is exactly what they should have done? Not bumped him off and then disposed of the body like in some kind of mafia style gang-land execution.

Personally I would have liked to see him spending the rest of his days sharing a prison cell with Slobodan Milosovic (former president of Serbia responsible for anti-Muslim ethnic cleansing during the Balkan wars) I'm sure they would have gotten along famously, but unfortunately, one way or another, people who commit the really huge crimes never seem to come to trial.

Perhaps some people are scared that it might set a precedent.

So instead we are left with this murky, unsatisfactory, fundamentally confused conclusion where the body of Osama Bin Laden may well be dead (by now anyway, I'm not sure how long a 54 year old man who must have had a kidney transplant at some point in the recent past would last under CIA enhanced interrogation) but the idea of Osama Bin Laden is still going strong.

So I guess we'll just have to wait for the WikiLeaks on that one!

To AV or not to AV, that is the question!

On the fifth of May the UK goes to the polls once again, not only to elect our representatives into local or devolved government positions, but also to chose between the Alternative Voting system (AV) where voters rank the candidates in order of preference and if no overall winner emerges second and then third choices come into play, and the First Past the Post voting system (FPTP) which we currently use. This is only the second UK wide referendum in British history, and the first ever where the result will be legally binding rather than just consultative, as with the 1975 referendum on Britain's continued involvement in the European Economic Community.

So in that sense at least, it is a truly significant event in the history of our democracy.

We should all be very excited.

Hmmmmm...

I have to admit to being slightly perplexed on this one myself. It has taken me this long to form any kind of a clear opinion on it at all, and unfortunately, it isn't a particularly good opinion.

The referendum came about as part of the negotiations between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats last May, as they were coming together to form the coalition government. The Liberal Democrats are very much in favour of electoral reform and wanted a change to Proportional Representation (PR), a third voting system where seats in parliament are allocated to parties more accurately according to the national share of the vote. The Conservatives, virtually by definition, are fundamentally opposed to electoral reform so anything as radical as a change to PR did not even get a look in, but they did need to offer something to get the liberal Democrats into bed with them - considering that Conservatives and Liberals are not supposed to be natural allies, remember they are the natural descendant of the two sides which fought each other in England's civil war.

After what I imagine must have been a great deal of fairly sleazy political solicitation, they settled on AV, which Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg is quoted as calling "a miserable little compromise". A phrase that pretty much sums up the Liberal Democrats whole position within the coalition government if you ask me, miserable little compromises seem to be fine so long as they garner the Lib Dems a little more political power, but I digress...

So the Conservatives are completely opposed to AV, perhaps because they perceive they will lose seats because of it, and the Liberal Democrats who stand to gain the most from the introduction of AV are of course extremely enthusiastic. Labour have no official position with MPs free to vote as they please, although party leader Ed Milliband is in favour of AV there is also the fear that constituency boundary changes contained within the referendum bill will favour the Conservatives, and amount to gerrymandering. Other key Labour party figures supporting a Yes vote include Alan Johnson, Peter Hain, Hilary Benn, Sadiq Khan, Tessa Jowell, Alistair Darling, Diane Abbot, Lord Mandelson, Ken Livingstone and Tony Benn, whereas John Prescott, David Blunkett, John Reid, Lord Falconer, Margaret Beckett, Hazel Blears and Lord Winston are all opposed.

Amongst the popular press, The Guardian, The Independent, the Financial Times, and the Daily Mirror all support AV, whilst The Sun, the Daily Mail, The Times, the Daily Express and The Telegraph are against it.

Celebrity figures and campaign groups have also taken sides, with Eddie Izzard, David Mitchell, Stephen Fry, John Cleese, Helena Bonham Carter, Benjamin Zephaniah, Steve Coogan, Polly Tonybee and Joanna Lumley all pro-AV, lined up against such luminaries as Esther Rantzen, Peter Stringfellow, David Gower, Darren Gough, and Ross Kemp in the "No" camp.

Having written all that, I am starting to wonder why I was so torn on the matter, the Yes campaign seems so full of the kind of people I generally regard as cool (apart from Lord Mandelson that is), while the No campaign appears to be well stocked with dinosaurs, bigots, loonies and Tories (and Rupert Murdoch obviously, who counts as all four).

Perhaps it's because AV seems set up to deliver more of the type of coalition governments we are presently encumbered with?

Perhaps it's out of a desire to see the Lib Dems fail in the one thing they actually stood to gain from entering a coalition with their political opponents (aside from a little taste of power, of course)?

Perhaps its because although we clearly need political reform in this country, the bullshit rebranding exercise that is AV just doesn't come close?

I think a successful "Yes" campaign will cause real political headaches for all of the senior Tories, and I do think it will at least count as a thumbs up to the general principle of political reform. On top of that I do not think, in all conscience, that I can side with the Conservative Party and the right wing Murdoch press in voting against AV, not without spontaneous human combustion becoming a real and present danger anyway.

