Our failed war on drugs
For a politician, I’m not sure there’s anything more humiliating than defending your own failures. A few days ago the President of Mexico was forced to deny that he was presiding over a failed state. As his country prepared to send two thousand more troops into the troubled city of Ciudad Juarez, Felipe Calderon insisted that he wasn’t losing control of his country and that victory was just around the corner – contrary to growing fears in the United States that their neighbour is close to becoming a narco-state.
In a technical sense, Mr Calderon is correct that Mexico isn’t yet a failed state, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t failing. Since assuming office in December 2006 and immediately escalating the doomed ‘war on drugs’, there have been over 8,000 drug-related executions.
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Towards a police state
I don’t often disagree with ScepticIsle, but I do on one point. He says we’re sleepwalking towards a police state. I fear we’re marching there.
From today, it will, in effect, be illegal to photograph policemen, as Kate has pointed out below.
Of course, the government will claim that the intention of this act is to stop terrorists preparing to kidnap policemen. This is phooey.
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For once, punishment fits crime
It’s good to see that good sense has prevailed in the case of Robert Holding, the 72-year-old milkman who also supplied his elderly customers with cannabis resin as a sideline, with Judge Lunt suspending the custodial sentence, despite him warning that he was likely to go to prison.
The ostensible reason is that Holding’s wife, who has Alzheimer’s, has gone into a care home and that in an “act of mercy”, the judge suspended the sentence so he could continue to visit her. It would however be nice to think that perhaps he was influenced by some of the reporting of the case, with even the right-wing virulently anti-drug papers taking a quite apparent dim view of him being sent to prison for trying to help people with their pains, however misguided.
Further evidence to his “crime” being purely to help was that he was selling the drug at well below street prices, making more money on his milk round itself. If all dealers were so publicly spirited, the war on drugs would be even more of a clusterfuck.
How do we deal with these casualties?
In 2002 Amrit Bhandari was walking through the centre of Chester when two women asked him for money. He refused, but the beggars persisted and one threatened to accuse the 72-year-old of rape if he didn’t hand something over. They never assaulted him, but Mr Bhandari was so panicked by the harrassment that he suffered a heart attack. Rather than try to help the man they had literally frightened to death, the girls took his briefcase and wallet, and fled.
One of the girls sentenced for the manslaughter of Amrit Bhandri was Sarah Campbell. Sarah’s short life was one filled with horrors few of us can imagine; sexually abused throughout her childhood and raped at 15, she became clinically depressed, sought escape through drugs and, by the age of 16, was enslaved by an addiction to heroin. Just one day into her three year sentence, Sarah swallowed a lethal quantity of prescription drugs. She was eighteen years old.
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Do we need a different approach to criminals?
It’s an interesting piece of ancient philosophy that a criminal has broken the rules of society and therefore does not deserve to receive the benefits from society. In our world this philosophy has completely disappeared.
For us, we are all equal in the eyes of the law and the law is equal in all our eyes. A mass murderer in prison serving a life term has equal access to law, medicine and the protection of the police, as any other member of society, regardless of his conviction.
But should left-liberals think about re-evaluating this approach?
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Domestic violence: whose problem is it?
In a previous post, which suggested a few measures government could take to reduce domestic violence (or at the very least improve care for its victims), I mentioned the necessity for greater provision of refuges where women could seek shelter from their tormentors.
Conveniently, this survey by the Equality and Human Rights Commission details the extent of the current provision – or lack thereof – and produces some quite troubling figures.
The commission found that one in four local authorities in Britain has no specialised support services whatsoever, that a quarter of the rape crisis centres which do exist fear closure or cuts in funding, and that ethnic minority women – whose circumstances can be slightly different due to the intersection of culture, relgion and misogyny – are particularly poorly-served by current provision. In short, we’re just not doing enough to care for victims.
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EU in ‘not about to lock us all up forever’ shock
One of the most popular sports played by politicans across Europe is ‘blaming unpopular things on the EU’. The specific unpopular thing varies across countries: here, it tends to be Rules And Regulations; in France, it tends to be the ability to buy things without enormous tarrifs; while pretty much everywhere it’s immigration.
However, it’s only in the UK where we have a large, or at least vociferous, group of utter maniacs and obsessives who’re willing to blame absolutely everything that happens on the EU, and to view the organisation as a tool of the Devil, or possibly Hitler, to bring about a communist Hell, or possibly a Fourth Reich.
R.I.P Oscar Grant – victim of authority
We are, in the supposedly democratic and developed world, not without terrible events happening on our own doorstep by those that are supposed to be protecting our freedom. Rodney King beaten brutally in the US in 1991 pales in to insignificance compared to Jean Charles De Menezes being murdered by British police because of a poorly executed operation based on flimsy evidence here in the UK, or Alexis Grigoropoulos being shot to death for (allegedly) throwing stones at a police car.
We can now add to this list, along with however many other possible unreported or undiscovered incidents, Oscar Grant, a man being arrested and detained along with several other people on a subway in San Fransisco by transport police, shot in the back despite being restrained by two police officers with another standing by ready to assist. The sad thing is some of his last words are reported to be a fear of getting tazed, in a country that brought us “don’t taze me bro“, he knew he was going to get shot with something while being restrained, little did he know it would be a gun.
