David Cameron has rejected the call for a Royal Commission on the UK's drugs laws. This request did not come from a bleary-eyed, teen stoner sporting a T-shirt that with an alien head and the logo 'Take Me to Your Dealer', which might explain his refusal. No, this proposal came from a House of Commons select committee on home affairs, none of whose members wore T-shirts saying 'Adihash', 'Coke Is It' or 'Marijuana - Millions stoned' in the style of the McDonald's logo. One MP was wearing a T-shirt under his business shirt with a picture of a small fat-faced dog with a diagonal red line through it, strapline 'Say No Pugs'. What that proves is anyone's guess, perhaps that this MP genuinely thinks comedy tees are funny or that he failed to do the washing and had to substitute this weak dog joke top for a vest.
Whatever the select committee may or may not have been wearing, under or over their business dress, did not apparently influence Dave's decision to dismiss this plea out of hand. He gave three reasons in a short interview. As he was pressed for time, I have helpfully filled in what he was trying to express.
1. 'We have a policy and it's working, drug use is coming down'
What I meant to say was the government has a policy of ignoring its own scientific advice and that of senior police officers. We prefer instead to stick with prohibition because we are terrified of hostile articles by the likes of Melanie Philips or Richard Littlejohn in the tabloids. Strangely despite my obsession with opinion polls, in the case of drugs' laws, I prefer to ignore the views of over 70% of the population.
Drug usage has come down a little bit, so I will pretend that there's some connection between our policy and the outcome. Quite why it's taken 30 years for the identical policies to have effect I won't bother to explain and if drug use were to go up again, I will be very quick to deny any link between consumption and policy. As I have conveniently avoided discussing the counterfactual, you don't have a chance to compare what might have happened in the UK with different policies. I won't do this, because the example of Portugal in recent years disproves my original point.
2. 'We need to do more to keep drugs out of our prisons'
Rather than answer your question about the need for a Royal Commission, I have instead mentioned an different issue which is the systemic smuggling perpetrated by our prison officers. This relates to drugs prohibition in exactly the opposite way I'm suggesting, as were drugs decriminalised, no prison warder need smuggle the substances inside nor would there be any inflated profits by virtue of their illegality.
Not letting facts or logic upset my polemic, I have instead used the simple, yet effective, trick of saying certain words close to each other. This creates an entirely artificial and fallacious choice in your mind thanks to verbal proximity: support for a Royal Commission equates with supporting more drugs in prisons. This is absolute nonsense, but as I've said it with the sort of serious face usually reserved for the death of an elderly family pet you might just buy it. To be honest, the only kind of person who would actually support the crazy idea of more drugs in prisons would be a prison officer. He's hoping to save enough to buy that static caravan he's always dreamed of the Pembrokeshire coast.
3. 'We need to focus on [the above] than a very long term Royal Commission'.
I'm going to stick with the same basic formula for point 1 and 2, which is to say things one after another which have no connection in the belief that most people are too stupid to spot logical flaws. This is pretty much what passes for serious debate in this country about drug policy.
You might have thought that as a rightwing free-market advocate running a Coalition that desperately needs to raise runds the pure economics of legalisation might appeal to me. Nope. I would much rather be consistently and hopelessly wrong that embrace any hint of the complexity such issues present in the real world.
And I won't trouble myself with the inconvenient fact that if the UK drug laws were as rigorously enforced on rich white males as they are on poor black males, yours truly along with many of his cabinet colleagues and associates would have a criminal record.
Now if you'll excuse me George Osborne and I are rather busy at the moment trying to do more damage to the UK economy than any other individual in the last 100 years. We are currently joint 3rd with Goering.
Showing posts with label David Cameron. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Cameron. Show all posts
Tuesday, 11 December 2012
Wednesday, 11 May 2011
Voting Alternatives
Dear Reader
If you were a supporter of electoral reform then you must be hurting from the almighty pimpslap you received from the British electorate, which knocked you seven ways sideways or, as some commentators claim, thirty years into the future. The debate was conducted with about as much good grace as a late night punch-up in the high street, with David Cameron hitting Nick Clegg over head with a metaphorical traffic cone whilst the Lib Dem leader then hid in a mini-cab office and called the police. In this analogy, the cone represents smear tactics, Paddy Ashdown is a mini-cab and Ed Milliband is the police. Hang on, that made more sense in my head.
The British voters decided that in the middle of three wars, yes three - Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq (not over yet), the greatest economic downturn for seventy years and national debt on course to double, that changing the not-obviously-broken voting system should figure low on everyones' to do list. One tip for any future reform campaigns is beware the celebrity endorsement. Much as we may cherish and admire screen and stage work of comedians and actors, no one is really going to trust them on political issues as they quite clearly could not be left in charge of a box of pencils.
