• am spending too much time on it, on lots of other blogs, and on Twitter
• am hopelessly addicted to politics and news, to the exclusion of other intellectual pursuits such as making a dent in my enormous ‘to read’ pile
• have failed to market it properly (and was never really prepared to post often enough and quickly enough anyway) so have failed to get beyond more than a handful of readers
• have a book to try to get published, and a second to make a start on, which I feel is a better use of my monumental writing ability
• am now on my local community council, which is a better outlet for my petty gripes
• am weary of holding the weight of a heavy world on my shoulders, and am keen to separate the political and the personal a bit more
• started the blog as a showcase of writing for potential future employers, but (a) have a great job on the good old PSGT for the foreseeable future and (b) cannot hold to that mission and still write with any honesty
• sense that I am, worst of all, starting to repeat myself

I may make an embarrassing comeback in due course.  Unlike every other blogger ever, I don’t imagine I know everything, and hope I have instead posed some interesting questions.  Looking back, the posts I’m happiest with are those in which I’ve not got bogged down in policy or ideas and have let loose lyrically, whether on architecture or popular culture or whatever.  So, if I do make a comeback, I expect it will be more in that vein.  In the mean time, I can sum up the main themes thus far thusly —

• the liberal left and the libertarians are mostly well meaning, but mostly misguided
• lots of people believe in God but not religion; more and more I believe the reverse
• just as each generation has to relearn civilisation and not take it for granted, so Britain cannot feel entitled to our hitherto privileged position in the world
• elitism is damaging and divisive, so the nascent direct democracy and blue Labour movements are to be encouraged
• economically we should probably be somewhere in the middle

This can all be summed up as:

• the natural lot of man is extreme liberty, extreme inequality and extreme misery, and postmodern nihilism can only take us back to this natural order — some constraints on both economic and social behaviour are necessary if we want a happier, more equal and more unified society

Thanks to all of you who’ve read and commented over the past couple of years.  For now, lonely reader, as ignorant armies clash by night, not with a bang but a whimper do I exhort you to cast off your mind-forg’d manacles and, forever surprising a hunger in yourself to be more serious, follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.  And as the lone and level sands stretch far away, remember that those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible.

And that is that.  The end.

“Filth!” Ignatius shouted, spewing wet popcorn over several rows. “How dare she pretend to be virgin. Look at her degenerate face. Rape her!”

(The same phenomenon was also recently captured in a dubious story in the Daily Mail about the effects of porn, illustrated by a photo of a man looking at actual porn.)

I’ve only been to one rap gig (are they even called gigs? probably not) but it was one of the best I’ve been to; the energy, lyrical dexterity and interactivity of Skinnyman and Killa Kela were such a refreshing change from the mumbling, shoegazing, tedious indie bands I usually went to see in those days.  Skinnyman’s theme tune was about his shooting a crackhead paedophile, so his music at least had a sort of spaghetti western morality to it, rather than the usual gangsta rap bravado.

It seems odd that a song about shooting a crackhead paedophile could be made to seem quaint and innocent, but this guy manages it.  The Guardian won’t stop writing about him, so I feel compelled to do the same.  His shtick seems to be rapping about rape and calling everyone a faggot.  Naturally the Guardian divides into two camps: the nihilists, who think words don’t mean anything so we shouldn’t take them seriously and should just relax and enjoy the music; and the moralists — in this case gay and women’s rights lobbyists, as those who are primarily troubled by the glamorisation of young black men shooting other young black men have long since been sidelined — who disagree.  As Ken Clarke’s rapegate showed, feminists and gay people are now the foremost moralists in our society.  My sympathies are with them, but maybe I’m just jealous because the band I was in at his age had equally depraved lyrics, but it never made us rich.

I don’t want to get too far into assomeonewhoery, but as someone who makes a living out of correcting other people’s grammar, I of course think language is important and has social and political consequences.  Context is of paramount importance.  You and I can see that the cheeky chap in question isn’t really a rapist, and very probably isn’t really even a homophobe, and that he’s merely trying to shock a largely unshockable postmodern culture by challenging some of its last taboos; I suspect there would be much more of an outcry if someone clearly devoid of irony — 50 Cent, say — were to mine this seam instead.  No doubt going to a concert of his full of other irony-drenched Guardianistas in their late 20s would be very entertaining.  But I would be troubled to find myself at such a show surrounded by impressionable 13-year-olds, who may not yet have developed an advanced capacity for irony and so may take the words at face value.  Does this make me sound hypocritical?  Perhaps, but hypocrisy gets a worse press than it deserves.  Were you, cynical and worldly wise reader, honestly not more impressionable, more open to peer pressure, when you were 13 than you are now?  I think you were.  Hypocrisy (in the sense of one rule for me, another for others) is often a sensible alternative to irresponsibility.  I don’t imagine that most or even many people of that age will immediately hear gangsta rap, or rape rap, and go out and start shooting or raping people, but very few of us are quite as insusceptible to cultural influences — to the vast sums spent very effectively but more prosaically on advertising, marketing and branding, for instance — as we suppose, and some of us have minds so open our brains have fallen out completely.  To quote my favourite socially conservative anarchist: all art is propaganda.

