JUDGING by RESULTS

Given the bad odour into which politics and politicians have fallen over recent months, inducing among swathes of the public a feeling of “a plague on all your houses”, it is neither surprising nor inappropriate that the general election results should disappoint everyone. Everyone, that is, except Naomi Long of the Alliance Party in Belfast East whose 23 percent swing kicked out of Westminster the Stormont First Minister, Peter Robinson (see my earlier posting The Woman Taken in Adultery); and except Caroline Lucas who won the first ever British parliamentary seat (Brighton Pavilion) for the party she leads, the Greens; and except Labour’s Margaret Hodge who had genuine reason to fear the challenge of the BNP leader Nick Griffin in her London East End seat of Barking but who, in the event, beat him four-to-one, kept him in third place and even reduced the vote share achieved by his predecessor by two percent.

By the same percentage, there was a swing in Barking from the Tories to Labour, on a night when the average swing from Labour to Conservative was five percent. Indeed, if Labour had done as well nationally as it did in both London and Scotland, Gordon Brown would now be handing out portfolios in a fourth successive Labour administration.

But Labour didn’t do anything like as well as that. No Cabinet ministers were unseated but two former Home Secretaries were. Few tears will be shed in Downing Street or anywhere else for Charles Clarke, a relentless critic of Brown after he wasn’t kept in the government. Jacqui Smith, somewhat unfairly over-tarnished by the parliamentary expenses scandal, was never going to hold Redditch, perilously retained in the 2005 election, but the nine percent swing away from her looked as though it contained a punitive element. Some good second-rank ministers lost – Vera Baird, Mike O’Brien, Chris Mole, Shahid Malik, Bill Rammell, Jim Knight, Angela Smith and others, including Gordon’s parliamentary private secretary Anne Snelgrove in Swindon South, the woman who said that she hugged him every day.

After all the supposed “Cleggmania”, the Lib Dems proved to be the dog that didn’t bark, increasing their vote only by one percent and taking a net loss of five seats, among them the really excellent medical specialist Evan Harris in Oxford West and that colourful character Lembit Opik on a staggering swing of thirteen percent to the Tories in Montgomeryshire. But the Liberals did take by a majority of exactly 800 the West Country seat of Wells, held since 1983 by David Heathcoat-Amory, old Etonian member of a well-known political family and tainted (literally) by manure in the expenses scandal.

Nick Clegg has announced that he believes David Cameron should be allowed the opportunity to attempt to form a government, seeing as the Tories are the largest party. Gordon Brown remains Prime Minister by convention and has graciously acknowledged that everyone should wait until Cameron and Clegg have done negotiating. Naturally enough, however, Brown has indicated why Clegg ought to throw in his lot with Labour after going through the motions with the Conservatives.

For his part, Cameron has made what he calls “a big, open and comprehensive offer” to the Lib Dems. He may, however, have thrust a broom handle through the wheels by ruling out of any negotiation the questions of Europe, defence, immigration amnesty and voting reform, offering on this last matter only “an all-party committee of enquiry”, which is to say nothing. This may be the clinching issue. Brown has proposed a referendum on the voting system and that must be more attractive to the Liberal Democrat party.

Were I Brown, I would go further. In return for a guarantee of support – which I suppose means in practice a coalition – I would offer Clegg another general election within twelve months, conducted under proportional representation. That ought to be an irresistible carrot for the Lib Dems. It gives Brown and Darling a chance to deliver what they believe they can deliver: an economic recovery this year without the cuts that the Tories intend to implement. It defines the arrangement as finite, allowing the possibility of Brown perhaps stepping aside early next year. It also seems to allow the Tories to believe that their inheritance is only postponed for a year. Twelve months is simultaneously an aeon and the bat of an eyelid. Making such an apparently tight timetable would give purpose to an exhausted Labour administration. And it would allow the opportunity for a little of the shine to rub off Clegg while he tries to make a parliamentary pact work in his party’s favour. I suggest that it is a creative, workable suggestion that has one huge advantage: everybody wins except the Tories.

A postscript about the BBC coverage: David Dimbleby’s problem with uninformative shots of cars might profitably be sorted out in the editorial office rather than on air. I had much more trouble with the continual truncating of interviews, frequently for what turned out to be no discernable reason. I also found Jeremy Paxman’s default position of vexed hectoring accompanied by a look of Martita Hunt imperiousness rather wearing. His not being able to understand that Lembit Opik might actually be quite upset about his defeat made him seem like the class bully. And he is surely experienced enough to know that politicians do not answer hypothetical questions if they can possibly help it. Putting an outrageous point does not necessarily provoke an outrageous response. In the end, I doubt that any of Paxman’s interviews furnished any memorable observations. Though I dislike him intensely and thought a lot of his interviewees were a waste of space, I found that Andrew Neill drew out many more intriguing answers. And a final suggestion for the BBC: the word "extraordinary" should be banned for five years, especially from the mouth of Fiona Bruce.

NUTT’s in “MAY NOT” ROW

While I was away in London last week, the most interestingly developing story was that of the sacking by Home Secretary Alan Johnson of Professor David Nutt. A psychiatrist and long-time researcher into alcohol and drug abuse, Nutt was chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. The ACMD – no longer 31-strong since others have resigned in sympathy – is an NGO made up of scientists and other experts in the field.

From 1971 (when it was enacted) until 2007, the Misuse of Drugs Act had always followed the ACMD’s recommendations in the way recreational drugs were classified. Indeed, in 2004, the then Home Secretary David Blunkett followed ACMD advice and downgraded cannabis to Class C, carrying lesser sentences for possession and dealing. The so-called drugs czar, Keith Hellawell, disagreed and accordingly resigned. But since Gordon Brown became PM, the ACMD has been sidelined. Former dope-smoker Jacqui Smith restored cannabis to Class B (the then chair of the ACMD, Sir Michael Rawlins, immediately stood down). Then, in February, she overruled the ACMD’s recommendation on ecstasy.

Last month, Prof Nutt wrote a paper, Estimating Drug Harms, for the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at his academic base, King’s College London. The newspapers picked up on the press release, particularly Nutt’s personal reclassification of various addictive substances, including alcohol and tobacco. That he ranked these respectively fifth and ninth – as against amphetamine at eighth, cannabis eleventh and LSD fourteenth – got the commentators steamed up. It was also brought to the attention of Johnson who duly sacked Nutt by email.

I couldn’t find Nutt’s full list anywhere in the press, so finally called up the CCJS document which you can read here:

http://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/estimatingdrugharms.html

And here is the table Nutt constructed to reflect his view of the comparative harm that various substances cause:



To read this chart, I suggest copying it onto your desktop and then zooming in

Since his sacking, Nutt has been very visible and very voluble. Clearly he senses a ministry that may be confidently kicked when it is down. He has said that the Brown government has “systematically undermined” the work of the ACMD; that politicians “distort” and “devalue” research evidence (and in this he includes those opposition politicians like Ann Widdecombe and shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling who have supported Johnson’s action); that ministers drastically overlook the “time-bomb of alcohol”. An ally, former ACMD secretary Jeremy Sare, referred to “pesky irritants like scientific evidence”. Those who will lambast the government with any material they can get have written scornfully of successive Home Secretaries’ self-trumpeted desire for “science-based” decisions that are then disregarded.

If only to be not on the same side as the likes of Melanie Phillips, one would not be attacking David Nutt. But the issues are not clear-cut. Defending his decision, Alan Johnson wrote to The Guardian that Nutt “cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy”. On the face of it, that seems reasonable enough. But Johnson also described Nutt’s “horse-riding analogy” – Nutt had earlier pointed out that a hundred people a year die in incidents while on horseback, as against thirty linked to ecstasy – as “a political rather than a scientific point”. Well, so is Johnson’s earlier thrust.

It is understandable if advisers feel angry and frustrated when their advice is not taken. Equally, ministers have to administrate and make policy choices and they cannot be hidebound by the apolitical advice of non-political analysts. How helpful is it for Nutt to compare drugs that are illegal with drugs that are not and are deeply embedded in the culture? If ministers were going to act on all recreational drugs – including nicotine and alcohol – in an equal manner, they would not want to start from where we are. The gradual marginalising of cigarette smoking has been highly controversial and, in some quarters (think David Hockney), very unpopular. What politician would be rash enough to embark on such a path with booze?

But then it seems absurd to many that cannabis, ranked by ministerial fiat as Class B, can attract five years in jail and/or an unlimited fine for, as Nutt puts it, possession of sufficient for one joint. In practice, no one, I would suggest, gets five year for such insignificant possession. But, as a matter of good public policy, the statute book should not be packed with penalties that are never going to be handed down.

And experience and anecdotal evidence supports Nutt’s contention that cannabis is “significantly less harmful than alcohol”. Take into account accidents and incidents and fights that have arisen out of drunkenness, along with the liver disease that is rapidly growing in our booze-sodden culture, and alcohol clearly has many more victims than other – perhaps all other – addictive substances on Nutt’s list.

Do we want recreational drugs decriminalised? Which companies would start to dominate the capital investment in such a new free market? What kind of a culture would develop in Britain if many or all recreational substances were decriminalised before other countries followed suit?

On the other hand, the illicit drug market is a notably nasty one, dominated by laundered money and brutal gangs. Many people who think they are snorting coke are imbibing no such thing. What does it do to your body to ingest Harpic or some other noxious chemical? How damaging is skunk? Maybe a proper commercial trade in these drugs would clean them up.

It is often argued that taking cannabis inevitably “leads on” to hard drugs. I always thought this fallacious. The connection between dope and heroin is simply that they are apt to be offered by the same suppliers because they are both illegal. If cannabis is downgraded, it is in practice psychologically and physically separated from coke and crack and the rest. It cannot be insignificant that, while cannabis was classified as C rather than B, its use among teenagers declined, according to the government’s own figures.

So the whole issue is complicated and prone to the taking of none-too-consistent positions. Nutt told The Observer that he thought the ACMD could well become “unviable”. There have been some resignations among its members but rather fewer than Nutt would probably have hoped for. As the days pass, his martyrdom will be forgotten and Alan Johnson will get on with his other tasks until the election. There are, one feels sure, very few votes in drugs policy.

But there are some interesting ideological ramifications, or so it seems to me. In very broad terms, the left has always favoured regulation, the use of law and governmental powers to protect the vulnerable and keep the rich and powerful in their place. In its extreme form, that becomes state dictatorship and oppressive interference in private matters. The right clings to the free market, deregulation, getting government out of people’s lives, even where some go unsupported to the wall. In its extreme form, this becomes a breakdown of law and the spread of pre-revolutionary anarchy.

Paradoxically, right-wingers are more likely to advocate fierce rules for others, particularly concerning their private lives (sex and drugs, for instance). And people on the left tend to be those who want less regulation in some fields, notably those of recreational drugs (which left-wingers perhaps are more liable to use) and, say, the internet which left-leaning rather than right-leaning libertarians are given to look upon as romantically free and outlawish.

With its stern, son-of-the-manse puritanism (small ‘p’), the Brown government not only wants more regulation of drugs and the internet, it also is almost as deregulatory in instinct, when it comes to capitalism, as the Tories. All of which goes to reinforce the opinion that most of us former Labour-voters have entertained about successive Blair and Brown governments: that (with a few exceptions) it’s been much like living under Thatcher and Major.

O TEMPORA, O MOIRES

It’s pretty hard, I suggest, for any sentient being to hold back from weighing in against the Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir and her drippingly poisonous piece about the death of Stephen Gately. For a gay man, it is impossible.

The column in question may be read at the following address:

www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1220756/A-strange-lonely-troubling-death--.html

The title of the article has been changed; it was originally “Why there was nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death”. The headline change does not remove the first version’s implication from the article itself. Moir – who is not, as far as I am aware, medically qualified, a coroner, a resident of Mallorca (where Gately’s death took place), an intimate of Gately’s circle or indeed an investigative journalist with particular contacts in, say, the police – is evidently just another homophobic bigot who has decided on a whim (or under deadline pressure) to air her prejudices to the naturally receptive Mail readership.

Unfortunately for her, there is a big online community with a fast response capability these days and if, in years gone by, one could let off a fart in a newspaper and not have it smelt, nowadays the public domain knows no limits. I have not had a copy of the Daily Mail in my hands since before David English’s time but I have read the column. One should declare one has read it because Moir’s first line of defence is as pathetic as her column is nasty: “I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read [my column]”. Well, dear, it’s not like the Christian lobby bleating about Jerry Springer – The Musical, the seeing of which would require effort and expenditure of time and money when obeying what the flock leader prescribes is so much easier. Reading an article as thin as yours takes two minutes and can be done online. We don’t need to leave ourselves open to being caught out in not having read it. We’ll leave unthinking bias to you.


Stephen Gately, a natural

Nor, also unlike those censorious delusionists, are we organising to bring you down. Moir complains of “what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign”. Who does she think organised it? The Stasi? Just because many people have a similar response to a piece of junk, it doesn’t render that response illegitimate. I have not discussed it with anyone else and I have read almost nothing of the complaints, over a thousand, made about the piece to the Press Complaints Commission. In that case, Moir will probably dismiss me as a lonely crank. So be it.

Moir’s defence concludes that “it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones’. I agree. Her homophobia and bigotry is far more than mere undertones. It is out front. Her central point is that “whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one”. You could argue that, not being privy to the coroner’s evidence, the events of the night when he died or any other germane material, Moir is simply in no position to pontificate on the nature of Gately’s demise. But that isn’t the fox she is after. The clue is in the word “natural”, the age-old complaint against homosexuality.

Moir says in her defence that she is “on the record in supporting” civil partnerships. In her article, though, she says that this event “strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships”. I know of no one in a civil partnership (I and my partner included) who subscribes to such a myth. It is one of Moir’s making. She goes on that “gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages”. No they aren’t. It is only heterosexuals and gay Christians who ever use the term “gay marriage”.


Gately: a nice cup of tea

My partner and I did not enter into a civil partnership because we wanted to ape straights, nor do we think of our arrangements as remotely like marriage. We did it so that, if I should die first, my estate will go to my partner rather than to my alcoholic cousin whom I haven’t seen for years, who has never been to the house and who would only drink away the money he made from its sale.

Moir links Gately’s death to the suicide of Kevin McGee, the former partner of Matt Lucas (she calls McGee “the former husband” of Matt Lucas, another term gay people don’t actually use; I am not my partner’s husband or his wife; we are not heterosexuals in drag). This is of course, in Moir’s own term, “mischievous” to say the least. Apart from sexual orientation, nothing links the two cases. But Moir wants to propose that Gately’s life was “shadowed by dark appetites or fractured by private vice”. She has no evidence to describe Gately’s life in those terms – or, for that matter, to accuse him of “public” vice, which I guess she would find preferable. Unless, that is, being gay is to still to be considered a dark appetite or a private vice. To consider so would reasonably enough be dismissed as homophobic. If not, what could be termed homophobia?

In her completely speculative account of the night Gately died, he and his partner Andrew Cowles took another man back to their apartment. “It is not disrespectful” she essays “to assume that a game of canasta … was not what was on the cards”. It is certainly presumptuous. Moir assumes that her readers imagine, as she evidently does, that gay men go at it like knives and that no encounter with another man can possibly be with anything non-carnal in mind. Who knows? Maybe they did play canasta. People do and gays are people too. Maybe, as Boy George once put it, they’d “rather have a nice cup of tea”.

Moir says that Cowles and the guest went to the bedroom together. She has no basis for that assertion. Gately died asleep on the couch. He wasn’t conscious. I don’t know what makes his death “lonely”. Like most other people, he died alone because, save in war, large-scale accident or explosion, people are apt to die one at a time. She says that “it has just been revealed that [Gately] smoked cannabis on the night he died”. Big deal. But hardly a dark appetite or a fracturing shadow.


Frump and looker

Like so much journalism, Moir’s piece is full of innuendo – the “undertones” she affects to scorn – that doesn’t stand up and, because it’s not spelt out, doesn’t need to, she believes. Well, I don’t go in for innuendo, I call it as I see it. Jan Moir is a nasty old frump, no doubt jealous of Gately’s looks and charm. After all, as can be seen from the likeness here, her glamorous by-line shot is extremely flattering. If she thinks that’s what she looks like, she’s living in cloud cuckoo land. So, like frumpy high-horse merchants down the ages, she is terribly afraid that someone somewhere might be having fun. She wants the world to know that, if you have fun and follow your heart, you will be punished, even unto death. And she doesn’t care if what she sicks up in her column turns people’s stomachs and greatly distresses the bereaved. It’s easy for journalists to imagine that, because of the hallowed “freedom of the press", they can write what they affect to think without any consequence. So it’s bracing that so many companies have withdrawn their advertising from the Mail’s website, reluctant to be associated with such primitive views. Next time she airs her narrow little prejudices, perhaps she will think before committing herself.

A LEGG to STAMP ON

A few belated words on the recent developments over MPs’ expenses. Politicians get a bad press on the whole; as I have just indicated, I think the press deserves a bad press. But I do believe that members are justified in objecting to the rewriting of history that has been indulged by Sir Thomas Legg in his letters to MPs. Members who broke the law – and there clearly are some – should be prosecuted. But all those who put in claims that were accepted and ratified by the proper offices are justified in feeling aggrieved that they are being caned for it now. If the rules were bad, unclear or full of holes, someone – probably any one of decades’ worth of Leaders of the House – should have addressed them.


Not a pop star, just an old Legg

I had rather hoped that Jacqui Smith, in her formal apology to the house demanded by Legg, would get up on her hind legs and tell him to blow it out his backside. But she is an obedient soldier and she is quietly taking a peerage after the election. Others who are steaming about it, and steaming rather more because their leaders are telling them to pay up and shut up, ought to get together and act. Some of them are not standing for re-election, others know that their chances of re-election are slim. Those who believe they are hard done-by should jointly resign their seats forthwith, thereby forcing a fusillade of by-elections.

For Labour that would be disastrous. It might be less than good news for the opposition parties too. Those with the stomach for it could further stir the pot by putting in a last-minute candidature as an independent, thereby further damaging the chances of the defending party. The widely touted public outrage may be less deeply felt than the conventional wisdom has it. Had the evidently popular Ian Gibson, forced to stand down from his Norwich North seat by the Labour Party, stood as an independent at the by-election that his angry resignation precipitated, the result might have more interesting than the comfortable win for that nodding-donkey girl for the Tories.

FREEDOM from INQUISITION

Today’s report that the Home Secretary is prepared to consider outsourcing the national database is one of the most alarming developments so far in the shaming story of New Labour’s flight from its own base, both in terms of its increasing instincts to control every damned thing and of its growing love affair with the private sector. As The Guardian put it, such a move “would be accompanied by tougher legal safeguards to guarantee against leaks and accidental data losses”, but of course there can be no such guarantee, however “tough” the safeguards.

We know already that the security applied to supposedly encrypted and/or confidential data is close to non-existent and that those who behave in a cavalier manner with sensitive material are almost never in practice subjected to penalty, either through the courts or even in their career paths.

I would like to make a modest proposal. Let Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, build into the premise of the operation of the national database’s security a provision that, in the event of a leak or a data loss, the then holder of the office of Home Secretary along with Ms Smith herself (whatever her then status) be obliged to serve a term of not less than two years’ detention in a maximum security prison. Such a provision would offer a rather more reliable “guarantee” against leaks and data loss and, moreover, would furnish both the then Home Secretary and Ms Smith with useful first-hand experience of “tough” security.

It never ceases to astonish me that politicians cannot envisage situations in which the powers that they wish to arrogate to themselves might be considerably more oppressive, for instance in the hands of some as-yet unforeseeable successor. In my lifetime, several European nations, not so unlike Britain, have laboured under dictatorships, usually of a military stripe. It is sadly not beyond the power of imagination to picture Britain too being governed by a regime even less concerned to protect the freedom of the individual than is New Labour. In fifty years from now, Britain will doubtless be a Muslim state. How much more effective will it be to inflict upon the nation the extremes of Sharia law when the Blair and Brown governments have created the infrastructure of surveillance that will allow a future mullah-turned-Interior-Minister to enforce orthodoxy on a British people who once rejoiced in their non-conformist traditions.

Rather more urgent – because the present economic climate makes it unavoidable – is the certainty that forms of access to the national database will be sold for profit to commercial organisations. Once the control of the data moves out of the hands of central government and into the hands of entrepreneurs who are answerable first to shareholders, the rush to cash in will become a stampede and government, having acceded to the thin edge of the wedge, will be powerless to prevent, say, your insurance company having total access to every financial transaction you conduct, every email you send or receive and details of every visit you make to a website. Is that what you voted for?

Sir Ken Macdonald, lately Director of Public Prosecutions, told The Guardian: “The tendency of the state to seek ever more powers of surveillance over its citizens may be driven by protective zeal. But the notion of total security is a paranoid fantasy which would destroy everything that makes living worthwhile. We must avoid surrendering our freedom as autonomous human beings to such an ugly future. We should make judgments that are compatible with our status as free people”. I couldn’t put it better.

Regulation is a perfectly honourable instinct in the make-up of the left. The current catastrophe of capitalism makes the case for regulation of the markets as no politician, however eloquent, ever could. But there is regulation and there is oppression. I do not say that the present government has turned to oppression … yet. But we are on a worrying path. Already more CCTV cameras gaze upon Britons than the residents of any other nation if measured by head of population. The suspicion that most of the cameras do not actually function properly helps to make the Brits relaxed about this chronic level of surveillance. After all, as a nation we are – we have always been – hopeless at maintenance. Count the clocks in public places that have stopped, the great majority of them not during the past month either.

If the level of surveillance actually delivered what it promised, there would be no shooting, no arresting and no convicting of innocent civilians. There would be much less theft, shoplifting, criminal damage and breaking in; much less speeding, hitting and running, dangerous driving and illegal parking; much less rape, kidnap, assault and child molestation; much less gang culture and fewer sink estates. The cost of this vast network of surveillance is nowhere near justified by its results.

So what the hell does the government want of this love affair with data-collecting? The knee-jerk response – that it is a crucial weapon in the front line of “the war against terror” – is a busted flush. The government could enact all manner of targeted controls on the community from which terrorism emerges if it were not so squeamish about giving offence to Islam. Faced by the loss of confidence in Labour among the non-Muslim population, part of it fuelled by the resentment at the imposition of oppressive regulation on communities that do nothing to justify it, you might think that Mr Brown’s advisors would suggest that he cut his losses and pursue a more broadly popular agenda.