All this past week there has been a great wailing and gnashing of teeth in the media and leftish politics over a number of possibly drug-related shootings of young black men in South London and other working class areas around the country.
There’s been reams of analysis trying to work out the reasons why those dreadful kids act the way they do, as though these young people were some isolated tribe, completely disconnected from some mythical, largely white, largely comfortable middle England – an innercity, urban abberation, the scary Other, a phenomenon to be examined in the mode of a colonial administrator reporting the discovery of a band of previously unknown New Guinean headhunters.
The Daily Mail:
The fact is that no one in the police wants to talk about gang warfare in South London, because the last thing senior officers want is to give credibility to this breed of savage young men who are capable of horrific violence unfettered by the most basic concepts of morality.
Not once have I seen anyone in the mainstream media or politics make any connection between these murders and theirs and their friends’ own recreational drug use. No, it’s just another youthful indiscretion, if indeed if it ever stopped.
As the Telegraph’s Sam Leith pointed out, “drugs have lost their toxicity as a political issue” because the generation for whom their use is normal now fills the corridors of power. A simple test is to ask what you’d like to know about your boss. Told that prostitutes visited his home, as the News of the World alleged against the Duke of Westminster, you would be all ears. Would you be interested to learn he had taken a couple of spliffs at school? Not very, I should think.
Drug use is the big tacit unspoken in British politics and the Labour Party and its hangers-on are the biggest hypocrites of all on the subject. So Cuddly Cameron smoked a spliff at Eton aged 15? Well, woop-de-doo-bloody-doo.
Of more concern to me is how the spliff got to him, and who was hurt or banged up as collateral damage for his teenage half hour of posh herbal euphoria.
The same goes for New Labour: you should’ve seen some of the Labour party notables I’ve seen toking up in the eighties and nineties, thinking they were in safe company, or the local councillors loved up on ecstasy and lemon Hooch on a girls’ night out. That’s not to mention drink, cocaine and legally prescribed medication; I strongly suspect that at least half the government, national and local, is chemically affected in some way or another at any given time.
And what about those nice, middle-class journos and civil servants and bank workers with their weekend hits of charlie or whizz, or the poppers that spice up their nice middle-class sex lives? My own son has been approached at clubs (because he is black, duh) by a probation officer (and now former friend of mine) and several criminal lawyers of my acquaintance looking to buy dope. That tells you what you need to know about the integrity of the justice system.
Do these people ever give a thought as to where their little indulgences come from as they buy their teenth or a tab from their friendly local hipster round the corner? I doubt that very much. In fact the very next day they’ll be in committee or on telly or in the House or in the columns of the Grauniad or The Times, pontificating about the dreadful moral laxity of the young.
Being such hypocrites on the subject of their own drug use it ill behoves them to be so draconian on youth, drugs and crime policy.
In partaking of American War On Drugs and Zero Tolerance rhetoric and practice the Blair government, with typically blustering incompetence, has driven the youth prison population up, criminalised a generation, and pushed drug criminality and violence down the age scale, as what were tweenie runners trying to supplement their (often addicted themselves)parents’ measly unemployment benefit with the crumbs from the only local growth industry now find the field clear for the expression of their wildest, pubescent, PS2 and MTV-fuelled fantasies of gangsterdom and Respect.
All the government current policy has done is to temporarily take out a layer of competition in dealers : it’s done nothing about the growing demand for recreational drugs. Those hooked on crack or heroin (or now, crystal meth) are hardly going to say “Oh damn, you took the big boys out of circulation, I’d better give up drugs then”. Where the demand is comes the supply.
The teenagers shooting each other in South London for market share are just, as they’ve been taught by ten years of neoliberal economics and music videos, practicing capitalism in its purest form. But they are being framed by the media and government as savage, feral, a race apart.
The profit from trade in drugs, like that in arms or torture equipment is a major driver of the UK’s intangible economy. Wherever the money comes from and no matter how tainted, one whizz around the City of London carousel or a churn in the property market and it’s squeaky clean again and ready to be invested elsewhere. But at the bottom, no matter how squeaky clean the money is, no matter how smart the suits or politically connected the players at the top are, are violence and greed and poverty and despair and mothers mourning dead children.
With the obsolescence and collapse of its manufacturing base Britain is increasingly reliant on crucial invisible earnings, the skim off the top of that immense money market in the City of London. Gordon Brown’s economic plans are dependent on it; ever larger swathes of the country’s population make their livings servicing the financial machinery that keeps those earnings flowing, and those who are not so fortunate as to have their livelihoods dependent on the whim of an overpaid, overbonused city whizzkid are, of course, just lazy ingrates who should show a little entrepreneurial spirit. So they do, emulating their ‘betters’ in the most immediate and most lucrative way possible.
You’d think a government that admires the naked aggression of invading Iraq to cut out the middleman supplying their own addiction would admire the naked opportunism and entrepreneurship that the teenagers of South London demonstrate, wouldn’t you? New Labour has been in power for ten years now and they’re just doing it the New Labour way, See a market – take it, with guns if necessary.
I doubt there’s a family in the country that hasn’t been affected in some way by drugs and the toxic criminality and poverty that accompanies it. Young people from a working-class background, especially young black people, who manage to escape that life seem to be in a dwindling minority. It’s like watching a whole generation slide down the drain and no-one giving a damn.
Figures released by the charity today, based on statistics compiled by the Council of Europe, show that England and Wales has the highest number of young adults in prison in western Europe.
They’re just chavs, after all. Who cares? The reductionist conservative view would be that it is Darwinism in action. But every drug casualty, every life nipped in the bud, has a parents, siblings, friends, – all are affected and the ripples spread far and wide.
Having had close experience with the horrible effects of addiction and drug violence in my own close family I’m no naive idealist, but I seriously believe that the only possible way to stop this poisonous stew of hypocrisy, class and race prejudice cascading even further down the generations is to decriminalise and regulate the supply of drugs entirely. Human history has shown that if there’s a mind-altering substance available to them mammals will try it. Even cats and elephants enjoy getting high so why not just acknowledge that?
The Blair government’s is a hypocritical, evangelical Christian-driven drugs policy that emphasises punishing individual ‘sin’ whilst at the same time practicing that very ‘sin’ in private and encouraging profiteering from it.
It and the British media fail to acknowledge the central role that they themselves play in the drugs trade. Every time you smoke a spliff in Britain, if it’s not home-griown then you have contributed to the degradation of a generation too. Hyperbolic yes, but until we all acknowledge that its our own personal roles in the international movement of drugs and capital that’s fueling these teenage bedroom executions we can’t have any hope of a sensible treatment-based drugs and crime policy that could pull this generation back from the brink. It’s way past time for a bit of honesty from everyone involved.
