Defend Democracy From The Nutters

Dan Hannan is badly wrong about drugs, but absolutely right about our democracy and the threat to it:

I just heard a BBC presenter remark that drugs policy should be taken out of the hands of politicians and left to a panel of experts, rather as interest rates were left to the Bank of England. (Not, perhaps, the most felicious example, given the way in which the Bank’s decision to keep interest rates too low for too long contributed to the current recession.)

If drugs policy, why not also tax policy? Or education policy? Or European policy? I mean, I reckon I’d qualify as an expert on the EU: I’ve worked in its institutions for ten years, I’ve read the Lisbon Treaty, I can explain the difference between a Directive and a Regulation. So why not “stop Europe being treated a party political football”, and just leave the whole issue to me?

For what it’s worth, I agree with Prof David Nutt, the adviser sacked after criticising the Government’s decision to categorise cannabis as a Class B Drug. If anything I’d go further. He’s plainly right, this Nutt, when he says that the government’s attitude to cannabis is counter-productive, ill-informed and vote-grabbing. But that is what governments do: they grab votes. And, for all its faults, no one has come up with a better system than democracy. The BBC/Nutt option – contracting out important decisions to “experts” – has been the justification for every dictatorship in history, from Bonaparte’s onward.

If Prof Nutt feels strongly about the subject – and, as I say, he has every right to – then the correct procedure is to stand for election and see if he can convince his fellow countrymen.

Better yet, let’s decide issues of this sort by referendum. I realise that, as a libertarian, I might well lose. But I’d rather live in a democracy than a quangocracy – even when, as must occasionally happen by the law of averages, the quangocrats happen to be right.

Have we really lost confidence in our ability to govern ourselves through the ballot box? What fools our fathers were if this be true.