A Public Health Approach

Truly, Nigel Farage sets the agenda. He wants to legalise drugs across the board, Richard Tice wants to legalise at least cannabis, and Lee Anderson signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023. Are those now the views of Ann Widdecombe and Danny Kruger? They are avowedly the views of Zack Polanski, who demonstrates that he has never lived with drug dealers by imagining that, given the opportunity, they would register for VAT. So much for the Green Party.

There cannot be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. 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. Unlike the Conservative Party, which merely thinks that it is and acts as if it were, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are constitutionally committed to the “free” market. And now, the Green Party is behaving as if it were, in perhaps the only ideological turn even worse than straightforward fidelity to its reactionary roots and Philosophical Basis.

Instead, 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.

A bodybuilding enthusiast, if you doubt that Jihad Al-Shamie had some sort of substance abuse problem, then, again, you have never lived cheek by jowl with those who combined that interest with one in physical violence. “Jihad” strikes South Asian Muslims as an odd name, but Al-Shamie was an Arab, and specifically a Levantine. So yes, that was his birth name. And yes, his family has been both very outspoken in support of the Palestinians, and utterly appalled at his actions. As many members of Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation were killed yesterday by the Police as were killed by Al-Shamie, while the Police injured another congregant, so synagogues might pause for thought as to whether they would be safer if they were more heavily policed.

Those availing themselves of their right to heckle David Lammy need to reflect on their own desire to deny to others the exercise of the right to peaceful protest. The deaths of two people, one of them at the hands of the State that wanted to issue us all with digital ID, are not a reason to refrain from protesting against a genocide that that same State was arming and for which it was flying nightly reconnaissance missions. If, as is extremely unlikely, there was a specific policy trigger to Al-Shamie’s actions, then it was most likely the proscription of Palestine Action by Yvette Cooper, who granted entry to every foreign speaker at the “Unite the Kingdom” rally, and who, as a close ally of the former right-wing Labour Leadership of Durham County Council, kept me in prison twice as long as I had been assured in writing that I would be, until the very last date by which the judge had insisted from the Bench that I was to be released on the almost explicitly stated grounds that, guilty pleas or no guilty pleas, I was obviously innocent of those and of all other charges that had ever been laid against me.

Nor are those deaths a reason to refrain from protesting against the taking hostage of the Global Sumud Flotilla. Being famous for nothing except her political activism, Greta Thunberg may be many things, but she is not a virtue-signalling celebrity. Nor is Chris Smalls, one of the great trade unionists of the age. And nor is my comrade, Dr Yvonne Ridley. If Prevent, which is in any case based on a proven hoax, had not been bothering blind wheelchair-users and octogenarian clergywomen, then it might have noticed Al-Shamie. A great deal more plausibly, he might have been picked up if there really had been a war on drugs. Then again, if he truly was a Syrian Islamist, then he was a supporter of Ahmed al-Sharaa, who is otherwise Abu Mohammad al-Julani in the manner of “Tommy Robinson”, and who is seen here with a more than deserving target of Mancunian baracking and jeering.

That would be a repetition of successive British Governments’ transformation of Manchester into the world centre of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group that went on to bomb Manchester Arena. Britain invaded Libya in order to install such people as its new regime. From the ensuing civil war, the Royal Navy rescued both Salman Abedi, who went on to carry out that bombing, killing himself in the process, and his brother Hashem, who went on to be a key figure in the planning of that bombing, and who in April of this year threw hot cooking oil over, and stabbed with makeshift knives, three Prison Officers at HMP Frankland, members of our community here in County Durham. Not least in view of the imprisonment of Nicolas Sarkozy, a reckoning is long overdue. It is not the only one.

Another example would be the employment and engagement by The Times and the BBC of Melanie Phillips, who knows perfectly well the fineness of the line, if there is one, between denying the existence of a people and denying that the individual people who so identified had the right to exist; in other words, to live. Her view that the lives of her own ethnic group were simply worth more should disqualify her from a public platform. A pity, because she is very sound about drugs. But so are other people, from whom we ought to hear instead.