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...and we still don't seem to know what to do about bankers!

The Bank of Scotland, whatever is now left of it, is 312 years old. That of England just two years older. Ever since the banking system has been built on state protectionism, corporate welfare, monopoly privilege and, at its heart, a gigantic fraud.

The fraud was that a goldsmith could give both you and I receipts for my gold stored in his vaults and make money on both - from me a fee for keeping my gold, from you interest on the receipt you had borrowed from him. Indeed they found they could duplicate this so frequently, fraud upon fraud if you like, that though gold is perhaps regrettably no longer the basis of our money, the "hardest money", real "hard cash", amounts now to just three per cent of our total money supply in terms of everything we all have collectively borrowed and deposited.

To be fair, most goldsmiths at least issued notes of their own. Customers - both depositors and borrowers - chose which goldsmith to bank with on their reputation. If they became overstretched, issued what was felt to be too many receipts for the same gold, their notes would be less desirable in trade, there may even be a "run" when all the receipt holders tried to get their "real" money, the gold, out of the bank, which of course had much less gold than he had issued such receipts for. Nowadays, however, what they create and destroy in their lending business is denominated in the national currency, a currency issued nominally at least, by the state and guaranteed by the state.

This means it is no longer a private affair between a bank and its customers as to whether their business practices jeopardise their customers' savings; it is a problem for us all. We have ceded control of the supply of money issued in our name to private businesses whose main aim is to make profit for themselves and who, in the course of that otherwise noble pursuit, play fast and loose with the very air the entire economic system requires to function. And states protect them, bail them out as seems about to be the case in the US to the tune of almost countless billions, because they have to guarantee the currency they have so little control over.

Regular readers will know I am very fond of a quotation from Josiah Stamp, Liberal politican, Chairman of the Midland Bank in the 1920s and reputedly second wealthiest man in Britain in his lifetime:

"Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again.

"However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of Bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits."

It rather seems to me that with the events of the past few days, we may be "taking the earth away from them" (or, more accurately and nauseatingly, buying it back from them) which they have stolen from us with their inflationary approach to money, but leaving them the power to create those deposits all over again with which, in the next bubble, they will buy it all back again.

Everyone seems to think that money has somehow been pretty constant. The way it works I mean, not whether we call it shillings and guineas or pounds and pence. But the current confidence trick really began with the depression of the 1930s and the work of two extremely wealthy, powerful men in the US who persuaded the government of their day to set up the system that enabled them to create "our" money according to their corporate priorities. The results of John D Rockerfeller and John P Morgan Jnrs' work was the Federal Reserve and the rapid ramping up of fractional reserve banking, and the eventual demise of real solid backing for that currency.

If the current crisis really does turn out to be the "big crunch" at the end of the cycle begun by that 1930s "big bang" we should be ready with policy to replace that fraudulent, anti-competitive, oligarchical system, designed by the very wealthy to keep them that way for little actual productive work with something different. Entirely different. I do not detect any mainstream politicians with the cojones to say so. Our governments and politicians are but eunuchs to the bankers, and the longer that continues, the more the vast majority of us will suffer.

In this Vatican announcement of a new "Seven Deadly Sins" for the twenty first century, the Catholic Church has included the "taking of and dealing in drugs". Rarely can Rome be accused of political correctness, but on this occasion Archbishop Girotti has been spouting the most ungodly bollocks.

In the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 7 verse 15 Christ says: "There is nothing from without a man that entering into him can defile him. But the things which come from a man, those are they that defile a man."

In the very first chapter of the bible, Genesis 1, verse 29 God said to Adam: "Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed upon the earth, and all trees that have in themselves seed of their own kind, to be your meat."

Most of the substances that humanity has used as recreational drugs for thousands of years have been completely natural in origin. Created, they would acknowledge, by God. Nothing in that creation is inherently bad. Each has its own place in our "diet", with some providing sustenance, some healing, and some oiling social interactions.

The great twentieth century monk Thomas Merton said that it made a difference what the purpose of using any of these gifts of nature was, whether the taking of them became sinful. In his case he looked at alcohol, and suggested that alcohol was good when it was used for companionship and for helping social situations on their way, but bad when it was used as an indulgence merely to get drunk, to lose one's faculties of judgement.

One can argue I suppose that many drugs can do the latter better than the former. Try talking to someone who has just shot up some heroin! On the other hand, cannabis can induce much loquacious companionship and even cocaine or ecstasy can cut the ice at parties - especially for those of us who are naturally quite timid (terror inducingly so) in such situations. I suppose addiction is a form of gluttony in some cases that has gone to extremes. But the mere act of taking drugs cannot be described as a "deadly sin" just because of the substance being used.

Because of the "war on drugs" we have a terrible situation in which some places, indeed some entire countries are in the midst of a battle with the organized crime that supplies the underworld global market in drugs, and supporting such organized crime is compounding the misery for many. But it is that "war on drugs" that creates and exacerbates that misery.

The Vatican should be denouncing instead the "war on drugs" as a biblically indefensible attack on some of the uses human ingenuity has found for some of God's entirely good creation.

The "taking of drugs" will certainly not be on this Catholic's confessional list any time soon. And I reckon the current crop of Vatican apparatchiks falls woefully short of the wisdom of St Gregory the Great!

Earlier this year the big fuss about cannabis was research that purported to show that it *caused* mental health problems. Or, more specifically, that amongst those people with a predisposition to schizophrenia and other serious mental health problems it somehow lit the fuse that was already prepared.

