There are times for a dignified silence

You would have thought Jacqui Smith would be a little bit too busy preparing her excuses - sorry, reasons - for her expenses fiddle, but yesterday she still found time to comment on Professor Nutt's comments that ecstasy was no more dangerous than an addiction to equestrianism.

Now, far be it from me to make a scientific comment, but having had the numbers of deaths caused by ecstasy rammed down my throat (what was it, 30 last year?), compared to deaths involving horses (ah, wait, something like 100, yes?), I wonder if he might have a point.

Unity has made this point before over on the Ministry of Truth. The Drugs policy in this country is a shambles, despite all the evidence suggesting that prohibition doesn't work, the government continues to pursue it. I think most people fail to realise is that doctors prescribe drugs daily which have side-effects and can be fatal or damaging if taken in large doses. Paracetamol is available over the counter, for heaven's sake, knock back enough of them and you'll be getting your stomach pumped in no short order.

Would regulation and legalisation allow for the purity of a substance to be defined? Probably, yes. Would that make it safer? Undoubtedly. A big problem for heroin users, for example, is when the quality changes and suddenly they've taken twice as much as they're expecting. Make it legal and you can bloody tax it. Since cigarettes and alcohol are already such an earner, why not diversify?

So, I have to ask, why are drugs like tobacco and alcohol legal, substances such as oxycodone and diazepam available on prescription, yet a drug that literally does as it says on the tin - ecstasy - is illegal? The argument that it is dangerous doesn't hold any water, and when new studies keep suggesting that it is no more dangerous than alcohol (which is proven to cause long-term damage, unlike ecstasy), you start to wonder why the establishment is so keen to ban it. Don't they like people having a good time? When people have died, it's been as a result of dehydration or in some instances over-hydration. Most happy clubbers I've seen are smart enough to have a bottle of water in hand.

In the case of disco biscuits, the same counter-argument as for marajuana applies - we don't know the long-term implication because it hasn't been around for that long. Well, newsflash, we prescribe drugs daily where we *do* know there are long-term risks, some are pretty serious, yet we prescribe them anyway.

Fact is (oh, how I hate myself for saying that), there is a huge culture of drug-taking in Britain. There are kids out at the weekend on coke, speed, ecstasy, ketamine, a good few cooking up GHB (which *is* filthy fucking stuff), and there are a lot of them. I wouldn't even dare to put a finger in the wind guess on the real numbers, but how many of the clubbers at Fire in London do you think aren't on something? Ever been to The Arches in Glasgow on a Saturday night? And how many deaths are we hearing of every week?

Just because it wouldn't be a drugs-prohibition-related-rant without at least a mention of Holland. Hash legal. Are there hundreds of stoned Dutchmen on the streets? Err... no, actually. Plenty of stoned Brits over for the weekend, but it's pretty harmless. Back over this side of the stream, as Unity pointed out in his article, the police actually quite like (relatively speaking) dealing with people on pills, as for the most part they're too loved up with the world to be any hassle. It's the drunk ones that cause the issue.

Trying to crowbar myself back on track here, there was something Freebee Smith spewed in her denunciation of Professor Nutt that just irritated me:

"For me that makes light of a serious problem, trivialises the dangers of drugs, shows insensitivity to the families of victims of ecstasy and sends the wrong message to young people about the dangers of drugs."

Seriously. She erodes her own moral authority and thinks she can take the high ground? The serious problem in her eyes is that people take drugs. The serious problem as I see it is that we spend so much time telling people what not to do that we don't think that maybe, just maybe, the majority of people are smart enough to make their own decisions. It's just like tobacco, or the codeine your doctor is prescribing you. If you know the risks you can make an informed decision.

At the end it all boils down to one question. Why do people take drugs? To enhance the way they feel. But you don't like people feeling good, do you, Jacqui.

Educate and inform, don't command and control. Let us choose for ourselves.

EU Procurement law Vs. My taxes.

I received today an e-mail inviting me to attend a seminar on EU Procurement law. There have been rather a lot of seminars on this subject lately, but this one was going for an attention-grabber:

“The EU procurement rules are fraught with difficulty.

You are required to navigate between the black letter of the law and the commercial reality of putting together a procurement.

To manage the risk effectively you need rock-solid advice on what you can and can't do.”

It went on to list a number of the hurdles and complicated rules that can make a public sector contracting exercise something of a minefield, from when you can and cannot speak to suppliers during the process, when a framework is anti-competitive and thus non-compliant, and so on and so forth.

Normally these things get the ‘delete’ treatment without any further ado; however this framed the problem faced by contracts teams within the Public Sector very succinctly. Basically, there are so many pitfalls, red tape and ridiculous levels of bureaucracy designed at making the process as ‘fair’, ‘open’, ‘transparent’, ‘non-discriminatory’, etc, etc. as possible that it becomes an uphill struggle before you even get started.

