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Six months into the Labour Government, it’s become clear that it is concentrating on some crimes (above all, violence against women and girls, VAWG; and antisocial behaviour) and not others (drug addiction). Unfortunately, the real world is not like that, writes Mark Rowe.
Synthetic drugs cause devastation wherever they are found, the Home Office minister Dame Diana Johnson said last week, announcing that numerous such drugs have been banned. She added: “I have been concerned about the growing presence of these drugs on UK streets and I don’t think enough has been done in recent years to get a grip on it.” If illegal drugs are so serious a problem that’s not been addressed (by previous, Conservative, governments, she left unsaid), that made her next remark all the more surprising, about her Government’s approach to drugs, ‘which we hope to set out later this year’.
In other words, she was unable to say that after 18 months of a Labour Government, it would have a published strategy about drugs. Contrast that with all the ministerial statements from Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer down about the ‘epidemic’ of violence, and meetings, making it plain to the police and others called in that VAWG is the priority. She implied also that the drugs strategy published in December 2021 under then PM Boris Johnson’s signature was defunct. Yet it’s hard to see how any Labour strategy would add usefully to the 20,000-plus words of Johnson’s. Besides, its title was ‘From harm to hope: a 10-year drugs plan to cut crime and save lives’. That implied not only that Boris Johnson and his party would be in power for ten years (how did that turn out?), but, to state the obvious, that the plan would be relevant for all the 2020s. How will Labour be markedly different? It’s an example of what the Bagehot column in last week’s The Economist set out; UK Government is beset by process – making inquiries and writing documents rather than taking decisions.
Good politics
That Labour is making so much of VAWG and relatively little of illegal drugs is good politics. VAWG has appeal. Before the election, senior Labour politicians such as the now Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and the shadow Justice Secretary Emily Thornberry (not given office by Starmer) made plain in speeches – Thornberry, for example, a year ago on a Fabian Society panel sponsored by Mitie – that not only was violence wrong, ‘enough was enough’; VAWG was something personal, to them. A sexually harassed woman on a bus, someone suffering domestic violence, rape, are our sisters, cousins; we want a safer, better country for our daughters. Politicians and law-abiding voters cannot make such a connection to drug addicts. Quite the opposite; typically addicts are antisocial by default. They are estranged from their families because they cannot be trusted; they steal to pay for drugs; they set a bad example to any children around.
Sticking out
The most amateur student of human nature can watch drug addicts, at a suburban shopping parade, on a high street, around a main railway station (pictured, Birmingham New Street, as an example of the zonked-out taking up police time, despite the national policy of ‘right care right person’ to leave the unwell to healthcare professionals). Some are more obvious and pitiful than others, shuffling, perhaps wearing a blanket over their shoulders against the cold. But they stick out in a ‘crowded place’, to use the counter-terror jargon: their hair and clothes are dishevelled (their addiction destroys any sense of looking after themselves); their skin complexion is bad (no wonder, they are choosing to put toxic substances into themselves); they don’t carry the possessions of law-abiding shoppers (addicts have few or no possessions, because of their ‘chaotic lifestyles’, to use some more jargon).
NBCS event
They are antisocial in the sense that they have an informal or intuitive society of addicts, and greet one another with fist-bumps. Like any society, it serves two purposes: to enclose those who belong because they are addicts (and the stronger and less well-off addicts may be able to prey on the weaker and temporarily better-off) and to shut off regular society. They become criminally antisocial when they steal routinely from shops, break locks on parked cycles, or carry out whatever acquisitive crime will afford them drugs for the day. For the recovering addict who spoke at the National Business Crime Solution (NBCS) conference last month, featured in the February edition of Professional Security Magazine, it was theft of handbags (‘it seemed the best way forward’). Violence may come in if employees in a shop, often women, challenge the thieves by getting in the way of the prospect of their next drug-taking, although the woman told the NBCS event that she was not one who ‘kicked off’ when caught by a store’s Security (leaving unsaid that some thieves do indeed ‘kick off’).
Businesses endure ‘repeated shoplifting and anti-social behaviour on their high street’, to quote from Boris Johnson in the foreword to that 2021 drugs strategy. As if to anticipate Diana Johnson’s complaint, Boris Johnson also wrote: ‘the old way of doing things isn’t working’. He argued for treating drug abuse ‘not just as a law enforcement issue’ (although ‘serial offenders should be properly punished’) ‘but as a problem for all of society that all of government must deal with’. Is Labour going to come up with anything different, more nuanced? The addict told the NBCS that addicts, if not fixed for their addiction, keep offending (‘I have been to prison 28 times, I have had 57 probation orders that I have never even started, countless community orders. You go to prison, it’s just being put on pause.’)
The catch is that addicts have to want to rehabilitate (‘I just thought, I have had enough’) and going ‘clean’ is so difficult far from all can do it (‘I am not going to lie to you, it’s absolutely horrific, I spent ten days in my own vomit, hallucinating, seizure’). Even assuming enough rehabilitation places are available. Indeed, availability, is the overall problem. The woman said that she lives on Hagley Road, ‘the worst street in Birmingham, so I am surrounded by drugs, all day, every day, and it doesn’t interest me’. But that implied it interests others.
