The Ministry Of Truth

Another day’s newsprint; another day to wonder if it’s worth getting out from under the duvet anymore.

The Independent is still running with the story of the senior police officer (the Chief Constable of North Wales Contabulary Richard Brunstrom) who dared to tell Tuesday’s Today programme that it probably wasn’t totally ridiculous to consider, properly and sensibly, legalising drugs given that the “War On Drugs” our governments and police forces have been waging for more than a quarter-century has been lost.

Cue – naturally – tabloid hysteria on Wednesday about this nutter copper who’d gone a bit gaga.

This is what Brunstrom actually said:

I’m certainly out of step with the majority of senior police officers, but not all of them.  But in terms of society, public attitudes change quite rapidly and you need look no further than drinking and driving: in the space of my lifetime drinking and driving has gone from being socially acceptable, almost the norm, to being socially unacceptable.

I think that the legalisation and subsequent regulation of proscribed drugs is now inevitable, and I think it’s ten years away, not ten months away.

It has already happened in for instance Portugal, a full member of the European Union, decriminalised under the existing international treaties.  The same sort of thing is being talked about across the world.

We’re still causing something like £20bn worth of damage to our society every year.  More than half of all recorded crime is caused by people feeding a drugs habit.

The government wants evidence-based policy; the evidence is very clear that prohibition doesn’t work, it can’t work, [and] an enforcement-led strategy is making things worse, not better.

There’s a lot of scaremongering and rumour-mongering around Ecstasy in particular.  It isn’t borne out by the evidence.  Ecstasy is a remarkably safe substance – it’s far safer than aspirin.  If you look at the Government’s own research into deaths you’ll find that Ecstasy, by comparison to many other substances – legal and illegal – it is comparably a safe substance.

Clearly this is barmy stuff from a dangerous man who should have his mouth washed out with soap and water before being tarred and feathered and publicly disembowelled.

Either that or he’s a career copper who’s come to the not entirely unreasonable conclusion that we probably could be directing our finite resources towards something more worthwhile.

Perhaps surprisingly, the first rentaquote to shake off his New Year’s Eve hangover was Labour MP for Rhonnda, Chris Bryant, who said Chief Constable Brunstrom had “extraordinary” opinions and is

…obsessed with his own publicity. I think these are very dangerous views. Ecstasy is not a safe drug.

It surprises me that Bryant was coherent on New Year’s Day.  After all, I assume he’s the same Chris Bryant MP who posted this photograph of himself onto t’Internet

alongside the information that he’d

love a good, long fuck,

and is

as horny as buggery.

Now surely an elected Parliamentarian can’t have done THAT while he was stone cold sober, could he…?

But it’s not just gobby, self-obsessed MPs and barmpot Littlejohns having a pop at Brunstrom.  Martin Barnes, the chief executive of the independent drug information and expertise centre DrugScope, said:

On an issue as complex and emotive as drug policy, it’s a shame that unhelpful soundbites from people in authority cause a publicity storm, rather than opening up a calm, informed debate.

Shame Mr. Barnes can’t apparently appreciate that in issuing such soundbites himself he’s adding to the publicity storm.  Still, as is quickly becoming the Minister’s mantra, he got his name in the papers on a slow news day so fair play to the fella.

Today’s Indie has done a bit of number crunching:

The exact number of deaths brought about by Ecstasy use is hard to pin down, as it depends how the figure is measured. According to the National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths, compiled from looking at coroners’ reports from around the UK, there were 42 deaths related to Ecstasy-type drugs in 2006. Most of those involved the taking of Ecstasy in combination with other drugs, though. Only 16 deaths came after the use of an Ecstasy-type drug alone. And even within that figure, very few deaths have ever been caused by direct poisoning from the drug. Most come from other related effects, most commonly overheating and dehydrating in a hot club. Some cases – such as the high-profile death of Leah Betts in 1995 – involved consuming fatal quantities of fluid after taking Ecstasy. Supporters of legalisation argue that such deaths could be avoided with health warnings that would accompany proper regulation.