So, the extent to which artists (or, more realistically, those who sell their work) are obliged to exercise moral responsibility really depends on their hinterland.  In the case of Lars von Trier, for example, his audience entirely consists of sophisticated intellectuals dripping with irony and thus with emotional immunity to anything they might rationally be able to see as morally dubious.  He is therefore freed of the same responsibilities that should lie with those shaping young and impressionable minds, which is why I can’t believe anyone could really be shocked by anything he does, whether making an outrageously misogynistic (but brilliantly done and impossible to take seriously) film like Antichrist, or this week pretending to be a Nazi.  He is a professional provocateur and should be enjoyed as such, whereas because of the different context I can’t quite share the nihilists’ sanguinity about the rapey rapper.  Honestly, though, I defy you to read the transcript of Lars von Trier’s gaffe and not lol.

Anyway, here’s a slice of hip hop we can all enjoy —

Their first effort wasn’t bad either, though it should be pointed out that the people behind the videos are big Hayekians, which explains his underdog treatment —

Who’s right?  No idea.  I have a lot of time for the idea that the Second World War and its highly ordered, heavily mobilised aftermath was the closest Britain ever came to being an equal and unified society.  Keynes’ theories have clearly not withered with the winding down of wartime production, but in times of peace, freedom and openness Hayek’s epistemological scepticism seems more appealing and more relevant.  My sense is that both are somewhat misrepresented in today’s debates (and in these videos, however entertaining) and that there is perhaps more common ground than meets the eye.  I read The Road to Serfdom recently, and didn’t recognise the libertarian bible it’s held up to be at all.  He argues that, while the government should practise economic liberalism (in the old sense of the word), it should also use taxes to fund a social safety net for those left behind, and should intervene in the market to prevent the growth of monopolies.  This seems much more like a small-c centre-right agenda than a minimalist one.  Ayn Rand, the Mrs Rochester of the American right, recognised this and thought him a despicable traitor (another big point in his favour for me).  As for Keynes, his contemporary supporters seem too happy to overlook the bit about reducing deficits during booms — but should we expect governments to do this, any more than we should expect them to follow Hayek’s advice and put interest rates up?

The question I would ask any Keynesians who might be reading is this: if everyone as a whole, i.e. the market left to its own devices, is incapable of organising the economy efficiently, why should it be the case that a far smaller group of people, i.e. the government, should be able to do any better?  The dispersal of information seems to warrant the dispersal of power, which is why I support more direct democracy.  The paradox of this, of course, is that a completely democratic society would never vote for a completely unfettered market.

Walter Bagehot famously quipped that “the cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it”.  Having sat through several postprandial hours of a debate on ‘the benefits of the Segway personal transporter’, it’s hard to disagree.  It’s also hard, on the other hand, to keep one’s rational faculties clear when in the building and not be seduced by the awful, artificial and amusing work of Augustus Pugin and Charles Barry and its supremely confident Gothic (that is, explicitly non-Roman) assertion of British exceptionalism.  I find it takes a great effort, and I can’t be alone in this, to disregard the indisputable aesthetic and technical accomplishments of the age of empire when weighing up its social, economic and moral pros and cons; too easy, in other words, to use beauty as a proxy for truth, justice, virtue.  The whole place is a spectacular triumph of Victorian propaganda: the Soviet Union had its stirring anthem and its heroic art, the US has its sexy movies, and we had the Tudor rose and the portcullis.  In the little reporters’ corner of the chamber, with some anonymous lifer suggesting to half a dozen of his fellows how to decide the makeup of a committee to determine the composition of a working group to investigate the regulation of the makeup of the committee, the eyes are inevitably drawn by the carved lions and unicorns, by the heraldic oak panels of the four patron saints, and eventually by the dazzling gilded ceiling whose ornaments and chandeliers seem to melt off it like stalactites, and your distracted reporter, overcome by a sort of reactionary Stendhal syndrome, finds himself transported to his own Burkean Ambrosia.  (The Commons is much less ornate and perhaps cosier for it, but the most profound sensation to be had in the estate is to be alone at night in Westminster Hall, gazing up at the hammerbeam angels still keeping watch nine centuries on, and only dimly aware of the restless metropolis beyond the buttressed walls: on such occasions I always find myself communing with Bede and his sparrow.)  So perhaps Bagehot would have been more accurate to say that the cure is to go and listen to it, while keeping your eyes shut.

