A bit late to the Baroness Scotland party, I’m afraid, but because it’s a perfect opportunity to be able to say, “bang to rights” I thought I’d get involved. Better late than never.

If you don’t already know, the woman who passed a law forcing everyone to check that prospective employees have been authorised by the state to work was found to be employing an unauthorised worker. She’s been fined £5k, and everyone except Gordon Brown and his cabinet seem to think that breaking your own law is something that should cost you your job. Political nerds watch incredulously as Brown hopes the story will just go away.

Yesterday, on the radio, a well rehearsed and typically monotone Prime Minister told 5 Live’s listeners that resignation for Baroness Scotland would be inappropriate because all she’d done is forget to take some photocopies.

Then, tonight, Harriet Harman drags herself onto Question Time? and parrots exactly the same well rehearsed line.

Funnily enough I rehearsed my own line on this particular subject, and it’s very simple:

The reason you need the photocopies is to prove you’ve looked at the documents in the first place. No photocopies, no proof you’ve followed the rules. That’s why she’s been fined £5k, and that’s why she needs to be sacked.

The law considers failure to provide photocopies to be as bad as not looking in the first place for that very reason, so as not to create an incentive for people to have a lassez faire ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy regarding unauthorised employment.

It, once again, comes down to trust in politics and trust in politicians. One rule for them and another for us? The public just won’t tolerate it, if they ever really did.

Brown seems incapable of understanding just how much damage he’s doing by continuing to stick to Campbell’s stupid 12 days rule (if you’re still in the papers after 12 days, says Campbell, you have to resign… ergo, if it’s less than 12 days, wait and see what happens) in order to protect his team rather than doing the obvious and decent thing.

He has good grounds for thinking the story will go away before the 12 days are up – It’s Labour’s Conference after all, so it’s almost inevitable that the Baroness will drop off the news agenda very soon.

An end to spin? Not quite there yet, I’m afraid. Baroness Scotland’s resignation isn’t on Brown’s Media Grid, so it’s not going to happen.

Down in Bournemouth I met a lot of Lib Dem Bloggers, but there’s one I didn’t meet – the pseudonymous Costigan Quist, winner of the Lib Dem Blog of the Year award on the Sunday, and ex-blogger on the Monday.

Apparently he was in the room when the award was given out, yet got his friend to accept the award on his behalf anyway – there were other rumours that Mr Quist was going to a lot of trouble to avoid anyone linking the blog to his face.

What was the reason for this level of paranoia? Curious bloggers had to know! It’s not like bloggers are camped by paparazzi photographers, or stalked by tabloid journalists. It’s not as if Costigan had been attacking people (I’m reasonably certain he never attacked anyone). He’s not been publishing scoops, or exclusives, or anything that raises even the slightest hint of controversy.

So the rumour doing the rounds (and it’s from a pretty good source so has a lot of credibility) is that the reason for all this anonymity is because Costigan is, in fact, a Lib Dem Councillor in a (exact words were) ‘a very SDP area’, and he’s terrified that his blog will be used against him.

If that rumour is true, that’s incredibly disappointing. The idea that any Lib Dems are actually perfectly liberal, but have to pretend to be left wingers? That’s heart breaking.

Of course, it’s all rumour, so don’t take this as gospel, but this is a theme I’m going to be coming back to again and again over the course of this next year: Don’t hide your liberalism.

Although Radio 5 were umming and ahhing about whether or not to tune in to Barack Obama’s speech or Nick Clegg’s, they thankfully picked Nick Clegg so I had the Leader keeping me company on the drive back up from Conference.

It’s not easy being the leader of the Lib Dems. He’s got to stop people switching to the Conservatives or the Greens, and he has to try to reach out to independents, soft Tories and soft Labour voters to, if he can, get them to consider voting Lib Dem. And… he needs to keep existing Lib Dems on board and avoid getting knifed. Meanwhile, he has no ability to impose policy – he’s completely at the mercy of what the members vote for or against.

The job is, in short, impossible.

Now away from the hardcore political geekery of the blogosphere, I think he gave some good reasons for people (not libertarians) to look at the Lib Dems: Removing people who earn less than £10,000 from tax is a brilliant policy – although you can appreciate it doesn’t go far enough for me -  I also think the stuff about breaking the state up, reducing the number of departments in Whitehall by half and devolving power is at least pointing in the right direction. I can support that sort of thing.

The Green stuff is, probably, a bit scary (not quite as scary as Glee club though.) It seems that this is for the Lib Dem activists who, as a rule, are less sceptical about climate change than I am. It could be that I’m completely out of touch with the majority opinion here, but I still believe that environmentalism is a vote loser… and fundamentally illiberal. There are strong parallels with the anti-Terror legislation – infringing liberty, making sacrifices in the hope that some unspecified thing might not happen in the future.

The Green issue is no less a threat to liberty – it’s just it primarily hurts people’s economic freedom, and Lib Dems, as a rule, don’t seem to make that connection that if you control people economically, you control them full stop.

Taking off my policy hat and putting on my communications hat, some of the rhetorical flourishes, too, were good. Telling the story about each of his team in their departments was a very nice touch – it answered the question, “what would a Lib Dem Government be like?” and it almost sounded quite good.

