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item0061A 910, 911 910 17 January 2004 Dear Sir Your leader (16 January 2004) argues for the retention of the Council Tax, and so do I. Throughout Europe, residents are taxed upon their properties, and the principle is sound. The real problem with Council Tax is not its level: it is its unpredictability. The solution is for it to be nationalised (as “Business Rates” have been nationalised) and the level determined by the Chancellor as part of overall fiscal policy. Indeed, all central government services should, as a matter of constitutional principle, be funded by nationally-determined, nationally-collected taxation. Local Councils should be permitted to collect supplementary sums for purely local projects, as parish councils are currently entitled to do. What matters, for local independence, is not the right to collect taxes, but the right to decide how tax income is deployed. The Welsh National Assembly does not collect any taxes, but wields great power through its administration of the Welsh Block Grant. Local government is in the same case.Nick Raynsford should forget about inventing new taxes. He should simply nationalise the old one. Yours sincerely Roger Warren Evans What do you think? Drop me a line
911 22 January 2004
Illogicality Matters... In matters of political policy, I respect a strong sense of logic. It is the sheer illogicality of the Scottish devolution formula that is perpetuating The West Lothian Question, in the run-up to the top-up fee vote. The Welsh formula is far more robust politically, because more logical constitutionally. And it is the bewildering illogicality of the Government's drugs policies has opened up a new Howard's way to attack the "downgrading" of cannabis. In the case of drugs, Labour is living out the consequences of an earlier mistake, namely its espousal of the muddle-headed and illogical Runciman Report, which advocated this course. Ruth Runciman, who chaired that ill-fated "Commission", was desperate to find some "liberal" compromise to put forward - short of arguing for decriminalisation. From a position within the establishment of the Left, she tried to find a sanitised way of moving forward, with the tangled drugs debate. I respect her for that, and for the effort she put into polishing up a "middle way".But the chickens of illogicality have come home to roost. The spatch-cocked "down-grading" of cannabis is in disarray, because its logic is impossible to explain, or rationalise. No wonder people are confused, and the Government is having to spend £1m to try and explain the absurdity. Many are striving to move to a harm-reduction strategy, to give the message that cannabis/heroin/cocaine addicts who need medical assistance will receive it, without stint and without reserve - just as they would for any other addiction. But that is wholly inconsistent with the categorisation of all consumption of these substances as "illegal", and an illegality carrying the threat of imprisonment. If to catch AIDS were a crime, just imagine the additional difficulties of treating it - yet that is what we do with certain categories of "drug". And we blight the lives of the 90% of all drug-users, using their ordinary human rights to live their own lives and who never even approach a state of "addiction". The criminalisation of drugs represents a disastrous error of judgment upon the part of those in power, in the UK, the US and throughout the world. In our modern world, it represents a glaring breach of human rights, a gross invasion of personal freedom. Criminalisation (1920) was an error induced by a Christian evangelist who occupied the White House (President Woodrow Wilson, in 1919) - and it has ever since been perpetuated, throughout the world, by an American Federal state desperate to find and retain arguments to justify the scale of its military and police networks. The "war on drugs" forms part of America's oppressive global regime, and we are wrong to play along with it.The UK Left ought to be asserting fundamental personal freedoms, and freeing future generations from the scourge of of this deeply misguided interference in citizens' private lives. The Labour Government, by its total failure to grasp these issues, has been caught in an absurd, illogical, middle position. Michael Howard is right to pillory its absurdity. My hope is that some elements in the Labour Cabinet will come to realise that these grotesque illogicalities cannot stand, and that society must move towards legalisation and a humane programme of education and harm reduction.
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