I digress.  The question is: what use does the place serve now, and how could it be improved?  Here the traditionalist and the radical democrat in me clash (a problem Orwell had all the time).  A few perceptions about the noble and not-so-noble Lords persist that are no longer quite accurate.  Only 88 of the old hereditaries — Wilde’s old unspeakables — remain.  The vast majority of the rest are life peers, appointed by various prime ministers; a few bishops are left (and are we really about to see a Conservative prime minister eject them?), and the law Lords have moved across the road to the Supreme Court.  A lot of these are former or failed politicians, but a great many are also those who’ve excelled in various non-political fields: the arts, law, media, sport, business, academia, war.  In this sense, at least, they could be considered more diverse than the Commons, which with every election becomes more and more the preserve of PPE Oxonians in their mid-40s from north London who have only ever worked in politics.  The Lords, unlike the Commons, still has plenty of endearingly amateurish speakers (whom I always hope to avoid having to report on) and endearingly unsmooth operators.  And despite Cameron’s additions, Labour still has more peers than the Tories.

The balance that needs to be struck is to combine the resilient independence of the incumbent Lords (who stood up to the previous government on, among other things, the chilling effects of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act) with a greater (that is, any) popular mandate.

It seems inevitable, with the defeat of the AV referendum, that the Lords will become proportionately elected before the Commons ever does.  There is one serious objection to this: that, by picking who appears on the lists and in what order, the party managers would retain or even strengthen control over this occasionally rebellious House.  The Lords aren’t so easily whipped now, but their replacement senators (most of them presumably seeking re-election) could well be.  Might the coalition, then, use this opportunity to strengthen the executive relative to parliament?  That would surely be the opposite of what we should hope for.

So the extent to which we should welcome reform really depends on what sort of PR is on offer.  If Cameron, Clegg and Miliband have complete control over the party lists, then what comes next might if anything be worse than what we have now.  But if the government is actually willing to give power away — perhaps in the form of multi-member STV wards, or even open primaries, as are now used to pick some Commons candidates — then the public will have more say than the politicians, and the reformed chamber will have more legitimacy than the one it replaces.  There is a great opportunity for something better, but we will have to wait and see whether we are given another stitchup instead.

Our zeal for reform shouldn’t lead us to assume that what is done in its name will necessarily be more truly democratic, rather than a pale imitation of the deeply dysfunctional Commons; instead, we have to hold the coalition to account and insist that the upper House becomes as democratic as it possibly can, and that it gives power away from politicians, both elected and appointed: on this occasion, we have to keep our eyes wide open.

Naturally, if perhaps hypocritically, I will celebrate all of the above by stocking up on cheap booze while I still can.  That is one issue on which I hope moral conservatism will eventually trump big business conservatism.

I turn rather awkwardly to an unrelated issue which sort of fits that description: graffiti and its role in contemporary art.  Before I do so, have a read of these two pieces in City Journal which skewer a cruel form of decadence very eloquently.

The articles remind me of Orwell’s piece pondering why ‘if you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back’.  The difference is that rich people can throw whatever expensive crap they want at each other, but this new form of ‘art’ is an obviously hypocritical celebration of a destructive selfishness that exclusively harms the non-rich.

I have to confess to being slightly pleased that the Greens’ Martha Wardrop failed to get herself elected to the Scottish Parliament: purely because, as a councillor (see blogs passim on why multi-member single transferable voting is so great) she has been helpful and responsive in pestering the Council to clean up our own various neighbourhood works of low art, as well as other quotidia like litter.

What is it about graffiti that annoys me?  Perhaps the same things that make decadent people enjoy it: that it is a rejection of the rule of law.  A moment’s thought — and clearly the graffiti artists and their novelty-seeking propagandists have wasted very few moments on thinking — shows why this is a bad thing.  Leave aside the debate over the broken windows theory, and the practical problems of having street signs and public information notices covered in writing or paint.  The graffitist explicitly says: I don’t care about your private property, therefore I don’t care about your economic wellbeing.  From this it seems logical to infer that he is also saying, more subtly: I don’t care about your physical wellbeing, your safety or your health either.  In sum, the graffiti artist says: I don’t care about other people.

I make one or two exceptions for warranted and clever political statements: the enormous ‘ONE NATION UNDER CCTV’ painted on the side of a tall building in central London was impressive; but for every one example like this (and for every community mural, which are a far better use of young people’s artistic talent and of which there are several good examples, like the one beside Kelvinbridge Underground) there are a million annoying and disfiguring tags and scrawls.

I say private property, but more often than not the vandalism targets public property (usually postboxes, bins, etc) and has to be cleaned up at public expense, if it is at all.  Am I autistically out-of-touch, or do other people find it as incredible as I do that it needs to be explained to otherwise intelligent and educated people — the mainstream of the contemporary art world — why destruction of both public space and private property, and a general disrespect towards other people, and especially towards people in more deprived communities, is bad?

Perhaps the best response — an explicitly petty-bourgeois Marxist one — to the barbaric-decadent underclass-overclass axis, buggering those of us in between who still aspire to something better, would be to graffiti-bomb the museum, or the homes of its directors, and see how they like it.  I think it would be legitimate, in the spirit and tradition of situationist direct action against powerful elites, to call such an action a subversive work of art in itself.

