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.