Taken from Iain Brassington's excellent post about Professor David Nutt's sacking by Alan Johnson on the BMJ Group Blogs. His friend Kate's response to Mr Johnson is:
I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy and have therefore lost confidence in your ability to make decisions as Home Secretary. I would therefore ask you to step down from the Government with immediate effect.
I think the most depressing thing about this whole latest drugs policy farago is that it is looking like things will not be any better if the Conservatives get in after the next election.This was an inevitable decision after his (Professor Nutt's) latest ill-judged contribution to the debate but it is a sign of lack of focus at the Home Office that it didn’t act sooner given that he has done this before.
Drugs policy in this country has been failing for decades. Drug abuse has increased massively, the number of drug-related deaths has risen substantially and drug-related crime accounts for up to half of all acquisitive crime. I hope that our report will encourage fresh thinking and a new approach. We need to get away from entrenched positions and try to reduce the harm that drugs do both to users and society at large.
The news has broken this afternoon that the Home Secretary Alan Johnson has sacked Professor David Nutt, the head of its own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Johnson's statement on this says:
I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy and have therefore lost confidence in your ability to advise me as Chair of the ACMD.I would therefore ask you to step down from the Council with immediate effect.
Alan Johnson, and rest of Home Office, so far refusing to do interviews tonight to explain their sacking of David NuttJohnson's letter accuses Nutt of undermining public understanding of govt messages on drugsBizarre - nobody will come on to defend Alan Johnson. They all prefer to issue statements that can't be questioned.....
I am part of a project called "Bloggers' Circle" which encourages bloggers to link to interesting content from other bloggers.
Professor David Nutt has made some more comments today about the relative harm of drugs including alcohol and tobacco and has accused politicians of distorting and devaluing the debate. It sounds like he agrees wholeheartedly with me! Perhaps I should see if he will do a guest post for this blog....
Paul on Liberal Burblings has drawn my attention to a letter written by Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to the members of the Californian State Assembly refusing to sign an assembly bill. The thing is there is an interesting message if you just read the first letters of the two paragraphs in the letter. They are in order F, u, c, k, Y, o and u. Is Mr Schwarzenegger a fan of acrostics I wonder.
Sara Bedford has tweeted today about how she has been blocked from following an MP. She hasn't said which one (although I can take a wild guess). UPDATE: Sara has done a blogpost herself about this now and it is who I thought it would be - Nadine Dorries MP.
Guy Aitchison from OpenDemocracy has tagged me in a meme asking for my big idea for POWER2010 (which I blogged about here previously).
Elizabeth Truss, the newly selected Conservative PPC for South West Norfolk is facing potential deselection following the revelations that she had an affair with fellow Conservative (and MP for London & Westminster) Mark Field.
Everyone's favourite young Conservative blue coloured fluffy bear has a shock headline this morning: "Lib Dem PPC in Bribery Scandal".
There is an interesting piece by Unity on Liberal Conspiracy this morning which highlights how Nadine Dorries' comments about having got to parliament without having needed any form of positive discrimination seems to be contradicted somewhat by a contemporaneous account published in The Times.
I have never, other than when looking into the eyes of my new born babies, felt as proud as I did on that night. That pride, that sense of achievement, the knowledge that I was selected on the basis of my performance and merit above all other candidates on that day is what enables me to hold my head up high in this place. It’s what humbles me every morning when I walk into Members’ Lobby. It gives me confidence to take on my male colleagues with not just a little bottle, because I got here by exactly the same process that they did. They are no better than me and I no lesser than they.
The Liberal Democrats for Drug Policy Reform website has been launched today by Ewan Hoyle the founder of the group. As a member of LDDPR, I look forward to seeing how this develops and hope to attend future events.
Ewan organised an excellent inaugural fringe event on drugs policy which inclued Danny Kushlick of Transform Drugs Policy Foundation as one of the speakers.
He has already seeded a few threads in the forum which looks like it could be a good place to get discussion about aspects and consequences of drugs policies going.
You can also follow Ewan on Twitter here.
In the last few days I have been listening to the first few episodes of "The Pod Delusion", a collaborative podcast about "interesting things". There have been some good contributions so far on subjects as diverse as Can you be a Formula 1 fan and still green?, a review of the first UK "Amazing Meeting" and what should young children be taught?
John Pienaar's guest on his 5 Live political podcast this week was James Forsyth, the new political editor of The Spectator (it is still accessible here for a few days). The discussion was about BBC Question Time, Nick Griffin and the BNP and James made a number of what I thought were good points about the programme and how it played out.
A colleague of mine went out canvassing with them (the BNP) recently and he said it is amazing to talk to people on the doorsteps who are voting for the BNP and they are voting because they haven't seen a politician because they live in a seat that is so safe for the Labour Party that no-one's been there for 20 years. That's what we've got to, you know, politicians have to realise that they can't take votes for granted.
