In Front of Your Nose

 

 

I have two debates ( both on drugs) to attend in the next two days, one of them in Yorkshire, so must be brief. Sometimes I am baffled by the responses I get to particular articles. I am used to the way in which the anti-God fanatics and Olympic-standard bores try to find some way of restarting their interminable quibble on the thinnest excuse. And I am woefully aware of the bilious intolerance of the drug legalisation lobby, which mounts organised attacks on any tiny sign of resistance to its new orthodoxy.

 

But do wake up.

 

Sometimes in journalism it's necessary to be a tiny bit oblique to get a message across. You might know something you can't actually say out loud. There's a very good example of this in Arthur Koestler's 'Scum of the Earth', an absorbing account of his very narrow escape from the Nazis in 1940,  where he spots a cunning Paris  journalist evading the censorship and telling his more alert readers that the French Army has broken at Sedan, and the Germans are once more on their way to Paris.

 

I made the Lord Dannatt affair the main item in my column partly because it is an interesting and illuminating story about modern Britain.  I think it it is quite obvious to any thinking person why he withdrew from the campaign, even though I leave the explanation unsaid.

 

But I also led with it because it is by far the most important. It has little or nothing to do with homosexuality or with my views on it, or anybody's. It is I who said elsewhere that this subject is Stalingrad for moral conservatives, so I'd be obliged if other people, using this term, attributed it to me, rather than offering it to me as if it were a new-minted idea that hadn't occurred to me.

 

It is about the rapid narrowing of permissible public debate, since the three major parties united behind the policy of Equality and Diversity. In my 'Abolition of Britain' I quote the Sixties radical Richard Neville, editor of 'OZ' as saying 'there is an inch of difference between the Conservative and Labour parties. But it is in that inch that we all live'.

 

I doubt if Mr Neville foresaw that within 40 years that inch would have first been metricated into 2.5 centimetres, then narrowed to a millimetre and then, with the Howard-Cameron putsch in the Tory Party, close altogether.  Nor would he have predicted that the resulting consensus would be a good deal closer to the view of 'OZ' in 1968 than to the views of , say, the 'Daily Telegraph' of that date.

 

But so it is, and if we are alarmed by Vladimir Putin's closure of debate, and by the way in which Russian political life is open only to a small circle who conform to the views of the Putinocracy, and we say we are, then why are we not rather  alarmed at the same process, admittedly more smoothly conducted, here in our own country, where we live and where we supposedly have some influence over events?.

 

By the way, on the drugs issue, there is no need to go to the index to work out what a proper enforcement policy would be like. If anyone is so obtuse as to pretend not to know, the answer has many times been set out here – the interdiction of demand as well as supply, with severe penalties, properly imposed and enforced by an active police force, for possession of illegal drugs, and for use of premises for the consumption of drugs. This was the position in this country before 1971, when use of illegal drugs was far lower than it is now. Is it possible these facts are connected? I only ask.