Woolsacked

After the defeat of AV, expect the next epic battle (and the next poisoned wooden spoon Cameron hands the Lib Dems) to be House of Lords reform.  At this point I’d better declare an interest as having worked there (as an erstwhile Hansard reporter).  Despite knowing the institution more intimately than I do any other, I don’t think I’ve written much about it before; this is because I find it quite difficult to make up my mind about what to do about the damn place.

Walter Bagehot famously quipped that “the cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it”.  Having sat through several postprandial hours of a debate on ‘the benefits of the Segway personal transporter’, it’s hard to disagree.  It’s also hard, on the other hand, to keep one’s rational faculties clear when in the building and not be seduced by the awful, artificial and amusing work of Augustus Pugin and Charles Barry and its supremely confident Gothic (that is, explicitly non-Roman) assertion of British exceptionalism.  I find it takes a great effort, and I can’t be alone in this, to disregard the indisputable aesthetic and technical accomplishments of the age of empire when weighing up its social, economic and moral pros and cons; too easy, in other words, to use beauty as a proxy for truth, justice, virtue.  The whole place is a spectacular triumph of Victorian propaganda: the Soviet Union had its stirring anthem and its heroic art, the US has its sexy movies, and we had the Tudor rose and the portcullis.  In the little reporters’ corner of the chamber, with some anonymous lifer suggesting to half a dozen of his fellows how to decide the makeup of a committee to determine the composition of a working group to investigate the regulation of the makeup of the committee, the eyes are inevitably drawn by the carved lions and unicorns, by the heraldic oak panels of the four patron saints, and eventually by the dazzling gilded ceiling whose ornaments and chandeliers seem to melt off it like stalactites, and your distracted reporter, overcome by a sort of reactionary Stendhal syndrome, finds himself transported to his own Burkean Ambrosia.  (The Commons is much less ornate and perhaps cosier for it, but the most profound sensation to be had in the estate is to be alone at night in Westminster Hall, gazing up at the hammerbeam angels still keeping watch nine centuries on, and only dimly aware of the restless metropolis beyond the buttressed walls: on such occasions I always find myself communing with Bede and his sparrow.)  So perhaps Bagehot would have been more accurate to say that the cure is to go and listen to it, while keeping your eyes shut.

I digress.  The question is: what use does the place serve now, and how could it be improved?  Here the traditionalist and the radical democrat in me clash (a problem Orwell had all the time).  A few perceptions about the noble and not-so-noble Lords persist that are no longer quite accurate.  Only 88 of the old hereditaries — Wilde’s old unspeakables — remain.  The vast majority of the rest are life peers, appointed by various prime ministers; a few bishops are left (and are we really about to see a Conservative prime minister eject them?), and the law Lords have moved across the road to the Supreme Court.  A lot of these are former or failed politicians, but a great many are also those who’ve excelled in various non-political fields: the arts, law, media, sport, business, academia, war.  In this sense, at least, they could be considered more diverse than the Commons, which with every election becomes more and more the preserve of PPE Oxonians in their mid-40s from north London who have only ever worked in politics.  The Lords, unlike the Commons, still has plenty of endearingly amateurish speakers (whom I always hope to avoid having to report on) and endearingly unsmooth operators.  And despite Cameron’s additions, Labour still has more peers than the Tories.

The balance that needs to be struck is to combine the resilient independence of the incumbent Lords (who stood up to the previous government on, among other things, the chilling effects of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act) with a greater (that is, any) popular mandate.

It seems inevitable, with the defeat of the AV referendum, that the Lords will become proportionately elected before the Commons ever does.  There is one serious objection to this: that, by picking who appears on the lists and in what order, the party managers would retain or even strengthen control over this occasionally rebellious House.  The Lords aren’t so easily whipped now, but their replacement senators (most of them presumably seeking re-election) could well be.  Might the coalition, then, use this opportunity to strengthen the executive relative to parliament?  That would surely be the opposite of what we should hope for.