It’s tempting to blame the excuse-making, poverty-blaming, bed-wetting liberal left for this, or perhaps that section of the left (these days best represented by Laurie Penny, who may or may not be a rightwing satirist) that romanticises violence and disorder on the streets (the right generally only romanticise violence in or against other countries).  But I suspect the egoism, and denial of delayed gratification, inherent in consumerism also have quite a lot to do with it.  The confluence of the two, I suggest, is at the heart of our modern anomie; hence my sympathy for the emerging Blue Labour school of thought that addresses both.

If the new SNP majority government can give minor offenders (eg those who do graffiti) community sentences that actually involve their removing this damage, that will probably be a better bet than sending them to prison.  Whether these community sentences actually do that, or become like ASBOs a laughable and easily ignored stunt, remains to be seen.

Finally, you may have noticed a while ago that, while Brown presented Obama with “an ornamental pen holder made from the timbers of the Victorian anti-slave ship HMS Gannet” (and got a set of region 1 DVDs in return!), Cameron, when it was his turn, gave Obama “a painting by a graffiti artist with three convictions for criminal damage”.  This suggests to me, unfortunately, that our prime minister has rather more in common with the curators of the LA Museum of Contemporary Art than with most of the rest of us.

“I remarked again how much the comfortable circumstance that we still had a King made for the reputation of England in this world of Asia.  Ancient and artificial societies like this of the Sherifs and feudal chieftains of Arabia found a sense of honourable security when dealing with us in such proof that the highest place in our state was not a prize for merit or ambition.” — T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

That “the highest place in our state was not a prize for merit or ambition” seems to me a point still in constitutional monarchy’s favour.  I think the monarchy’s probably the only issue I’ve never really changed my mind about, even as my faith in the union of the parliaments has waned.  A ceremonial head of state of some other sort would be one thing (though in practice this would likely be an ex-politician of some sort, so hardly a unifying figure), but to have a political one would be frightening.  Look no further than George W. Bush’s presidency, for instance, to see the perils of allowing an individual to merge the political powers of the nation-state with all of its semiotics and paraphernalia.  This dangerous combination made it so much easier for him to question his political opponents’ patriotism at a time of national crisis, to skew the debate and to accumulate more powers for himself.  Our consitution of course allows the prime minister too many similar powers, but that is an argument for strengthening parliament, not for dusting off the guillotine.  No argument yet put forward by republicans in this country has convinced me that abolition would be worth the risks inherent with a politicised head of state, or worth the bother of a non-politicised one.

As for the wedding itself, and given the ill fortune some of his male relatives have had in this department, I can do no better than offer Prince William this quote from Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra… “Careful have I found all buyers, and all of them have astute eyes. But even the astutest of them buyeth his wife in a sack.”

We can disagree with Burns without endorsing the market fundamentalism that would make higher education the preserve of the mediocre wealthy and a handful of brilliant scholar boys.  I would suggest that, if savings must be made, universities should cut places rather than treble tuition fees.  A glance at the dropout rates for Scottish universities suggests that there are a lot of people at university wasting their time (even if many of those, as Burns plausibly suggests, would stay on if grants were restored, which could also become possible if we cut places).  We are also wasting their time by telling them this is their best, or only, option.  I don’t know quite how, when and why the idea that it was better to do something academic than something technical came about — it seems such a perversion of so much of what the Victorians achieved — but the government and schools should now do all they can to equalise the two (as in Germany, which uncoincidentally has retained a high-value manufacturing base).  Bear in mind also that foreign students, attracted by the prestige of British universities, are heavily subsidising native ones.  If Johnny Chinaman decides that our universities are being devalued for some obscure domestic political reason, he will happily decamp to another European, American or Australian one and take his tens of thousands of pounds a year with him.

By limiting places (while also making radical changes to schools) instead of raising fees, we could preserve high academic standards and promote vocational alternatives, without forcing unrich, academically gifted but debt-wary potential students away from the idea of university.

Roy Hattersley, liberal elitist and professional deformer, argues against the idea that Labour should again concentrate on the anxieties of the working classes.  But have a listen to the example he gives: gay rights.  This is perhaps the only issue which is not a zero-sum game between the liberal middle classes and the socially conservative working classes.  In fact, gay rights are clearly in everyone’s interest, since homosexuality is hardly the preserve of the middle classes.  Traditional Labour voters may (I don’t know) have antiquated views on homosexuality, but I doubt many would describe it as one of their core concerns, up there with immigration, housing or crime.  On these issues Hattersley is typically disingenuous in his silence.

The liberal left wrings its hands over its failure to sell immigration, multiculturalism and globalisation to the C2s, Ds and Es.  What they never admit is that none of these changes, even if they are positive overall, are universally in everyone’s interest.  For the middle classes, they provide public sector jobs, allow us to own holiday homes in sunny climes, and give us a handy source of cheap labour: a “21st century incomes policy” as blue Labourite Jon Cruddas puts it.  But for the non-immigrant working classes, their relatively privileged position (relative to their peers in poorer countries) disappears as the manufacturing jobs, council housing and much else that was once part of our social settlement becomes unavailable.  Immigrants don’t “steal our jobs” as the BNP would have you believe, but on a big enough scale the process can keep wages at the bottom under control: this is good for inflation, but less good for equality.  And while there may not be a lump of labour, there is certainly a lump of land.

