European Commission Considers Legally Regulated Supply of New Psychoactive Substances

Here's a statement from a press release from the European Commission (emphasis mine):

The Commission is considering various ways to make the EU rules more effective, such as alternative options to criminal sanctions, new ways of monitoring substances that cause concern, and aligning drugs control measures with those for food and product safety. In the autumn, the Commission will present a series of options in this respect.

These words are music to this drug policy reformer's ears. What is being actively considered here is a legal framework for the supply of new recreational drugs that spring up.

The problem of 'legal highs' is growing, with 115 new substances being identified in the EU over the last 5 years. Our hopeless drug laws can't keep up with criminalising more and more chemical compounds at an ever increasing rate. The drugs are typically sold as 'not for human consumption', even though they are produced with human consumption in mind. Clearly the current legislation is farcical.

No one denies that drugs can be dangerous, and each drug brings its own unique set of challenges for the health of the user and the wider effect on society. When talking of 'food safety' regulations, I hope the EC mean tighter rules than those covering, say, tinned tomatoes. The regulations should be modelled on those covering alcohol and tobacco as a bare minimum, to reflect the dangers of a drug.

The EC report also fails to consider what is causing the big increase in new pschoactive substances entering the market. The demand for legal highs is created by the illegality of more 'traditional' recreational drugs such as cannabis, ecstasy and cocaine. The scientific understanding of traditional drugs is also stronger, at least when compared to a brand new legal high substance. We therefore could have a situation where there is a proper legal framework for supplying less well understood recreational drugs, whilst well-known drugs remain criminalised. It would be more successful if legislation were designed to fit around the best understood recreational drugs.

If the EC successfully produces legal high supply regulations, I would expect that some of the first drugs to make use of the regulations will see a reasonable number of users, which could steal the recreational drug market away from both criminal dealers and the unregulated legal high traders.

It is also interesting to note the language used by the EC in its press release. It promotes a non-criminal justice approach with the familiar rhetoric of populist drug policy: "tougher action", "protect our children", "rules must be strengthened", "make sure young people do not fall into the trap" etc. The communications staff at the EC may well have figured that the "tough" rhetoric will be needed to sell what is actually a pragmatic policy approach which faces up to the reality of a demand for recreational drugs. As long as the legislative outcomes are to be a success, I'm happy for the politicians to sell it to the press and public however they can.

Finally, it must be said that there's a long way to go with this yet. This is a highly emotive topic, and EC has many political hurdles to jump. I can imagine the Daily Mail having kittens over this - EU SECRET PLOT TO PEDAL KILLER DRUGS TO OUR CHILDREN seems an inevitability. Nevertheless, we are seeing pragmatic, non-dogmatic drug policy being actively considered by governments at all levels. Reformers are slowly winning the War on Drugs Policy.

P.S. This autumn's Lib Dem Conference will see a motion debated on the party's drug policy. Please urge your local party's conference representatives to attend the debate and vote for the motion, and if you're a conference rep, make sure you urge yourself!

In Praise of U-Turns

Governments have three options:

Option 1: Be a radical, reforming government, and plough on with the reforms you feel are right for the country even in the face of criticism and unpopularity at your ideas.

Option 2: Avoid any reforms that might be controversial to avoid deep unpopularity.

Option 3: Be a radical, reforming government, but be willing to change course to avoid making unpopular and flawed reforms.

Option 1 was clearly favoured by Thatcher, as espoused by her famous quote - "the lady's not for turning". The problem is that such a belligerent attitude is deeply divisive, and while you may win some praise for 'strong leadership', your reforms could create negative consequences that could be avoided if you'd listened to criticism.

Option 2 will no doubt avoid lots of negative press. But what's the point in getting into power, something you've worked for your entire life, only to not do anything with it? You also miss the chance to make changes for the better, simply out of timidity at making a decision.