So the extent to which we should welcome reform really depends on what sort of PR is on offer.  If Cameron, Clegg and Miliband have complete control over the party lists, then what comes next might if anything be worse than what we have now.  But if the government is actually willing to give power away — perhaps in the form of multi-member STV wards, or even open primaries, as are now used to pick some Commons candidates — then the public will have more say than the politicians, and the reformed chamber will have more legitimacy than the one it replaces.  There is a great opportunity for something better, but we will have to wait and see whether we are given another stitchup instead.

Our zeal for reform shouldn’t lead us to assume that what is done in its name will necessarily be more truly democratic, rather than a pale imitation of the deeply dysfunctional Commons; instead, we have to hold the coalition to account and insist that the upper House becomes as democratic as it possibly can, and that it gives power away from politicians, both elected and appointed: on this occasion, we have to keep our eyes wide open.

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Fight the powder

A couple of quick points about the elections: while I’m disappointed by the AV result (made inevitable by a campaign run by liberal leftists who took the ‘progressive majority’ as axiomatic and spoke only to other liberal leftists who were going to vote for it anyway), I am pleased about three things in particular.  First: the overdue collapse of the arrogant, cynical Tammany Hall machine that was the Scottish Labour Party.  Second: the failure of George Galloway to get elected (which has gone a long way towards restoring my faith in my home town).  Third: the collapse, even greater than the Lib Dems’, of the BNP in English local authorities.  Would it be opportunistic to suggest this is a welcome result of Cameron’s more populist stance on immigration and multiculturalism?

Naturally, if perhaps hypocritically, I will celebrate all of the above by stocking up on cheap booze while I still can.  That is one issue on which I hope moral conservatism will eventually trump big business conservatism.

I turn rather awkwardly to an unrelated issue which sort of fits that description: graffiti and its role in contemporary art.  Before I do so, have a read of these two pieces in City Journal which skewer a cruel form of decadence very eloquently.

The articles remind me of Orwell’s piece pondering why ‘if you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back’.  The difference is that rich people can throw whatever expensive crap they want at each other, but this new form of ‘art’ is an obviously hypocritical celebration of a destructive selfishness that exclusively harms the non-rich.

I have to confess to being slightly pleased that the Greens’ Martha Wardrop failed to get herself elected to the Scottish Parliament: purely because, as a councillor (see blogs passim on why multi-member single transferable voting is so great) she has been helpful and responsive in pestering the Council to clean up our own various neighbourhood works of low art, as well as other quotidia like litter.

What is it about graffiti that annoys me?  Perhaps the same things that make decadent people enjoy it: that it is a rejection of the rule of law.  A moment’s thought — and clearly the graffiti artists and their novelty-seeking propagandists have wasted very few moments on thinking — shows why this is a bad thing.  Leave aside the debate over the broken windows theory, and the practical problems of having street signs and public information notices covered in writing or paint.  The graffitist explicitly says: I don’t care about your private property, therefore I don’t care about your economic wellbeing.  From this it seems logical to infer that he is also saying, more subtly: I don’t care about your physical wellbeing, your safety or your health either.  In sum, the graffiti artist says: I don’t care about other people.

I make one or two exceptions for warranted and clever political statements: the enormous ‘ONE NATION UNDER CCTV’ painted on the side of a tall building in central London was impressive; but for every one example like this (and for every community mural, which are a far better use of young people’s artistic talent and of which there are several good examples, like the one beside Kelvinbridge Underground) there are a million annoying and disfiguring tags and scrawls.

I say private property, but more often than not the vandalism targets public property (usually postboxes, bins, etc) and has to be cleaned up at public expense, if it is at all.  Am I autistically out-of-touch, or do other people find it as incredible as I do that it needs to be explained to otherwise intelligent and educated people — the mainstream of the contemporary art world — why destruction of both public space and private property, and a general disrespect towards other people, and especially towards people in more deprived communities, is bad?