Ultimately the liberal left will have to choose between equality and diversity.  Can you, thoughtful reader, think of many countries that truly have both?  A quick glance at Russia (the world’s most diverse country, and increasingly its most unequal, though this is entirely the fault of its proto-fascist elite), the US, Brazil, Japan and Scandinavia suggests an inverse link between the two, and between levels of immigration and the extent to which the state is able or willing to protect its citizens from the caprices of the free market.  Personally I wouldn’t want us to end the free movement of people (or for that matter goods and services) around Europe: but we have to be honest about what this means for wages, for inequality (the growth of which may be inevitable but should still worry us) and for the welfare state.  The boom years allowed us to paper over the cracks inherent in trying to have it both ways and (to mix my metaphors a bit further) to sweep too many of our own underclass under the carpet: the undercarpetclass, to coin a phrase.

The blue Labour movement is at least making an honest attempt to solve this conundrum, but it seems doomed to be a romantic minority pursuit, especially since the Guardian readers will flock back to Labour from the treacherous Lib Dems.  But it is just possible, thanks to those same Lib Dems, that fewer young working class people will become exposed to the left-liberal groupthink of our universities, and will no longer buy into the dubious idea that a degree will guarantee them entry to a middle class career and lifestyle, and so will no longer buy into the liberal middle class weltanschauung.  If this aspirational false consciousness erodes at the same rate as our living standards, then… who knows?

Hi. You put the case in favour of decriminalisation very well. For me the most persuasive aspect of it is to take the whole thing out of criminal hands — and, in the case of heroin users for instance, to reduce the possibilities of overdose, HIV infection, etc. These are all compelling arguments — but I still have a few quibbles before I can be entirely convinced…

Firstly, there’s a story on the BBC News website today reporting that drug use among under-15s in Scotland has halved in the last decade. You point to evidence of similar declines in Portugal since decriminalisation — but doesn’t the fact that this has happened here anyway, without legalisation, suggest that it would be wrong to say there’s a direct link between legalisation and declining use? Mightn’t Portugal’s decline have happened anyway, as it did here?

Secondly, the great George Monbiot wrote a piece a while ago which pointed out that “At present the trade in class A drugs is concentrated in the rich nations. If it were legalised, we could cope. The use of drugs is likely to rise, but governments could use the extra taxes to help people tackle addiction. But because the wholesale price would collapse with legalisation, these drugs would for the first time become widely available in poorer nations, which are easier for companies to exploit (as tobacco and alcohol firms have found) and which are less able to regulate, raise taxes or pick up the pieces. The widespread use of cocaine or heroin in the poor world could cause serious social problems.” How do you respond to the possibility (and it is just a possibility — I think Monbiot on the whole favours decriminalisation) that legalising drugs here might actually increase harm elsewhere?

Thirdly, as far as I can see, all of the evidence cited in favour of legalisation seems to come from countries with similar, broadly liberal systems of crime and punishment to ours. However, anyone who’s been to, say, Singapore or Japan will see that their drugs laws are far, far harsher than ours — and as far as I can see they also have lower levels of drug use than we do. I worry, then, that our evidence base is too narrow — that we are in danger of policybased evidencemaking, rather than the other way round. In this context it seems parochial to describe Britain’s drug laws as “fearsome”, given the possibility of far lengthier imprisonment or even execution for drug use in other countries.

As I say, I’m openminded on the matter, but I’d be grateful if you could address these points that are still troubling me. Thanks.

He responded:

Interesting points. The third seems to be dealt with by the WHO’s claim that there isn’t a statistical relationship between the harshness of drug laws and the level of drug use. The Portugal example may not show that drug use will go down, but it certainly shows that drug use hasn’t gone up, and I think we need good reasons to make things illegal, not the other way around. Also, there are the public health benefits.

Monbiot’s argument is the worrying one, and I do seriously take it on board. My suspicion, and it’s only a suspicion, is that more good will come from destroying the drug lords and failed states than harm will come from exploitation by drug companies. But I can’t back that up, and I do acknowledge that that is a serious concern.

I responded thusly:

Thanks for your reply. On the question of Portugal v Scotland, it is a major plus for your argument that drug use at least hasn’t gone up. However, you would agree with me that it would be unscientific to say that legalisation had caused drug use to fall.

I’m glad you point me in the direction of the WHO, because I really was looking for a study of the whole world, not just of likeminded Western democracies. I’ll have a proper look at it over the weekend. If their conclusion is as you say it is, that would go a long way towards answering my concerns.

I suspect you’re right about Monbiot’s point — and given the state of some parts of West Africa and Latin America, his worst case scenario could hardly be any worse than the status quo. As you say, though, we would need a further study to look into this. All of which goes to say that the evidence may well be supportive, but not conclusive — and neither could it be, given the amount of variables in such a huge and complicated question of social policy.