My contribution to the Lib Dem Voice "Introduction to blogging" series has been posted today.
I don't often do blog posts that basically just link to a single other post but Anton Vowl's post on "The Enemies of Reason" today entitled "Hmm... remember this?" is absolutely superb and deserves to be linked to widely. He contrasts the "outrage" expressed on the front pages of today's tabloids regarding Nick Griffin (largely directed at the BBC for letting him on) with many previous front pages of each of them showing headlines that could pretty much have been BNP press releases.
It's all very well people blaming Labour, or the BBC, or whoever, for the 'rise' of the BNP. But if there has been a significant increase in BNP support - and it hasn't translated into votes yet, despite a severe recession and growing unemployment - perhaps that might have more to do with the legitimisation and absorption of their extreme views by newspapers creating scare story after scare story concerning race and immigration, often baseless stories created simply to scare? It's one thing going to a BNP meeting but it's quite another to hear exactly the same thing over the breakfast table from a publication which purports to report the facts.
I have attended a few events organised by Editorial Intelligence in the last few months. They are a company that works to aggregate the interesting comment from the mainstream media and blogs amongst many other things.
The "Gordon Brown resign" petition which was still in No 1 position for live petitions yesterday has now closed with 72,222 signatures. It is now in the top 10 of all time petitions. As we all know, these petitions generally reflect much wider opinion but I think it is a decent snapshot of those who think for whatever reason that he should no longer be our Prime Minister.
Jan Moir has published a "clarification" about her hateful article last week on Stephen Gately's death today in the Daily Mail. There is a cached version of it you can read here so that I don't need to link to her article. There is also a cached version of her original one here.
The point of my article was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, Stephen Gately's death raised many unanswered questions. What had really gone on?After all, Stephen was a role model for the young and if drugs were somehow involved in his death, as news reports suggested, should that not be a matter of public interest?
We were told that Stephen died of 'natural causes' even before toxicology results had been released. This struck me as bizarre, given the circumstances.Absolutely none of this had anything to do with his sexuality. If he had been a heterosexual member of a boy band, I would have written exactly the same article.
Yet despite this, many have interpreted my words as a 'bigoted rant' and suggested that my motive was to insinuate that Stephen died 'because he was gay'.Anyone who knows me will vouch that I have never held such poisonous views.
My assertion that there was 'nothing natural' about Stephen's death has been wildly misinterpreted.What I meant by 'nothing natural' was that the natural duration of his life had been tragically shortened in a way that was shocking and out of the ordinary. Certainly, his death was unusual enough for a coroner to become involved.
To say it was a hysterical overreaction would be putting it mildly, though clearly much of it was an orchestrated campaign by pressure groups and those with agendas of their own.
Finally, I would just like to say that whatever did or did not happen in Majorca, a talented young man died before his time. This, of course, is a matter of regret and sadness for us all.
There was a fascinating article by Melanie Reid in The Times on Monday. It covered the release of a report by Dr Fiona Measham and Dr Karenza Moore, criminologists from Lancaster University which set out to "explore the hidden world of pharmaceutical intoxication in Britain’s bars and night clubs". Here are a few snippets along with my thoughts:
They discovered evidence that almost all Britain’s thousands of clubbers routinely take drugs, in particular cocaine (tried by 83 per cent of people), cannabis (93 per cent) and ecstasy (85 per cent). Eight in ten had taken a drug within the previous month, and nearly two in three of those questioned had taken, or were going to take, drugs on the night they were surveyed.
The extent and complexity of drug use that the academics uncovered surprised them. “Everyone knows that it goes on,” says Measham, a senior lecturer in criminology, whose 2001 study Dancing on Drugs was until now the seminal study of recreational drug use. “How else would the clubbers stay awake until 5am, when the club closes? But it’s unspoken.
...Here too is highlighted another contradiction: between the growing commercialisation of the night-time economy and the increasing government policy of what Measham calls “the criminalisation of intoxication” without education, advice or treatment services attached. The people who suffer, under the present situation of tacit tolerance of drugs, are the users. “Even if the club owners wanted harm reduction literature in their club, it would acknowledge that there was drug taking on the premises. And they are concerned about being arrested or shut down.”Last year the owner of the Dance Academy in Plymouth, Manoucehr Bahmanzadeh, and its manager, Tom Costelloe, were found guilty of allowing the venue to be used for the supply of Ecstasy and jailed for nine years and five years respectively. This despite neither man having actually sold drugs on the premises.
