Green taxes, apparently they will save the world. I on the other hand think that they are being mishandled and misused as a means for generating income off of people unfairly. Green taxes, at their best, are a means of penalising those that make active choices to do environmentally unfriendly things and to take money from them to actually go about solving this country's climate change issues.

At their worst, however, they are used to plug gaps in local governance finances with disregard to reality and to simply make it looks like something is being done to tackle climate change...even if it means telling supermarkets to generate more profits without a set plan on how to spend those profits on green initiatives.

As it happens David Cameron has wised up to this and becomes the only party leader so far to actually start thinking sensibly on the issue of climate change when it comes to Green Taxes, for whatever means that is.

So the first part of my thoughts goes to Environmentally charged changes in the budget, potentially one of the biggest political areas in the budget that turned out to be more than a damp squib.

All in all I don't think that the budget we witnessed today was especially ground breaking. Commentators have already said about how most of it was expected and about the tone, my only interest is what the effects mean for people in the long run. Personally I don't think it is as bad as it could have been but it's certainly not favourable, certainly some of the "positives" are barely positives at all in more historical context and it's not within me to congratulate people for offering piecemeal as if it is a huge concession.

So I was talking with a friend tonight and started to brainstorm about how I would deal with the issues of smoking, drinking and over-eating and the burden the pose to the NHS. It's not old news that some are attempting to weasel out of treating the sick and so I wondered in this climate how you could perhaps work a fair system.

Yes, it's true! The Tories are ignoring the statistical evidence in front of them and state they will tax dwindling sales of alcopops as well as strong beer and cider, you know the stuff that generally only find in your traditional local pub, and are going to use that barely existent amount of money to try and drop the price on alcohol that kids really drink. Lager.

A-policy-a-day Smith is up again today with something a little more palatable, though ultimately pointless. Lots of arguments are being had as I write in the House of Commons over a new view on immigration, but it seems to be about petty semantics. Ultimately it puts some more requirements on those wishing to move to the UK, charges them a little bit more money to irrelevant ends, and extends the current 5 year period before British citizenship is attained to 6.

From my point of view what is being proposed is disappointing in that it is yet another policy that pretty much does nothing to benefit the country while making life more tough for immigrants, and seemingly all in the aim of sounding tough on another issue.

Let me get this out of the way straight away, I think the stats that the Lib Dems have uncovered using the Freedom of Information act are never going to be positive. Any rise in the amount of kids being admitted to A&E because of alcohol related problems is a negative. The question for me is are they as much of a negative as pure percentages would suggest, and what are the realities of such data. Unfortunately no matter how much scouring I can do will uncover qualitative data.

The overall numbers mask alarming regional differences. We need to find out why the number of children drinking so much that they end up in hospital is so much higher in some parts of the country. - Norman Lamb MP

Another day another party deciding there is something else that needs banning or enforcing through extreme prohibition. I thought Labour could get no more idiotic after last week's series of woeful announcements on housing, dental health and internal investigations...yet here we are again, this time with kicking "illegal file sharers" off of the net.

Initially this throws up several questions; How does the government and ISPs intend to tell conclusively that someone is file sharing illegally or legally? What assurances can the consumer have that ISPs won't just "play it safe" when it comes to high bandwidth and kick off anyone with high usage no matter how legitimate? How is this truly enforceable with so many unsecured networks around the UK, and indeed internet Cafes, without truly spying on what every person is accessing on the net? Do we really need to resort to French policy to solve our own issues?

The next episode of Politalks is now here, with thanks to Gavin Whenman who will for the foreseeable future be partnering me on the project. Video below is probably NSFW!

Over on CentreRight Charlie Elphicke has posted a continuation of their new debate on Britain's relative decline (and not just economically, they say). In his post he talks about how we should be more rich, not touching the more ambiguous topics supposedly in distress such as crime levels and military power.

I feel Labour have kept the economic boat steady one way or another, with the counter-balance most probably being that we aren't reaching the GDP growth we're capable of. But with many less unemployed than under Tory led policies, more benefits for the poor stifling most hints of outrage at just how few people get so much of the total wage packet every year, and an economy that may not be super strong but also doesn't succumb to the mega lows of Conservative politics, one has to ask just how you should measure how "rich" a nation is in the first place.