I should add that I can’t accept the Delingpolist libertarian argument for drug legalisation — I don’t believe Mill’s otherwise very useful ‘do what you want unless it harms other people’ applies, because the harm caused is too often not confined solely to the user, which would remain the case even under legalisation. Think of the increased capacity for aggression by cocaine users, or the misery caused to families of heroin addicts — it would be childish to argue that these users are only harming themselves, just as no-one argues that alcohol abuse only harms the drinker. In this regard illegal drugs are much more like alcohol than tobacco. You might say everyone should ‘do what they like’, presumably at least so long as they don’t harm others, but in this case the activity intrinsically raises the risk of harming others. Or do you hold that the right not to be harmed by others is outweighed by the infringement of the right to harm oneself? Anyway, while rejecting what seems a selfish and irresponsible libertarian argument, I can however, with these reservations, just about accept the utilitarian one. We should agree that taking drugs is intrinsically harmful, and not something we should view with neutrality — thus we should want to reduce that harm, and if legalisation can help with that, we should support it.

As well as correcting my sloppy, interchangeable use of decriminalisation and legalisation, I would now go further and say I find the libertarian position (on everything) ridiculous.  Anyone who pressgangs Mill, who was arguing against genuine political and religious tyranny, into service to justify acts of hedonism that are such a reliable source of harm needs to go back and read his On Liberty.  Nonetheless, I still find myself somewhere between the utilitarian and authoritarian positions, or as we might call them the realistic and romantic positions, unable to quite make up my dope-addled mind.  I’m much more convinced that cannabis, E, acid and mushrooms (which are class A, but whose only danger is from users self-defenestrating) should be legal, and that junkies should get their fix on the NHS rather than rob or whore, than I am that we should sell cocaine over the counter.  Perhaps the wisest policy would be to accept the least harmful drugs, make them less harmful still, and concentrate on trying one way or the other to reduce use of the most harmful ones: but imperfect outcomes for users are a price worth paying for reducing harm to others, which is why I’m all for methadone programmes and needle exchanges if they cut crime and disease transmission.

Note that I don’t say ‘rather than have to rob or whore’.  One aspect of the drugs debate I really can’t stand is the attempt to remove any possibility of individual autonomy from users.  We are all human—we are all capable of free will, of rational thought and reasonable behaviour—we all always have a choice not to harm ourselves or others, even if many of us fail to exercise it.  But moralising will get us nowhere: we have to accept that many, many people — the Delingpoles of this world — are selfish and will happily buy cocaine for fun of a weekend, even in the knowledge it causes death somewhere else in the world to some poor, anonymous black or brown person whose fate they couldn’t care less about.  We have to accept that and build policy around it.

I also think liberalisers should be a bit more honest about the current non-existence of the war on drugs, at least in Britain.  Go to Camden High St on a Friday night and watch the police drive up and down, ignoring crack deals in the hope of confining them to that neighbourhood.  As wars go, it’s not exactly Laurent Nkunda v the Interahamwe.  In many ways we are already nearer de facto decriminalisation than a war.

Of course, no discussion of drugs can now take place without the talk turning to alcohol, the drug to which we are almost all addicted, which brings me neatly onto the imminent Scottish election.  If you agree, as I do, with Elish Angiolini that cheap booze is at the root of many of our problems with health, crime and the economy (and, er, to a lesser extent education, though I fondly remember one or two pisshead teachers), and if you accept the simple fact that people adjust their behaviour in response to price incentives, then you will also agree that minimum pricing of alcohol is an overdue policy, and one which ought to be weighed when deciding how to vote.  The SNP tried to bring this in, and have said they will try again.  Naturally Labour are against it, probably only so that they can bring it in themselves in a bid to repeat the success of the smoking ban, which was about the only worthwhile thing they managed in office.  I’ve generally had quite a lot of time for Annabel Goldie — her support for the budget in return for policies like extra police officers was how opposition parties should behave, rather than opposing everything for the hell of it — but the Tories’ failure to support this move was very disappointing, and confirmed the charge that they will always be more on the side of big business than of the working class (also true of Labour).  Annabel may have a point about the other parties’ auctioneering of unaffordable policies, but as my mole in the SNP points out, ‘all of her supporters are rich anyway’, and she’s not immune to giveaways either.  For instance, I’m concerned about the removal of prescription charges — have a look at what’s happened to antibiotics to see why — but then, I can’t remember the last time I had to get a prescription, and would have been perfectly able to afford it anyway, so I accept that epidemiological worries are a luxury when medical and financial ones aren’t.  In a wider sense, I fail to see why the upwards transfer of wealth from overtaxed poor Scots to better-off pensioners and graduates is still classed as solidarity and social justice: but that is another abstract complaint, and there are some very quotidian matters to settle first.  Weighing the parties in the balance then, we find that they are all wanting, but that some are wanting more than others.

