There is disquiet amongst the staff at Carstairs Hospital – a secure mental facility – over plans to ban inpatients from smoking anywhere, even outdoors.

Carstairs State Hospital houses a wide group of patients. As the tabloids like to remind us, it houses murderers and rapists. Yet also incarcerated within it’s gates are people who have been convicted of no crime. As its website states, patients can be sent there under the mental health act, and can be admitted from NHS hospitals as well as prisons and courts.

Locking up unconvicted individuals is, in itself, morally problematic. Yet most would accept that in very  extreme cases such measures might be justified to prevent those who are very mentally unwell  doing serious damage to themselves or others. It is, however, absolutely indefensible for liberties to be gratuitously taken away from mental patients. It is unacceptable to remove from mental patients those freedoms that enjoyed by ordinary citizens, when doing so cannot be justified on grounds of safety, security or treatment.

Front line Staff at the facility –  those who will actually be responsible for enforcing a cold turkey regime on the patients – are particularly anxious about the smoking ban.  One is quoted in the Daily Record as saying :

“It’s all very well for people who have little or no contact with patients to make decisions in a boardroom as they sip coffee and eat biscuits. But they are putting those of us on the frontline at greater risk of harm.”

I cannot imagine that many smokers would be surprised by these sentiments. If somebody locked me up and told me that I couldn’t have a cigarette for the forseeable future, I cannot imagine that my reaction would be particularly pacific.

But the fundamental issue here is one of civil liberties. Mental patients are citizens too. And at the very least, they ought to enjoy the dignity of making decisions about whether or not they smoke.

An interesting discussion has been taking place about the routes of New Labour’s illiberalism. In a piece limited by an evident lack of understanding about the history of the Labour movement or of British marxism, Francesca Klug argued that traditional Marxist influences in the party were to blame. (Francesca says that Marxists were uninterested “in the state as a potentially oppressive force” until Ralph Miliband in 1969. LOL.”  Lenin’s tomb hit back  with a well worth reading piece arguing that the strong state ironically  is routed in Neo-Liberalism. Meanwhile Guy Aitchison at our kingdom has written a thoughtful piece once again emphasising the significance of Marxism in stimulating New Labour’s disregard for liberty.

Where Guy is correct is in identifying a tendency within old labour which emphasises ends over means and which justifies restrictions on liberty on the basis of social welfare. An ex -ide to Gordon Brown once said that the best way to convince him of anything was to put up an oOHP  with a graph showing the worst off in society getting better off. There is most certainly a tendency with old labour which says that “real freedom is bread on the dinner table” – a tendency which at its worst treats the working class as though they want nothing more than to be fed and watered.

But  the analyses of Guy Aitchison and Francesca Clug are undermined by their unnuanced perception of old Labour and the labour left.  It is worth remembering sometimes that Bevan – the ex miner, the radical, and the father of the welfare state – was fiercely anti-communist. At its inception the labour party was characterised by a struggle between ideological socialists – many of them Marxists – and trade unionsts who were concerned, sometimes exclusively, with pay and conditions and living standards and who regarded the first group as dangerously ideological. It was a tension that continued right through the history of old Labour. And it is these bean counting social democrats – not the Marxian influence within the Labour party – whose tradition has shaped the authoritarianism New Labour. It is in this tradition that the Labour Party lined up behind the smoking ban, on the grounds that any level of intrusion and interference could be justified on the basis of improved life expectancy.

What New Labour also draws upon is a tradition of well meaning technocracy. 21st century policy wonkery is in many ways infused with the spirit of 1920s bloomsbury. It is infused with the spirit of those like the Webbs who seemed to believe that the masses could effectively be bypassed and that a few clever people – equipped with powerful state machinery – could put right societies moral and material failings. Equally their good friend Keynes – hero of the old Labour soft left and an anchor point of post war social democracy – was sometimes forthright on the need to insulate the management of the economy, and other aspects of policy, from democratic pressure.