Then recently the same statistical evidence used to justify this claim was re-examined by another group of researchers who found a more plausible explanation was that people with such mental health problems actually tend to try to self-medicate as their illness progresses. So use of cannabis is the effect, not the cause, of those mental health problems.

Now the Independent reports that 50% of drug addicts and alcoholics (the same thing of course!) have mental health problems for which the drinking or addiction is often an attempt to self medicate and that many are being misdiagnosed because practitioners see the symptom, not the cause - the addiction, not the pre-existing mental illness.

The distinction is of course crucial...

The former research tells us that some natural substances that mankind has used apparently for as long as human history are the cause of terrible illnesses, parents blame the drugs and the drug dealers for their tragically damaged, sometimes terminally, children and the "war on drugs" has a powerful propaganda weapon.

The latter says that these drugs seem to offer some kind of relief for an often undiagnosed condition. Perhaps even that the medical wisdom of the ancients was quite sound. And that the "war on drugs" is possibly little more than a classic moral panic that has been doing more harm than good for the best part of a century.

I know which side I am on. The "war on drugs" leaves more casualties than the drugs themselves. It is that that is immoral. Way beyond the harm that a user of a properly regulated, non-criminal underworld market would suffer.

Not surprisingly there's a reasonably well informed debate going on on Starkey's Last Word with Howard Marks on the show, Fraser Nelson from the Spectator - "I'm normally of a libertarian leaning but..." (you either are or you aren't IMHO) - has brought up some hackneyed cliches -

The illicit drugs market is not like the smuggling of tobacco:

He was worried that if you made drugs legal and controlled you would still have a huge amount of black market product like the fact that one in four packets of cigarettes are smuggled. The point is is that for the main part the smuggled tobacco products are legally produced and controlled, they're just avoiding the tax on them. If you could buy quality controlled Heroin from Beyer (who hold the trademark on the name incidentally) in small measured doses quality controlled and as "safe" as can be made, why would you ever go back to buying the Vim (sorry, Cif) cut crap sold out of the back of white BMWs? Even if you did have smuggled stuff to get round any tax measures imposed by government, it would be of the same quality as the legally sold and taxed stuff or they would not be able to sell it.

They've tried legalization in Alaska/Netherlands/Switzerland/wherever and it didn't work:

Erm, no, they didn't. They made possession and use a lesser or no offense, but acting alone in the world they could not get into the supply side and start controlling the quality and availability of supply. They practiced "tolerance" rather than full blown legalization with all the structures of the market opened up. It still did not make it socially acceptable to be a drug user and seek help for it when you needed it.

We're an island, it ought to be easy to cut off the supply:

Wrong. Especially with "harder" drugs. Such is the technology available to concentrate and then dilute drugs, especially heroin, that you can fit enough to supply an addict for a whole month under a postage stamp. How on earth are we supposed to police that? You don't have to ship it around in multi-billion dollar bundles on board someone's Falmouth registered yacht. The more we clamp down the more people work on the concentration technologies and the only thing that is likely to result is that people who don't know how to dilute properly will die.

Yesterday in my piece about the Policy Exchange think tank's suggestion that Oxford and Cambridge ought to be allowed to expand to as many as a million homes I mentioned the work "Car Free Cities" by J H Crawford which I came across a decade ago when looking into Oxford's last Local Plan. In it he postulates a city of a million people with a topology and transport system that means that any two addresses anywhere in the city would be no more than 35 minutes apart by foot and rapid transit system.

The city is made up of many districts of about 12,000 population like strings of beads along one of three overlapping rapid transport loops. Every home is less than five minutes walk from open countryside. And whilst the densities within the districts are amongst the highest on earth (similar to Seoul, for example, although nothing is more than three stories in the reference designs) only 20% of the total 100 sq mile (10 by 10) area is developed at all, leaving all the areas between the beads and strings as open countryside or managed parkland or whatever. Overall then the density is not a lot greater than Oxford's current density and less than the average of Greater London as a whole.

So, for a bit of fun, I superimposed Crawford's one million population city topology onto the ten by ten mile square centered on the current centre of Oxford. Now sure, a million population is only probably about a third of the million households the Policy Exchange report was ultimately suggesting, but if anyone says to you that it would simply be impossible to imagine a million people in the area between Wheatley and Eynsham, Littlemore and Kidlington, you can say you have seen how, and with no traffic and only 20% of the land developed to boot! It would currently take me over an hour to get from the end of one of these loops to about a third of the way out the adjacent one, incidentally.

Now nobody is suggesting that we do this, least of all me. I'm just demonstrating that it would be possible, indeed whilst making more of the green belt actually because all the space would be accessible in minutes rather than in half an hour in the car, it would reach right into everyone's neighbourhood - with open country no more than 400m from every front door. Fitting such principles into existing cities is of course much more difficult than an academic sitting at a drawing board with a blank sheet of paper. They need not be loops for example but twelve strings with termini at the end of each. It would increase average journey times but not the overall maximum of 35 minutes door to door and could be fitted in along existing radial roads as a series of villages.

Incidentally, the picture on the right here shows some of the housing in the ward with the highest density in England, at least that I can find - a "middle level super output area" either side of the Cromwell Rd in Kensington & Chelsea.  I notice from Net House Prices that there have been 267 £1m plus residential property transactions in the last eight years in this post code area.  This is getting pretty close to the densities that would be required in a city such as that in Crawford's book.  It's hardly slum clearance stuff is it!