New Labour New Highs

In a masterful and courageous move, Labour has decreed that you do indeed get higher on cannabis than you do on mere class C drugs. Not as high as you would on a class A drug, of course, that is some serious shit, but if you find you only get a class C high, then I think you can report your dealer to trading standards.

At least that is, presumably the message Gordon Brown is trying to send. This is all about message after all, rather than inconvenient reality.

Unfortunately the message actually sent is that government drugs policy is arbitrary and not to be trusted. Science, it turns out, has a higher duty to the truth than it has to the tabloids, which makes it unsuitable as a guide to policy.

It gets worse. Had the message worked as intended, it would have implied that class C drugs are all broadly safer than cannabis and class B drugs about as dangerous as cannabis. That is to say the government wanted to send a message that it was soft on all drugs but cannabis - and softer indeed than the evidence would demand.

I am genuinely suprised that they do not reclassify all class C drugs as class B, all class B as class A, and all class A drugs as class A*. Grade inflation does the job in education, why not here. And it would prove that they are being tougher than ever on drugs.

Sign the petition.

Strange angle on road deaths

In the news today is a report showing that children in deprived areas are four times more likely to die in road accidents than those in wealthier locations, and that therefore deprived areas should get priority in funding for speed bumps, cameras etc.

On the face of it that sounds fair enough, but actually it is deeply confused and offensive. Funding for traffic calming should go to where it has the greatest benefit. If this correlates with poverty, then more of it will go to poor areas, as it should. But where there are accident hotspots in prosperous areas these should be dealt with on an equal basis.

The idea that poor areas should get priority just because poverty correlates with risk, is a bit like saying you should hire tall people when you want smart employees because height correlates with intelligence. (You shouldn't, you should test your applicants' intelligence.)

The suggestion here is that the life of a richer child is worth less than the life of a poor child, and that is grossly offensive. The implication is that reducing child deaths is not the policy goal, but rather equalising child deaths across the social divide, as if this were a front in the class war.

Greens and Keynes: total muddle

You'd think it would be a simple question. Do the Greens support the fiscal stimulus to get the economy growing again, or do they, like the Tories, consider it more important to balance the budget sooner?

Logically, as the Greens are not supposed to be that keen on economic growth anyway, you would expect the latter answer. But that has to be weighed against visceral knee-jerk opposition to the Tories.

So I've been intrepidly commenting on Green blogs trying to get to the bottom of this. Natalie Bennett at Philobiblon was cheering the return of Keynes but wouldn't explain whether she wanted the growth that Keynesianism is thought to deliver.

When Jim Jay attacked Cleggy over the "savage cuts" remark, I asked whether opposing growth won't mean even savager cuts in the long run. And I get some vague guff about a "paradigm shift away from a capitalist economy", which is a rather vague answer to quite a specific question.

And now Rupert Read adds mud to the water with a pithy condemnation of growth. So is he against the fiscal stimulus? He wouldn't say.

This muddle is all the more surprising when we consider that it would actually be quite easy for no-growth Greens to come up with a clear and consistent position. If you think that the Tories are correct that balancing the budget now is better for prosperity in the long run, then go with Keynsianism. And if you think the Keynsians are right that a fiscal stimulus now is better for prosperity in the long run then go with balancing the budget. You'd have to half agree with the Tories either way, and I guess this is the problem.

Now it turns out that growth figures are about how much the goods and services we supply each other are worth to us, and not about how much environment is destroyed, and so the greens really ought to be a bit more specific and focus their attentions on the actual destruction of the environment rather than on an aggregate statistic like GDP that includes a great many good and unobjectionable things.

But no. Far from being more specific, their solutions just get vaguer. Paradigm shifts. Alternatives to capitalism, as yet unspecified. Read's suggestion of a stimulus to stabilise the economy is at least specific, but suggests that his green new deal should stop dead as soon as growth figures go positive.

