Britannia Radio

Monday, 20th September 2010

MELANIE PHILLIPS.

Jumping on the bandwagon (or Popemobile)

8:11am

How heartwarming to see the British Prime Minister David Cameron endorsing the Pope’s call for a public role for Christianity in Britain!

How inspiring to discover, suddenly, that ‘religion’ (which one?) apparently lies at the very heart of his Big Society!

How refreshing to find in the Prime Minister a man of rock-like principle, who wouldn’t dream of making opportunistic use of a wildly successful Papal visit which revealed the existence of a huge constituency either signed up or receptive to the message of uncompromising Christianity that the political class has until now brusquely ignored!

Might we now therefore expect the Prime Minister to repeal the pernicious ‘equality’ laws and the whole panoply of totalitarian victim culture and thought crime under which, as the Pope pointed out, Christians in Britain are now being oppressed?

September 20, 2010

George Michael goes to junkie heaven

Daily Mail, 21 September 2010

The jailing of George Michael for crashing his car while high on cannabis is deeply disturbing on more than one level.

To begin with, he joins the long list of junkie rock icons who present appalling role models to their millions of young fans.

The next cause for concern is that, despite a long history of drug offences — including possession of crack cocaine — he has been given, in the past, no more than a mild rap over the knuckles.

And even now, he has received a mere eight-week jail sentence, although he could have killed someone by driving when stoned out of his mind.

He thus joins the long list of personalities who appear to have been treated with kid gloves over their drug-taking. That sends a signal to the young that drug-taking rock stars are heroes rather than zeroes.

But perhaps the greatest cause for concern is what George Michael is almost certainly finding out in jail.

Pentonville prison — where he was briefly incarcerated — is apparently awash with drugs.

Michael has now been moved to Highpoint prison in Suffolk. But a 2007 report by the Prisons Inspectorate found that Highpoint had a ‘serious problem with drugs’. As, indeed, do many — if not most — other English jails.

A Home Office report last year warned that in many prisons cannabis, hard drugs, tranquillisers and prescription pills were easier to obtain than on the streets.

Staggeringly, nearly 40 per cent of prisoners will take drugs at some time during their sentence.

The chances of George Michael being less of a menace to society when he comes out of prison must, therefore, be virtually non-existent.

Is this not totally astounding? Prison is supposed to help inmates get on the straight and narrow. Yet when they go to jail they find they have arrived in junkie heaven.

Drugs are openly tolerated in prison — through a combination of corruption and a cynical and lazy willingness by jailers to use them as a chemical cosh to keep the prisons quiet. And successive governments have done nothing about this scandal.

Instead, Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke intones sanctimoniously that prison ‘doesn’t work’. Is it any wonder?

Yet, instead of ending the drug scourge in our jails that helps turn them into revolving doors of crime — and for which he is responsible — he proposes, absurdly, to let criminals go free.

Such sloppy thinking is a prime example of the deep demoralisation that blights our governing class. And that helps explain not only why prison ‘doesn’t work’ but why drug policy doesn’t work either.

Almost every week, someone who most definitely should know better says something totally irresponsible about drugs. The latest person to join this lengthening inventory of idiocy, the Chief Constable of Humberside Tim Hollis, yesterday
proposed decriminalising the personal use of drugs such as cannabis.

His reasons? Well, Mr Hollis does not want to give young people caught with minor amounts of soft drugs a criminal record, since this could ‘ruin their career before it has begun’.

What on earth have we come to when a chief constable wants to turn a blind eye to crime out of tender feelings for the criminal?

He also claimed that financial constraints meant it was impractical to arrest everybody caught with drugs.

But the same thing could be said about the impracticability of arresting all burglars, for example. Yet no one proposes that burglary should stop being a crime.

Strangely, Mr Hollis used precisely this argument in an article he wrote for the Yorkshire Post nearly two years ago, when he claimed — apparently contradicting what he said at the weekend — that ‘those who say we should legalise as “we’ve lost the war on drugs” adopt a false logic’.

He also said then he had ‘absolutely no doubt that law enforcement has a crucial role to play in tackling drugs’. But he appears to believe that the law should be enforced only against dealers rather than users.

The problem, Mr Hollis, is that often no distinction can be made between the two. Indeed, it is the long-standing police strategy of treating dealers as criminals but users as victims which is largely behind the collapse of drug policy into a morass of mixed messages.

Given that one distinguished pillar of the establishment after another is trotting out such illogicality, ignorance and confusion about drugs almost weekly, one is beginning to wonder whether something is being put in their tea.

Last week, the neuropharmacologist Professor Roger Pertwee argued that cannabis should be licensed for use by people deemed fit enough to take it. Yet, in the next breath, he conceded that the fact this would expose millions more to the harm done by cannabis was a serious problem with his proposal.

Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, the outgoing president of the Royal College of Physicians, suggested that relaxing the law on possessing drugs, such as heroin, cocaine and cannabis, would not increase the number of addicts. But how could it not do precisely that?

Following suit in this strange medical rush to expose many more folk to pharmacological harm, the editor of the British Medical Journal, Fiona Godlee, gushed that an article she ran by the drug legalisation pressure group Transform, calling for an end to the ‘hopelessly failed war on drugs’ and its replacement with a legal system of regulation and control, was a ‘beautifully argued essay’.

Yet statistics available from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime show that consumption of cocaine has fallen by 75 per cent in the U.S. over the past 20 years — suggesting that the American ‘war on drugs’ has been rather successful.

Remarkably, consideration of crack cocaine was simply omitted from Transform’s regulatory scheme.

As one of Britain’s most scholarly medical journals, the BMJ is supposed to publish academically refereed papers. So what’s it doing publishing tendentious propaganda?

The latest claim by the legalisers, being mindlessly parroted by establishment figures, is that Portugal’s decriminalisation of drugs in 2001 has led to a fall in drug use among young people. But this claim is based on statistical jiggery-pokery.

Between 2001 and 2007, drug use in Portugal actuallyincreased by 4.2 per cent, while the percentage of people who used drugs at least once in their lives multiplied from 7.8 per cent to 12 per cent — with cocaine use more than doubling.

The plain fact is that the ‘war against drugs’ has not failed in Britain, because there has been no war against drugs.

On the contrary — for years we’ve had a de-facto policy of decriminalisation, with the police and the courts increasingly unwilling to take action against people caught in possession of illegal drugs.

Those now queuing up to advocate an end to the enforcement of the law against drugs are missing the point by a mile. It is a bit like reacting to widespread illiteracy among schoolchildren not by addressing the failure to teach them to read but by getting them to watch films instead.

There is no war on drugs because, quite simply, the entire criminal justice system has given up on the problem.

Week after week, authority figures tell young people that the law against drugs is an ass. Leniency to rock junkies underlines that the law on drugs just isn’t taken seriously by all those charged to enforce it.

Our prisons are awash with the stuff. Police officers refuse to police it. The courts administer mere slaps on the wrist to those caught with it.

War on drugs? We should be so lucky.