Perhaps the best response — an explicitly petty-bourgeois Marxist one — to the barbaric-decadent underclass-overclass axis, buggering those of us in between who still aspire to something better, would be to graffiti-bomb the museum, or the homes of its directors, and see how they like it.  I think it would be legitimate, in the spirit and tradition of situationist direct action against powerful elites, to call such an action a subversive work of art in itself.

It’s tempting to blame the excuse-making, poverty-blaming, bed-wetting liberal left for this, or perhaps that section of the left (these days best represented by Laurie Penny, who may or may not be a rightwing satirist) that romanticises violence and disorder on the streets (the right generally only romanticise violence in or against other countries).  But I suspect the egoism, and denial of delayed gratification, inherent in consumerism also have quite a lot to do with it.  The confluence of the two, I suggest, is at the heart of our modern anomie; hence my sympathy for the emerging Blue Labour school of thought that addresses both.

If the new SNP majority government can give minor offenders (eg those who do graffiti) community sentences that actually involve their removing this damage, that will probably be a better bet than sending them to prison.  Whether these community sentences actually do that, or become like ASBOs a laughable and easily ignored stunt, remains to be seen.

Finally, you may have noticed a while ago that, while Brown presented Obama with “an ornamental pen holder made from the timbers of the Victorian anti-slave ship HMS Gannet” (and got a set of region 1 DVDs in return!), Cameron, when it was his turn, gave Obama “a painting by a graffiti artist with three convictions for criminal damage”.  This suggests to me, unfortunately, that our prime minister has rather more in common with the curators of the LA Museum of Contemporary Art than with most of the rest of us.

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Thinking out of my box

I had an interesting conversation the other day on token Telegraph lefty Tom Chivers’ blog in response to his post on legalising drugs.  I put a question:

Hi. You put the case in favour of decriminalisation very well. For me the most persuasive aspect of it is to take the whole thing out of criminal hands — and, in the case of heroin users for instance, to reduce the possibilities of overdose, HIV infection, etc. These are all compelling arguments — but I still have a few quibbles before I can be entirely convinced…

Firstly, there’s a story on the BBC News website today reporting that drug use among under-15s in Scotland has halved in the last decade. You point to evidence of similar declines in Portugal since decriminalisation — but doesn’t the fact that this has happened here anyway, without legalisation, suggest that it would be wrong to say there’s a direct link between legalisation and declining use? Mightn’t Portugal’s decline have happened anyway, as it did here?

Secondly, the great George Monbiot wrote a piece a while ago which pointed out that “At present the trade in class A drugs is concentrated in the rich nations. If it were legalised, we could cope. The use of drugs is likely to rise, but governments could use the extra taxes to help people tackle addiction. But because the wholesale price would collapse with legalisation, these drugs would for the first time become widely available in poorer nations, which are easier for companies to exploit (as tobacco and alcohol firms have found) and which are less able to regulate, raise taxes or pick up the pieces. The widespread use of cocaine or heroin in the poor world could cause serious social problems.” How do you respond to the possibility (and it is just a possibility — I think Monbiot on the whole favours decriminalisation) that legalising drugs here might actually increase harm elsewhere?

Thirdly, as far as I can see, all of the evidence cited in favour of legalisation seems to come from countries with similar, broadly liberal systems of crime and punishment to ours. However, anyone who’s been to, say, Singapore or Japan will see that their drugs laws are far, far harsher than ours — and as far as I can see they also have lower levels of drug use than we do. I worry, then, that our evidence base is too narrow — that we are in danger of policybased evidencemaking, rather than the other way round. In this context it seems parochial to describe Britain’s drug laws as “fearsome”, given the possibility of far lengthier imprisonment or even execution for drug use in other countries.

As I say, I’m openminded on the matter, but I’d be grateful if you could address these points that are still troubling me. Thanks.