Clugg and Aitchison, meanwhile, offer no explanation as to why those members of the Parliamentary Labour Party who appear closest to Marxists traditions and politics – such as Jeremy Corbyn and John Mcdonnell – have been amongst those most opposed to New Labour’s attacks on civil liberties.  Klug argues that there was an “intellectual tradition which never really saw the problem with the state – provided it was in the right, or rather left, hands” – yet Marxists more than anyone have understood that gaining elected office does not in itself alter fundamental aspects of the state and the way it operates. As did my comrade Tony Benn who entitled one of his memoirs “Office Without Power”.

Drawing a straight line between a caricatured vision of Marxism, and the policies of a decidedly non-Marxist new labour government illminates little. But Klug nonetheless has done us a service by raising important questions about the relationship between socialism and liberty.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

This government is not fond of people who disagree with them. Witness the Serious Organised Crime Act (Socpa), the swingeing restrictions on protesting within audible distance of parliament. The government do not like to hear voices of dissent, and especially when those voices join together in a chorus. So with the growing consensus of outrage amongst the scientific community over the treatment of independent scientific advisors, the government must be feeling a whole new wave of nausea and legislation coming on.

In the early days of Blair, Peter Mandelson laid claim to the secularism of Labour: “We don’t do god,” he said. Unfortunately, secularism is not the same as objectivity or fairness. As time wore on what became increasingly apparent was that while the government may not ‘do’ faith it also doesn’t ‘do’ facts or truth. In fact, it doesn’t ‘do’ anything that doesn’t fit the template of policy (and sometimes it just doesn’t do anything at all). Science is about seeking answers, and government, like its incestuous sister PR, is all about hiding them to protect the grand plan / the status quo / the public from themselves.

Now, however, Labour and the Tories are very publicly at odds with some scientists – and if there’s one thing that people in search of ‘the truth’ are not good at doing it’s keeping quiet. So after the government decided to ignore his advice, Professor David Nutt, the leading authority on the harmful effects of drugs, decided to give an academic lecture on the topic (which happens to be his specialism) at a university. Alan Johnson accused him of political lobbying and fired him. If an academic lecture constitutes a political action then the nation is being secretly run by the universities. I for one am relieved by this revelation, for a moment I had thought we were being run by a bunch of fanatics in Westminster.

The government’s drugs policy (and that of the Tories – they’re fairly interchangeable on ‘law and order’) can be summed up as follows: all drugs are bad, except the ones we get large amounts of tax from.

Let me tell you a story – it may seem completely fatuous at first but bear with me… I once went to the hospital for a test. On my appointment card I was told to drink two pints of water an hour before the test. I am a very small person with a very small bladder. Suffice to say it was the closest I have yet come to a near death experience. When I asked the doctor (a scientist) why I needed to drink so much water prior to the test he laughed and said I didn’t need to – the NHS had decided that because most people don’t drink enough water generally they would overstate the amount necessary and ‘simplify’ the instructions to ensure they got the results they needed. This taught me a couple of very valuable lessons:
• Those in authority will tell you whatever they need to to achieve a result;
• Those in authority will assume you are an incorrigible moron unless proven otherwise;
• I should never drink two pints of water and then travel to hospital via a road with one of the largest concentrations of speed bumps in London.

Now here are two statements:
1. Drugs such as cannabis, LSD and ecstasy are statistically less dangerous to your health than alcohol and tobacco
2. The money you spend on cannabis, LSD and ecstasy is likely to go to morally reprehensible people (possibly even more morally reprehensible than the government).
Those two statements weren’t too difficult to understand were they? Then why is it that the government thinks that the general populus is too stupid to be able to hold both statements in their head at the same time and weigh them against each other to make a decision?

Alan Johnson said that in firing Professor Nutt he was bending to the will of the people – that the people think drugs are bad. However, Johnson also thinks those same people are too stupid to be able to understand even basic science.

