PETER HITCHENS: The question is not who is taking drugs, but who isn't

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

It must be 35 years since I flung an old friend out of my tiny North London flat for bringing cannabis into my home. I was still pretty modishly Left-wing about most things in those days. But I felt (as I feel now) a special disgust against drugs.

How could it not be wrong  to deliberately dim and dull your senses? If you don’t  like the world as it is, then change it. Don’t numb yourself into apathy.

I have to say that when I told him to get out, I thought I was expressing a pretty conventional opinion. It only dawned on me later just how out of tune I was with the times.

Not that it’s a bad thing to be unfashionable. In fact it’s more or less a duty, if your mind is alive.

People have told me since – and they were only half-joking – that Harriet Harman and I were probably the only two people at the University of York in the early 1970s who didn’t smoke dope.

I know directly of several outwardly respectable figures who take drugs and let their children do the same.

And, while I feel a wave of hatred beating against me whenever I walk into a BBC studio, it is never so strong as when I have come there to argue against the weakening  of the drug laws.

In fact they have pretty much stopped asking me to discuss this at all, since I dared to give a hard time to their favourite advocate of drug law relaxation, Professor David Nutt (how long before he gets his own show?).

Drug abuse, you see, isn’t just a minor fringe activity. It is the secret vice of the whole British Establishment.

I wonder how many government and media buildings would get through a thorough search for traces of cocaine, for instance.

That is what has mainly worried me about the allegations now being made against the Rev Paul Flowers, and against Nigella Lawson. I have no idea if the charges are true.

But is anyone really surprised to hear such claims? And how much further does it go? Let me share with you two other revelations from recent days.

The first is that, in Brixton Prison in London, the jail’s Government-sponsored Independent Monitoring Board reported that inmates are smoking so much cannabis that the clothes of prison officers and of volunteer staff stink of the drug.

Remember, this is a prison, a place supposedly for the absolute enforcement of law. Yet the drug law has broken down totally, in a building under the direct control of the State. If this is so in a prison, what about the streets?

And then there was this interesting comment, by the insiders’ favourite insider, the political columnist Matthew d’Ancona.

He wrote that an ‘unspoken agreement’ had been reached between the main parties about drugs, saying: ‘It was clear that a campaign of inquisition, digging into every senior politician’s university past, would leave the front benches more or less deserted.’

University past, Matthew? I think we are talking about much more recent events than that.

As he added, a Tory researcher had claimed to him, before the last Election, that ‘some of the teams within the party were notoriously better at acquiring drugs than others’.

He says this sounded ‘outlandish’ to him. It sounds like the sober truth to me.

This widespread secret illegality is a form of corruption. Fearing personal exposure if they act or speak against  drugs, our political class let  this man-made plague rage through our society, fuelling all kinds of crime, driving young people mad and debasing our whole society.

I suggest we offer our ruling elite an amnesty. All crimes confessed to within a set time to be forgiven – on condition they now enforce the laws they were elected to preserve, protect and defend.

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Poor Robbie's got a new Ed of hair

Even I feel some sympathy for Robbie Williams, spending all that cash on a hair transplant, then finding he looks startlingly like Ed Balls. Talk about unintended consequences 

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The biggest pay-day loan in Britain has been taken out by David Cameron, frantically promising to do conservative things after the next Election.

How terrified he must be of actually winning in 2015 and having to pay up. He dreads a majority. The idea is to shore up his collapsing vote and stay in coalition.
 
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It's such a pity that nobody knows any history, or it would be quite obvious what so-called Scottish ‘Independence’ is about.

Our continental enemies sought for centuries to detach Scotland from England, to weaken us. Now they’re doing it again.

If Scotland breaks away from England, it won’t be run from Edinburgh, but from Brussels and Frankfurt, and Scots will discover what it’s really like to be someone else’s subject province. I’m sure they’ll have more sense.

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Children pay the price for our ‘fluid’ lives

So to the continuing PR problems of our banking industry, alluded to by Nigel Lawson and the Archbish of C last week.

Sir Ronald Grierson, the distinguished financier, has lobbied since the crash for a change in the nomenclature of our financial institutions.

He says only places that bother to put their customers first, and which sedulously protect their deposits, should be allowed to call themselves ‘banks’.

Other institutions, with demonstrably less interest in this service – who, like RBS, are accused of drumming customers out of business – should term themselves ‘companies’. The Chancellor isn’t interested.

Here’s my solution, as I don’t think the word ‘bank’ is fit for purpose. Institutions that look after and grow people’s money – rather than the casinos that play with it on a high-risk, high-reward, fat-bonus basis – should be entitled to call themselves ‘depositories’.

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Would-be UKIP voters are browbeaten by Tories telling them that they’ll ‘let Labour in’. This  is false in so many ways. First, the Tories are politically identical to Labour.

Do you really find  it hard to imagine Theresa May or Liz Truss in a Labour government? Or Chuka Umunna or Rachel Reeves in a Tory one? It’s only the tribal label that’s different.

No, the people who should be scolded are those who still plan to vote Tory, after all the evidence that the Conservatives cannot win, and would continue with pro-PC, pro-EU and anti-British  policies even if they did.

Vote Tory and get Labour.
 
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How about plain packets for political parties?

hey’d be forbidden to advertise and accompanied everywhere by hideous photographs of what happened to people who believed them in the past.

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