He responded:

Interesting points. The third seems to be dealt with by the WHO’s claim that there isn’t a statistical relationship between the harshness of drug laws and the level of drug use. The Portugal example may not show that drug use will go down, but it certainly shows that drug use hasn’t gone up, and I think we need good reasons to make things illegal, not the other way around. Also, there are the public health benefits.

Monbiot’s argument is the worrying one, and I do seriously take it on board. My suspicion, and it’s only a suspicion, is that more good will come from destroying the drug lords and failed states than harm will come from exploitation by drug companies. But I can’t back that up, and I do acknowledge that that is a serious concern.

I responded thusly:

Thanks for your reply. On the question of Portugal v Scotland, it is a major plus for your argument that drug use at least hasn’t gone up. However, you would agree with me that it would be unscientific to say that legalisation had caused drug use to fall.

I’m glad you point me in the direction of the WHO, because I really was looking for a study of the whole world, not just of likeminded Western democracies. I’ll have a proper look at it over the weekend. If their conclusion is as you say it is, that would go a long way towards answering my concerns.

I suspect you’re right about Monbiot’s point — and given the state of some parts of West Africa and Latin America, his worst case scenario could hardly be any worse than the status quo. As you say, though, we would need a further study to look into this. All of which goes to say that the evidence may well be supportive, but not conclusive — and neither could it be, given the amount of variables in such a huge and complicated question of social policy.

I should add that I can’t accept the Delingpolist libertarian argument for drug legalisation — I don’t believe Mill’s otherwise very useful ‘do what you want unless it harms other people’ applies, because the harm caused is too often not confined solely to the user, which would remain the case even under legalisation. Think of the increased capacity for aggression by cocaine users, or the misery caused to families of heroin addicts — it would be childish to argue that these users are only harming themselves, just as no-one argues that alcohol abuse only harms the drinker. In this regard illegal drugs are much more like alcohol than tobacco. You might say everyone should ‘do what they like’, presumably at least so long as they don’t harm others, but in this case the activity intrinsically raises the risk of harming others. Or do you hold that the right not to be harmed by others is outweighed by the infringement of the right to harm oneself? Anyway, while rejecting what seems a selfish and irresponsible libertarian argument, I can however, with these reservations, just about accept the utilitarian one. We should agree that taking drugs is intrinsically harmful, and not something we should view with neutrality — thus we should want to reduce that harm, and if legalisation can help with that, we should support it.

As well as correcting my sloppy, interchangeable use of decriminalisation and legalisation, I would now go further and say I find the libertarian position (on everything) ridiculous.  Anyone who pressgangs Mill, who was arguing against genuine political and religious tyranny, into service to justify acts of hedonism that are such a reliable source of harm needs to go back and read his On Liberty.  Nonetheless, I still find myself somewhere between the utilitarian and authoritarian positions, or as we might call them the realistic and romantic positions, unable to quite make up my dope-addled mind.  I’m much more convinced that cannabis, E, acid and mushrooms (which are class A, but whose only danger is from users self-defenestrating) should be legal, and that junkies should get their fix on the NHS rather than rob or whore, than I am that we should sell cocaine over the counter.  Perhaps the wisest policy would be to accept the least harmful drugs, make them less harmful still, and concentrate on trying one way or the other to reduce use of the most harmful ones: but imperfect outcomes for users are a price worth paying for reducing harm to others, which is why I’m all for methadone programmes and needle exchanges if they cut crime and disease transmission.

Note that I don’t say ‘rather than have to rob or whore’.  One aspect of the drugs debate I really can’t stand is the attempt to remove any possibility of individual autonomy from users.  We are all human—we are all capable of free will, of rational thought and reasonable behaviour—we all always have a choice not to harm ourselves or others, even if many of us fail to exercise it.  But moralising will get us nowhere: we have to accept that many, many people — the Delingpoles of this world — are selfish and will happily buy cocaine for fun of a weekend, even in the knowledge it causes death somewhere else in the world to some poor, anonymous black or brown person whose fate they couldn’t care less about.  We have to accept that and build policy around it.