Option 3 involves changing your mind, and therefore provides an easy opportunity to be attacked as being 'not in control', prone to 'U-Turns', and of 'weak leadership'. However the benefits are numerous - your more popular and less criticised reforms will get through and have a real impact, and the policies that change will end up being better for the country. While you may be painted as 'weak' as you change course, it is clearly stronger than not trying make changes in the first place, and it takes courage to alter your plans in the face of insults thrown from the opposition.

A U-Turning government is a more pragmatic government, a more courageous government, a more democratic government, and if we're to have any faith in democratic process at all, it should prove to be a more successful government.

So here's to listening, engaging, responding, reforming, and yes, U-Turns.

Creating Opportunities In The Homelands Of Economic Migrants

If ambitious people in underdeveloped countries have no opportunities in their native country, they'll migrate to developed countries. If developed countries want to reduce migration, erecting border controls is not enough. There will still be ambitious people are still driven to improve themselves, and they'll cross borders illegally if that's what it takes.

So developed countries need to work with underdeveloped countries to create the conditions that will remove the need for the ambitious to be economic migrants, and instead gives them a chance of self-improvement in their homeland.

Take a look at this TED talk which describes a model to create cities that could perform this very function:



Free movement without borders is an end in itself for me, but to achieve this as a long term goal, the large numbers who fear large-scale immigration need to have their concerns addressed. Meanwhile, the government will only reduce net migration if it engaging in schemes like this.

Facing Up To The Challenges Of The New Boundary Regime

It's time to dust the cobwebs off the blog, this time merely to suggest that the Liberal Democrats need to significantly reform the way we operate if we are to survive the upcoming national political climate.

THE CHALLENGE

The Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011 could have introduced two major changes to the way general elections. The voting system was subject to a referendum and subsequently rejected by voters, so only the constituency changes are now to go ahead. In summary, the changes are:

• Reduce the number of constituencies from 650 to 600;
• The electorate in each constituency will vary by no more than 5% (with a few exceptions for islands and sparsely populated areas of Scotland);
• The new boundaries are to be in place for the next general election and will be reviewed every 5 years (and with fixed term parliaments, that means boundary changes between every general election).

This is a big shake-up, and changes a lot about what we currently understand about what a parliamentary constituency actually is. To fit within the strict 5% variation limit, the Boundary Commission will need to radically change the nature of the political map, and change it regularly. Constituencies in your area could well be in a state of complete flux from election to election.

OUR PROBLEM

Article 4.3 of The Constitution of the Federal Party sets out how Local Parties must organise themselves. Basically each Local Party can be either a single parliamentary constituency, or a combination of multiple constituencies. Given these boundaries are liable to change every 5 years, our grassroots will need to reorganise itself every 5 years to fit to the ever changing boundaries.

This organisational problem is then compounded by research by Democratic Audit, which shows that the Lib Dems are likely to see the biggest proportion loss of MPs to the boundary changes. Unlike the Labour and the Conservatives who win swathes of neighbouring seats in their core territories, our seats are more isolated, so bringing in parts of other seats will generally hurt us harder. This effect is further strengthened when the focus of our campaigning is in our target seats at the expense of neighbouring no-hope seats.

TOWARDS A SOLUTION

So we need a more stable set of boundaries for our Local Parties can build up without having to frequently reorganise, and we need to spread our campaigning beyond the existing rigid constituency boundaries, with an eye on neighbouring wards that could be part of the battlefield for the next general election.

Article 3.3 of The Constitution of the English Party gives us a way forward. It additionally allows Local Parties in London to organise themselves along Borough lines rather than solely constituency lines. This should be extended to all district-level government.

This has numerous advantages: Local authority boundaries are far less fluid, saving a lot of time and energy when boundaries change. They give a reasonably well-established outline of existing communities around which to organise and campaign locally, and naturally give the boundary of a specific council for the Local Party to target at all times. More broadly, tying Local Parties to Local Authorities generally fits better with the Lib Dem commitment to localism, and could cause a small shift in culture away from national politics and towards local issues (not that I feel this is really a problem as things are).

