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I don't normally watch the "One Show" but I forgot to turn over today and Andrew Neill is on giving his take on the budget. I loved this one line in particular:

"This is a good budget for the Colombian Medellin Cartel"

He is right when he says that an ecstasy pill is now cheaper than a pint and a line of coke cheaper than an alcopop, and probably right that trying to attack binge drinking by increasing the cost will simply mean the real bingers take more pills or lines instead.

For me, cheaper alcohol simply means that when I do drink, which is not often, I can get a better quality of wine for the same money. Why should I be penalized?

Tough liberalism is what we need.

...it's more like 2% of our money that is actually real, tangible stuff.

You're lucky if you happen to have some of the real stuff in your hands in fact. Why shouldn't the good old coin counterfeiter have a go. The Masters of the Universe who are at this very moment plunging us all into financial depression are the ones who are really the counterfeiters. And on an unimaginable scale. So unimaginable that we would rather believe it's not been happening.

The fact is that what we think of as pounds and pence are really only represented in the real world by, at the last calculation, about £45bn worth of notes and coins. Yes, that's the sum total of what the state has ever issued in our name.

But add up what we all have in our bank accounts and the humungous numbers represented by our outstanding mortgage balances and so on, there are more like £1,800bn or one point eight trillion.

Is it any wonder that this house of cards is teetering? And the fraudulent pound coins and notes that sometimes inconvenience us when a shop assistant tells us we can't use the money we thought we had are only the visible manifestation of a fraud so much grander we'd prefer not to think it exists.

Maybe my blog reader is faltering, but I seem to be getting enough comment on the Irish EU Treaty vote from eurosceptic types. But very little from members of the most avowedly "pro-EU" political party in Britain. Are the Lib Dems collectively stunned by the result?

As that strangest of beasts a pretty anti-EU Lib Dem I'm personally kind of pleased.

On Thursday "The Insider" (a laughable conceit of sniping from behind anonymity mostly at people trying their best to do some good in local politics) in the Oxford Mail complained that a Green councillor had not updated his blog for a few months, describing a blog as a "self important forum to tell people what you have been up to".

Until I got into this I was extremely skeptical myself about it. And I did think blogging was a bit of onanistic self-promotion that probably nobody would ever read. Of course the Insiders gives the lie to that suggestion - since he, or she, obviously does follow them sometimes. We've seen how instant news from ordinary people on the scene - long before the news crews could get there - gave us insights into the July bombings, the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the war in Iraq direct from a chap in Baghdad. How the BBC and other news networks are paying people for their camera phone eye-witness reports and images and so on.

All one can reasonably conclude is that it is in fact the media running scared. Blogging offers an opportunity for people to air their opinions for others to find and read. It threatens the monopoly of the "Fleet Street" scribblers in holding our attention for a few precious minutes every day. And of course they do it for money - whether the journalist or commentator getting paid, to the media giant continuing to attract advertising - if we all got our opinions from each other (and they're no less valid - often it seems more honest and truthful than opinion journalists in my experience) instead of from the self-important scribbler in a newspaper or television office, they have little else of worth to us.

Finally running scared of the power of the web are we, "Insider"?

Just a couple of weeks after getting back into full swing blogging frenetically after redesigning the site it's likely to be another slowish week ahead. Mark Wadsworth thinks the new design is a bit confusing, and, whilst it appears to have achieved some of its aims in keeping more readers on the site to look at other stories, I tend to agree it's not been ideal. But I learned a lot in the process and so am starting again and will hopefully take a lot less time to rebuild, this time with more bling. And I've got a busy week ahead, with lots of conspiracies beginning to take off for me this week:

Monday - presentation to an Oxfordshire parish council about Community Land Trusts

Tuesday - meeting with the Oxford group of land taxers to put together a framework for a book we want to publish later this year on how the "Liberal Economic Tradition" exemplified in particular by the 1909 budget can answer our needs for social and economic justice without big state solutions to welfare and public services.

Friday - similarly conspiratorial meeting in London (my first visit to the National Liberal Club) amongst a group of similarly economically liberal thinkers.

...but on the plus side, we are finally interviewing for the position vacated by a colleague in September which holds out the prospect of me being a bit less stressed at work in the near future. However the boss will then be away for the rest of the week leaving me on my own supporting all our users as best I can.

Oh...and sometime in there before Tuesday night I've got to get a motion to Spring Conference on the monetary reform implications of recent events in the international capital markets signed off and in to Cowley Street for the deadline on Wenesday.