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Governing by tabloid headlines
Yesterday, Polly Toynbee dismissed David Cameron’s new tax proposals as “part populism, part poison”. If that’s so, then I hope she’ll react with similar disgust to Hazel Blears’ latest belch of blame-the-poor prattle:
Hit-squads will make early-morning calls to make sure parents are out of bed to get their kids ready for school before heading out to look for work. They will even turn up with rubber gloves to get families to clean up filthy homes. Communities Secretary Hazel Blears said: “In a recession, there’s no space for freeloaders. We need a more muscular approach to ways the state intervenes into deliberately-unemployed people’s lives. Young people are often capable of much more than signing on the dole like their parents.”
Let us be clear; these aren’t serious proposals.
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Youth crime and Tories; another broken record
Since the Tory conference 2007, there have been periods where every week or so, the Conservatives announce a new policy with which they hope to win over more votes. It seems to be the nature of politics these days; one doesn’t exist unless one is appearing in the media. When announcing such policies, the Tories in question often indulge in hyperbole, blaming Labour, citing the end of Labour, citing the awakening of popular consciousness against Labour and so on, ad nauseam.
The last few weeks have seen such behaviour with regard to crime – knife crime at first, then moving to general crime and now it is the turn of youth crime. “Back public against crime – Tory” is the ridiculously jingoistic title of the BBC piece showcasing Dominic Grieve’s interview with the Indy. The Shadow Attorny General has been saying that we should give adults the right to intervene with any young person they feel to be acting in an anti-social manner.
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Why I am not a Libertarian
Recently, there appears to have been an influx into the Liberal Democrats of Libertarians. This is typified by the members of ‘Liberal Vision‘, which is in turn part of a Tory organisation called ‘progressive voice’ (essentially a bunch of Objectivists).
Now, in many ways I agree with libertarians on many subjects – which is, of course, why we can be in the same party – I am all for more personal freedom, for a lack of government interference in people’s lives, for the restoration of recently-lost civil liberties and so on. But libertarians seem, to me, to have two big holes in their thinking, both of which are summed up by some recent comments by Nick in this thread on Liberal Conspiracy (scroll down).
‘Nick’ is following the libertarian ‘party line’ almost exactly: the government should not interfere with the workings of the market when companies are failing. Not only should they not spend any money bailing out the companies (a reasonable, debatable position) or on retraining the workers so they can get jobs elsewhere (a much less reasonable position in my view) – they should not even pay unemployment benefit to the people who lose their jobs, because the money would be better allocated by the market.
Now, there are two distinct errors here.
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Labour wants you to pay up
This is an incredibly late April Fool, surely:
The government has been accused of trampling on individual liberties by proposing wide-ranging new powers for bailiffs to break into homes and to use “reasonable force” against householders who try to protect their valuables. Under the regulations, bailiffs for private firms would for the first time be given permission to restrain or pin down householders. They would also be able to force their way into homes to seize property to pay off debts, such as unpaid credit card bills and loans.
The government, which wants to crack down on people who evade debts, says the new powers would be overseen by a robust industry watchdog. However, the laws are being criticised as the latest erosion of the rights of the householder in his own home.
The government, which wants to crack down on people who evade debts. I can think of a few individuals and companies which have been known to evade their debts, or as they are sometimes also known, taxes. How about sending the bailiffs after the likes of that fucker Philip Green, who paid his wife £1bn into a Monaco account to avoid having to hand over any of his quite legitimately owned moolah? Why don’t we hire the goons when Rupert Murdoch is next in town to loot his office, all the while pinning him down so tightly that he can’t breathe?
Or perhaps we could set them on probably the biggest debtor in the country, or as he’s otherwise known, the prime minister. I can just imagine the burly bastards shoulder charging Number 10’s door, gathering all the Brown’s belongings, including his children’s toys, and putting them outside while the heavens open, Brown unfortunately being winded after getting obstreperous and asking them whether they know he is and then pleading with them that he will eventually be paying back that £645bn, honest. Fair is fair, after all.
Article 8: Getting the limelight it needs
The right to a private and family life, it seems like such a simple request does it not? Yet it is taken for granted, and is a right that is readily abolished by our government and other agencies to ensure our “safety”. Are we really living in a world where we cannot be safe without giving up our right to a private life? Thankfully a couple of recent decisions, regarding the holding of DNA on a national DNA database and of being retained on the sex offenders register indefinitely, have had a huge impact on restoring the value to the Article 8 right of the ECHR.
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Is this what Cameron thinks of them?
Harpymarx says if you thought James Purnell was bad, then try Civitas.
Sure but if you thought those idiots were bad, check out David Cameron’s latest editorial in the Daily Mail. Now we know what the Tory leader truly thinks of all unemployed people: that they’re just on the verge of turning into Karen Matthews.
