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 common sense, or rather legal sense, has prevailed. Manhunt 2, after being restricted and restricted again is now finally able to be purchased as an 18+ game as it should always have been. The BBFC tried to step above it's station with this one, as they have with other games and films in the past, and to try and restrict adults from being able to get the game because of rather weak arguments about children still being able to get hold of them. As it's been widely criticised for, it's not really the BBFC's position to state that parents and people are so shit at self censorship that they are allowed to become overlords of entertainment where they decide what is and isn't good for us. That doesn't stop them sounding particularly peeved at this fact though...

Quick note also, click the link below to continue reading my thoughts, but I am now off for a weekend break and haven't had time, unfortunately, to write up some articles to be published over the weekend. I'll be back with Politalks some time on Tuesday and hopefully some more on the inside of the budget report.

How do you solve a problem such as "British Citizenship" and how to encourage us all to feel like we're British? Well you force them to stay in school or training until 18, at which point you "encourage" them to swear an oath to the country in one form or another before presenting them with a series of choices whereby the only realistic one is to sign up to a national ID database. From then on you're golden with plenty of opportunities to keep that individual under check and "British", in fact the only thing missing is a microchip for the brain that forces them to stand up and put their hand to their heart every time "God Save the Queen" is heard.

Unfortunately the bill I have previously asked people to support didn't get a simple hearing on Friday as the timings involved meant that the debate has been delayed. This isn't a bad thing of course, it just means a bit of a wait for the verdict from the MPs interested, the debate continues on the 14th (this coming Friday). So, of course, I urge people to continue to support this trial especially given that we can see from Hansard just how a minority of people seem to be opposed to any positive move for utterly petty reasoning.

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.

I found this consultation on the Bristol City Council website. If you're from Bristol then I would really suggest filling it out with your views as I already have done. But what struck me about a lot of this survey was that it was inherently negative about alcohol. I'm not necessarily suggesting all the questions should have asked people to praise alcohol to high heaven but I believe this to be a poor survey worded in such a way that simple positive answers are being sought from complex questions. Read on for some of the questions and what I feel about them.

Over on Liberal Conspiracy a very good debate is formulating over a series of posts about abortion and the liberal/left stance, with a surprising amount of decent interjection coming in from those that tend to always disagree with the postings on there. Once again I found myself responding to something on there and it getting too long to be a comment, so here is my view on the very muddy subject.

I can't bring myself to support abortion or oppose it on the basis of socially prescribed ethical codes, religious belief or, most crucially, the date at which a foetus has at least some chance of staying alive if removed from the womb…currently found to be 24 weeks and being argued by conservatives and more sensible religious groups to be lowered to 20 weeks. To me the issue is about the life of a child, just as it is for the god squad or those that put a great deal of weight on the rights of the unborn, it is just that such a question of quality of life and reasonable expectation have to enter the debate.

The National Farmers' Union conference has been held this week, and all parties have taken the opportunity to try and win favours with the crowd. Unfortunately for Labour it would appear that Hillary Ben didn't go down so well, while Cameron appeared to talk the good talk, and Nick Clegg will address with a similar message today. Supermarkets must be wondering what they've done to incur all this ire at one moment in time, first suggestions that they will need to sell off land they own to allow competition to thrive now at least two of the big party leaders slamming them for unethical practice and eroding British farming.

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