Both sides in the AV debate used and abused the word 'fair', as if it proved their respective case. There can be few words more misleading than 'fair' when used in a political debate other than perhaps 'radical'. 'Radical' should be removed from all policy documents and media is coverage as it is nearly always redundant. Using the simple Pol Pot sliding scale of radical policies, with zero being not radical at all and 10 being Year Zero, totally-bat-shit-mental-radical, most policies count as one or two out of 10, namely more of the same with a few tweaks. Be grateful that radical policies are nothing of the sort, real radicalism tends involve working in a slave labour camp with only mud soup for dinner. (If you work in a call centre in the North East, this may sound like an improvement, but for the rest of us it isn't).
'Fair' when employed in a political debate is often another way of saying that the speaker prefers one set outcomes to another, so the Liberal Democrats claimed that AV was fairer because they would get more seats. The Tories on the other hand, said that first past the post was fairer because there would be less Liberal Democrats and regardless of the Coalition most Conservatives would like to bury the Liberal Democrats at sea, before they are dead. The Lib Dems want to do the same, but in sustainably sourced coffins.
There is no commonly agreed standard of 'fairness' in elections and voting systems. They all have flaws and all produce outcomes that some resent. For those readers in favour of proportional representation then there is one image to bear in mind: a Viagra-charged Silvio Berulsconi naked in a hot tub with four women whose combined ages still don't equal his own. First past the post has numerous problems, not least that you are forced to elect someone, even when you think a random person plucked of the street would do a better job. In some cases that is clearly true, Nadine Dorries, come in your time is up, the man who stacks the trollies at Asda wants to have a go.
So this typing ape concludes that whatever your preference for voting: FPTP, AV, PR or CTDAPP (chimps throwing darts at a piece of paper), there's no such thing as fair. Life isn't, why should voting be any different?
If you were a supporter of electoral reform then you must be hurting from the almighty pimpslap you received from the British electorate, which knocked you seven ways sideways or, as some commentators claim, thirty years into the future. The debate was conducted with about as much good grace as a late night punch-up in the high street, with David Cameron hitting Nick Clegg over head with a metaphorical traffic cone whilst the Lib Dem leader then hid in a mini-cab office and called the police. In this analogy, the cone represents smear tactics, Paddy Ashdown is a mini-cab and Ed Milliband is the police. Hang on, that made more sense in my head.
The British voters decided that in the middle of three wars, yes three - Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq (not over yet), the greatest economic downturn for seventy years and national debt on course to double, that changing the not-obviously-broken voting system should figure low on everyones' to do list. One tip for any future reform campaigns is beware the celebrity endorsement. Much as we may cherish and admire screen and stage work of comedians and actors, no one is really going to trust them on political issues as they quite clearly could not be left in charge of a box of pencils.
Both sides in the AV debate used and abused the word 'fair', as if it proved their respective case. There can be few words more misleading than 'fair' when used in a political debate other than perhaps 'radical'. 'Radical' should be removed from all policy documents and media is coverage as it is nearly always redundant. Using the simple Pol Pot sliding scale of radical policies, with zero being not radical at all and 10 being Year Zero, totally-bat-shit-mental-radical, most policies count as one or two out of 10, namely more of the same with a few tweaks. Be grateful that radical policies are nothing of the sort, real radicalism tends involve working in a slave labour camp with only mud soup for dinner. (If you work in a call centre in the North East, this may sound like an improvement, but for the rest of us it isn't).
'Fair' when employed in a political debate is often another way of saying that the speaker prefers one set outcomes to another, so the Liberal Democrats claimed that AV was fairer because they would get more seats. The Tories on the other hand, said that first past the post was fairer because there would be less Liberal Democrats and regardless of the Coalition most Conservatives would like to bury the Liberal Democrats at sea, before they are dead. The Lib Dems want to do the same, but in sustainably sourced coffins.
There is no commonly agreed standard of 'fairness' in elections and voting systems. They all have flaws and all produce outcomes that some resent. For those readers in favour of proportional representation then there is one image to bear in mind: a Viagra-charged Silvio Berulsconi naked in a hot tub with four women whose combined ages still don't equal his own. First past the post has numerous problems, not least that you are forced to elect someone, even when you think a random person plucked of the street would do a better job. In some cases that is clearly true, Nadine Dorries, come in your time is up, the man who stacks the trollies at Asda wants to have a go.
So this typing ape concludes that whatever your preference for voting: FPTP, AV, PR or CTDAPP (chimps throwing darts at a piece of paper), there's no such thing as fair. Life isn't, why should voting be any different?
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