Poor, poor Nick Clegg. What can be said about a man who chose to dare? He successfully moved the Lib Dems from the pristine yet pointless ground of an unelectable party but only managed to turn it into a disreputable one. At its most cynical, the political scene in Britain today can be summarised thus. Labour do awful things and feel bad afterwards. Tories do awful things and feel good afterwards. Lib Dems, however, do nothing.

The result being that the government that no one wanted was able to fight the crisis completely on its own terms.  The image presented, to the public as well as to the circling international credit ratings agencies, was one of unity; two parties fighting together, and a nation whose classes were all in it together. It was expected that the presence of Lib Dems at the table would force their partners to be more cautious in applying their agenda of slash and burn.

A swathe of unpopular reforms however, ended any hopes that the Lib Dems would be able to rein in some of the Conservatives’ more vicious tendencies. At their best they were a speed bump to their partners, who knew that, never having actually held office, the Lib Dems would not have the means or the experience to be contenders on the stage of power. To all those who voted Lib Dem and are disappointed: you have a right to be. When it came for them to have their moment in the sun they got burnt.

It’s not as if Clegg and co. have been completely idle since they took their poisoned chalice. One thing the Lib Dems have been working hard on is the coalition’s strange Orwellian doublespeak. The argument that a cut in the 50p tax rate for those earning more than £150,000 will hit the rich is a bold statement.  It may indeed have done more damage than anything else to the idea of a recovery where everyone, rich and poor, will help pay the way. Ed Miliband may relish the opportunity, presented by the recent cash for access scandal, to brand their partners “the same old Tories”. But for the Lib Dem voters it seems as if they are willing stooges to one of the most blatantly elitist governments in recent memory.

The rupture between party and voter takes on another twist with the proposed NHS reforms. A recent poll by the Royal College of Physicians showed that 7 out of 10 Doctors voted to reject the reforms. They cited fears such as risks to the quality of patient care and the eventual total privatisation of the NHS. Original public outcry against reforms is complemented by the scepticism of the professional class expected to make them work.  The Lib Dems failure to stop this bill is another missed opportunity  to reconnect with the public, following on from their broken promises over tuition fees. 

These are the partners the Lib Dems have chosen for themselves. Their voters expected them to act as a counterweight within government, not to be swallowed up by it. This is why Nick Clegg has breached his mandate from his pivotal minority of voters.  Whilst the party elite have chosen to turn blue, their electorate and once party faithful prefer to jump ship into the grey waters of apathy and shame.  Nick Clegg has led his party into hell; I doubt he will be leading it out again. 

Last Saturday, at a summit in Antigua, the President of Guatemala called for an end to the war on drugs. He spoke as the leader of a country with one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world – 39 per hundred thousand per year. The UK suffers just 1.2.

Also present were senior representatives from El Salvador and Honduras. With murder rates of 71 and 86 per hundred thousand, these two nations have the worst record in the world, meaning that if you died last year in Honduras, there is a one in sixteen chance that you were murdered. The widespread and deadly violence that has given rise to these figures is a by-product of a long and protracted mission to make the cocaine more difficult and expensive to obtain.

In Afghanistan the black market for opium fuels widespread corruption which undermines the flimsy government and also funds terrorism and insurgency. In West Africa, an emerging drug trafficking network adds to the chaos and violence that typifies much of the region. In Colombia, the world’s largest producer of cocaine, the trade fuelled the disgustingly bloody civil war that began in the 80s and has effectively continued into the 21st century, with only some recent amelioration. In the early 90s much of the country lay in the hands of murderous drug lord Pablo Escobar and in 1992 alone 27,100 people were killed in the violence. 

With the exception of El Salvador, the countries most hit by the ‘war on drugs’ do not have a serious domestic drug abuse problem. They are in this position out of international obligation to prop up the failing policy approaches in the developed nations. As the influential UN Global Commission on Drug Policy has pointed out, the vast, deadly and destructive effort put into the ‘war on drugs’  since it began at the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961 (although Nixon would only coin the term 10 years later), has failed. It has failed to prevent the steady increase in drug abuse over the past decades and it has failed to stem both demand and supply of narcotics. It has failed because it is totally the wrong approach.