I for one am sick of being patronised and being spoon-fed half-truths, spin and soundbites. If the leading expert in the field tells you something you don’t want to hear you have every right to disagree with him (granted on non-scientific grounds – moral, political, whatever… and that’s the big problem, no-one from the government has yet explained what their grounds are…). But you don’t have the right to stifle his voice and to punish him for exercising his democratic right to freedom of expression.

I can handle conflicting ideas, I think most people can. This government may treat us like children and that may make us behave like them at times, but there is still one vital difference between the taxpayer and children: children can’t vote.

In an exclusive interview with The Third Estate, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg sets out his vision for change

Nick Clegg

It can’t be easy, being the leader of Britain’s third major political party. Caught between a disintegrating New Labour and a resurgent Conservative Party waiting for its coronation, convincing the British public that what you have to say can make a difference to their lives is an uphill struggle from the start. Nick Clegg, however, is a man of firsts. Elected to the European Parliament in 1999, he became the first ever Liberal Democrat parliamentarian in the East Midlands, and the first Liberal since 1931. Ten years later, MP for Sheffield Hallam and Lib Dem leader, Clegg has his eyes on Gordon Brown’s job. “Let me tell you why I want to be prime minister. It’s because I want to change our country for good,” he said at last month’s party conference as he attempted to position the Liberal Democrats to oust Labour as the dominant force in progressive politics for the first time in almost a century. On the back of the conference, as Parliament returns from recess and we prepare to enter a general election year, I quizzed Clegg on some of the big questions facing his party and whether or not his policies in the current economic climate can truly be considered progressive.

Grabbing headlines when you’re a bronze medallist often means you have to shout louder than the rest. And it was Nick Clegg’s call for “savage cuts” last month which became the buzzword for the conference season. I ask him how it is possible to reconcile these kinds of cuts in public spending with the assertion that the Lib Dems are poised to replace Labour as the true progressive force in British politics. Surely retrenchment has always been the antithesis of social justice? “Politics is about priorities,” he says. “Simply spending money doesn’t make you progressive; it’s about what you spend it on. This government has radically enlarged the amount of money spent by the state, but the gap between rich and poor has grown. There’s nothing very progressive about a country in which a child born in the poorest area of Sheffield will die a full fourteen years earlier than one born down the road in the wealthiest part. So it is right to look at the money government spends and work out if we can use more of it to help those who need more support.”

One area in which the Lib Dems certainly have picked up the ball dropped a long time ago by Labour is in their opposition to nuclear weapons. In his youth, Tony Blair was an active member of CND. In his middle age, he presided over the multi-billion pound decision to renew Britain’s nuclear weapons programme. “What’s progressive about renewing Trident – spending billions on a system that doesn’t protect the country from the modern threats we face?” Clegg argues. “We could put that money into helping people on the lowest incomes.”

But are the Liberal Democrats really willing to commit the money necessary to help people on the lowest incomes? One of the party’s most popular policies amongst students of all backgrounds has been its opposition to tuition fees. “I believe tuition fees are wrong, I believe they need to be abolished,” Nick Clegg told the party conference, shortly before saying that they had to be realistic about whether doing so would be affordable given the country’s current debt and fuelling speculation that the Lib Dems were planning to axe one of their core progressive policies. Given that improved access to education is vital for long-term economic growth, I ask Clegg, should we really be backing away from doing the right thing just because it’s easier now?

“None of these choices are easy, at any time,” he says. “But we’ve got to be straight with people about what can be afforded right now. I’ve set out a radical programme that would make our society fairer, and give every child – no matter their background – the best chances in life. We know that at the moment a poor, bright child will be overtaken by a better off, less intelligent child by the time they’re seven years old. So we have to get in there right at the beginning, with smaller class sizes for 5-7 year olds, and extra support for children from the poorest backgrounds. We would give schools more money for taking on children from poorer families and that big injection of cash would make sure everyone had the best start in life. Then more children from disadvantaged backgrounds would have the opportunity to go to university later on. And yes, I want to get rid of the tuition fees system too – it’s just a question of when.”