So I will most likely be voting yes to AV in the referendum next Thursday, but that isn't the opinion I promised earlier in this article.

It is a cynical opinion, but I believe that if the choice of voting system we use had even the slightest chance of changing the political status quo in this country, we would not be getting any say in the matter whatsoever! We have been granted the opportunity to vote in our first UK wide legally binding referendum only because the matter at hand is a trivial irrelevancy. We did not get a referendum on ratifying the Treaty of Lisbon for instance, or on the decision to remortgage the country to bail out banks that were considered too big to fail, and the decisions to invade Iraq, and more recently to attack Libya, were already made long before the choice was even put to our parliament, let alone to a referendum.

Too many of the important decisions affecting us, particularly in economic policy and foreign policy, are made at a level above that of our elected representatives, by bodies such as the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organisation, NATO and the UN Security Council. Without genuine political reform that recognises the changes globalisation has brought to the world, and updates our democratic systems to maintain transparency and accountability to the people at every level of decision making, the choice between two methods of electing our MPs is little more than a distraction.

We're damned if we do, they're damned if we don't...

The continuing tragedy of our illegal invasion of Iraq, is that we have no moral authority to demand action when we should!

Colonel Gaddafi has proven beyond all shadow of a doubt that he is a brutal and murderous tyrant, prepared to use troops, tanks, heavy artillery and war planes against the people of the country he ruled for 30 years. Western governments have now finally begun to recognise the "rebels" in Libya as the legitimate government, even as Gaddafi's "war against his own people" intensifies. Foreign journalists have been taken and tortured by Gaddafi's forces which raises serious concerns at the treatment Libyan revolutionaries who have been captured must be receiving, or what horrors await the people of Libya in the bloody aftermath if Gaddafi is able to crush this uprising.

Every humanitarian instinct in me is screaming out that we should already have sent in the RAF to provide air cover for the rebels, and that international forces should be enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya, preventing the regime from using its helicopter gunships, fighters and bombers on towns and cities held by the rebels. These people are rising up in the name of democracy and freedom, they deserve and need our help, and although they are understandably opposed to the idea of British or American ground forces in Libya, they have made increasingly desperate requests for a no fly zone to be imposed.

In the meantime western leaders appear to be making the right noises whilst sitting on their hands, and the cynic in me suspects that they are just waiting to see how our own interests in this oil rich state can best be served before we intervene. My own reluctance to insist that my government takes immediate and forceful action against the Gaddafi regime in these circumstances absolutely sickens me! If we are to have armed forces then surely this is the kind of situation where we should have no doubt that these people need and deserve our help, but I quite simply do not and can not trust our leaders enough to demand that they go to war in our name, simply to find that we have annexed another nation in the name of democracy only to seize control of their natural resources.

This is the legacy of Bush and Blair's "war on terror", and yet another reason to pile condemnation upon them for robbing us of any moral legitimacy to use force when it is absolutely necessary.

Now please excuse me but I think I need to throw up.

See If They Care!

Yesterday's by-election in Barnsley Central was a fairly predictable landslide to the Labour Party, with the Conservatives pushed into third behind UKIP, and Liberal Democrat Dominic Carmen losing his deposit and being relegated to the part of the table usually labelled "others". What is really fucking worrying to me though, is that only 36.5% of those eligible to vote actually bothered to do freely, what people in other countries literally risk life and limb to do.

Its pretty obvious that if more than 60% of the population can't be arsed using a right that generation after generation of their very recent ancestors fought to win them, then whoever does end up in charge of the country has a green light to do more or less whatever they fucking please for five years. Privatise the health service? Triple tuition fees? License arsenic as a children's medication? Why the fuck not? They obviously don't give a shit! Why the fuck should a politician give a damn about keeping their manifesto promises, when the majority of the population couldn't even tell them what those promises were?

Don't give me any of that "not voting is an act of protest" bullshit either. Turning up and wiping your arse on the ballot paper would be an act of protest, and at least they have to count soiled ballots. Not voting is an act of pure bloody bone-idleness, in some ways I hate them more than lifelong Tory voters and they should be ashamed of themselves! No, actually, shame would be a kind of an opinion, and when you refuse to take part in the democratic process you give up the right to have an opinion, on anything important anyway. Perhaps they should just piss off to some country where they don't expect you to slightly inconvenience yourself by walking half a mile to the local polling station once a year, like Saudi Arabia perhaps, or North Korea.

A slightly more practical solution, and one that would also help us cut the deficit, is a 25% tax hike for anyone who doesn't vote, a "Didn't-Poll" Tax if you like. Chances are that those affected will be too busy watching "My Big Fat Gypsy Talent Factor" to notice and even if they do, who gives a fuck? If they couldn't be arsed voting they're unlikely to sign a petition, let alone put in the effort required to start even a medium sized riot.

So fuck 'em! Cut all their public services, tax the hell out of them and give it all to fat cat bankers, turn their elderly relatives into soylent green and sell their kids into slavery.

See if they care!

Rant ends.