I’m not saying that any of these goals are a bad thing. On the contrary, they are wonderful principles of a free market. Public money should be accountable, and we should not be awarding the contract to someone who isn’t going to offer the best value for money.

It’s also fucking difficult to argue against the rules. They make irritating sense to a free-marketeer. If followed, they stop protectionist policies and are intended to prevent sharp practice, all good things. In fact, you can’t even say that a public body should be able to spend its money in the local economy, because the whole point of the rules is that the best response to your tender will win the business.

In other words, if local suppliers want to win the business, then they need to up their game and improve. It also means that there should be no barrier to those local suppliers winning business elsewhere in Europe, if they decide to do so. Great, in theory.

So, does that mean I’m happy that my tax money is going to line a German, or Spanish company’s offers? Well the flipside is that their tax money could well be lining those of a British company, so you could argue that it will all come out in the wash.

What I’m trying to make clear here is that the spirit of the EU Procurement rules is something I agree with. My issue is more whether or not the sheer cost of implementing the laws, enforcing them, and even writing the damned things is actually delivering us any value for money, or if in fact is costing governments – and therefore you and me as the taxpayer – a huge amount of money that could be better off back in my pocket.

It also means that the UK Government can’t say to contracting authorities (basically a body spending public cash) that they should source locally and support the British economy. It has no say over where that public money will end up. Of course I should be happy that the most economically advantageous tender will win, therefore saving the taxpayer money. It’s very easy to end up in a circular argument on this.

When the House of Commons commissioned the construction of new offices for MPs, what was to become Portcullis House, the contract for the windows went to a British firm. The problem was that a French-owned firm, Harmon, had submitted the most economically advantageous bid. Someone at the House had decided we should buy British. Harmon challenged this under a breach of the EU Procurement rules and were awarded damages in court for £1.85m. There were other aspects they could also sue for, however the House of Commons settled out of court for an unspecified fee. So the taxpayer paid for the windows twice over, maybe more. Now, can you spell colossal waste of my fucking money?

Fine, you say, live within the rules. I question not the spirit of the rules, let me re-iterate that. What I do believe in is choice. The same choice afforded to the private sector, which has far more freedom to make decisions on where it spends its money. What I question is why that accountability seems to lie with Europe, and not with the UK taxpayer. Why the fuck are some overpaid bunch of bureaucrats allowed to tell our public sector that it can’t support local businesses if it chooses to do so? It may not be the right choice, but the point is that the public sector in the UK should be responsible to the UK taxpayer, not to fucking eurocrats.

I fail to see why we need another layer of bureaucracy on top of our own, trying to tell us what we can and can’t do – private or public sector. Big government is not a good thing. More big government above a big government is worse. We have enough crap from our own politicians, we really don’t need to be subsidising eurocrats as well, and we really don’t need more layers of red tape, processes and procedures that cost the taxpayer even more money.

Smoke and mirrors. And Sat-Navs, nannies, mortgages...

Mr Eugenides has cross-posted on DK about a little smoke-and-mirrors at Westminster - namely, that the much awaited 'review' of MPs expenses, in a severely watered down format, was conveniently announced (without much ado) on the same day as the Heathrow runway debacle. John McDonnell's little performance served as a nice little headline grabber to draw attention to the fact that very little has changed.

The Times has the run-down here.

Correspondent's Diary, Lagos - Day Two

This one is a few days late, and I’ll try and catch up on the reportage – internet has been down for a few days and we’ve just got it up and running now.

So, Monday. Even this close to Christmas, Lagos was busy with life, and with traffic. We woke early to head down to the BG Nigeria offices to be given a security briefing – mandatory for all guests, visitors and family.

The Security Advisor taking us through all the details was an ex-Army chap who had been working out in Nigeria for the past twelve years. From the sound of it, he had been on the rough end of a kidnapping himself on at least one occasion. His message to us, more than anything, was that Lagos, and Nigeria, like anywhere, had places you could go, and places you should avoid. Common sense was the key, and that was what my brother and I took to heart. We have no intention of heading anywhere near the Delta on this trip. In all but name, a civil war rages there, but for the distance, it might as well be a different country. Until Lagos sorts out its infrastructure it will never be a holiday destination, but having seen some of the culture and some of the potential, I have to wonder that maybe in a few generations once the political process has had time to bed in, that might just become a reality.

We headed down to the yacht club a little too late in the day to get any time on the water – winds were dropping and most of the boat-boys had gone home, so I sat and indulged in a Bloody Mary while Iain got a dry lesson on the GP14.

Life is tough.