Professor Nutt, the cannabis propagandist in a scientist’s white coat
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
The authorities in this country have given up trying to enforce the law against possession of cannabis.
I know this because I have spent the week researching a statement recently made by the famed Professor David Nutt, hero of the cannabis lobby. And it is deeply misleading, which is especially shocking in one who holds the title ‘Professor’.
Professor Nutt said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that last year ‘160,000 people were given criminal sanctions for possessing cannabis’.
Well, it is true that the Home Office recorded 162,610 cases of cannabis possession in England and Wales in 2009. But what happened next? Savage punishment?
Not exactly. The majority of these cases – 86,953 – were dealt with by a feeble procedure known as a ‘Cannabis Warning’. This has no legal status, does not lead to a criminal record and is not even recorded nationally. Yet it is recommended by the Association of Chief Police Officers as the first option, unless ‘aggravating factors’ are present.
Another 19,137 cannabis cases were dealt with through Cautions, which expire after a maximum of three months and normally needn’t be declared to employers.
Slightly tougher, but not exactly life-changing, were the 11,492 Penalty Notices for Disorder, which are recorded indefinitely but do not involve a court appearance, a fine or imprisonment.
Only 22,748 cannabis cases, slightly more than one in eight, actually ended in court. Nobody in Whitehall is able to tell me what sort of penalties were imposed or what distinguishes these cases from the others. I suspect that most of these involved persistent offenders, or possession with intent to supply, or were charged in conjunction with other crimes.
For good or ill (and I believe it is for ill, since several such people will end up spending their lives in locked mental wards), a young person who smokes cannabis in private is most unlikely to attract the attention of the law. And if he does, he will not be seriously punished. Is a Cannabis Warning a ‘criminal sanction’ in any true sense? Or even a Caution?
Yet because David Nutt is a professor, he can say this sort of thing unchallenged on the BBC, and can also assert that ‘criminalising young people for smoking cannabis is actually more dangerous to them and their life than decriminalising it’.
It’s amazing what the Camerons get away with.
If Cherie Blair had worn the jaunty fedora hat that Samantha Cameron sported on Remembrance Sunday, the whole world would have been about her ears, denouncing its frivolity and saying, in my view rightly, that it wasn’t fitting for such a solemn occasion.
If Anthony Blair, or Gordon Brown, had used a grubby lavatory swearword in an after-dinner speech in front of dozens of prominent journalists and politicians, as Mr Cameron did on Wednesday night, he would rightly have been excoriated on front pages for lowering the standards of publicbehaviour.
Actually, they could equally well be called ‘Darker Later’, since that will certainly be the effect on our mornings in winter. Here are a few things about them you might like to know.
They are an offshoot of the fanatical man-made global warming outfit 10:10. That organisation, a favourite of the anti-British, pro-EU Guardian newspaper, were responsible for the disgusting No Pressure propaganda film, in which people who doubted the message of warmist zealots were blown into bloody shreds in a series of supposedly comic scenes.
They sought to organise an invasion of our website last week (I have the evidence), so giving a false impression of public feeling on this matter. They claim that making it darker later in winter will reduce road accidents. Initially, I accepted their claim that this had in fact happened during the 1968-71 experiment in darker mornings.
I sought other explanations for this. But then I checked the actual road-death figures for the period.
Here they are:
1968: 6,810.
1969: 7,365.
1970: 7,499.
1971: 7,699.
1972: 7,763.
Yes, total road deaths in Great Britain went up during this period.
I don’t know why they went up. But they certainly didn’t go down. This one fact is worth a ton of projections and speculations, which is what ‘Darker Later’ come up with when challenged on this issue. I have also asked them to name me one free and democratic country, outside the reach of German diplomatic and economic pressure, that has voluntarily set its clocks to a meridian 600 miles away. There has been no answer.
This was rejected with relief by public and Parliament when we did it 40 years ago. A similar attempt to mess with American clocks in 1974 and 1975 was abandoned because the dark mornings were so unpopular.
My contention that this idea has its roots in the EU has been challenged. To this I reply that one of the many attempts to skew our time eastwards was the ‘Central European Time Bill’ of 1994, keenly supported by the arch-Europhile Roy Jenkins in the House of Lords.
I might also mention that the EU is known to work constantly and covertly for its own ends, as shown in our story about Hughie Green last week, and in the sinister Seventies breakfast lobbies at the Connaught Hotel, exposed ten years ago in an unforgettable BBC Radio 4 programme, A Letter To The Times.
