4 posts from August 2007

I didn't believe the council leader, last night in the interview on local news,  when he claimed that the newsletter was revenue neutral, and even if it is, that's a great deal less than the savings promised.

It could work but not as they currently do it - rather than waste money sending it to every household
it can be targetted at fewer, better targetted audiences, such as doctors surgeries, libraries, job centres, etc.

Also it shouldn't just be CCC but get other cornish and devonshire councils to advertise in it, as well as major
devon and cornwall employers such as the police, sww, met office, etc to help pay for it and make it more worth reading for those who are looking at high end jobs.

While they're at it, they should also include contract and consultancy tendering.

As it stands the pish "newsletters" we get from South West Water and Cornwall County Council are a waste of time, money and resources - nothing more than an exersize in praising themselves and further alienating users of their services.

So, apparently the RSA report back in march was a "wake up call" according to our party leader, Sir Campbell, and since then Transform have also published a report on how we need to reform drug laws.

We've also seen a media backlash against the bad science and dodgy statistics linking Mental Illness to cannabis (quick summary - using cannabis could maybe increase risk of from 1% to 1.4% although you may have to an underlying condition, or self-medicate before diagnosis).

So where is the intelligent debate from our national political parties - Prime Minister Brown was going to have a massive consultation (predestined to pointlessly reclassify a couple of relatively harmless drugs back to class B in order to look tough on crime), it's all gone quiet after a bunch cabinet and shadow cabinet ministers confessed to using drugs but "regretted it" and preaching that just because they've tried it and got away with it and didn't do them any harm, they are terrible nasty illegal things and if you get caught you should rightly be imprisoned.

Liberal Democrat drug policy is hidden in the online equivilent to the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard', and ammounts to a couple of pages of double linespace A4 waffling about how decriminalisation would be nice, but not yet (just like nuclear disarmament would be nice, but not yet), and how we need some good reports to held decide policy.

....Well we've had reports, we have medical research on at least one drug (and I'm sure if MPs researchers and journalisists could be bothered) there is plenty of research on how much more harmful legal drugs like alcohol, etc are than illegal ones, so where is the intelligent discourse?

Where are our new innovative and fair policies and proposed legislation?

We had a recent party campaign on being tough on crime - but standing on the fence on social issues like drugs and the sex trade means being soft on crime - in a word the war on drugs (and failing to end it) means being soft on crime
!

ps http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article2788634.ece

So I was reading the political spectrum article about UK parties in the last few years ( http://www.politicalcompass.org/extremeright ) and was surprised how far right (both socially and economically) the liberal democrats have veered - I don't think that our current economic policies are are too far to the right, but the chart seems to back up my thoughts about how disappointing our party is on the social liberalism front.

Maybe that's because I'm a hippy ( http://www.politicalcompass.org/printablegraph?ec=-2.75&soc=-4.67 ) - which is odd because I support almost all our economic policy - possibly a problem with the wording of the questions in the poll at the compass site.

Apparently the liberal democrat great and good have decided on a blanket 10 pound a flight "green tax".. wtf?!?

What an incredibly badly thought out idea. Last time I flew I paid a fiver 'airport development fee', then another tenner of airport and flight tax.
 
It's already taxed disproportionately, and of course it's no disincentive to using cheaper and/or older planes that pollute more heavily.

Why not just tax seats based on CO2 output and altitude? A modern small plane, with a economy seat configuration flying at a lower altitude does less damage than an old larger plane at a higher altitude.

The maths isn't that hard, you can also tax the fuel rather than the seats, as with cars - airlines have already taken a lot of measures to reduce fuel use (and therefore emissions), and increased tax on fuel will have a direct impact on emissions.

Charging a blanket tax gives no incentive to airlines to be more efficient and reduce emissions and no incentive to travellers to choose a flight with less emissions.

source : http://politics.guardian.co.uk/green/story/0,,2140998,00.html