Nick’s obvious ambition and hunger for success comes across well, too. This was his best speech, but I don’t think it did anything to address the problems people have with this party once and for all.

The highlight? Pointing out that the people could make just about anyone the Government, if they wanted it badly enough. It doesn’t have to be the Tories, and it’s not right that Cameron might win power because it’s now his ‘turn’ rather than having to earn it.

It must be final day of the Lib Dem conference. Completely out of the blue I get an email from Comment is Free inviting me to submit something. I fired something out before setting off in my car for Halifax, only to discover they needed another paragraph. Ended up stopping at Service Stations trying to find some Wi-Fi, then realised I had 15 minutes left on the Laptop battery. Whoops. I had to stop again to send them a photo. Was quite exciting really – the finished piece is here.

And yes, this really happened…

I’d heard Gordon Brown on the radio earlier in the day claiming the reason he wanted to reduce the Trident fleet to 3 was because of concerns about nuclear proliferation. So, of course, I said:

“This is classic Gordon Brown. Who else would reduce the number of submarines to 3 and then claim he’s doing it to save the world, when everyone knows we can’t afford to replace one sub, never mind 3.”

I also made the point that Nick gave his speech at the same time Obama was giving his. Not good.

But yes, that’s my dose of mainstream media. Whether or not this is something that’s repeated is a complete mystery. I suspect the reality is that things will return to normal soon. All this sort of thing is actually highly disruptive to my normal blogging – I apologise. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

This is the speech I gave at the Politics and Prohibition event. Twas brilliant fun, although all the attention fell on Colin Eldridge who had the miserable task of defending the Nanny State in the worst possible context ever. As a handy bonus I also met fellow bloggers Dick Puddlecote and the Heresiarch (easily recognisable by the mask he wears). But anyway, without further ado here’s (roughly) what I said:

So, I’m a political blogger. If you don’t know what that is, bloggers are people who write on the internet, have no money and as long as they don’t libel anyone they can say whatever they want – the worst thing that can happen to a blogger is someone else writes about them pointing out how insufferably stupid and wrong they are – that’s never happened to me, obviously.

On the other hand, there’s politicians.

With a few exceptions, they’re not free to talk openly and freely in public. They need to win elections so they need to avoid committing political suicide. The result is political dialogue that, I think, leaves a lot to desired. Anyone with even the most basic critical thinking skills can see that political communication and policy is dominated by rhetoric and fallacy, and this compounds the problems of trust in politics and politicians.

One example I’ve used before:  David Cameron, right, was in the treasury, right, on Black Wednesday. Therefore he’s not fit to be prime minister.

I’m sure most of the people in this room can understand why that’s not a good argument. But this culture is the root of the problem for those of us against prohibition.

We look at the evidence. We look at the facts. We can be reasonably certain that prohibition costs the economy something in the region of twenty billion a year and  funnels huge buckets of money into the hands of criminals… who don’t pay tax. Lucky them.

Crucially, prohibition does not work – by that I mean the point of prohibition is to stop people taking drugs. Now I know this is completely mind-blowing, but people still take drugs!

So the first fallacy here is that if you ended prohibition, people would start taking drugs. Truth is most people are aware that all drugs have both desirable and undesirable qualities.  Philip K Dick, the sci-fi writer, made the case that some drugs are, in fact, more than enough punishment in and of themselves. Heroin is a classic example of this, but I’m sure we’ve all met people who’ve gone paranoid from speed, dull witted from cannabis. It seems cruel and usual to regard these people as criminals as well.

There’s another big fallacy I like to call the Argumentum Ad Maternitate (and i’d like to thank people on twitter for helping me with the latin on that one). This is the belief that mothers are always right, so the opinions of “Mothers Against Drugs” (or MAD for short) for example,  seems to take priority over everyone else when drug policy is being drawn up… and I think that’s damaging and unhealthy for democracy in general and pretty close to rule by lynch mob.

But it’s also depressingly inevitable that politicians, appealing to the Argumentum Ad Maternitate themselves, believe it to be politically advantageous to be seen as on the same side as Mothers Against Drugs. We know that’s because of the tabloids who seem to regard their readers as an irredeemably clueless mob, but having a nice ‘drugs are bad, m’kay’ sound-bite in the tabloids might well be regarded as a sort of cat nip for politicians.

The miserable reality here is that the three main political parties are holding a proverbial gun to each other’s heads. As long as we all follow the usual populist authoritarian nanny state tabloid agenda, everything’s fine… but it’s not fine, is it?

This is a fantastic state of affairs for Labour. But what about us in the Liberal Democrats? They have us on the defensive. We’re on the back foot. We’re scrabbling around trying to avoid a ‘Lib Dems would legalise drugs’ leaflet when we should be saying, over and over again, that Labour’s drug policies line the pockets of criminals, that the official policy of the Liberal Democrats is to get rid of uncontrollable street dealers selling poisons to children who have no recourse to law.

We need our politicians to have the confidence and courage to re-frame this debate, to let a valid, reasoned argument be heard in public, in the mainstream and not just out here in the fringes.