High Times for Dave and Nick

A good spot by Ewan Hoyle: The Telegraph has gone after Nick Clegg’s support for a more sensible approach to the “War on Drugs”. It seems that when he was an MEP the Liberal Democrat leader supported decriminalisation. This, we are supposed to believe, is a Bad Thing.

Which makes it amusing or interesting that way back in 2005 David Cameron also called for “fresh thinking and a new approach” to drugs policy. That, as you know, means keeping at least an open mind about decriminalisation.

Now proposals for a sensible drugs policy are, alas, unlikely to feature prominently in the next Queen’s Speech and I don’t expect much from the next parliament on this matter but this is, again, a reminder that the Cameroons and the Cleggers have more in common than is sometimes thought.

You couldn’t (and probably shouldn’t) build a coalition agreement – formal or not – on drugs policy, nor on scrapping ID cards and limiting the advance of the surveillance state (rolling it back, I fear, will prove too ambitious a notion) but if the real divide is not so much between left and right but between liberals and authoritarians then here at least one might think that a Tory-Liberal arrangement might actually be preferable to any of the alternatives.