Britain Etc.

by Mark Easton

  However, the real damage to government credibility was being felt at the Treasury, where the Chancellor Gordon Brown was increasingly concerned that trust in economic statistics was denting international confidence. In a brief statement in Parliament towards the end of 2005, Mr Brown announced he would make ‘the governance and publication of official statistics the responsibility of a wholly separate body at arm’s length from government and fully independent of it’. A new statistical watchdog would be created whose responsibility, enshrined in statute, would be to protect the statistical system’s integrity.

  The news was afforded little more than a weary shrug, but the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 amounted to a rare but decisive victory for science over politics. The United Kingdom Statistics Authority (UKSA) was given the job of ‘promoting and safeguarding’ official statistics, including their impartiality, accuracy and relevance. It placed a duty on ministers and officials to comply with a code of practice drawn up by the authority, although the legislation specifically states that ‘no action shall lie in relation to any such failure’. Offending spin doctors would not be dragged off to the Tower.

  Nevertheless, under the chairmanship of Sir Michael Scholar, a Whitehall mandarin who had been Margaret Thatcher’s Private Secretary when she emasculated the statisticians, the authority opened for business in April 2008. Any questions as to where Sir Michael’s loyalties lay, however, were quickly dispelled when he sent a public and censorious letter to Number Ten following the government’s use of ‘unchecked’ figures on knife crime (See ‘K is for Knives’). He called the affair ‘corrosive of public trust in official statistics, and incompatible with the high standards which we are all seeking to establish’. There was a sharp intake of breath across Whitehall. How would ministers and the civil service react to being openly ticked off by the anoraks in the stats department?

  The reply from Gordon Brown, now at Number Ten, was revealing. His Private Secretary Jeremy Heywood wrote of how ‘the Prime Minister remains strongly committed to building public trust in official statistics and to the new measures he has put in place to safeguard their independence.’ Following the letter, the head of the home civil service, Sir Gus O’Donnell, reminded all his staff of the need to protect the integrity of official statistics.

  The War of Numbers was not over, however. When the coalition government came to power, determined to reduce Britain’s budget deficit, conservative instinct and economic adversity led one Cabinet minister to suggest statisticians were an unnecessary luxury. ‘The money being spent on form fillers and bean counters could be far better spent helping elderly people to stay in their homes,’ Communities Secretary Eric Pickles argued, before adding, ‘or almost anything, in fact.’ True to his word, he then scrapped a number of statistical surveys in the face of vehement opposition from Sir Michael Scholar and the National Statistician Jil Matheson. ‘We are keen to move away from costly top-down monitoring and measurement of local policies,’ Mr Pickles said. ‘These surveys are a cosmetic exercise which never change anything,’ his ministerial colleague Grant Shapps explained. To many of the so-called bean counters, it was as if the ghost of Sir Derek Rayner was haunting Whitehall once more.

  Shortly before his departure from the UKSA in 2011, Sir Michael Scholar responded to what many statisticians feared was a new attack upon their profession. ‘There are strong forces at work,’ he warned, ‘to demote rationality, analysis and the pursuit of knowledge within government.’ He spoke of Whitehall’s diminishing interest in neutral information and a growing interest in the persuasive press release, with its careful selection of facts and numbers, designed to communicate as effectively as possible some predetermined message.

  Only one in six people in Britain thinks the government doesn’t manipulate official numbers. In a recent survey of public trust in official statistics across the twenty-seven member states of the European Union, the UK came twenty-seventh. ‘Right at the bottom of the class,’ Sir Michael said.

  The War of Numbers grinds on. But what is becoming clearer to protagonists on all sides is that, when they lack credibility, all numbers add up to zero.

  O is for Opium

  Cultural orthodoxies are like piles of sandbags — resistant walls of principle and prejudice built up over time, which shape our democracy. Argument hits these solid barriers and is stopped stone dead. Further discussion is futile. Debate has reached society’s buffers.

  Our leaders know the lie of the land, where Britain’s invisible ideological boundaries are placed. There is little point in entering territory upon which the court of public opinion has a settled view; indeed, to stray into such minefields may be regarded as political suicide. What actually tends to happen is that elected representatives, often aided and abetted by the popular press, add further layers to the existing bulwarks, reinforcing the external margins of conventional thought as they play to public opinion.