Clubbers of all ages queue quietly outside the Manchester venue — many, Measham’s evidence would suggest, already “front-loaded” with drugs. Notably, only people who have taken alcohol are behaving obnoxiously. The security on entry is strict but not too strict: Measham and Moore found that in practice only large quantities of drugs — ie, too much for personal use — will be removed from clubbers.
What is important, Measham and Moore say, is to draw the distinction between this kind of recreational drug use, and the problem drug use that dominates the political agenda and absorbs its resources. The two groups do not overlap; the dealers are different; and so are the drugs. Clubbers almost never take heroin or crack cocaine, the academics’ surveys show, and they remain in society. The UK’s problem drug users, with a daily dependency on such drugs, may be hugely outnumbered by the recreational drug takers — 150,000 as opposed to four million — but they remain the focus of government policy.
There is a new campaign called "Open Up" which was launched a couple of days ago and seeks to get all parties to run open primaries in order to select their parliamentary candidates.
I worry because the anti-politics rhetoric that is informing this campaign (and others) is leading people up the garden path. Instead of embracing the opportunity to shout loudly for pluralist politics and for moving beyond politics meaning little more than voting every few years, people are grasping at ideas that don’t even amount to half measures.
I have come across an interesting video on Youtube this morning. It is from local Bracknell constituent Dan Haycocks who is campaigning to try and get current MP Andrew MacKay to pay back the money he seems to have overclaimed or instead step down if he is not willing to do so. He has created a campaigning website called Goodbye MacKay.
David Cameron's announcement today that he is going to impose all women shortlists in some seats for the next election has met with a mixed reaction, not least from Conservative bloggers, many of whom think that this is a profoundly unconservative move.
Mike Smithson on Political Betting today is speculating that the TV debates may now not happen. He quotes reports of arguments going on with both Brown and Cameron stipulating different formats and numbers of debates. Nick Clegg of course also wants to be involved in all the debates which as I have stated before I think has to happen.
Mike thinks that Cameron is using the Blair playbook from 1997 on this which is agree the principle but allow the negotiations to get bogged down in the hope that it will all fall apart and not actually happen, after all as the front runner he probably feels he has most to lose. Mike thinks this ploy may actually work too.
I am not so sure. Back in July I called for a broadcaster to promise a televised debate for the 3 main leaders and threaten to "empty chair" any of them that refuse to attend. In early September, Sky News stepped in and did exactly that. At the time it seemed that Brown would be the one to bottle it, however if it turns out that Cameron is trying it on too then the same should apply to him. We are a bit further down the line now and the main broadcasters have agreed the principle of holding the debates with the minimum number I have seen mooted as 3. Therefore, if agreement from the party leaders cannot be reached soon, I think the broadcasters should again step in and say they will have 3 debates with all 3 main leaders and threaten to empty chair any of them who refuse to attend.
I know some people will think this is allowing the broadcasters too much power but I feel very strongly that political manouvering should not be able to rob the people of this country (yet again) of the chance to see proper televised debate between the party leaders.
Dazmando has done a sterling job on Bracknell Blog of recording what happened during yesterday's Bracknell Conservative Open Primary/Caucus event that was eventually won by Dr Phillip Lee.
He has detailed how each of the seven candidates performed as well as provided details of their leaflets and his thoughts about how the event went as a whole with the things that worked well and some problems with the process too.
It is well worth a read.
The result has just been announced of the Conservative Bracknell open primary/caucus and the winner is Dr Phillip Lee. I want to extend my congratulations to Dr Lee for his victory in this hard fought contest.
The contest has been very closely tracked in the blogosphere not least because of the presence in the shortlist of the leading Conservative blogger Iain Dale who came third. My commiserations to him.
What I wanted to focus on in this post though is what message Bracknell may be trying to send to the Conservatives and politicians in general about these primaries and the candidates they were offered. I should state that despite being a constituent I was not at the meeting (I am abroad at the moment) so I do not know how each of the candidates performed. However I was concerned right from the outset that there were no local candidates on the shortlist.
My friend Darren did some interviews with some of the candidates on Bracknell Blog and from Phillip's interview, as well as other information I have seen it struck me that although he did not live in the constituency, he was the "most local" of the candidates having been a GP just 10 miles outside the seat boundary and actually having some on-call patients within the constituency. Given all of this, my hypothesis was that if the "localness" of a candidate was a crucial element in the minds of the voters then Phillip would win. That has now come to pass.
Of course I do not know if this was the crucial element in his election, there may well be other reasons. I would however be surprised if it was not at least a factor and given how close the contest seems to have been (it went to 5 rounds) it could easily have been what made the difference. So, perhaps there is a lesson here for all parties but especially the Conservatives who have been most keen on this form of caucus/primary type election.
I think it will be worth looking at how other contests of this nature go in the future to see if a pattern of local (or "more local") candidates being selected is borne out. If it is then it will be food for thought for the party bosses making the decisions about how to select candidates. After all, if it becomes increasingly difficult to parachute favoured candidates into safe seats in the future I suspect they will not like that. At all...
