Libertarians, drugs and drink

I have returned from the Freedom Forum in Birmingham.

This is a new initiative for students and young undergraduates. There were around 100 delegates at the conference which took place in the bowels of the Birmingham & Midland Institute in a quiet street very close to the city centre. (Delegates were staying in a hostel around the corner.)

In terms of speakers all the usual suspects were there – many took part in our Voices of Freedom series of debates last year – but in my session, alongside Simon Richards, director of The Freedom Association, and Mark Wallace, former campaign director of the TaxPayers' Alliance, we also had Graham Aitken representing Students for Sensible Drug Policy UK which wants to legalise all drugs.

Afterwards we had a chat. Graham was wearing a casual but smart jacket and he told me he wears it so people don't leap to the conclusion that he's a junkie himself.

Personally, I've always struggled with the issue of hard drugs. Well, when I say struggled, I would never condemn anyone who consumes any substance, whatever it is (it's their body, after all) but would I support the legalisation of all drugs? I'm not sure. For me, the arguments for and against balance themselves out and I find it hard to decide. Most of the time I just don't think about it.

Dinner took place at Bank Restaurant in Brindley Place and the guest speaker was Mark Littlewood, director-general of the Institute of Economic Affairs. Dressed in a leather jacket and this season's Southampton football shirt (think Peru rather than Sheffield United or Stoke City), Mark gave a polished yet witty speech, well suited to the occasion.

I particularly liked the story about US humourist and journalist PJ O'Rourke who was asked by Clive Anderson, in a television interview some years ago, to explain his conversion from socialist-leaning student to Republican-leaning commentator.

Bemused by the question, the answer to which seemed blindingly obvious to O'Rourke, he replied: "I got a job."

I have noticed that a similar change often befalls students who profess to be libertarians. One minute they want to legalise all drugs and deregulate everything that moves. Then they get a job (or enter politics) and all those fine liberal sentiments are quietly ditched. (I won't speculate why but I think we can guess.)

Anyhow, I declined an invitation to stay the night and my decision was vindicated when I read the following message from Simon Richards, director of The Freedom Association, on Facebook this morning: "You know you're in a student hostel when ... you're woken up at 6.30am - by people going to bed."

Btw, when it was announced during the 'Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs' session that The Free Society would be paying for the drinks at last night's dinner there was a cheer and I got what I think was the biggest round of applause of the afternoon.

So the lesson from the Freedom Forum? Give a libertarian a drink and you've got a friend, if not for life then at least until they get a job.

The Free Society at the Freedom Forum

Since the appointment of Tom Miers as editor of The Free Society on March 1, the number of subscribers has risen by 20 per cent (a three-figure increase).

See TFS March 2011 ebulletin. To register your support and receive a copy of the bulletin direct to your inbox, click here.

Tomorrow, wearing my Free Society hat, I shall be in Birmingham speaking at the first Liberty League Freedom Forum.

I am sharing a platform with Simon Richards, director of The Freedom Association; Mark Wallace, former campaign manager, TaxPayers Alliance; and someone from a group called Students for Sensible Drug Policy. We're discussing 'Alcohol, tobacco and other drugs'.

Speakers at other sessions include Mark Littlewood (Institute of Economic Affairs), Josie Appleton (Manifesto Club), Claire Fox (Institute of Ideas), Alex Deane (Big Brother Watch), Guy Herbert (No2ID), Tom Clougherty (Adam Smith Institute), Tim Evans (Cobden Centre), Steve Baker MP (Conservative) and John Hemming MP (Lib Dem).

After dinner tomorrow The Free Society will be underwriting some late night drinks for delegates (nearly 100 "freedom-thinking students and recent graduates"). I do hope there are no 'incidents'.

See: Freedom and liberty in Birmingham (Simon Richards)

Live and kicking – the new Forest website

The new Forest website is now live and you can visit it here.

It's a project that is still in development but I'm rather pleased with it. Visually it's a big step forward, but the big difference is that visitors can now post comments on the site in response to breaking news stories.

The aim is to make the site more much immediate and interactive than the old one, so I hope you will add your own comments in the days and weeks ahead.

