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Whilst I am sure that petty threats from a minor blogger well beyond the outskirts of the Westminster village who only leaves Headington Hill once a month to buy toiletries in Crabtree and Evelyn will cut little ice with Lib Dem party apparatchiks either in Cowley Street or the West Midlands region, I hereby pledge my support for Cllr Gavin Webb, the "Stoke One". Gavin has been suspended from the party pending a full hearing for, ostensibly at least, voicing personal opinions on liberal and libertarian issues which we both largely share.

If he is out of the party for that, then it is likely that I would be too if it weren't for the fact that I get on seemingly much better with my local party.

I am aware that Gavin has taken the decision not to be in the official Lib Dem council group at Stoke for some time, and that to some he has been a bit of a thorn in the side, but that in itself is no good reason to expel him from the party, nor, he says, has he actually been given details yet (six weeks or so after the event now) of the "charges" against him, so we can only really assume it is for the temerity of holding an opinion.

A number of fellow party members with libertarian leanings have started up a web site to support Gavin at "Save the Stoke One". Having spent my best years at school very near Stoke, I never thought I'd find anything amongst the former smoke stacks and bottle kilns to want to save! Though I distinctly remember some older school friends raving on about seeing The Clash at Victoria Hall in the early eighties!

For all those people who claim that alternate weekly residual waste collection has given rise in Oxford to a plague of rats and who believe they can demonstrate that by pointing to the 5% increase in the number of callouts to the council's pest control department in the second half of the year (despite a 20% drop in the first half of the year) comes less comforting news from elsewhere in the country:

BBC NEWS | England | Shropshire | Rat complaints double in a year:

Mr Rodgers says other areas have experienced the same problem

Shrewsbury and Atcham Borough Council received 118 calls in 2006 and they have had 255 so far in 2007.

Rat-catcher Geoff Rodgers said the animals love decking, water features and bird seed but he believes climate change is also a factor.

"We've seen a marked increase this year in the amount of calls this autumn but this area is no different to other areas in the country," he said.

He added: "They've all experienced the same problem. It's just something that we have got to work with and bear in mind.

"With climate change these creatures adapt to it like they adapt to other things."

I've solved the world's energy problems. Well, to give due credit, my boss and I did out on our lunchtime "health walk" (yes me!).

And no, it doesn't involve harnessing the steam coming off my shirt after a quick perambulation round Headington Hill Park!

For a few years now I've been dimly aware of some statistic that the energy from the sun that reaches the planet's surface is so enormous overall that just a few hundred square miles of hot desert covered with the right kind of solar panels/collectors/converters could supply every drop of the world's current energy use from fossil, nuclear, and all other large commercial sources and a whole load more.

And I found this map at Wikipedia tonight:

Basically it shows in the orange areas the relative amounts of solar energy that hits the surface and the little black disks are the area required on each continent to between them supply the entire planet's energy needs.

But every time I've thought about it the nagging thought has come along, what about transmission loss? Just how do you get all that electricity from Mali to Manchester? And I mentioned it out walking today and the boss had an instant answer - you don't. If the solar potential is so great why not use it to power hydrogen extraction plants for fuel cells?

Bingo. What's wrong with that then? Sun, sea, sand and power cells...better than sex - well, at least all those exhibitionists amongst you will be able to keep the lights on still....:)

You could even use it, I suppose, to water the deserts. Surely the amount of money we are storing up in disposal costs for nuclear waste, current and future, could be well put to developing this sort of thing. These people seem to be doing a "Sterling" job developing the technology.

Failing that, personally, I would really love to live in one of these:

A conversation got me thinking; what is it we seek to control through drugs laws? Is it the substance in question itself, as the system for enforcement would have it - since it prohibits specific substances. Is it the effects of taking certain substances? And if so, is it the health effects, the social effects or the immediate short term effects of taking those substances?

It seems to me that the latter, the short term usually neurological effects that people seek, are mostly benign. People don't do drugs in order to hurt themselves, to bring on short term pain, usually, but in order to give them a particular desirable feeling - often of wellbeing, escape from some painful reality, sometimes of added confidence, at other times of empathy for others, sometimes merely relaxation, or extra energy. All these seem like legitimate feelings and effects for people to want to seek. And sure, they can be gained by all sorts of ways other than by taking drugs - though possibly with more difficulty and less convenience.