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18 November 2010 2:35 PM
Berlin Time and Time Again
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Do I ever think of Giving Up in Despair? And Other Questions
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16 November 2010 7:29 AM
The BBC's idea of Impartiality, versus mine. Some musings
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15 November 2010 10:18 AM
Don’t let them force you to live your life on Berlin Time
Such time is fine for that great and historic city, you might say. But Berlin is 580 miles and 15 degrees of longitude east of Greenwich, which means that the sun rises and sets there an hour earlier than it does in England.
The German capital, quite reasonably, does not fix its clocks to the time in Kiev or Minsk. Nor does it seem to suffer greatly by refusing to do so. So why should it be thought sensible for us to live as if we were far further east than we are?
And especially why should the people of the North of England and Scotland do so, when it will mean black darkness till around ten o’clock in the morning in the winter months?
According to Rebecca Harris, a chirpy, enthusiastic young Tory MP, this is a price worth paying for the many sparkling advantages of living our lives in step with Berliners. She believes that later, lighter afternoons in winter – and even later ones in summer – will make the roads safer, make old people less lonely, reduce crime, save energy and boost business.
She has all kinds of studies that appear to prove this, and is supported by a mass of pressure groups that agree with her.
My own impression is that many of these claims are pretty much guesswork. Shifting the clocks about changes less than you might think. The amount of actual daylight remains the same. It is just available at different times of day.
There was an experiment between 1968 and 1971, when we stayed on Summer Time all the year round – and lower road casualties for this period are often cited as an argument for the change. But the same years saw the introduction of roadside breath tests and the 70mph speed limit, so it is hard to claim that lighter evenings and darker mornings are solely responsible – or even to be sure that they are responsible at all.
Evenings are more dangerous than mornings on the roads, especially in these days of cheap alcohol and all-day opening, and of sparse police patrols, because drivers have had more time to drink too much. Light and dark make little difference to that.
But Mrs Harris’s well-supported Bill is well on its way anyway, unlike several similar efforts on the subject over the past dozen years. These all ended in defeat, as did the 1968-71 experiment.
But this one is different. An active and busy lobby seems to have got behind this measure, as any careful student of the media will have spotted. How did all those breezy, uncritical articles come to be written? How did the Prime Minister find the time to imply his own support?
It goes before Parliament on Friday, December 3, and if passed it will trigger the first steps towards this momentous change, possibly separating us for ever from the Greenwich Mean Time which we invented.
We have done this before – but only in the desperate days of wartime, when it was necessary to keep munitions workers at their benches, and farm labourers out in the fields, as long as possible.
But do we really need it now? In fact, might it not be a positive disadvantage to many, and not just those living in the North or Scotland? It is all very well for businessmen who wish to telephone colleagues in Frankfurt, Paris or Rome, though a one-hour difference is really not that hard to manage. But shoving us an hour eastwards would narrow the window in which we can speak to the US, especially to the increasingly crucial West Coast, which would be nine or even ten hours behind us.
In any case, clocks and times are not arbitrary. They measure the objective passage of time, which is governed by the rotation of the Earth. We do not have the power to change this.
Anyone who does much flying knows the unsettling effect even of a small shift in time on the human frame. This is because our clocks are out of synchronisation with our surroundings. What is being proposed is that this should now be our fate for ever. When our clocks say it is noon, or midnight, they will always be lying. For the summer months, they will be lying twice as hard.
But it is easy to see that since 1893, when Kaiser Wilhelm II’s arrogant and expansionist new German Empire adopted Mitteleuropaische Zeit (Central European Time to you), German power has been forcing its ideas of time on the rest of the Continent. First in 1914, and with redoubled force after 1940, the conquered nations of the Continent were instructed rather sharply to shift their clocks forward to suit the needs of German soldiers and German railways and German business.
A map of the present Central European Time Zone looks disturbingly like a map of a certain best-forgotten empire of 70 years ago. Would it really be silly to suspect that the neatness and standardisation fanatics of Brussels and Frankfurt, who have abolished almost every border in Europe, devised the European arrest warrant and the Euro passport and the European number plate and the European flag – and imposed a single currency on almost every state – would not also like a single time zone?
But wouldn’t it also be fatal to their desire if people in Britain recognised that this was what was going on? Are the smiley, optimistic ‘daylight-saving’ lobby perhaps useful idiots in someone else’s campaign? Rebecca Harris emphatically says that this is not so. But then, if it were, would she know?