There is one big disadvantage that needs tackling: Whereas constituencies are reasonably constant in size, districts vary massively - from the tiny Isles of Scilly with just a couple of thousand people, to huge Birmingham with a population over a million. There would need to be flexibility in any new rules to allow small districts to merge and large districts to split, but this should be done on other tiers of local authority boundaries.

Another problem is with electing the parliamentary candidate, but this could be the time when Local Parties organise themselves for the general election on the forthcoming election's boundaries, so that the membership is worked out and a candidate elected.

Needless to say there are multiple other issues that would need addressing were this to happen. But the cost of not adapting to the new landscape may mean a lack of coordination and self-inflicted defeat. It's time for the party to start planning ahead and ensure that it is fit for purpose in the future.

I feel this may be the time to draft my first conference motion... Eek!

The 5,000 Labour Voters Who Secured This Tory - Lib Dem Coalition

When the results came in after last year's general election, one thing became clear: the only stable coalition on the cards would be between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. Given the Tories and Labour are too belligerent to work with each other, the one remaining alternative would be between Labour and the Lib Dems. But the election result didn't allow for this: Labour seats + Lib Dem seats only comes to 315, but 322 MPs are needed for a working majority (accounting for Sinn Fein MPs not taking their seats).

With 7 more MPs, the Lib Dems would have been able to form a coalition with Labour. So if 7 of the Con/LD marginals were won by the Lib Dem instead of the Conservative, a Labour - Lib Dem coalition would have been a real option.

So in these 7 seats that where the Lib Dems came closest to beating the Conservative, Labour voters who didn't vote tactically for the Lib Dems actually voted to ensure that Labour weren't in power. The totals shown are the number of Labour to Lib Dem switches needed to defeat the Tory:

1. Camborne and Redruth: 67
2. Oxford West and Abingdon: 177
3. Truro and Falmouth: 436
4. Newton Abbot: 524
5. Harrogate and Knaresborough: 1040
6. Watford: 1426
7. Montgomeryshire: 1185

That's a total of 4,852 Labour voters who ensured Labour were out of power and helped the Tories in.

If you think this is stupid, I agree. Under AV, Labour voters would have been able to vote Labour as their 1st choice and Lib Dem as their second, making sure their vote didn't do the exact opposite of what they intended. This is yet another reason to ditch our broken political system and vote Yes in the AV referendum on May 5th.

Ternary Plots of the General Election in England

Here are plots of the top 3 party vote share for most of the English seats from the general election plotted. Seats in the red zone were won by Labour, blue zone by Conservatives, and yellow zone by Lib Dems. The lighter triangle in the centre represents seats won with less than 50% of the vote, so shows the seats that will be affected by AV at a 3 party level.

I've shown English seats only, as results in Scotland and Wales distort the picture due to the additional presence of the Nationalist vote, which would require 3D to show properly. I've also filtered out constituencies where parties other than Labour, Conservatives and Lib Dems don't form the Top 3 parties to avoid a misleading picture.

The data comes from this incredibly useful spreadsheet which I come back to time and time again.

2010:

Not shown: Barking, Brighton Pavilion, Buckingham, Cornwall North, Dagenham and Rainham, Devon North, Devon West and Torridge, Thirsk and Malton.

Con: 185 over 50%, 110 under 50%.

Lab: 89 over 50%, 100 under 50%.

LD: 20 over 50%, 22 under 50%.

For comparison, here's the projected result from 2005:

Not shown: Barking, Bethnal Green and Bow, Boston and Skegness, Brighton Pavilion, Burnley, Dudley North, East Ham, Hornchurch and Upminster, Liverpool West Derby, Mansfield, Morley and Outwood, Poplar and Limehouse, Sedgefield, West Bromwich West, West Ham, Wyre Forest.

Con: 101 over 50%, 102 under 50%.

Lab: 146 over 50%, 119 under 50%.

LD: 15 over 50%, 33 under 50%.

In a future post, I'll identify zones on the 2010 chart which I see as having different dynamics at the next election.

