Of course David Cameron should have said whether he has used illegal drugs. The Daily Mail and the BBC were right to ask him. He should have answered. The view of Cameron’s friends, that standing as leader of the Conservative party should confer immunity from the criminal law, is absurd.
The 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act embodies Burke’s dictum that bad laws are the worst tyranny. The act is so useless as to constitute a major threat to social order. All drugs are in some degree harmful and should therefore be properly regulated by government, as are nicotine and alcohol. In Britain they are not. They circulate uncontrolled in pubs, clubs, colleges, schools, police stations, even prisons. They fuel a third of all property crime. For many normal families they threaten their one brush with criminality. Yet MPs lack the guts to abolish the act and bring drugs within reach of statutory regulation.
Now a Tory leadership contender feels unable to say whether he has broken this stupid law. I am sure he would unashamedly protest his innocence of fraud, rape, violent assault or treason. The use of a class A drug in Britain is, by order of both Conservative and Labour governments, an equally serious criminal offence. Some 30,000 people are in prison as a result of the drug laws. Why should senior politicians be exempt by virtue of the past tense? Is criminality to be a matter of dates?
Cameron and his aides protest that drug taking is “a strictly private matter”. Really? Opinion polls suggest that a majority of British citizens take that view, but unfortunately that does not constitute a majority of MPs, least of all Conservative ones. Cameron may have favoured last year’s reclassification of cannabis, but that is trivial. Reform of the 1971 act is now critical to combating the anarchy that the rampant market in drugs has brought to Britain’s towns and cities. Both parties treat it as taboo.
Last week Cameron was given a golden opportunity to break the taboo and win the sympathy of millions of voters, young and old. If he had broken the law he could have said it was a daft law that was wrecking lives less fortunate than his own, and pledged himself to repeal it. Where the state has intruded too far into the private domain, he would drive it out. He would curb the drugs market and tackle addiction other than through imprisonment. In the event he seemed more concerned with the views of backwoodsmen on Planet Suburb. In short, he funked it.
Drugs are an extreme case of the new politics of cowardice. In his party conference speech last month Tony Blair claimed that “every time I’ve ever introduced a reform in government, I wish in retrospect I had gone further”. Many will have smiled wryly at such a confession from this most timid of prime ministers. More significant is what he did next. He returned to Downing Street and authorised two breathtaking capitulations to political expediency.
The first was the postponement of domestic property tax valuation until after the next general election. The other was a climbdown on public sector pensions in the face of a strike threat from civil servants. Both were absolute corkers. They rank with past grand capitulations: to the motoring lobby on fuel tax, the cronies on Lords reform, the greens on nuclear power, the brewers on licensing hours, the reactionaries on GCSE reform and, most recently, the police on ID cards and 90-day detention. I cannot think of a single goose to which Blair has recently said boo.
This summer’s postponement of council tax revaluation beggared belief, since the one good time to initiate it is immediately after an election. The general effect of postponement is to appease wealthier homeowners at the expense of those living in cheaper properties. It is a stealth tax on the poor.
As for pensions, the capitulation was no less craven. Alan Johnson, the pensions minister, had declared his intention to bring public and private sector pensions into line at a retirement age of 65. He said that the case for an across-the-board shift from 60 to 65 was “irrefutable”.
Faced with a strike, Blair immediately refuted it. Retirement at 65 was originally fixed for 2013, then postponed under union pressure to 2018. Now it will not start until 2044, at a cost to future taxpayers vaguely put at a staggering £10 billion. It must be the most costly U-turn in history. It means that a 21-year-old civil servant today can look forward to a salary-linked inflation-proofed pension from the age of 60. By then it is certain that such a perk will be unavailable to any section of the community (except rag trade tycoons). It is a public sector concession worthy of Mussolini.
The climbdown may be small beer amid an unfunded government pension liability said to exceed £700 billion. But Britain is now heading for a two-class workforce, public and private. Last week’s concession of nine months’ paternity/maternity leave could come only from ministers with no experience of the private sector. It will cripple many small firms and make younger women increasingly unemployable. Nor does it augur well for the forthcoming government decision on pensions reform. The only line that Downing Street seems able to hold at present is that of least resistance.
The list continues. Changes to the National Health Service are now so constant and chaotic as to lack all intellectual coherence. On Thursday the government retreated from its plan to privatise the employment contracts of 250,000 NHS nursing and other medical staff. This step was regarded in health circles as a test of Blair’s commitment to NHS decentralisation. Yet at the first whiff of union grapeshot he turned and fled. The plan has now been abandoned and Patricia Hewitt, the hapless health secretary, is in that purgatory known as “listening mode”.
In the offing are two bigger tests of Blair’s commitment to courage. One is whether to commission a new generation of nuclear power stations and stop pretending that wind turbines are any substitute. This urgent decision was last week recommended by Sir David King, Blair’s chief scientist.
The other test is whether to renew Britain’s Trident missile programme and order a new nuclear submarine fleet. Unlike rates revaluation this cannot be postponed beyond the present parliament.
A brave response would be for Blair to approve nuclear power — warts and all — and abandon Britain’s other-worldly nuclear deterrent. It would be to switch Britain’s nuclear future from swords to ploughshares and from war to peace.
Nobody in Whitehall is offering bets on any such course of action. The smart money is on Blair resorting to listen and dither, dither and listen, and then leaving the decision to future generations. That is what you get with a prime minister who has never met a payroll.
Disraeli found from long experience that “courage is the rarest of all qualities you meet in public life”. What is curious about Blair is his awareness of his failing in this department. Eagerness to please is understandable in a ruler, but some display of leadership would not come amiss.
The prime minister’s obsession with his legacy surely demands some gloss of courage, some sign of futurity triumphing over the drive for re-election. Yet eight years into high office Blair can publicly bemoan his lack of bravery to his conference audience and demonstrate it daily in his decisions.
Cameron is described by his promoters as the new Blair. This is said to be a qualification. I am inclined to wonder, which Blair? Is it the man whose youthful radicalism mesmerised his party in the 1990s and turned it into a successful vehicle for his ambition? That Blair did have courage. He fought the unions, the left and his own party to get his way. Or is it the Blair who in office is all courage-after-the-event, who wonders why he never went a bit further, tried a bit harder, took more risks?
I am sure Cameron is pleased that he has faced down the Daily Mail. The achievement stands to his credit. He would deserve greater confidence if he had also faced down the Misuse of Drugs Act.
