Long Overdue

It is a fascinating admission that taking away passports or driving licences would hit the middle classes, since the Government is in the process of requiring the production of such documents in order to vote. And isn’t this a criminal offence?

I have now been both to university and to prison, and I have still never taken an illegal drug in my life. The treatment of such behaviour as normal is based on extrapolation from the wildly untypical experience of the people who decide these things. Drugs-based blackmail is fundamental to political power in this country, and the likes of Michael Gove, or Boris Johnson since he is no longer an American citizen, have lied on their United States visa applications.

Intentionally or otherwise, and for all his faults, Jeremy Corbyn threatened to destroy that Blairite lifestyle by creating an economic order in which no one would have felt the need to become a drug mule or, say, a rent boy. Therefore terrified of economic equality, the lifestyle liberals turned on him as they had not turned on any other politician in living memory. And here we are.

Any economic arrangement is a political choice, and there cannot be a “ free” market in general but not in, among other things, drugs. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today.

We need a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of two years for a first offence, three years for a second offence, four years for a third offence, and so on. (I no longer believe in prison sentences that include the possibility of release in less than 12 months; in that case, then your crime was not bad enough to warrant imprisonment, which the possession of drugs is.) We need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one’s premises to be used for illegal drug purposes. And Peter Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought should be taught in schools, as pro-drugs propaganda is routinely.