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…

Swiftly They Move

The business section of today’s Daily Mail remarks upon a sell-off of Royal Mail taking place as early as April of this coming year. The paper also briefly details a list of potential buyers including TNT, Deutsche Post and the US Federal Express.

This merely points out the true inevitability of the situation – that the future of Royal Mail is in ‘privatisation’. It does not matter what we think about this; whether we agree or disagree with ‘privatisation’, it is not up to us to decide any longer – and it has not been our decision for quite some time.

As I previously highlighted, the European Union Postal Services Directive 2008/6/EC, which amended the previous Postal Service Directive 97/67/EC has decreed that ‘privatisation’ will indeed occur. Furthermore, as Directive 2008/6/EC clearly states:

Member States shall bring into force the laws, regulations and administrative provisions necessary to comply with this Directive by 31 December 2010 at the latest. They shall forthwith inform the Commission thereof.

Therefore the ‘privatisation’ of Royal Mail from its position as majority universal service provider must occur by 2011. In targeting April for a sell-off, our Labour administration is simply doing as it is being told by our EU masters in the Commission rather than following the advice of any policy groups or reports.

I should also point out that even if the Conservative party were against the ‘privatisation’ of Royal Mail (which they are not), then it wouldn’t make the blindest bit of difference. Our continued membership of the European Union confers upon us the necessity of obeying its legislation which is now part of our own law.

Democratic Issues

On Friday the BBC published an article outlining some of the comments made by various MPs from the three main parties on the arrest of Damian Green over supposed leaks from the Home Office.

Now, what I have found particularly interesting about the whole Damian Green saga (which I think has been completely blown out of all proportion by our typically hopeless media) is the outcry from the likes of Nick Clegg and an assortment of Liberal Democrat, Labour Party MPs.

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg told the BBC in an interview that he was deeply shocked by the arrest of Mr Green and claimed the event was a ‘mayday warning’ for democracy in Britain, saying:

This is something you might expect from a tin-pot dictatorship, not in a modern democracy.

The fact is though, like so many of our MPs that aimlessly waft around in Parliament, Nick Clegg only becomes interested in ‘democracy’ when the safety of the increasingly irrelevant Westminster bubble is punctured.

What do the likes of Nick Clegg really know of democracy? Where were he and others when our powers of self-government and democracy were being given away to the EU? Oh yes, that’s right, they were there in Parliament voting to give it away.

Bearing the above in mind, the speed with which our MPs of all parties have rallied to one another’s side and in the process ignored the real issue of our increasingly non-existent democracy betrays the truth that in fact MPs from all parties often have more in common with each other than they do the voting electorate.

Non-Event Alert

And the winner of this week’s non-event goes to the resignation of the Welsh Secretary Peter Hain, who is almost certain to be replaced by someone equally useless and incompetent.

Most people should have realised by now that many of our right honourable members are prone to corruption and breaking the laws they themselves created, especially with regard to party funding.

I explained back in December why this is really not as important an issue as it will be made out to be. Yet, unfortunately and without really surprising anyone, the British mainstream media will be on full alert tomorrow, ready to cram their papers full of pointless discussion and analysis on this non-event until everyone is completely sick and tired of the whole issue.

This will undoubtedly be at the expense of highlighting far more important issues such as a certain EU Constitution making its way through Parliament at the moment – though having said that, the British media were unlikely to have discussed that anyway – but there is even less chance of it happening now.