Meritocracy is not exactly Marxism, but it is an ideal to which most left-of-centre MPs believe we should aspire. Are the Lib Dems doing enough, however, to distinguish themselves from the other main parties? “I think we have distinguished ourselves very substantially by setting out the radical, progressive programme for change that I’ve been talking about,” Clegg says. I ask him why, then, the party is failing to capitalise on the deep dissatisfaction with the government. Labour suffered its worst defeat in almost a century at the recent European elections. But despite the wars, privatisations and crises, and despite the Lib Dems emerging from the expenses scandal as the cleanest party, why was it that they saw their share of the vote fall by 1.2 percent?

“Of course it would have been great to win more votes in the European Elections,” Clegg says. “But just look at the local elections which took place on the same day. We pushed Labour into a devastating third place, and we now control more big cities outside London than either of the other parties: Bristol, Sheffield, Hull, Leeds, Liverpool, Cambridge – they’re all Liberal Democrat cities, and I could name more. And in places like Bedford, where voters chose a new mayor just the other day, people are realising that Cameron isn’t offering real change at all. In an election where Labour came fifth, the Tories didn’t win – we beat them. In all these parts of the country we’re showing the way we treat power, dispersing it to the people, using it to cut crime, and regenerate areas that have wanted for attention for so long. People see the difference Liberal Democrats make in these places and they vote for us time and again.”

Smart, young, stylish, Oxbridge educated, leader of an opposition party, Clegg is keen to distinguish himself from Cameron as the voice of change in British politics. It was David Cameron who claimed that there was “barely a cigarette paper” between their two parties when he called for “one national movement that can bring real change” – broaching the idea of a Lib-Con coalition should his party fail to win a majority next year. Clegg was having none of it, however, describing the Conservative leader as a “con man” and attacking his hypocrisy on civil liberties. But how would a Liberal Democrat government under Nick Clegg reverse the alarming erosion of civil liberties and human rights that has taken place under New Labour?

“We’ve published a Freedom Bill, which shows how we’d repeal thirty years of Labour and Conservative authoritarian legislation,” Clegg says. “That Bill would restore the right to silence, which the Tories took away; it would bring back jury trials, which Labour have tried so hard and so often to curtail, and it would stop government storing DNA from people who’ve not been convicted of any crime. On day one, we’d scrap identity cards – along with the Government’s massive National Identity Register. It’s an enormous, expensive incursion on our civil liberties; a total inversion of the relationship between citizen and state, where we have to account for ourselves to the government, not the other way round.” Clegg clearly doesn’t think that a cigarette paper is all that separates his policies from Cameron’s. “The Conservatives’ commitment to this kind of reform is just paper thin. I don’t think anyone should take them seriously on the rights of the citizen while they retain their commitment to abolish the Human Rights Act.”

"The weekly pictures of soldiers being returned home to grieving families should give everyone pause for thought about the merit and the purpose of this conflict."

But are Lib Dem commitments on human rights and civil liberties sufficient to see them running against the pack of British politics? I remember marching against the war in Afghanistan in November 2001. Back then, only a handful of MPs opposed the invasion, and only 12% of the country was against it. Eight years later, with Afghanistan in a worse state than ever and British casualties on the rise, opposition to the ongoing conflict is not such a lonely position when it comes to voters, even though a consensus remains amongst Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems on the need for a continued British presence in the country. The Lib Dems were widely praised for being the only major party to oppose the war in Iraq, but with the presence of foreign troops arguably exacerbating the instability of a country that has never in its history been successfully occupied, I ask Clegg if now is the time to take a principled stance against the war in Afghanistan too.