  Our national conversation is conducted according to this geography, a narrative fixed by the co-ordinates of accepted wisdom. The mysteries of the news agenda are understood by those who can read the map. However, it is not entirely a one-way process. Gradually but inexorably, quietly but determinedly, nonconformist ideas can work away at the foundations of orthodoxy. New voices and ideas, with enough force, can start to undermine the status quo. The first objective is to open debate as to whether the wall should exist; once that has been achieved, and with often shocking speed, the whole edifice may collapse, the sandbags carted off to be piled up somewhere else.

  When it comes to Britain’s relationship with opium and other recreational drugs, the walls of the debate have not shifted for half a century. A towering cultural orthodoxy has been constructed around an accepted view that such substances are evil, a malevolent force that must be eradicated by uncompromising use of the criminal justice system.

  But it seems to me that we are witnessing an increasingly powerful challenge to this philosophy. Former Cabinet ministers and police constables, peers of the realm, academics, senior journalists, business leaders and celebrities — mainstream establishment voices from all quarters — are asking whether we need to test conventional thinking.

  Recent governments have seen what is happening but dared not engage. A parliamentary exchange between a former Home Office minister and a Lib Dem backbencher in 2010 indicates the nervousness that has existed. Tom Brake asked Labour’s drugs spokesman Alan Campbell if ‘when sound, factual evidence is produced to show what is effective in tackling drug crime and addressing health issues, the hon. gentleman will sign up to that?’ Mr Campbell thought he detected a trap: ‘I cannot give the hon. gentleman the assurance he seeks because he is sending me along a route he knows I cannot go down.’ The route, of course, would have required the Labour spokesman to consider decriminalisation or legalisation of what were prohibited drugs. He could hear the sound of Joshua’s trumpets: the walls of conventional debate were threatened and chaos lay beyond.

  I do not propose to debate the wisdom of legalising drugs on these pages; readers will have no trouble finding proponents on all sides of what is an increasingly noisy discussion (albeit conducted outside the Palace of Westminster). But I did want to offer an historical perspective to explain how we got here.

  Taking the long view, a slogan to describe Britain’s attitude to recreational drugs would be ‘Just Say Maybe’. The United Kingdom has been a reluctant prohibitionist and, one hundred years after the original international drugs control treaty was signed, it should not come as any surprise that this country’s liberal and practical instincts are rising to the surface once again.

  The first gangsters to use extreme violence and intimidation to control the supply of illegal drugs were associates of the British government. In the eighteenth century, the state-regulated East India Company secured a monopoly of opium production in India and, despite China’s determination to ban the highly addictive drug from its soil, smuggled hundreds of tonnes a year into the country. When the
Chinese authorities tried to clamp down on the foreign traffickers, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Lord Palmerston sent in the gunboats. Royal Navy cannons ensured a swift victory for the British smugglers and dealers.

  The consequence of the Opium Wars was that the drug became one of the most valuable commodities in the world and the British Empire took full advantage. By the 1880s, the Indian opium fields produced enough to satisfy the daily needs of around 14 million consumers in China and South East Asia, and the British Raj was reliant on feeding the addiction it had helped create.

  Quantities of the drug arrived back in Britain. Mrs Beeton recommended readers of her Book of Household Management to keep their cupboards stocked with ‘opium, powdered, and laudanum [opium mixed with alcohol]’; ‘Vivat opium!’ the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning reportedly told a friend; Prime Minister Gladstone put it in his coffee to steady his nerves. To some well-connected Victorians, opium was the opium of the people.

  Domestic condemnation from religious groups grew, but the sparkle from 93 million silver rupees in annual Indian revenues prompted a more pragmatic than principled response. Gladstone, once a severe critic of the narcotics trade, appointed a Royal Commission on Opium which helpfully concluded in 1895 that the evil of the drug had been exaggerated and there was no association with any significant moral or physical health problems. Hurrah! The British government had scientific justification for a fruitful policy of zero intolerance, which was to last another seventeen years.

