A Very Interesting Appointment

Is this the most soft-on-drugs government Britain has ever had?  I mean in terms of the penetration of its higher levels by people who have already decided that surrender to the drugs lobby is wise and right, so ensuring that arguments for serious prevention are sidelined and ignored, and a 45-year campaign for tacit non-enforcement of existing laws continues and expands. A very important appointment at the very top, which I discuss below, seems to give us a clue.

 

 I don���t mean in terms of actual, open legislative action.  All the major political parties still hang back from direct legalisation, not least because this country is still bound by international treaties to maintain laws against certain named drugs. This is also because a lot of the older voters upon whom the Tory Party  and the labour Party rely for their survival would not support it

 

The wealthy international Big Dope campaign is working hard to get these treaties rescinded or revised, and will (I suspect) begin to achieve this aim within ten years, after which the collapse will be swift.

 

But in the meantime, the creation of an atmosphere in which all expect (and many want) the drug laws to be weakly enforced, and in which the idea that such laws have any good purpose is systematically rejected and mocked, is continuing.

 

This is done largely by the media, but also by the ���sending of signals���, by brilliantly uncoordinated actions by drug lobbyists, who don���t know each other, who never meet for lunch or dinner, never have private conversations in which they discuss influencing public opinion to their advantage. To suggest that they did such things would be a ���conspiracy theory��� and therefore laughable .

 

So, for instance, while the Independent on Sunday was alone in calling for the actual legalisation of cannabis, a call it later withdrew, much more conservative organs, including the Times, The Economist and the Daily Telegraph, long ago allied themselves with the respectable campaign for decriminalisation. The difference between these positions is one of tactics, rather than of principle.

 

Of course ( and the BBC is also party to this) if you treat an opinion as if it is uncontentious, and avoid giving time or space to its opponents, you eventually *make* it uncontentious.  That���s why in so-called ���debates��� on drugs you now very rarely hear any voice speaking for legal control on them. All the debates are about *how* we should relax the law, on the assumption that the need to do so is agreed and established. This is how the alleged ���centre��� is created - by first marginalising, then ignoring and finally silencing those with whom you do not agree. That���s why my book ���The War We Never Fought��� was killed mainly by being ignored. Most people will never even know what kind of book it is, let alone discover the facts it contains. Widespread knowledge of those facts would be a serious obstacle to the universally-chanted claim, which people actually think they have invented themselves as they mouth it,  that ���The war on drugs has failed���.

 

The political class has played its part in this process. For instance, the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee has twice this century (in 2002 and 2013) sided with the campaign for the evisceration of the British drug laws, entirely adopting the language, attitudes and conclusions of the decriminalisation lobby ��� as if these opinions were not even contentious any more.

 

On one of those occasions (in 2002), the present Prime Minister, David Cameron, was a member of that committee. In fact, his participation in its report was the only significant political commitment he had made as an obscure MP,  before he was suddenly ���discovered��� and rushed by a skilfully uncoordinated media campaign, into the leadership of the Tory Party, over the heads of dozens of more experienced and better-qualified men and women.

 

You may say that he was just an MP and had no choice. But you would be wrong. One of his Tory colleagues on the same committee, Angela Watkinson, argued fiercely against its conclusions and refused to sign the resulting report ��� a very rare event, and quite possibly the last ever example of a Conservative MP actually doing a conservative thing (it���s all described in my book).   Mr Cameron cannot have been unaware of her dissent. He chose not to side with her.

 

Now he has appointed the Murdoch journalist (and his Oxford contemporary at Brasenose), Camilla Cavendish, to head his Downing Street policy unit. Ms Cavendish is a talented and distinguished journalist who has done some good and interesting work, notably on the injustices of the child protection laws,  for which she has rightly been praised.

 

But she is also a longstanding advocate of drug legalisation (using the usual dud excuses, many times exploded here, that there is a 'war on drugs' that has failed, that illegality means gangsters will control the trade, the alleged evils of alleged ���Prohibition���,  the dubious wonders of Portugal etc. etc.).

 

In an article she wrote in ���The Times��� of London on 24th February 2004, she said :���The logical conclusion of the drugs war might be to raid such clubs and jail half the top earners in the media and the City for recreational drug use. But, apart from being grossly unfair, this might have an unhealthy effect on Britain's GDP.

The better answer is one that many policemen -and politicians -already privately concede. It is to make drugs legal and tax them.���

 

Once, such an opinion would have disqualified anyone from heading a Downing Street policy unit. Now, I suspect it is more or less compulsory if you want to work for one. You see here the true spirit of this government and that generation, revealed. Moral surrender bolstered by ill-informed drivel, drivel accepted by otherwise intelligent people because it is what they want to believe.