A Political Sham

It’s all gone a bit quiet on the MPs’ expenses front at the moment with the majority of the media and political class still predictably continuing to occupy themselves with what has now rather amusingly been dubbed by the newspapers as ‘smeargate’.

While both scandals undoubtedly serve to remind us and the electorate of how out of touch the political class are with the rest of the country – both morally and politically – this cannot, I think, necessarily be seen as entirely desirable.

In the few years leading up to the 1997 General Election, the Conservative Government of John Major was engulfed in scandal after scandal involving the sleazy activities of Tory backbenchers and Ministers. The bedroom antics and financial misdoings of MPs whom nobody had heard of previously were suddenly splashed all over the front pages of the daily newspapers.

It would be fair to say that all Governments who have been in office for any considerable length of time are susceptible to these scandals. This does not, of course, make it right that they should have been carried out by the individuals in question, but simply to say that such human and political failings will almost certainly happen under any Government of any party given enough time.

As it happens, the supposedly ‘whiter than white’ Labour party that followed the Conservative implosion and electoral landslide of 1997 was swiftly involved in its own set of financial and sexual scandals, with Robin Cook choosing to sack his wife at the airport after a phone call with Blair and later marrying his mistress, while Peter Mandelson was caught up in the Hinduja passport row.

Yet, with a change of Government, very little by comparison was made of these similar scandals in the mainstream media, and sleaze suddenly became politically unimportant again (to most journalists at least). This therefore suggests that sleaze only seems to matter when a Government is perceived to be doing a bad job. This was the case in the mid-nineties under John Major and is equally so now under the tenure of Gordon Brown.

However, more importantly, the cry of sleaze levelled at individual MPs and Governments can be used by the media as a means by which to allow the political opposition into office without ever having subjected them to reasoned or thorough scrutiny of policy.

In short it is an unreasoned, mindless frenzy. It happened in 1997 with very little public scrutiny of Labour’s policies under the leadership of Tony Blair, and it appears that something similar is happening again with the Labour Government and our Tory opposition under David Cameron. The effect will be that ‘real’ political issues will not be discussed (or often even aired) and that as a consequence no honest political choice will be given to the electorate – they will simply be voting on personalities.

The Trouble With Drugs

Last Friday, Peter North, on his blog Letters from Limbo, wrote about what he called a ‘leadership vacuum’ over the issue of British drugs policy, which then led on to him railing against the many failings of our political system.

Like so many before him, Peter predictably called for the legalisation of all banned narcotic substances by the State arguing, in classic ‘harm reduction’ style, that what British people really need, rather criminalisation, is ‘better drugs education on how to take them safely and where to get help if needs be’.

Where do I start? There are so many comments and observations by Peter in his piece that I take issue with that it is difficult to know where to begin. I suppose, firstly, it should be made clear that even if we, as a nation, wanted to legalise such substances then we could not due to the binding international treaties which Britain has signed. Before we could begin to initiate legalisation in this country, Britain would have to break from these treaties.

Anyway, putting aside the fascinating issue of international law for the moment, it should also be said that North Jnr doesn’t get off to a fantastic start in his article when he says of drugs that:

The evidence that prohibition is a failed policy mounts up year after year but we remain in a constant state of political paralysis.

I would have thought that it really goes without saying that the banning of drugs such as cannabis and heroin in Britain are not in the slightest like prohibition. However, much like the pressure group, Transform, whose spokesman was given a rather soft interview by Evan Davis on the BBC’s Today programme recently, Peter North seems convinced that the British state somehow acts in a ‘punitive, prohibitionist’ way towards illegal drugs.

Click here to continue reading the article…

Nobody Cares

A Labour official attempts to smear leading Tories. Conservatives angrily deny remarks and bitterly complain. Damian McBride resigns and leaves his job. Cameron calls for a public apology.

Labour backbencher, John McDonnell, and Shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague, call for a swift inquiry into the email leaks and those responsible for the digital comments. The end of the world as we know it beckons.

Who actually cares? Certainly not me, though it seems that the usual suspects in the media and in the blogosphere have worked themselves up into a mad feeding frenzy over what amounts to be nothing more than a complete non-issue.

Nobody living outside the Westminster bubble actually cares at all either. Real people with real jobs and families are either too busy dealing with their own financial problems, as our economy falls into the worst recession for decades, or worrying about more important issues from health to immigration. Perhaps this is why the British National party are rapidly gaining traction in local elections at the expense of all the main parties?

In fact, this whole rather sad episode played out in Westminster just goes to further highlight how completely out of touch our political class have become. They’ve made more fuss over a few pathetic emails than they have over many, many other issues which are actually important to the electorate. This will only serve to drive yet more voters into the arms of the racist BNP.