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I don't suppose they were referred to the local DAAT (Drug and Alcohol Action Team), or SMART (Substance Misuse Arrest Referral Team), nor will the "formal warning" likely include a Drugs Testing and Treatment Order (DTTO). They're unlikely to have a probation officer who needs to send their details to the Employment Service to get their benefits stopped, but what the hell - they've got off basically...

...one rule for the few, and one for the many. Britain's drugs laws...useless, counterproductive and deadly...but usually only if you are poor.

This story caught my eye. It seems a bit bonkers really. Though I know the law is changing is respect of standing for election, but it seems you can judge your fellow citizens at 19 but not yet represent them:

New JP, 19, youngest in country: A 19-year-old law student has become the country's youngest magistrate, the government has confirmed.

Fair play to Miss Tate - if you can, do - it just strikes me as odd that you can get selected by a "local advisory committee" but not elected by a plebiscite.

On the subject though of making the bench more representative of the community, I think this is a fudge personally. A year ago I took a friend to his speeding hearing at Rugby magistrates and was sitting there all day waiting for his case to be heard, despite arriving well before the doors even opened as we were advised to do in order to get dealt with early. Apparently, if he had taken a brief along, he would have been seen earlier. Frankly I don't think it's relevant - if they tell you it's first come first served they should stick to that. Just because someone might be paying for representation shouldn't mean the rest of us have to wait all day.

All day there were whole families trooping in and out and hanging around. It was clearly a day out for people who wouldn't or couldn't pay their child support or who had breached their DTTO. It all made me feel that the time and money that processing these sorts of cases through the magistrates courts was certainly not in the community's interest. Most were clearly "regulars". Well known to the court staff and the duty solicitors.

On the one hand we have Antonia Bance regaling us about her recent e-democracy conference (arranged in Budapest by the government department that was previously headed by the now e-for-environment David Milliband) and that Cllr Tall bloke going on about his nearly win in some e-politix Oscars.

I am clearly never going to make any money in this life, as I am always five years ahead of everyone.

When I moved down to Oxford twelve years ago I tried to persuade our local book sellers to let me help them develop a retail over the internet system. They weren't yet interested. And when I was a city councillor, five years or so ago now, I created a website for my scrutiny committee to try to give another mechanism for the public to get involved in the scrutiny review of "Drugs and Street Crime" we were doing. (There's a subtle connection here - the author of that drugs and street crime report, Richard Huggins of Oxford Brookes University, also at the time had just co-authored a book called "New Media and Politics" - about all this sort of stuff as well).

Of course, back then, I actually got bollocked for doing so by the council. Okay, so I did use the council's brand - logo and website style - but so what, I was a councillor and this was on council business that would not have come to pass (indeed hasn't since so far as I am aware) without someone getting on and doing it. But it seemed an obvious way at the time of offering a new way that people could participate in the discussions going on on their behalf at the Town Hall.

But now I believe these gongs and conferences are actually out of date before they've really got started too.

You see now it's not a case of getting government online, but the case that as more people get online less government is required. It is true that cyberspace, at the moment at least, is a great leveller. Often those effects are seen in the most unsavoury ways - paedophiles pretending to be kids that they could never get away with in the real world and so on. But think a little further and you realise that the internet and access to it can give people the sort of advantages that once upon a time the state was set up to ensure.

Economies of scale, for example - I could now join a purchasing consortium with members across Europe to ensure I can buy into goods and services at the best prices. I can choose from suppliers all over the place. I can shop around for health care more easily. I could even go without pay if I were remunerated in Amazon wish-list items or Tesco online credits - sort that out Mr Taxman! I can already, in many aspects of life, effectively choose the jurisdiction in which to live and transact business.

It could have the potential, ironically given the huge business money that is spreading the net ever wider, to make it far easier for me to trade without those global conglomerate intermediaries we currently love or hate. Why should I need to buy my chocolate from Nestle at all if I can buy direct from some Ghanaian farmer put online by the MIT $100 laptop say? One of the first and most exciting internet purchases for me was when I discovered a small co-operative producer of Champagne where I could get 1990 vintage pop for a tenner a bottle and got a case for a Lib Dem election night party! Small businesses come to love it - it extends their reach far beyond anything else they can afford to do.

The same friend who introduced me to Open Capital Partnerships put it this way...

Once upon a time markets were decentralised and disconnected. The local village market - walking distance away at most - had to be pretty self-sufficient.

Then came decentralised and connected. Transport improved, and whilst you would still have to trade for things locally, agents could then transfer them to another, connected, market.

Then came centralised and connected - where we are now - where all the apparatus of states and global trade pulls things together. We have globally trusted currencies and government to enforce standards and so on.

But now we are able to go back to decentralised and super-connected when a lot of those intermediaries may become unnecessary. We are able to trade with almost anyone else in the world, at least within the forseeable future. Governments' role in this environment is not to enforce or do anything but to enable us to do more for ourselves. So we should support mechanisms to make it easier for people to be included in this brave new world.

A wireless mesh for Oxford would be a good start - that every household and business from Grenoble Road to Lakeside should be within direct access of superfast wireless broadband telecommunications at minimal connection cost. (By my reckoning this would be a minor capital project - about £1.5m capital cost).

Government could offer a role as "identity management" agents - to give trading counterparties more confidence by having a single identity authority. But on the other hand, why should we use theirs? In the business world there are competing trust management companies - Thawte and Verisign and so on (though these two may have been merged more recently, have they? I seem to remember reading something). And the whole rationale of trading between individual counterparties is that you save money by learning to trust that counterparty, not needing someone else to guarantee it at additional cost.

I'll bet these roles of "e-government" came up very little in Budapest - it would, after all, be a case of turkeys voting for Christmas. Maybe someone will read this this time and invite me to the equivalent conference in 2011 when they're ready to hear these things...:)