Anyone in Britain who wants to live by Berlin time is welcome to do so, just as they are welcome to breakfast on bratwurst. There are good arguments, too, for schools and offices in some parts of the country to open earlier and close earlier in the dark months from November to February.
But that is quite different from our whole country being permanently shifted on to foreign time.
It is not too late to stop Mrs Harris’s curious Bill if enough MPs – more responsive to the public than they once were since their recent embarrassments – can be persuaded by public protest to vote against it.
If we are foolish enough to hurry down this path, it is by no means certain that we shall ever be allowed back if we decide we do not like it. Once we have fallen in, who would be surprised by a quiet Brussels Directive making the change permanent, whatever Parliament does? Now is the time to save our own time.
Register your support by mailing your name and address to BritishTime@mailonsunday.co.uk or by printing off the form here and returning it to British Time Campaign, Mail on Sunday, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TS.
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13 November 2010 6:24 PM
Poor old IDS...a decent man who’s been conned by the Fake Conservatives
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
That is why the most painful example of this policy is the vainglorious and often damaging use by Anthony Blair of our once-superb Armed Forces, in places where Britain has no national interest.
Meanwhile, he compelled those same Armed Forces to surrender to the criminal gang called the IRA, the only recent war in which our soldiers were used for proper national ends. He also crippled them with cuts.
Then there was Blunkettism. This began with a pretence that we were going to ‘sack bad teachers’, ‘raise school standards’ and so on, though of course continuing to ban selection by ability, the only thing that would do any good.
All that in fact happened was a great deal of testing, whose results were promptly rigged to suggest success. The outcome was that illiteracy, classroom disorder and low standards continued exactly as before, if not worse.
But before this was obvious, David Blunkett had moved on to the area of crime. Here too he was highly successful in improving the statistics, without improving the conditions.
Then there was terrorism, a perfect area for distraction. The Government could pretend to protect us against Osama Bin Laden, or some other sinister, hooded, bearded person crouched in a cave in Yemen, while failing to protect our homes against burglars – and so look decisive and ‘tough’.
We reached the stage long ago when most thinking people could spot that this stuff was false coinage. Any sensible adult, hearing the word ‘crackdown’, instantly suspects that he is being gulled. But most of the media, being happy to act as the spokesmen and spokeswomen of power, duly report this bilge as if it were true.
Well, now we have the same thing happening with welfare. Mr Blair’s New Labour Government is ably headed by his understudy David Cameron – while Mr Blair is on leave of absence addressing conventions of lavatory-paper makers. And among its many mini-Blunketts is poor old Iain Duncan Smith, a decent man fallen among liberals. IDS has indeed thought a lot about welfare.
But his colleagues forbade him to think about the real problem. This is that, since the catastrophic Labour Government of 1964-1970, the welfare state has deliberately encouraged parasitism, as well as flooding the country with professional social workers.
Nor can he actually do anything about the suicidal subsidy to single-mother families, which has helped destroy fatherhood and wreck our society.
So the IDS scheme will not work, and is certainly not the ‘historic’ document the servile BBC makes it out to be. But for a while it will stave off demands for a real reform. And when we wake up to the truth, we will be another dozen irrecoverable steps down the dark and crumbling stairway that leads to national extinction.
But it does contain some interesting things. It portrays a stable, two-parent family sympathetically, and assumes it is a good thing and deserves to survive. Hollywood doesn’t do this for heterosexual marriage, preferring to defame the respectable suburbs in such rubbish as American Beauty and Revolutionary Road. It hints humorously at the possibility that even a lesbian couple aren’t all that wild about one of their children turning out to be homosexual. It notices the cool, grown-up contempt many of today’s young feel for their babyish, spoiled, Sixties-generation parents. And it is remarkably just and condemnatory about the cruel selfishness of men who don’t take fatherhood seriously.
The superficially charming sperm-donor character, who reappears in his offspring’s lives, is eventually dismissed by one of them with the quietly devastating words: ‘I wish you’d been better.’
Some questions arise. Why isn’t the baby wearing one? And are we supposed to believe that these people – one the atheist scion of one of Britain’s most glacially Marxist families, the other a pointedly unmarried London trendy – are wearing poppies because of their conservative pro-military patriotism? Or because the British Left have decided that this is a good way to try to fool people that they are really normal?
Personally I prefer the honest position taken by Channel 4 News’s Jon Snow, who says he will wear his poppy in church but not on TV.
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I am still waiting for Saint Matthew Parris to apologise for misrepresenting me at a public debate earlier this month.
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