PS: I should just make clear my view that I think contests of this nature would be unnecessary if our electoral system was changed to Single Transferable Vote with multi-member constituencies. That would give the entire electorate the chance to rank multiple candidates from different parties as part of the election itself.
Mark Pack has a great post on Lib Dem Voice today where he dissects the Press Complaints Commission's remit and explains why he thinks their oft-used criteria of "normally" requiring the person or family of the person directly affected to complain should not apply in the Jan Moir, Stephen Gately article case.
He suggests the following reasons:
(a) The widespread public reaction to the publication of the piece, resulting in the crashing of your website, a special page being added and your staff going on the record that they have received a near record number of complaints. That by itself is not a “normal” case.
(b) When someone’s relative has died there are all sorts of reasons as to why they may not wish to take up any regulatory actions. People may wish to grieve in private. They may have bureaucratic complications to deal with. They may wish to think about the media coverage of their personal tragedy as little as possible. Whatever the reason, these are precisely the sort of circumstances in which normal rules about requiring them personally to complain should not automatically apply.
(c) The nature of the complaints about the article, particular on the grounds of discrimination, is one that affects the wider population. For example, if a newspaper piece was to incite racial hatred, that could have an impact on people other than those named in the piece.
(d) Your remit explicitly provides for considering complaints from people other than those directly affected – hence the use of “normally”. If this is not such a case, what is?
I'm on holiday at the moment and have just dipped briefly into the blogs and Twitter again before heading out for the evening but I have been disgusted by Jan Moir's horrible, hate filled smear against Stephen Gately of Boyzone (I'm not linking to it) full of innuendo about his death which she has tried to relate to the fact he was homosexual.
However at the same time, I have been heartened to see the number of people on Twitter and across the blogosphere, literally from all corners, Tory, Labour, Lib Dem and others all expressing their disgust at Moir's article and at The Mail for publishing it. Apparently the pressure has been so intense that the advertisers have asked for their adverts to be removed from the online page where the article sits.
I am also heartened by the number of comments below the article itself (500+ at last count) expressing their disgust with it. It means that they cannot fail to hear the message.
The Mail has recent form for this sort of thing. They have to understand how reviled they are making themselves by publishing stuff like this. Hopefully the reactions they have had to this and other recent examples will start to have an effect on their editorial policy.
Channel 4 News' fact-checking department did a piece yesterday which analyses my safe seats and expenses scandal correlation work from back in May.
It has been prompted by an article that Nick Clegg wrote in The Daily Telegraph on Wednesday about expenses where in the final paragraph he says:
And of course, if we’re to sort out politics fully, we need to think about the future, not just the past. Britain needs voting reform to abolish the safe seats that make MPs complacent – those in safe seats were three times as likely to be identified as having abused their expenses by The Daily Telegraph. If we want to rebuild faith in politics, there can be no half measures. Only fundamental reform will be enough
...How important is the minister-factor in the make-up of the Telegraph's list?
It's not the case that everyone included is a big name. Thompson told us there were a large number of MPs he hadn't heard of - and he's a self-confessed political anorak.
Phantom mortgage claimants Elliot Morley and David Chaytor, both of whom have now been banned from standing again as Labour MPs, weren't exactly big household names. Neither was Margaret Moran, she of the £22,500 dry rot bill, or Fabian Hamilton, or Stephen Crabb - all mentioned in the early Telegraph investigations.
Clegg's claim is based on some fairly detailed analysis of a big tranche of MPs which made up the Telegraph's early expenses revelations, and found those in the top quartile of safe seats were three times as likely to feature as those in the bottom quartile.
Re-doing the analysis at a later date, when the paper had covered more MPs, showed those with the biggest majorities were twice, rather than three times, as likely to feature as those with the smallest.
Clegg implies that one factor causes the other, using the finding as a basis to call for reform of the first-past-the-post system which gives MPs such differing majorities.
But doesn't necessarily stack up. A correlation between two factors does not mean that one causes the other, and it's also worth bearing in mind that top frontbenchers are more likely to have safe seats than MPs as a whole.
Still, it's an intriguing piece of research - though perhaps one that we should be careful about stating as political fact without question.
Blogging may be light for the next week as I am off to New York, New York, New York (so good they named it several times or something) on Thursday. I may get the chance to post intermittently but I will mainly be focusing on having a good holiday. In an unusual move (for me) I'm going with my Mum. I haven't been on holiday with her for about 20 years!
There is a report in this morning's Times which suggests that members of the Estimate Committee are considering throwing out Sir Thomas Legg's independent report on MPs expenses as they think it has exceeded its remit.
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