Robin Hood Tax Propose Mythical Banker Taxation

Here's a screenshot from a new widget from the Robin Hood Tax campaign:

So a 100% Tax on something worth £7.2 billion would raise £7.2 billion for public spending, would it?

Short answer: No.
Long answer: Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Here's some content harvested from Wikipedia:

A 100% tax rate will also generate no revenue because at such a rate there is no longer any incentive for a rational taxpayer to earn any income, thus the revenue raised will be 100% of nothing.

How Representative is Parliament?

The whole point of representative democracy is that the MPs we elect to Parliament will represent the will of the people who elected them.

There are lots of ways to test this. One way is to see how many votes are represented by an MP. This is done by adding up all the votes that were cast for the candidates that got elected to Parliament. This can then be compared to the votes that didn't get represented - the sum of the votes that weren't for a candidate that got elected, and also the votes that didn't get used. Together, these make up the members of the public that aren't represented in Parliament.

From this spreadsheet (which only has seats in Britain, so these calculations don't include Northern Ireland), here are the totals for each group from last year's general election:

Represented votes: 13,695,495 (31%)
Unrepresented votes: 15,315,206 (34%)
Didn't vote: 15,435,593 (35%)


From these findings we can state the following:

• Over two-thirds of the public are not represented.
• Only a minority of voters are represented.

This isn't good enough. The decisions taken that affect all of us are being made by people who don't get close to representing the majority of us. There are many possible solutions, but there's one action you can take to improve this: Vote Yes in the AV referendum on May 5th.

How It Will Help

Here's why there are so many unrepresented votes (also called wasted votes) under the old First Past The Post system. These graphics are largely based on this handy Guardian animation.


Even though candidate A got more votes than the other candidates, most of the votes cast go to waste and aren't represented by the winner. This is what happens in two-thirds of constituencies across the country.

Here's how things will change under AV:


With AV, there is less waste, because it is guaranteed the winner will represent the majority of the final vote. That's because even though candidates C, D and E lost, that doesn't mean their voters' voices are silenced. This is why the MPs who win under AV will have to be more representative than under the old system.

Nobody's pretending AV will solve everything. There will still be people who choose not to vote under any system (although when the old system means there's little chance of your vote being represented, you can't blame them for not bothering). But when an opportunity comes to improve the representativeness of Parliament, we've got to take it.

Lies, Lies and More Lies from #No2AV

Here's the first thing you'll see on No2AV's website today:

I've pointed out three unequivocal lies that they are peddling. I'll go through them:

LIE 1: The Electoral Commission (which runs elections) don't say we'd need buy expensive voting machines - Channel 4 News has looked into this and rated it as 'Fiction'. Even if we did, they wouldn't have to be bought from Electoral Reform Services Ltd (the commercial arm of the Electoral Reform Society, which has been campaigning for change to the voting system since 1884 and is helping to fund the Yes campaign). A quick Google found plenty of other providers.

LIE 2: First, Nick Clegg is not going to be Lib Dem leader forever. Second, the Lib Dem leader only gets to "choose the government" if there's a hung parliament, and as Prof John Curtice has pointed out, "only in 2010 – when first-past-the-post also failed to deliver a majority – would a hung parliament have occurred under AV" since 1983 when pollsters started asked about second preferences. Third, it will be you who decides whether or not there is a hung parliament. Fourth, the Lib Dems are only in a kingmaker position if Labour and the Conservatives refuse to work with each other.

LIE 3: No2AV have made up the figure of £250m. £130m of it is for those fictional voting machines. £90m is the cost of the referendum itself (and that doesn't magically get refunded if you vote No), and the rest is for "voter education", based on the education costs of STV, not the simpler AV.

I also take issue with the suggestion that AV is "unequal" and not "one person one vote". AV elections have multiple rounds until the winner with over 50% of the vote is found. In every round it is one person one vote. I won't call this a lie, as it's more spinning the truth.

