
Well that's just peachy
During the worst recession in decades when unemployment is rapidly rising what better way to show how in touch you are than by bringing into government a guy famous for firing people on TV.
144 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jul 2007
"The Government respects the privacy of its citizens," said the Government Response to the Lords' report. "We take the protection of their personal information extremely seriously and we are committed to handling it safely and securely."
Do you think they believe this tosh themselves? Are they that deluded?
"many drug users turn to crime to feed their expensive habbits... How will this change if you legalise the drugs then heavily tax"
You're assuming that this is what would happen. Why not instead give addicts a prescription, so that's essentially free? The market for heroin collapses, dealers are put out of business and the rate of acquisitive crime drops like a stone.
You could pay for this by a (small) tax on softer drugs....
"he should stop crying and read the terms and conditions of those websites. soon as you host any image with them you forfit your copyright over the image"
You should read the terms and conditions because this is NOT TRUE AT ALL.
There is no way I would have signed up to flickr if it would mean surrendering my rights.
I'm seriously tempted to call you an idiot but I'm not going too.
"Those stats would be attained how exactly? Do they know and count everyone that uses (and how many times) and then work out the ratio of those that are seriously harmed - I doubt it."
The recent harm estimation did exactly that.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5230006.stm#drugs
Note "mean harm" on the graph. They worked it out in exactly the way you sugest.
Well the next election is sewn up before it starts. Groovy Dave's drugs policy is better than Labour's in the same way that herpes is better than AIDS, so that's a step forward. Kind of.
But we deserve better.
We deserve better than to be lied to by crooks who fiddle taxpayers' cash.
We deserve better than to be told what we may and may not do with our own bodies.
We deserve better than to have important policy decisions dictated to us by mouth-breathing cretins who are utterly unable to manage spelling, punctuation and grammar, let alone the avalanche of nonsense that passes for "news" coverage on this issue.
Enough is enough. It's high time something was done. We can sit around and bitch on the internet but no-one who can make a difference is listening.
The political parties will court the hysterical incoherent proles at the Mail and the Sun and will ignore our informed opinion, after all, we can only vote for one of three parties, all with identical policies.
I say no more, I say enough.
The next general election will be decided, like all the previous general elections, by a few thousand people in a few dozen seats around the country. There are the euro elections that no-one bothers to vote in and council elections that are decided on a few hundred votes. The system is rotten to the core. We can make that work to our advantage.
A part founded on completey legalising drugs standing in marginal seats would pick up votes. If we pushed hard enough it could pick up a lot of votes, maybe not a majority but enough to "send a message" as our politcial masters are so fond of saying.
Am I peeing in the wind here? Any thoughts?
Although the trend is unmistakable the figures quoted are ludicrous, and there is a reason for that.
Take a look at the actual survey, it's utterly rigged to get a positive result, as rather well described by Mr. Frizzlepop up thread:
http://www.ips.gov.uk/identity/publications-research.asp
Now I'd expect the lazy drooling spunkbaskets in the dead-tree press to mindlessly regurgitate whatever pan-fried nonsense the government provides, thus allowing them to fill pages with minimal effort, but I expect better from El Reg.
Have a look at the survey questions and see if you can see the problem, and also see why reputable polls from organisations most people have actually heard of show such different results. The government survey is designed to find the best ways to sell the scheme and not get an accurate picture of it's support.
I would expect any properly conducted survey to show a significant majority against the scheme now, after all this 55% is down from a high of 80% some years ago using the same bent methodology.