Or maybe he thinks that of all working class people. Anyone still praying for these arrogant toffs to come into power? (via Paul Waugh)
Update 1: Good related piece by Matthew Norman in the Indy.
Update 2: Beau Bo D’Or has knocked up a perfect response.
Who’s winning the war on welfare?
There has never been a better – or a worse – time to reform the welfare system. Aided by a recession which has made public spending the top political issue, and the deep anger caused by the tragedies of Baby P and Shannon Matthews, the public have become far more receptive to the idea of a tougher, sanction-based system than they were in the halcyon days of summer.
Short of a Labour rebellion on the scale of the 10p tax fiasco, our increasing antipathy towards the terminally jobless will probably see Purnell’s pet project sail through the Commons. And yet, as some are painfully aware, in days when the jobless figures keep rising, it’s hard to find jobs for the short-term unemployed, let alone those who have never worked in their lives.
The problem with trying to write about welfare reform is so much of the rhetoric tends to merge economic issues (the amount of money the state spends on the poorest in society) with social problems (the crime, poor education, family breakdown and general dysfunction which can be found in impoverished communities).The two are heavily linked, of course, but the mistake politicians often make is assuming that by producing policies to tackle the former, the latter will somehow fix itself.
The chief perpetrators of this mistake are the Labour government.
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Growing racism in Italy
A strange mix of racism and authoritarianism is surfacing in Berlusconi’s Italy.
Since Silvio Berlusconi’s landslide victory last April, it’s as if the country started to passively give the nod to a disturbing series of populistic and semi-authoritarian measures. Whether it’s style, rhetoric or actions, whatever the government is doing is increasingly greeted by a collective shrug.
Berlusconi’s victory wiped out of Parliament the radical and green left and dropped the decimated centre-left into a morass of petty infighting. That allowed the Government to hit the ground running. Propped up by the type of anti-immigration rhetoric that Britain would only tolerate if the BNP were in power, the new Italian executive agreed to some seriously draconian legislation. Immigrants are now officially b-citizens.
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What about homophobia?
I suppose you should call this a work in regress. Back in 2003, the execrable, homophobic loon Bounty Killer weaseled out of some UK concerts after Peter Tatchell & OutRage! called for him to be arrested for inciting violence against gay people.
Five years later, the Metropolitan Police have decided that Mr Killer ain’t all that bad, and providing he doesn’t perform songs where he says things like ‘burn the queer’ (it’ll be a very short set, I guess), then they’re okay with him spreading what I’m sure is his primary message of peace, love & understanding.
Both Tatchell & Brett are completely correct to point out that if a musician tried to enter Britain with a songbook of ballads about white supremacy, he or she would struggle to find a visa, let alone a venue.
Maybe the soft, passive, ‘well, the last time he played a concert no gays were killed’ way of dealing with things has its merits, and if anyone has a clue what they are, I’d be happy to be enlightened. But I don’t see how we’re going to succeed in erasing homophobia when the police’s actions seem to imply that it’s less of a social evil than racism.
CIC paper: Can British citizens become ‘active’?
Liberal Conspiracy is publishing a series of discussions about the government’s Community Empowerment White Paper. This is a summary of the second chapter.
Chapter 2: Active citizens and the value of volunteering
The government wants to “make it easier to be involved in voluntary and community activity” and proposes:
Volunteering
- Community Allowance pilots – paying people to do community work without losing benefits.
- Job Centres to help people do volunteer work.
- £2m more to support people with disabilities.
Mentoring
- Developing a strategy for extending mentoring
Citizenship
- A review of citizenship education in schools.
- a ‘Take Part local pathfinder programme’, offering information and training on being an active citizen for adults.
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Tory social engineering is back!
The Conservatives are publishing their recommendations. Don’t worry if your husband beats you. Iain Duncan Smith tells you why you should stick together.
What better way to publicise their proposals than in the wake of Baby P’s death and the ‘blood on their hands’ groundwork done by the tabloids? Back-to-basics Tories and social engineering are back with a bang. Iain Duncan Smith, former Conservative leader and now David Cameron’s advisor on ’social breakdown’ has published his recommendations.
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The roles of Sharon Shoesmith and George Meehan
On Saturday went I on Ken Livingstone’s LBC show.
Most of the time was spent on Baby P, not surprisingly. Just to break for a brief moment from Baby P – Ken said at the end that I could spend the last minute ranting about whatever I wanted. So I did. I made an appeal to Gordon Brown to re-open the sub-post offices in London that he has closed. Having decided to stop any further closures it seems to me that those of us who were unfortunate enough to have had the axe already fall should have the closures reversed.
Back to Baby P – Saturday was the day Sharon Shoesmith received some support in the form of a letter to the media from 61 head teachers in Haringey. Sharon is Director of Education here in Haringey. As Ken put it on air – she’s their boss.
But this isn’t about her competence or otherwise in education – it’s about her responsibility and accountability for the social services side of her brief – which includes having – under the Children’s Act of 2004 – the responsibility for child protection in Haringey. Under this legal framework her and the political leadership side of the equation have the ultimate responsibility.
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» How bad is the feline obesity crisis?
» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civic cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
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