[I]t may also cause non-fatal damage to the brain, though the evidence is so far inconclusive. The drug’s effect on the heart means that anyone with a heart condition, blood-pressure problems, epilepsy or asthma can have dangerous reactions to it. And it does create some unpleasant but less serious symptoms, such as nausea, a dry mouth and sweating.

Ecstasy is mainly used by clubbers to keep them dancing all night. Its use was strongest at the height of the rave culture in the early 1990s, but has since fallen. The most up-to-date government figures, compiled in 2004, found that 4.8 per cent of 10 to 25-year-olds surveyed had taken Ecstasy, while the figure for people between 18 and 25 was nine per cent.

42 deaths is 42 too many, of course.  16 is 16 too many.  But 300 people are killed and thousands more injured on Britain’s roads by drunk drivers every year.  Two-thirds of A&E admissions are drink-related.  Cirrhossis kills thousands of people a year.  But while nobody wants a 24-hour licenced pub on their doorstep, there’s no groundswell of support within society for banning alcohol.

Tens of thousands of people a year die of cancer, emphysema, heart disease and other ailments directly related to smoking.  Smoking kills, simple as that.  But you can buy fags in every third shop of the high street.  You can even buy fags in Self-Appointed Moral Guardians WH Smith, although though they won’t sell you a jazz mag for a quick and harmless hand shandy…

While there are prohibition lobbies against both cigarettes and alcohol, they don’t often find themselves being listened to – it’s a non-story (probably because most politicians and media workers overindulge in both tobacco and alcohol too often for their own good).

Yet when one copper says, “I’m not sure we are going about tackling the drugs issue the right way,” he’s vilified.

On the basis of the 9% figure, nearly half a million people between the ages of 18 and 25 have taken E.  That 9% figure doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface because it is my generation – the ones who were 18-25 in the first half of the 90s – that necked most of the stuff.  Christ knows I hate clubbing but even I did E twice, in 1991 and 1994.

On the first occasion it made me act like a twat for about five hours and confirmed that I find dance music monotonous beyond tolerance even when off my tits.  On the second occasion it made me act like a twat and sweat profusely for about five hours before becoming very paranoid about needing to get out of Derby as quickly as possible because it “wasn’t safe”.  On both occasions I slept through almost all of the next day.

Nobody got hurt (although I suspect I pissed off a few people by repeatedly telling them I loved them before falling asleep for twelve hours), no revelations were had and it was a pointless exercise I have never felt the need to repeat.

But simply by handling one tablet of Ecstasy I performed a criminal act that carries a maximum prison sentence of seven years.  As did well over a million other people.  What are we going to do – lock them all up in the flash new megaprisons we’re building?

The fact that this country has so many media outlets – and, in particular, so many national newspapers – is in many ways fantastic.  But the influence those newspapers wield over the country’s politicians is disproportionately huge, particularly so when the overwhelming majority of the country now forms its political views from television news and current affairs programming (which mercifully, as things stand, has a legal obligation to be balanced and impartial).

It shouldn’t matter what the Daily Mail thinks because five times as many people watch the ITV evening news bulletin every day than buy the Daily Mail.  Unfortunately, the ITV evening news bulletin runs the story in such a way that “a senior policeman is facing calls to resign” for posing awkward questions about drugs.

But from whom has he come under fire?

There are no mass demonstrations on the streets of which I am aware.

There are (unbelievably) nearly 700 MPs but there are only a couple who have been critical.

His own local Police Authority has publicly supported him and called for the issue to be debated properly.

So, basically, he’s come under fire from newspapers who believe they have the right to articulate moral outrage on behalf of a readership that has long since “turn[ed] right over to the TV page”.

And the media outrage somehow becomes a self-perpetuating story.

It’s the same with all the hifalutin New Year bollocks about the over-running railway repairs.

Of course it shouldn’t have happened.  Of course someone fucked up.  And of course someone should take a PR kicking as they make a public apology.

But shouldn’t someone in power also ask the question, “Are we running our railways in the best manner possible?”