We are still editing and updating copy that has been transferred from the previous site. When that work is completed we will add new information and resources.

The site will be updated regularly so I hope you will bookmark it and become a frequent visitor. We want to create a useful resource for adults who enjoy consuming tobacco as well as providing them with a platform for their views.

Politicians, broadcasters and journalists will be alerted to the new site so the more people who post the better.

Be the first to add a comment to the new site – click here.

PS. Although the new site is live, your browser may send you to the old site (which had the same URL). Don't ask me why. It's something to do with the Domain Name System (DNS):

DNS is a hierarchical naming system built on a distributed database for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. Most importantly, it translates domain names meaningful to humans into the numerical identifiers associated with networking equipment for the purpose of locating and addressing these devices worldwide.

Alternatively you may get a message saying "No page could be found at this address". Click on the 'Back to Home' link and it should take you to the new site.

It should sort itself out within 24 hours or so. If not, let me know.

What I remember about the introduction of the Irish smoking ban

Today is the seventh anniversary of the smoking ban in Ireland.

Older readers should look away now because I've told this story before (many times, in fact) but it was an occasion that for personal reasons I shall never forget.

The ban was introduced, if I remember, in the early hours of Saturday morning. I was intending to be there anyway but I was invited to Dublin as a guest of the Richard Littlejohn Show on Sky News. The producers had decided to do a live broadcast from the Shelbourne Hotel on St Stephen's Green on Friday night and the fact that England were playing Ireland in the Six Nations that weekend was, I guess, a coincidence and an added bonus for production staff.

Anyway the programme was broadcast from the main bar of the hotel from 7.00-8.00pm. Guests sat at small tables drinking and, in some cases, smoking, and Littlejohn moved from one table to another asking pre-arranged questions about the ban.

On my table was the former footballer (now an outspoken pundit and TV presenter) Eamonn Dunphy, who some might call a professional curmudgeon. I couldn't possibly comment. Thankfully he was on my side of the argument because I didn't fancy picking a fight with him.

Actually it was a miracle I was there at all. I had flown to Dublin the previous day and stayed overnight with friends in Delgany, Co Wicklow, which is south of the city. Around midday they dropped me at the station in Greystones, a mile up the road, so I could catch the train to Dublin, check into the Shelbourne (where Sky had booked me a room) and enjoy a quiet, relaxing afternoon.

It takes 50 minutes to get from Greystones to the city centre but it took me six hours. The trouble began when I boarded the wrong train, which was heading south instead of north. I didn't think this was possible because Greystones is the last stop on the DART (Dublin Area Regional Transport) network but in hindsight I had obviously caught a different service entirely.

Even then I didn't twig until, 15 minutes down the line, an inspector looked at my ticket and announced that I was travelling in the wrong direction.

He was very good about it, though. At the first available halt he instructed the driver to stop the train, helped me off, and pointed in the general direction of a few houses several hundred yards away and said, "See those houses? Keep walking. You'll come to a main road and a bus will take you back to Greystones."

Perhaps I should explain that a halt is nothing like a station. No platform, no taxis, no-one. It's the rail equivalent of a request stop for buses. As far as I could tell I had been dropped in the middle of a field miles from anywhere with a heavy bag and few directions other than the promise that I would eventually find the main road if I kept on walking.

To cut a long story short, I did find the main road. It was in a village called Kilcoole but to all intents and purposes Kilcoole was shut that afternoon. There weren't many cars on the road either and no sign of a bus.

I think I waited two hours but a bus did eventually appear and slowly (very slowly) took me back to Greystones where I finally caught the DART to Dublin. It was past six o'clock when I arrived in the city centre and I had to run (sweating) to the hotel where I checked-in, showered, before taking my seat in the well-lit bar where the Richard Littlejohn Show was about to start. I made it with 15 minutes to spare.

What really struck me that weekend was the response of the Irish media. There was a sense of pride that Ireland was "leading the world". The issue was tobacco control but it could have been anything. (The French, I'm sure, felt the same pride when they were the first to send fighter planes to enforce the no-fly zone over Libya. "Leading the world", see.)