I also think liberalisers should be a bit more honest about the current non-existence of the war on drugs, at least in Britain.  Go to Camden High St on a Friday night and watch the police drive up and down, ignoring crack deals in the hope of confining them to that neighbourhood.  As wars go, it’s not exactly Laurent Nkunda v the Interahamwe.  In many ways we are already nearer de facto decriminalisation than a war.

Of course, no discussion of drugs can now take place without the talk turning to alcohol, the drug to which we are almost all addicted, which brings me neatly onto the imminent Scottish election.  If you agree, as I do, with Elish Angiolini that cheap booze is at the root of many of our problems with health, crime and the economy (and, er, to a lesser extent education, though I fondly remember one or two pisshead teachers), and if you accept the simple fact that people adjust their behaviour in response to price incentives, then you will also agree that minimum pricing of alcohol is an overdue policy, and one which ought to be weighed when deciding how to vote.  The SNP tried to bring this in, and have said they will try again.  Naturally Labour are against it, probably only so that they can bring it in themselves in a bid to repeat the success of the smoking ban, which was about the only worthwhile thing they managed in office.  I’ve generally had quite a lot of time for Annabel Goldie — her support for the budget in return for policies like extra police officers was how opposition parties should behave, rather than opposing everything for the hell of it — but the Tories’ failure to support this move was very disappointing, and confirmed the charge that they will always be more on the side of big business than of the working class (also true of Labour).  Annabel may have a point about the other parties’ auctioneering of unaffordable policies, but as my mole in the SNP points out, ‘all of her supporters are rich anyway’, and she’s not immune to giveaways either.  For instance, I’m concerned about the removal of prescription charges — have a look at what’s happened to antibiotics to see why — but then, I can’t remember the last time I had to get a prescription, and would have been perfectly able to afford it anyway, so I accept that epidemiological worries are a luxury when medical and financial ones aren’t.  In a wider sense, I fail to see why the upwards transfer of wealth from overtaxed poor Scots to better-off pensioners and graduates is still classed as solidarity and social justice: but that is another abstract complaint, and there are some very quotidian matters to settle first.  Weighing the parties in the balance then, we find that they are all wanting, but that some are wanting more than others.

Which brings me not very neatly onto the AV referendum.  I’m a bit more excited about this than I am about the election, though I’m still at a loss as to why the voters should be considered too stupid to manage both on the same day: either they’re too stupid full stop, in which case we might as well pick a dictator and hope for the best, or they’re not.  Growing up in a city which at one point returned 71 Labour councillors to 79 seats, I was never much of a cheerleader for FPTP.  The oft-heard idea that it lets us ‘kick the bastards out’ is rubbish too: can you remember the last time we removed one party with a working majority at a general election and brought in the other with a working majority?  It hasn’t happened in my lifetime: in fact it happened only once in the 20th century (when Heath beat Wilson in 1970).  AV isn’t PR (my preference is for multi-member STV, which has given us a far fairer balance on the council), but it’s probably still an improvement, and a necessary first step if we are to break the stranglehold of the rotten two or three big parties.  Even with all this in mind I was swithering, until I read that Ken Clarke and John Prescott are against it and Nigel Farage, Phillip Blond and Caroline Lucas are for it.

It’s also more fun to rank candidates in order than to put a tick in a box.  It benefits not just those who support smaller parties, but those of us (most of us, now) who aren’t partisan.  Most of all, it benefits those of us who know which parties we hate more than we know which parties we like.  And if you’re still not sure, you can always hedge your bets and put a 1 next to yes and a 2 next to no.

So tell me, dear readers: do either of you have a strong opinion on drugs, the Scottish election or AV you’d like to share…?

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