Which brings me not very neatly onto the AV referendum.  I’m a bit more excited about this than I am about the election, though I’m still at a loss as to why the voters should be considered too stupid to manage both on the same day: either they’re too stupid full stop, in which case we might as well pick a dictator and hope for the best, or they’re not.  Growing up in a city which at one point returned 71 Labour councillors to 79 seats, I was never much of a cheerleader for FPTP.  The oft-heard idea that it lets us ‘kick the bastards out’ is rubbish too: can you remember the last time we removed one party with a working majority at a general election and brought in the other with a working majority?  It hasn’t happened in my lifetime: in fact it happened only once in the 20th century (when Heath beat Wilson in 1970).  AV isn’t PR (my preference is for multi-member STV, which has given us a far fairer balance on the council), but it’s probably still an improvement, and a necessary first step if we are to break the stranglehold of the rotten two or three big parties.  Even with all this in mind I was swithering, until I read that Ken Clarke and John Prescott are against it and Nigel Farage, Phillip Blond and Caroline Lucas are for it.

It’s also more fun to rank candidates in order than to put a tick in a box.  It benefits not just those who support smaller parties, but those of us (most of us, now) who aren’t partisan.  Most of all, it benefits those of us who know which parties we hate more than we know which parties we like.  And if you’re still not sure, you can always hedge your bets and put a 1 next to yes and a 2 next to no.

So tell me, dear readers: do either of you have a strong opinion on drugs, the Scottish election or AV you’d like to share…?

There’s no need for me to repeat the arguments in favour of intervention: you’ll have read little else all week.  I’ll also leave aside Sarkozy’s Napoleonic motives, and the legitimate question of whether a US President is in breach of their Constitution by acting without Congressional approval (having dragged his heels for a fortnight, he can’t say he didn’t have enough time).  In this country (as, it seems, in the US) this is one of those issues that divide the centre-left and centre-right from the further left and further right.  On this position (unlike, say, the EU) I’m on the side of the centre, as it were.

On the left, we constantly hear the refrain: “What about Bahrain/Yemen/Saudi Arabia/Zimbabwe/North Korea/China?”  I would argue that just because it isn’t always practical to change the world doesn’t mean we never should.  Our policy should be one of liberal realism: deal with the world as it is but, without getting ahead of ourselves, try to make it more like what we would all like it to be when an obvious opportunity to do so presents itself (such as when a nearby dictator is hours away from completing a massacre).  But, of course, your leftist sees the world in binary terms, and rejects any possibility of incremental improvements: for him it must be all or nothing, and we must either use force against everyone or no-one.

Thinking he has thought of something very original that can’t possibly have occurred to you, he then retorts that the real reason we intervene in Libya, and not in the others, is to get our hands on its oil.  But why does it follow that just because a policy is in our national interest it must necessarily not be in the interests of the other party?  It doesn’t follow at all.  If we help the rebels to overthrow their dictators, thus helping them into power, one would hope that they would then return the favour in some way.  Everyone’s then happy, except the old regime and their pals in China/Russia/Germany/wherever.  What’s wrong with that?

On the right we see a different variant of this ‘splendid isolationism’.  Kelvin MacKenzie says on Question Time that “Libya is not worth one ounce of British blood”.  I would say that anyone joining our armed forces knows the risks perfectly well — and if they have a profound aversion to the idea of shedding their blood then perhaps they should consider an alternative career — and that preventing the torture and murder of large numbers of civilians is as good a use of their bravery and our resources as any.  Meanwhile Peter Hitchens writes that we should leave them to fight it out and make a deal with the winner.  For a man who argues that the Christian faith should be taught as truth in schools, this seems a pretty unchristian position (and, I am certain, not one that his, his brother’s and my hero Orwell would have taken).  He rightly admits his policy is “heartless”.

The left fall back on their two most feeble arguments; the right think compassion and the rule of law should stop at our borders.  Blair tried to draw Gaddafi in from the cold after he gave up his nuclear programme, but selling him the tools to brutalise Libyan citizens (I refuse to use the phrase ‘his own people’) was a step too far.  The SNP gave him back al-Megrahi while his appeal was pending; it may be that they did so for compassionate reasons, and it may well be that he was innocent, but thanks to Salmond and MacAskill we’ll never know.  So far, then, I prefer the new policy.

Economics is a good example: the mountains of data it has accumulated still refuse to point to a clear conclusion.  The more the discipline progresses, the more disagreement there is between the Keynesians and the Austrians, both of whom can torture the statistics as they see fit and produce apparently convincing arguments.  The more I read from either, the less clear I am about which side is right: in theory the Keynesian position is appealing, but in practice the amount of responsibility it places in relatively few hands is a problem too.  Neither Ed Balls nor George Osborne really has a clue what will happen if we fiscally retrench, stimulate demand, put up interest rates, print more money, or whatever.  Each can quote roughly appropriate and superficially attractive examples from history to support his case, but neither can possibly quote examples that cover all of the variables that are in play in what is today an enormous, unique and uncontrollable experiment.  Beyond the very short term, our economic outlook is simply unknowable: unfortunately, politicians and commentators are respected for making confident predictions (even if those turn out to be completely wrong) so you won’t catch many of them admitting it.  Science and social science are, as it were, overlapping magisteria: the bigger and more complicated the political question, the weaker our ability to deal with it by scientific method.