“We have taken and are taking a principled and practical approach to Afghanistan,” Clegg says. “The weekly pictures of soldiers being returned home to grieving families should give everyone pause for thought about the merit and the purpose of this conflict. But I want our troops to return when the time is right, with their heads held high, knowing they’ve made a real, long-term difference both to Afghanistan, and to Britain’s security.” Clegg’s approach, however, is not simply a military one. “The Government has a responsibility to our troops, now, to advance a political surge alongside the military surge; the Karzai Government clearly lacks the support of the Afghan people, and it is that among other things which is exacerbating instability. I’ve been calling on the Prime Minister for some time now to press for a Government of National Unity in Afghanistan, so that we can start to divert this conflict off the road of failure. Without that kind of reconciliation between the different interest groups in Afghanistan, we cannot hope to succeed.”

As a long-time opponent of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s a position I can’t subscribe to, but Clegg’s appraisal of the situation is refreshingly honest for a politician sitting on one of Parliament’s front benches. And it is on the question of honesty in politics that I turn to finally, raising, in the spirit of the organisation itself, a question suggested to me by Guy Aitchison of the Power2010 campaign. At the height of the expenses crisis, Nick Clegg responded to David Cameron and Gordon Brown’s attempts to position themselves as democratic reformers by pointing out that the Lib Dems alone had consistently called for reform of a “rotten” Westminster system. Power2010 has received nearly 2000 submissions from members of the public beyond Westminster who also want democratic reform. But what is Clegg doing to mobilise people’s anger with the way we are governed beyond engaging in the very routines of Westminster village politics that puts them off in the first place?

“Well, it would be odd if we didn’t use the platform that Westminster gives Liberal Democrat MPs to make it clear where we stand on political reform,” Clegg says. “We’ve always favoured a much more open, transparent and responsive system of government. And whether it’s freedom of information or the way in which MPs get elected, we’ve always led the way in calling for change. The others just lag behind, and – as we’ve seen after 12 years with Labour – they see constitutional change as a sort of refuge from other political crises, running to talk about it when they’re in trouble and drifting back into their establishment ways the second they think they’re out of the woods.”

As a party that has always been held back by the first-past-the-post electoral system, it is, perhaps, natural that the Lib Dems alone should remain consistent to their message on democratic reform. “For us, changing the way politics is done is a central part of what we’re here to do,” Clegg says. “But you’re right: speaking up in Westminster isn’t enough. That’s one of the reasons I meet people every week in town and village halls around the country. People can come along and ask me, to my face, anything and everything they like; believe me, they do too! One of the great things about Power2010 is that it’s asking for your ideas, from people well beyond the bubble at Westminster. I’m really looking forward to reading what people come up with after November 30th. Politicians don’t know it all, and we have to ask people directly if we’re to know what they want.”

Wisest is he who knows he does not know, goes the old Socratic belief. But philosophers are not kings. Nick Clegg is the third most likely person to be Prime Minister next year in a country that is still a two-party state. Until we see the kind of far-reaching democratic reform that he touches upon, that will not change. And change is what it’s all about. All politicians are either gamekeepers or gardeners and Nick Clegg clearly wants to be seen as the latter. Whether he has done enough to convince a public hungry for politicians to be the change they want to see in the world, only time and an election will tell.

Five Glaswegians will appear in court today, charged with criminal offences for protesting at an army day parade.   It is understood that  those arrested were singing or chanting republican slogans.

If you haven’t heard of ‘Army Day’ until now, that is because it is a newfangled invention. On the back of a deeply unpopular war, it would seem that the powers that be feel that a new set of propaganda excersizes is in order. Thus on Saturday parades took place through Britain’s towns and cities.

Now if the army feel the need to hold propaganda excersizes in our town squares then that is up to them. But they cannot expect to do so wihtout encountering dissent. As a citizen, I  am regularly involved in propaganda excerises in the streets of my city. I have gone on countless demonstrations. And on a great many we have encountered vocal opposition. And this is fine. It is called free expression. I have the right march or parade or demonstrate and other people have the right to express verbal opposition.

So why should the army get special treatment? Why should the army be entitled not only to hold propaganda excerises, but to expect that any dissent will be silenced by the full force of the law?  I find Army  Parades such  as these distasteful and idiotic. But I am far more appalled by the idea that our normal rights to free expression should be suspended so that they can go unchallenged.