Often on specific policies the Greens sound like what is simply a high tax-and-spend party. And this too, would make sense particularly if you want to strangle the economy. But ask them about economics or political philosophy, and they will never say this. Why choose this vague waffle over a simple policy that meets your objectives? Is some deeply held contradiction at work here?

This is a breathtaking shortcoming for what claims to be a serious political party. What have they been thinking about for the last 20 years?

Why MPs should stop complaining and pay up

Various MPs are disputing the fairness and legality of Thomas Legg's retrospective application of limits to cleaning and gardening expenses. They shouldn't. Their argument is that if you employer approved your expenses, they shouldn't later change the rules and ask for it back.

The problem with this picture is that the parliamentary fees office isn't the MPs' superior, it is their subordinate. You cannot pass the buck to a subordinate. This is not a case of your boss saying "you can claim for this". It is more like your secretary saying "oh yes I'd claim for that if I were you".

If the rules failed to specify appropriate limits for such things as cleaning then it is quite right for Legg to invent them. The rules are also MPs' property, and their flaws cannot be blamed on anyone else.

This is not to say that Legg has got it right. He seems to have ignored the real money-spinner of subsidsed mortgages. I'd rather my taxes pay for cleaning and gardening than for mortgages which fund capital gains that go straight into an MP's pocket. (Although having said that, surely you generate no more dirt by living in two places, so cleaning costs in one should be largely offset by savings in the other.)

Is it unfair? Perhaps if you are one of the noble few who tried to reform this system sooner. But if you're that noble, you can live with it. You can welcome the slow approach of sanity.

The tyranny of the harm principle

So I and possibly half a dozen other people voted against the ban on airbrushing, which was not surprising given the one-sided nature of the debate, and the near-universal, it seems, misunderstanding of JS Mill's harm principle. With hindsight I should have tried to speak myself.

The harm principle is a prohibition on banning things that don't cause any harm to others. It is not a sufficient justification for banning anything. Some bans are worse than the harms they would prevent. And many bans are wrong because they are ineffective at preventing the harms they are intended to prevent.

The problem is that it can be difficult to be seen to agree completely that a cultural meme like body fascism is a big problem causing considerable harm to many people, while at the same time rejecting a particular social engineering solution to it. Speaker after speaker spoke of the harm done by unrealistic expectations of plastic beauty, as if this were the point of dispute.

Sure, there are those - the libertarians - who would interpret harm in the narrowest possible way - the initiation of force - in order to delegitimise almost every law. At the other extreme communists might argue that competition causes harm - which it does to those who lose - and reject economic liberalism. Both may claim, wrongly, to be good Millians.

The error both are making is in looking for a rules-based formula for when something ought to be banned or not, and then arguing over the interpretation of the rules. And if you misunderstand the harm principle as saying what must be banned, rather than what must not be banned, it is understandable that you might want to adopt a narrow concept of harm, to minimise the assault on liberty.

I suggest that the harm principle should be seen in the context of Mill's utilitarianism. Specifically, that goods or ills have to be weighed up against each other. Some precious liberty against some moderate harm? It's a judgement call, and the answer is often a boring compromise: 70mph; no parking between 9am and 6pm; hotels must have fire alarms...

And the most useful liberties - such as the freedom to compete in business - are thus justified in spite of the legions of bankrupted suicidal failures.

So the communist has a broad concept of harm and prohibits a great deal. The libertarian has a narrow concept of harm and prohibits little. I agree with the broad concept of harm, but I would still prohibit only a little, understanding that the harm principle does not demand a prohibition.

So back to the airbrush ban. I suggest that the correct and healthy attitude to have towards advertising, celebrity culture and so on is a skeptical one. What you are seeing is not real. The danger is that an airbrush ban might make you think it is real, compounding the negative impact of the image. I don't see a prohibition intended to increase the confidence you might have in the fidelity of body fascistic images in the media as worth any loss of liberty.

Meanwhile I am looking forward to the men's policy paper. I continually find my self-esteem undermined by the portrayal in the media of men who are richer and more powerful than I am. I worry about all the boys facing these impossible comparisons. Something must be done.