The phrase ‘evidence-based’, then, when applied to politics, where there is rarely a definitively correct answer, is one we ought to be wary of.  Indeed, since governments so often debase evidence-based policymaking into policy-based evidencemaking, we have to be even more sceptical than usual when dealing with any politician, journalist or public figure who purports to be operating on the basis of ‘the evidence’.  Politics is about how we run society, what we do with our and other people’s money, how we share our time on earth with other people, how we order the fundamentals of our lives.  Unlike crunching data from radio telescopes or splicing plant genomes, these are emotive issues, and it is impossible to be fully dispassionate and to disregard our own experiences of our lives and of society.  Anyone who claims to be able to do so should warrant our suspicion.  Anyone who can genuinely do so is a sociopath.

If we are being honest, we all — scientists and academics included — at some point or other fall into one of the following:

1. anchoring trap — giving disproportionate weight to the first item of information received
2. status quo trap — bias towards maintaining the current situation
3. sunk cost trap — making decisions which justify previous decisions, even if these are no longer sound
4. confirming-evidence trap — concentrating on finding evidence to support a favoured option
5. framing trap — posing the question for the decision in a particular way
6. overconfidence trap — overestimating the accuracy of estimates and forecasts
7. prudence trap — being over-cautious
8. recallability trap — giving more weight to recent and dramatic events

(Hammond, J S, Keeney, R L and Raiffa, H (1998), ‘The Hidden Traps in Decision Making’, Harvard Business Review, September-October)

As ever, Orwell is ahead of me:

Implied in the demand for more scientific education is the claim that if one has been scientifically trained one’s approach to all subjects will be more intelligent than if one had had no such training.  A scientist’s political opinions, it is assumed, his opinions on sociological questions, on morals, on philosophy, perhaps even on the arts, will be more valuable than those of a layman.  The world, in other words, would be a better place if the scientists were in control of it. … The fact is that a mere training in one or more of the exact sciences, even combined with very high gifts, is no guarantee of a humane or sceptical outlook.  The physicists of half a dozen great nations, all feverishly and secretly working away at the atomic bomb, are a demonstration of this.

Go and read his short piece in full, then come back to this one.

The problem is at its most acute when, as with the Keynes/Hayek question, an issue presents us with binary choices.  The drugs debate is a good example, and one where the liberal side (including the BBC’s Mark Easton, who no longer makes any pretence of impartial journalism) claims to have monopolised the evidence, citing Britain before prohibition, contemporary Portugal, and elsewhere as examples of successful legalisation and harm reduction.  Many of these arguments are convincing, but then so is the argument that giving visitors boarding passes that read WARNING: MANDATORY DEATH SENTENCE FOR DRUG TRAFFICKERS UNDER SINGAPORE LAW, and carrying out the threat, has resulted in a low drugs problem there.  Though they are clearly incompatible, essentially I agree with both sides: either extreme would be an improvement on the status quo.  But there is evidence on both sides, and neither side can conclusively demonstrate that their position, when applied to all of the other circumstances that are unique to our socio-economic situation, will work as they intend it to (for example, on the one hand the relaxation of late-night licensing laws failed to turn us into a continental-style cafe culture and merely extended the existing problems later into the night in the areas that adopted it, but on the other we had the legality and availability of ‘legal highs’ like mephedrone to thank for a drop in the use of other, nastier drugs like cocaine — at least until we made them illegal highs).  Both sides are advocating a leap in the dark, to a greater or lesser extent: but both are on firm ground to say that it is impossible to call the compromise that is our present policy a success.  What we ideally need is a global referendum in which the status quo is not on the ballot.  Much the same applies to the debate on crime and penal policy, where again the government seem to be advocating a mixed policy of community-based rehabilitation rather than short-term imprisonment, but without the vast amounts of money that such a policy would clearly need to have any chance of working — this seems to be the same sort of compromise as we have in drugs policy, and seems to me to have about as much chance of working.

The best way forward for politics and political science is to try to apply the methods of the information revolution: by acknowledging the limitations of social science as a discipline and the limitations on how much any individual or small group of people can know, by admitting the role of individual and social experiences in shaping people’s opinions, and by aggregating as much information as possible when formulating policy.  Policy should operate in the free market of ideas as price does in the free market of exchange: in the modern parlance, we should crowdsource it.  This is the opposite approach to fascism and communism (both of which, Orwell tells us, were supported by plenty of scientists and academics in their time), which both ultimately failed because too many decisions were being made by too few people with too little information.  The representative democracy we currently have — whereby we are ruled by an elite making what it thinks are the best decisions on our behalf, with a degree of our consent — is half way between the two positions.  The ultimate, revolutionary, goal — in synthesis with the revolution in access to information, which inclines me towards the rational optimist camp — is for as many people as possible to have as much of a say in as many decisions that affect them as possible.  Direct democracy may be some way off yet, but it is the direction in which we should be agitating to travel.