What mattered was the fact that, for one weekend at least, Ireland – and Dublin in particular - was the centre of world attention.

PS. ASH Ireland ("working towards a tobacco free society") are using the anniversary to urge the Irish Health Minister to introduce further measures to tackle smoking. It has produced a "10-point plan" which I am looking forward to reading ... (not).

See also: Amend smoking ban "to help save Irish pub", says Forest Eireann.

Coming soon ...

I am spending the day putting some final touches to the new Forest website.

This is not a facelift, as in 2007. It looks totally different and has been built with new software, which we are just getting to grips with. (Actually, it's quite intuitive.)

There are a few bugs and what builders call snagging to sort out, but it should go live in a day or two.

Watch this space.

Scandalous behaviour

Sorry to see one of my favourite emporiums, Fortnum & Mason, "stormed by 300 yobs" on Saturday.

I'm not a frequent customer but I do pop in now and again. Perhaps they were protesting at the price of glacé apricots, utterly delicious but now £40 a box.

Now that is something to protest about!

Don't be fooled by Ed Miliband or those estimated attendance figures

Inspired by Ed Miliband and the TUC rally in London on Saturday I have written a piece for The Free Society about public spending cuts.

Here's an excerpt:

Famously, the British governed India (population 300-350 million) with just 1,200 civil servants. By all accounts, British rule in India was highly efficient.

Goodness knows how many civil servants there are in Britain today (where there is a population of 60 million), let alone public sector workers, but in 2009 the Ministry of Defence alone employed 85,730 civil servants.

Clearly there is a huge amount of waste and inefficiency in the public sector which is staffed by hundreds of thousands of unelected mandarins (the same mandarins who draft tobacco control regulations).

Don't be fooled by Ed Miliband, the TUC and everyone who attended Saturday's rally in London. The economic crisis has given Britain an unexpected but wonderful opportunity to cut public expenditure and reduce inefficiency in the public sector.

As for the estimated attendance on Saturday, I would treat that with a gigantic pinch of salt.

According to the TUC, between 250,000 and 500,000 people attended the rally. Taking its cue from the organisers, the BBC reported: "It is estimated more than 250,000 people from across Britain have taken part in a demonstration in central London against government spending".

I have very good reason to be sceptical about this estimate. In October 1983 I stood on the roof of an office in Whitehall which gave me a bird's eye view of a CND march in London. According to the BBC, it was estimated that one million people took part in the march and subsequent rally in Hyde Park. Bizarrely this was far greater than even CND's estimate of 400,000.

They were both wrong. The group whose roof I was standing on belonged to an anti-CND outfit called the Coalition for Peace Through Security (CPS). Julian Lewis, who was director of CPS and is now MP for New Forest East, takes up the story:

"The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had, in its time, managed to rustle up more shouters on the streets than most: it turned out about 150,000 and 100,000 in 1981 and 1982 respectively, and characteristically claimed a quarter of a million on each occasion.

"In order to frustrate yet another such cavalier exaggeration in October 1983, the Coalition for Peace Through Security commissioned an expert photographic analysis which showed the true figure on that occasion to be approximately 98,000 for march and rally combined.

"So as to show 'progress' on their own grossly inflated estimates for the previous two years, the CND had felt obliged to claim 400,000 – a total ruled out as absolutely impossible by our aerial survey."

Without a similar survey I don't know how anyone could estimate accurately the number of people at Saturday's rally, but you can be sure that neither the TUC nor the BBC will have erred on the side of reality.

A bit like Ed Miliband, in fact.

Squeeze at the Royal Albert Hall

I mentioned earlier in the week that I had gone to the Royal Albert Hall to see Squeeze.

It was an eventful evening because I got a puncture en route and we missed most of the support act, which was a pity because I like The Feeling too.

The first time I saw Squeeze live was 30 years ago at a very different venue - the hot, sweaty bearpit that featured in the title of the Clash's 1978 single '(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais'.

Anyway, here's a video of Glen Tilbrook at the Albert Hall on Tuesday. He's singing one of my favourite Squeeze songs, 'Vanity Fair' from the 1981 album East Side Story.