Since I never thought the cash for honours scandal would ever stand up in
court, I cannot be shocked at its death at the hands of the Crown
Prosecution Service. It would be hard to convince even a cynical London jury
of the venality of a few reported winks, murmurs and e-mails. Besides, they
would conclude, all politicians are corrupt.
That said, the stern Presbyterian, Gordon Brown, must have thought himself
victim of a ghastly practical joke last week. He opened his cabinet door and
found his colleagues lolling about like a bunch of tattooed fugitives in a
Marbella nightclub.
Party chairwoman, Harriet Harman, was passing round the sangria at her gang
getting off scot-free on loans for honours and even dumping on the fuzz into
the bargain. Across the table the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, and the
chancellor, Alistair Darling, were swapping spliff stories about their
youth. Smoking cannabis was excusable if you were “sensible but fun-loving”
and if you stressed that drugs were wrong and might cause brain damage, like
becoming a cabinet minister. At this point six other Brown honchos admitted
that they too belonged to Pothead Politicians Anonymous.
Meanwhile Tessa Jowell and her brewery friends were cock-a-hoop at news that
nocturnal Britain had stuck to alcohol rather than turned to Blair’s
namby-pamby “cafe culture”. Jowell had just pulled off another coup by
stinging the charity whingers a full £2 billion for her sensational £9
billion heist, a fortnight’s elite sports party for the International
Olympic Committee mob in 2012. In a dark corner, even gloomy Des Browne was
quietly cackling at his success in leaning on friends in high places to get
the Serious Fraud Office to turn a blind eye to his arms contract bribes to
rich Arabs.
What, Brown must have wondered with horror, would John Knox have said?
Having spent 15 years imbibing and implementing Thatcherite discipline as a
political programme, he would have to become a Thatcherite social
conservative as well. Labour had passed some 50 crime and punishment acts
and created 3,000 new criminal offences. Yet Brown’s cabinet felt there was
one rule for the political rich and another for mortals. It was laughing at
the law. For moral compass the British Establishment had found a fake Rolex.
Corruption in British government takes many forms, of which the sale of titles
is ubiquitous and relatively harmless. That members of the House of Lords
paid to get there is as old as the hills and no worse than getting there by
birth or by grovelling sycophancy. Of all the charges that might be laid
against Tony Blair’s regime, the sale of honours (unprovable in court) is
hardly the worst. The case was like getting Al Capone for tax evasion.
The police must have known their case was weak when they staged theatrical
dawn arrests and when so much was leaked to the press. They might not
prosecute, but they could at least humiliate and induce reform. But do not
trust these politicians. The case has served their real objective, to get
taxpayers to cough up what the now untitled rich will not. This will relieve
them of any need to raise money from those on whom they should rely, honest
party members.
The drug confessions have a deeper significance. They indicate hypocrisy on a
subject of urgent concern to all parents. Why should their children go to
jail when half the cabinet was admitting the same crime. Yet on Friday the
reaction at Westminster was one of humour. Drug taking is apparently okay if
you can get away with it. Drug taking is okay if you pretend you did not
enjoy it, or “experimented”, or affirm it to be “wrong” without quite saying
why. Lots of things are wrong without being crimes, which is perhaps why
nobody last week mentioned the word crime.
The coverage suggested a yawning moral hypocrisy. On the one hand are the
middle-class young who use drugs and “deal” to each other. On the other hand
are the working-class young who “traffick” and should go to jail for a very
long time. The children of the rich are decent-at-heart victims of the
wicked children of the poor, who are rightly cramming the jails.
If Jacqui Smith were merely a run-of-the-mill public figure, there might be no
objection to her using past drug use to display honesty and born-again moral
purpose. But she heads a department that has, for a quarter of a century,
ignored the disastrous consequences of its own policies and which, under
Blair, has delegated them entirely to the right-wing press. Only last month
it was announced that cuts in the prisons budget will fall chiefly on
education and the pathetic sums as yet spent on prison drug rehabilitation.
The supposed justification for state intrusion into what libertarians call
consensual behaviour is where it harms third parties and particularly the
young, whether it involves sex, drugs, gambling, alcohol or nicotine. For
these reasons, once draconian laws on sexual behaviour have been relaxed
over the years, except where they concern children. The same has gone for
off-course betting and casinos, despite justified pleas that they wreck the
families of addicted gamblers. Drink licensing laws have been relaxed even
in the face of evidence that alcohol is the major contributor to social
disorder in Britain. But tough laws on smoking have proved acceptable and
effective under pressure from offended third parties.
Britain’s Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 has proved neither acceptable nor
effective. It is responsible for over a third of the record prison
population and an ever cheaper drugs market that is untaxed and virtually
unregulated.
The most savage laws imaginable – hapless drug “mules” from Jamaica receiving
10-15year sentences for a first offence – have proved no deterrent. The
attempt to eradicate Afghan opium as a way of curbing heroin use in Britain
has proved predictably farcical.
There is no “get tough on drugs” policy in Britain, rather a stay-weak one
cloaked in hypocrisy. Paying his ritual obeisance to the Daily Mail, Brown
has even suggested that cannabis be upgraded from class C to class B, based
on research showing psychological damage done by the extra strength of the
home-grown plant. This research was available to the Home Office when David
Blunkett downgraded the classification in 2004. The recorded 20% fall in
cannabis use since then may be statistically unreliable, but it hardly
supports the case for upgrading.
When the gambling laws were liberalised and off-course betting permitted in
the 1960s, moral conservatives were appalled at such sin being sold in every
high street. Yet betting shops, regulated to prevent advertising and exclude
minors, wiped out a chunk of criminal activity. Likewise legalising drug
outlets and treatment centres is the only way to regulate and thus try to
limit drug use and reduce its penumbra of massive criminality.
Every country in Europe now has a drug problem, but all are debating how to
reduce narcotic harm through targeted regulation. Britain is in the Dark
Ages through ministerial terror of some newspapers. The price is paid by the
urban poor whose lives are dominated by the ubiquity and liquidity of the
drugs market and the violence of the gangs.
The British Crime Survey indicated last week that the public has lost faith in
claims of “falling crime”. This will continue as long as meaningless police
figures are allowed to pollute the valid British Crime Survey. But people
are not easily fooled. They can see what is happening in their communities
at night. They can see rising vandalism and read in their local paper of
growing knife and gun crime. They hear the crack houses and see drug dealers
operating in their streets. The only crime that is falling is that which
they prevent themselves, by protecting their own cars and houses.
The government has successfully tackled one antisocial narcotic, nicotine, but
has failed to tackle alcohol or drugs. What the law cannot suppress, it must
regulate. Alcohol has been subjected to underregulation, drugs to
overregulation. Somehow ministers must find a middle way on both.
The one honest outcome of last week’s ridiculous mass confessional would be a
cabinet with guts enough to raise the duty on liquor, license and regulate
drug sales and return some dignity and order to the streets of Britain.
simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk
