item0054C  844, 845

"Circumstances have changed beyond recognition since the 1970s, certainly the 1960s when Roy Jenkins was at the Labour Home Office.  In my view, the last quarter-century has indeed seen social disintegration on a scale not experienced before, and Government has a major role to play in countering its disruptive effects.  And that requires both carrot-and-stick.  As a human rights activist yourself, I can understand your resistance to this new dimension of politics - but you are the one who is "out of step"!  On hooliganism, immigration, burglary, street-crime, generic social disorder - it is vital that we use both carrot and stick to contain the disruption caused to the lives of ordinary people.  This is not "authoritarianism" in any pejorative sense: it is the necessary feature of decisive action."  ...to read the rest, click here.

I suspect that  may indeed by the case.  That there is a sense abroad that personal behavioural conventions have been changed so radically by divorce and the progressive collapse of the nuclear family, and by the decline of "local, communal" religion, that "the State" must step in to act as the tutor and arbiter of acceptable social and inter-personal behaviour.

If so, that is a wrong perception.  If anything, the human spirit is moving (I would argue) in precisely the opposite direction.  Profound social changes have indeed occurred, in both family and community life, but that should not herald a more interventionist, more repressive state!  Heaven forfend! However disruptive the behaviour of some individuals may be, there are always positive and supportive ways of influencing it, as well as restrictive and punitive methods.  We should be choosing the ways not of confrontation, but of sympathy and understanding.

In the face of weakening "collective" ties, I see the emergence of new conventions of individualism and personal independence, which have their own disciplines, their own coherence.  These are indeed the creative growth-points of our society, and I rejoice in them. The function of the State is simply to support the individual, empowering the individual to solve his or her problems - that is all.  That is why effective support during unemployment is critical - and that is why the assurance of a safe financial haven at the end of life is central to contemporary socialism.  They are both support systems - NOT for the family, NOT for the collectivity, but for the free-standing individual, proud to carve out a distinctive path through life.  Given access to education and health services, support during unemployment and in old age, our children and grandchildren will make their own individualist journeys through life.

The last thing we need is the emergence of the State as quasi-family, as quasi-Church, as quasi-Village Bobby clipping teenagers around their "miserable ear-'oles".   I want the State to keep out of "good parenting" programmes, anti-truancy programmes, hooligan-rehab programmes, adult "healthy eating" programmes, anti-smoking campaigns, the prohibition of a few selective psychoactive drugs, and mandatory drug rehabilitation programmes.  While these all reflect legitimate concerns of civil society, they should not engage the full heavyweight apparatus of the State.  The repressive attitudes fostered by this paranoid obsession with "deviants" (smokers, the obese, inadequate parents) feeds a far wider intolerance, a far wider insensitivity to the fragile plant of personal freedom - upon which the true quality of our society turns. 

These ought to be no-go zones, for the State.  Family, Church, and community may well be changing - I do not deny that - but I am sure that the world will be a nastier place if P.C. Blunkett and P.C.Letwin are allowed to get their hands on any more truncheons, any more excuses to use them to belabour our fellow-citizens.

• No pun intended...

Do you share any of my concerns, on this front?  Drop me a line

 < Back to Home Page

Ruinous Prohibition

Drugs prohibition is ruining our society.  The damage is being done, not by drug consumption itself, but by the fateful consequences of its criminalisation.  Our society, having sown the wind by deciding to prohibit a fundamental human trait, a basic human liberty, is reaping the whirlwind.

The network of illegal high-profit dealing interpenetrates every neighbourhood, every street, fuelling local fears, provoking local disorder.   Gun usage is spreading rapidly throughout the country, as drugs gangs compete for the illegal empires we have created.  Gun killings proliferate, particularly among young adult men.  Our civil liberties are being steadily eroded, homes invaded, private life violated, invasive Court procedures extended, public corruption encouraged, by the official pursuit of the “war on drugs”.  Generational distance, between the young and their "elders" is increasing, the gulf of misunderstanding becoming more disruptive, more destructive. The moral ambivalence of prohibition inhibits the processes of public education and therapy which ought to be our principal concerns.  Jury trial is under threat, because of the perceived need to counter the risk of juror intimidation, principally from the growing network of drugs gangs.  Illegal drugs dealing continues to fuel and finance a thousand other illegalities, terrorism and all forms of political extremism.  The profitable UK illegal drugs market continues to attract vicious foreign gangs – Yardies, East European, Chinese triad. The massive administrative burden of prohibition saps our enforcement agencies, Police and Customs.

The remedy is in our own hands.  We must find the courage to repeal “prohibition”, to organise legal supplies of all psychoactive substances, and to inaugurate throughout society of a coherent, remedial network of treatment for addiction, in those minority of cases where it arises.  Nothing less will do.