Yet can you imagine how loudly the Mail and the Sun would scream tomorrow if Gordon Brown went on Channel 4 News this evening and said he was considering re-nationalising the railways because (a) the current system costs more in public subsidy than British Rail ever did, and (b) having one organisation in charge of both infrastructure and rolling stock might improve planning?

He can’t even float the idea and try to have a reasoned debate about it because the newspaper outcry (which in turn would drive the radio and TV coverage of the story) would drown out that debate.

Anybody prepared to think about the issue for more than ten seconds might indeed conclude that re-nationalisation could save the country money and result in more joined-up thinking on Britain’s railways.  Some of that saved money could then either be (a) re-invested by the government to improve public services further and/or (b) returned to the taxpayer in the form of lower taxes.

Lower taxes and better public services is precisely what the Sun and the Mail say they want day after day after day.

Sadly, good news doesn’t sell newspapers.

Politicians have always had to be populists (at least since Rotten Boroughs disappeared) but it’s a shame that generations of political leaders have submissively acquiesced to Fleet Street to the extent that neither Gordon Brown nor Posh Boy Dave can now locate their cojones with both hands and a map unless to do so would garner the applause of Paul Dacre or Rebekkah Wade.

Jesus, this country’s fucked up.

As Times columnists go, Alice Miles isn’t bad.  She transgresses into casual xenophobia a little too often for my liking, but she’s usually worth a read.  Today especially so – despite, ahem, repeated transgressions into casual xenophobia – as she returns to the Minister’s favourite theme of 21st century Great Britain Limited as a Chancer’s Paradise:

It’s the small things that take you by surprise on returning to Britain after a long break, as I did over Christmas. Not the weather or the headlines or Labour’s plunging fortunes, but things like the speed of cars, the cost of a train ticket, the convenience of cash machines (do we know how much they encourage profligacy?), and the number of newspapers on offer.

For me it was the smallest thing of all that gave me the greatest shock. It was the toilets at Gatwick…

One of the three cubicles had been locked shut, presumably blocked. Another I was told not even to show my daughter into in case it frightened her. I glanced, saw blood, retreated. The sole final cubicle, for which everyone was queueing, wouldn’t flush without a repeated pumping of the button and most people were coming out embarrassed and apologetic that they had not managed it.

Thence to wash their hands in a row of basins spattered with dried-on, encrusted vomit. It was extraordinarily embarrassing. I found myself apologising to… American visitors, saying that Britain wasn’t usually like this — and the words dried up in my throat. Because it so often is. Somewhere, some time, the soul of the United Kingdom lost its pride in itself. Public spaces are dirty, people from ticket salesmen to immigration officials are rude, life operates on some invisible financial level that entirely passes by the needs and desires of ordinary people…

Go to Houston, Texas; you could eat off those loo seats. Go, even, to Belize. You wouldn’t want to eat off them, and you might pay 25c for a bit of loo roll, but then you can at least use them, and flush too, and someone will even wipe the sink after you.

I have no doubt at all that the loos at Gatwick are attended to (or not) by badly paid foreign workers who couldn’t give a damn what an American tourist might think of the UK on first arrival. I know that the airport itself is run by a Spanish company that probably couldn’t give a damn etc. I expect the cleaning of the loos is contracted out to some ghastly low-paying employment agency. And I have no doubt that if I was in charge of cleaning them, even as a British citizen (is this what Mr Brown meant when he said British jobs should be held for British workers?), I would find it hard to take much pride in my work.

But find the reason why the public loos in North and Central America work — a 25 cent financial incentive for someone, or a decent contract, or simply some pride — and why those in Britain are often squalid, and you will find the reason for the dissatisfaction that British people feel in public services and the State today. The complicated mix of public and private, foreign and domestic ownership of so many things that we still consider public services, the jumble of foreign workers, the temporary contracts and the corner-cutting in the drive for productivity, productivity, productivity: these have so muddled the lines of responsibility and removed the traditional British pride and courtesy that no one seems to care who should clean a loo at Gatwick any more.