But is it actually immoral to take substances to achieve such ends? Clearly not, as many legal substances can do the same things and we don't necessarily proscribe chocolate (the theobromides - poisonous to dogs for example - promote wellbeing), coffee (the caffeine is the most commonly used stimulant on earth) or St John's Wort (an ancient treatment for depression, possibly an "over the counter" SSRI). Heck, humanity might not have survived so long without the supposed aphrodisiac effects of many natural and often exotic foodstuffs and supplements.

Anyway, the point is that we put all sorts of things, natural and synthetic, from oysters to Horlicks, into our bodies in an attempt to achieve certain feelings. And there are "chemists" out there, a whole industry, constantly trying to reproduce some of the effects of illegal substances without actually using any illegal substances. The science will likely always be one step ahead of the legislators, so I have no doubt that these concoctions are achieving more than a placebo effect. You can buy them on the internet for next day delivery from online stores that have forums that people join to say how much they enjoyed them or not. Just like eBay or Tesco online.

But whilst they may be legal, are they safe? They certainly don't have much of a regulatory framework or testing regime to prove themselves. Yet they are legal when many proscribed drugs have had centuries, even millennia of use for us to examine for evidence about their safety.

Why is heroin so intrinsically bad when common lore at least says that our longest reigning monarch to date ran the empire on an opium concoction; even a Roman emperor kept the northern Germanic tribes at bay whilst writing a classic tome about his predecessors while taking opium. Tales tell of how the first president of the United States kept himself in balance with cannabis and that the slavery campaigner William Wilberforce similarly emancipated half the world while toking. Some of our greatest poets seem to have had a penchant for mind-bending substances - would we have denied the world their art worried about what they may have been taking when producing it? And, just as today, throughout history there have been chemists, alchemists, trying to find such things as the elixir of youth.

So on the one hand we have all these relatively natural substances - opium, cannabis, coca, certain fungi and so on - used for millennia and with relatively well researched evidence about their effectiveness, the dosages at which they are safe (from experience if nothing else) and the circumstances in which they may not be, and they are illegal. Even the main active ingredients in some synthesized drugs like ecstasy have a hundred year history since it was patented my Merck and has been tested off and on for different uses - a drug waiting for something to cure! On the other we have perfectly legal concoctions, though nobody but the creator and I suppose a DEA investigator if they wanted to check, knows what's in them, they have little research history and for all we know they might be toilet cleaner and arsenic.

The devil you know, versus the devil you don't? I know which I would consider safer. Drugs laws are pointless. They criminalize the wrong people. And in the process drive the whole thing underground into a system controlled by organized crime - killing far more people in that process, from failed narco-states to street gangs in Manchester or London. And that criminalization makes it all the harder for people to seek help or even to be open about their use, often until it's too late. We know it would be possible to maintain a fairly humdrum ordinary existence even addicted to opium if it were available, regulated and quality controlled, for before the Harrison narcotics acts in the US that started the "war on drugs" we know that the preponderance of addicts were white upper and upper middle class women, like Queen Victoria mentioned above. We don't know that about the toilet cleaner and arsenic concoction deemed legal - albeit by default probably - and I think I know what I would rather my friends and family were taking if they were that way inclined.

When reputable science puts ecstasy nearly twenty places below alcohol and tobacco in the list of the most harmful substances and yet its supply can get you a life sentence who do we think these laws are serving?

Well done to Iain Dale on News 24 reviewing the Dead Tree Press tonight. He picked up on the ridiculous story of Andrew Phillips, the Lib Dem peer who wants to start taking things easy at 67 but has run foul of the house rules that say you can never really retire. You can take leave of absence but nobody's quite sure it seems whether that would reduce your party's presence or not and allow an extra place to be allocated next time there were a raft of party appointments.

These are of course the same rules that prevent people like Emma Nicholson from making an open decision about whether to stick with Europe or the Lords under the ban on holding a dual mandate - sitting in a national as well as a European legislatures.

Blair indeed promised to have this particular problem addressed for that very reason - so peers could resign to run for the European Parliament if they wanted to.

Whilst I completely agree with Iain on the necessity to elect the House of Lords, and as soon as possible, it's a bit ironic that the story that prompted it was Andrew Phillips, who takes a contrary line to party policy and would rather see the house remain pretty much wholly appointed as I understand it.

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