No2AV have had all this pointed out them repeatedly. For instance, I left a comment a week ago on their 'blog' piece attacking Nick Clegg. (Why can't they play the man not the ball?) It was instantly "flagged for review" and still hasn't been published. I've contacted them repeatedly on Twitter to ask why not, to no reply.

Despite all this, No2AV say they act "the spirit of open and honest debate". There's little sign of it so far.

Alcohol Needs a Less Dangerous Competitor

Millions of people in the UK (including myself) will get wasted on alcohol this evening. There's something inherent in humans (primates?) that makes being intoxicated an insatiable desire.

For many of us, it will be reasonably harmless fun, or at least nothing that a few ibuprofen, glasses of water and rashers of bacon in the morning won't sort out. In the process, many of us will make new friends, or improve the bond between existing friendships. Some of us will meet someone we end up falling in love with, and some of us will get laid.

But with all this, there are some serious downsides. A significant number of us will end up in hospital after an alcohol-fuelled attack, or spend the night in a police cell after being induced into violence. There will probably be a few deaths on the road caused by drunk driving. And in the long term, more and more of us are binging on alcohol too often, which is leading to higher rates of liver disease, as well as causing dependency and addiction.

Most of us know about these risks, but our instinctive enjoyment of inebriation makes the risks worth it. But that in turn means all these significant social costs won't go away unless there's a significant policy change that shifts society's relationship with alcohol.

The medical establishment's attempt to see minimum alcohol pricing didn't stand a chance up against the alcohol industry's powerful lobbying. Anything that could reduce our ability to get hold of our beloved alcohol is a hard sell politically, as our centreground-chasing politicians are terrified to do anything that will hit the wallets or lifestyles of swing voters in marginal constituencies. I admit experience shows that what I am about to suggest won't be any easier politically.

Those of us who seek inebriation tonight have little choice in the drug we take. Alcohol is the only legal means we have to artificially induce euphoria. The other options have been made illegal, which means tracking down a drug dealer and buying substances of unknown chemical composition, with the risk of getting caught and having the full weight of the law come down on you. Millions of (normally young) people every year take that extra risk, but a big majority of us don't.

However, given the huge problems alcohol will hand to the police and paramedics tonight, isn't there a better drug we could all be taking? I think there is.

Ecstasy is less toxic, less addictive and kills its users at a lower rate when compared to alcohol. The latest research (caution: only one trial) suggests that ecstasy may not have the negative effect on the brain that was once thought. Instead of making us violent towards each other, it would make us empathetic and 'loved up'.

This means there would lead to less violent crime and anti-social behaviour, and less pressure on health resources if users switched drugs.

However, it would mean users switching substances. Alcohol and ecstasy simply don't mix. Alcohol takes away from the stimulant effect of ecstasy, but both drugs place a great strain on the kidneys and can cause dehydration and overheating, so taken together compounds the immediate health risks. This in turn would mean the alcohol lobby would pile all its resources from stopping this from happening, because ecstasy would be a major rival to its substance-monopoly in the recreational drug market. The Daily Mail et al would also be morally outraged (for profit) at the mere thought of this.

I want to be clear:

• Whilst ecstasy remains illegal, I wouldn't suggest going near it. You don't know what's in it, and you don't want to give your money to criminals, or end up with a criminal record yourself. Sadly I doubt anyone who takes illegal drugs will ever bother heeding these sorts of warnings.

• I'm not advocating a switch of legal status of alcohol. That doesn't tend to work out too well.

• I'm also not suggesting that all alcohol users would be better using ecstasy. They are different drugs that induce different effects. Alcohol is primarily a depressant, whereas ecstasy is a stimulant. The issue is that alcohol at the moment is being used as a stimulant drug, which is having the negative consequences we see in our town centres at weekends. Frankly, many revellers would be better off taking ecstasy than alcohol.

In conclusion, my question is this:

When alcohol is a more dangerous and antisocial drug than ecstasy, why is ecstasy illegal?

I know which I'd rather be taking tonight.