ANOTHER VOICE
A vote for Kennedy is a vote for cannabis.
I'm voting Kennedy
MATTHEW PARRIS
1' hat a brave and sensible start Charles Kennedy has made to the leadership of his party by promising an open review of the mess we're in over drugs. Though no illegal drug has ever mattered much to me, I could be persuaded to vote Liberal Demo- crat — once — on drugs-liberalisation. There must be millions who think like me. Being unfamiliar with the inwardnesses and signalling systems of Mr Kennedy's party, I cannot say whether his remarks were meant merely to reassure radical members that their new leader is cool, or whether he really means to make headway with this cause. But I think he could.
Let's cut the doublespeak and admit that, for most of us, saying we want a review means we hope for liberalisation. We should not be coy about this. Though any review would have to weigh every option, including proposals to toughen the law, and though we cannot prejudge the evidence which might emerge, we who support Kennedy's call are overwhelmingly per- suaded, first, that the present approach cannot be made to work, and second, that society's difficulties with drugs would not be aggravated and might be reduced by bring- ing at least some drug-taking out of the shadows of criminality and into the light. So we want a review. It is disingenuous to pretend that we have not guessed its out- come — but, interestingly, so have the zero-tolerance brigade. Otherwise why would they become so angry whenever a review is mentioned? Why, if they are as morally and scientifically confident of their case as they claim, should they resist a care- ful study of the evidence? The truth is they know they're up a creek. You could hear that in Jack Cunningham's voice when he gave his promised update on anti-drugs policy just before the House rose for the summer. I have never heard a minis- ter speak with less conviction. There are one or two politicians — Mrs Ann Winter- ton, the Conservative spokeswoman on drugs, is probably among them — who hon- estly believe that more education, more customs officers, more convictions and more policemen would do the trick, but the remainder all suspect that zero-tolerance has failed. Beyond that, they divide into two groups, the first preferring a familiar Mess to the uncertainties of liberalisation, the second, privately favouring liberalisa- tion, but too scared to say so, because of what they take to be a conservative public opinion.
Yet if Tony Blair were tomorrow to announce a comprehensive and open- ended review of drugs policy, a third of the Conservative party, two-thirds of the Labour party and nearly all the Liberal Democrats would tell the press they had long suspected this was needed, and were glad that a prime minister had found the courage to say so.
So would about half the British public. It's odd how our democracy fails to pro- duce assemblies whose deliberations come anywhere near mirroring the views of those who elect them. Terror in the face of what they think is respectable opinion seizes politicians, deafening them to the quiet conversations which, if they would but lis- ten, they could hear in pubs, cars and sit- ting-rooms all across the land. But a log- jam develops at Westminster in which, long before the thing shifts, every individual in the jam can see that the shift is coming, but none wishes to be the first to budge. Then, all at once, the whole thing shudders and breaks up. Afterwards, everyone says the move was 'always inevitable'. It happened with the age of homosexual consent, it hap- pened within the Labour party with 'mod- ernisation', it happened with privatisation, and it will happen with drugs.
Maybe Charles Kennedy will be the log who breaks the jam. I hope so, for reasons which I shall not weary Spectator readers by labouring. Everybody must know the argu- ments for decriminalisation by now. Every- body knows the arguments against. They are precisely the arguments against and for Prohibition in America, earlier this century. For the record — and briefly — we who oppose the prohibition of a drug such as alcohol or cannabis do not do so in the belief that such drugs are harmless, but in the belief that the harm they do is moder- ate and containable and outweighed by the dangers which accompany criminalisation. We note, too, that they may give some plea- sure. The assault on liberty, the distortion scarcity wreaks upon price, the creation of a criminal culture, the allure of the forbid- den (especially among young people), and the pushing beyond the pale of those dam- aged by the drug, all add up to an argu- ment, as much pragmatic as philosophical, against prohibition.
There may be substances so poisonous and so powerfully addictive as to justify all- out war upon them by the state, with all the casualties such wars take; but we doubt that all the substances now banned fall into that category. I would first reconsider cannabis and Ecstasy.
It is important for those who want change to muster. I do not feel strongly in a personal way about drugs but am now suffi- ciently irritated by the ignorance and cant, and worried by the growth of a criminal underworld, to think the issue worth mak- ing a fuss about. Mr Kennedy might be sur- prised to find the political costs of such a fuss less severe, and the benefits more sub- stantial, than his critics suppose.
I said at the outset that there must be millions who think as I do and, like me, do not vote Liberal Democrat. Just one in 50 would yield the potential support of a mil- lion new voters. If we really believed Mr Kennedy's party could get a bandwagon going on this issue, momentum would build upon itself and — in an age when the great political issues sometimes seem to have been settled — many of us might be per- suaded to make an issue of this rather smaller matter. If the pro- and anti-hunting brigades can persuade party leaders that fox-hunting could swing elections, is it absurd to speculate that strong feelings about drugs policy might also exert some pull on the national imagination?
Of course, against new support, Kennedy would have to weigh the loss of votes from those who feared a review. The other two parties would try to represent Liberal Democrats as a party of drug-addicts and dangerous progressives. Doubtless this is what Labour and the Tories hope and Mr Kennedy fears. But I rather think the British public wouldn't buy it: Kennedy is only suggesting a review; the electorate are more resistant to party scaremongering and mudslinging than Westminster politicians realise. Too much of Miss Ann Widde- combe waving her finger and crying reefer- madness could backfire.
In the end one can only speak for one- self. Drugs mean little to me, but I do hate cant. Any party which cut the cant about drugs might tempt me, in a petulant, just- this-once sort of way, into the polling booth.
Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.
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