Dr. Hugh and Professor Stevens’ 2010 report on drug consumption in Portugal has shown clearly that in the 10 years since that country decriminalised all drugs, consumption trends were consistent with other countries which had not liberalised their policies. In fact, heroin abuse, the main concern of the Portuguese government, actually decreased over the period. Reinarman et al’s study of cannabis consumption in Dutch cities (where it is legal and regulated) compared with San Fransisco (where it is not), comprehensively concluded that there was no evidence that decriminalisation either decreased use or increased the age at which people began consumption. Similarly, the aforementioned UN report cites a number of studies which show that cannabis decriminalisation in the state of Western Australia did not change consumption patterns. Evidence clearly suggests that there is a negligible link between drug decriminalisation and increased consumption. This is not surprising – consider how easy and how cheap it is to get hold of most drugs in heavily policed western cities.

Besides being utterly ineffective at reducing consumption, criminalisation of drug abuse has had disastrous consequences for users and society at large. In the case of softer drugs like cannabis, it turns otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals. In the case of more harmful, addictive drugs, it forces the dependent to buy adulterated, dirty strains. In countries which lack the needle swapping programmes and methadone clinics that the UK has reluctantly introduced, HIV prevalence amongst users of injected drugs tends to be around 40%.

Instead of treating drug addiction as a serious sociological and psychological problem, a complex medical issue for those who suffer it, we instead choose to bully and arrest addicts in the forlorn hope that this will somehow cure them of their drug-dependence. We exacerbate the dangers and harm to users and criminalise decent people unnecessarily, at a cost of about £14bn per year in the UK alone.

The ‘war on drugs’ has been a brutal and violent war. The end result is a policy of prohibition that utterly fails to stem casual use and actually increases harm to addicts, while unnecessarily criminalising millions of people at a huge financial cost. It is time to end this madness.

‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ is generally a sound rule for democratic institutions, as with most things in life. So why on earth the mantra is applied to our second chamber I do not know.

The House of Lords used to encapsulate everything odious about Britain, especially its entrenched elites. Gone mercifully are the days when aristocrats could dictate policy in taxation and spending. Yet work is still to be done. There remains a rut of about 90 hereditary peers and offensively, in one of the most irreligious societies on earth, 26 Church of England bishops — placing us comfortably amongst Burkina Faso, Turkmenistan and Saudi Arabia in the democratic premier league. Though I confess to a soft spot for Archbishop Rowan Williams (his voice is ready-made for audiobooks, no?) the good nature of these men (exclusively men, of course) is not a price worth paying for our inclusion with Iran as the only other country to let unelected clerics make the laws we must obey.

In 1997 most inherited seats were rescinded in favour of appointed peerages. This prerogative has been used and abused by Prime Ministers for blatant patronage, packing it full of dodgy donors and personal cronies, exerting a massive corrupting influence throughout the highest echelons of business and politics. The ‘Cash for Honours’ scandal that dogged Blair’s last days in office poisoned his legacy almost as much as Iraq. The reforms merely changed the Lords from an aristocratic institution to one predominantly inhabited by the nouveau riche. As it is constituted today its members are either born into it, or they have bought into it. It remains a tool of the privileged, ‘perhaps the most potent symbol of a closed society’ says our Deputy PM. Quite so. The Lords is a ridiculous anachronism that cannot be made good. It has long been indefensible in theory; it is also defunct in practice.

Cue Nick Clegg’s proposal to transform the Lords into an 80% elected Senate of 300 strong. There are clear merits to such a plan. In austerity-ridden times, not the least of these is cost; last year the 800 peers billed us £150 million for their upkeep. By more than halving its size, we’d be able to return a big chunk of that to the taxpayer. But why stop there? Do we really want a bicameral legislature; that is a divided legislature where the upper house reviews and competes with the lower one. A second elected chamber would inject into Westminster the kind of deadlock and sluggishness that characterises America’s imperfect democracy. Such a dispersal of power between two bodies of equal legitimacy would lead to a paralysis of much the same fashion that confronted Lloyd George a century ago when he tried to pass the ‘People’s Budget’. Two chambers. Two mandates. Twice the carnage.

Many sincere liberals contend that we need the Lords in some form due to its role revising, improving and challenging legislation from the Commons that would otherwise pass unimpeded. The concern is understandable, but surely we can dismiss it? We have a strong, independent judiciary — ensuring the government can’t do anything illegal. We have a free press that is hardly deferential to those in power. And we have a strong civil society; experts and interest groups are unafraid to petition those in power and the electorate, if necessary, can boot them out when the time comes. New Zealand, Sweden and several US states all manage just fine without a second chamber. So can we.

Abolition of the House of Lords would complete the centuries-old business of bringing unelected parliamentary interests to heel. The current upper house is simply an embarrassment and proposals to augment it would undermine the efficient, unitary nature of our system. Ministers should not overlook the simple, yet radical, solution at hand.