  When in 1912 the Americans eventually cajoled Britain into signing an international agreement limiting the opium and cocaine trades, the UK did so half-heartedly and with ministerial fingers secretly crossed. After all, it had sustained an empire by selling narcotics. If one had popped into Harrods at that time looking to purchase something ‘for when the nose is stuffed up, red and sore’, the assistant would probably have suggested Ryno’s Hay Fever and Catarrh Remedy. It consisted of almost pure cocaine. How about chocolate cocaine tablets for customers with a sweet but aching tooth? And what better way to support the boys at the front during the First World War than Harrods gift packs, containing morphine and cocaine?

  It wasn’t until 1916 that the British government was convinced to take firm action. Ministers were worried that the use of drugs might be undermining the war effort, so the Defence of the Realm Act brought in Home Office controls on the unauthorised possession of opium and cocaine. It was Britain’s first embrace with prohibition, but this country did not share the passion for proscription that gripped the United States.

  From among the federal agents recruited for America’s moral crusade against the evil drink in the 1920s emerged a man whose enormous enthusiasm for prohibition would go on to influence global drugs policy for the next forty years. His name was Harry J. Anslinger. Anslinger regarded the opium poppy as ‘the instrument of unprincipled men who by it satisfied their lust for wealth and power, of nations who used it for amoral reasons and as potent weapon of aggression’. He saw himself at the centre of an international struggle against ‘the narcotics evil’.

  Under diplomatic pressure from the Americans to honour its obligations and toughen up its drug laws, the UK government decided to play for time by setting up a committee under the chairmanship of Sir Humphrey Rolleston, an eminent physician. The medical men around the table took a very medical view of the drugs problem, concluding after two years’ deliberation that addiction was a disease and an addict was ill. It was, therefore, the right of the medical practitioner to use his discretion in the choice of treatment in this, as in other illnesses. The pharmaceutical companies that manufactured prescription opium offered a silent prayer.

  The US saw drug abuse as a sin; the UK had decided it was a sickness. Harry believed the answer was global prohibition; Sir Humphrey concluded the cure lay in the hands of doctors. What became known as the ‘British System’ was seen as a direct challenge to the prohibitionists on the other side of the Atlantic. There was due to be a showdown in Geneva in 1936; the Americans, with Anslinger in determined mood, demanded a new international convention that would oblige nations to introduce laws for severely punishing every aspect of the non-scientific drugs trade — from cultivation through production, manufacture, distribution and consumption. Anslinger’s philosophy had a totalitarian simplicity: ‘We intend to get the killer-pushers and their willing customers out of buying and selling drugs. The answer to the problem is simple — get rid of drugs, pushers and users. Period.’

  When other delegates successfully argued that the proposed new sanctions should not apply to manufacturers or users, the United States went into a huff and refused to sign. The treaty was never implemented, but it was a turning point. The prohibitionists had changed the language of the debate.

  Not that the Brits were particularly bothered. Drug abuse, they believed, was largely restricted to medics who had been trusted with the keys to the pharmacy, some wealthy bohemians, and a few foreigners with exotic habits. But after the Second World War, with more pressing matters on its mind and reliant on American aid to rebuild its battered economy, Britain was not looking for a fight over narcotics. Anslinger took his chance, incorporating prohibitionist steel into the structure of the new United Nations. When it came to international drugs policy, there would be a reduced role for doctors and greater influence for law enforcement officials.

  Police in Britain took their cue amid post-war anxiety that ‘alien’ influences were contaminating the minds of the country’s young men. On the night of 15 April 1950, officers from Scotland Yard raided a nightclub on London’s Carnaby Street, looking for drugs. Club Eleven, now regarded as the crucible of modern British jazz, made headlines because the men found in possession of cannabis and cocaine were predominantly white, young and UK-born.

  Six musicians spent the night in Savile Row police station before appearing at Marlborough Street Magistrates Court the next morning, among them future jazz legends Ronnie Scott and Denis Rose. Scott failed to convince the authorities that his cocaine was treatment for toothache, later recalling how one police officer told the court the arrests had taken place at a bebop club. ‘What,’ asked the judge gravely, ‘is bebop?’

  ‘A queer form of modern dancing — a Negro jive,’ came the answer.

  The event helped confirm a growing establishment suspicion that illicit drugs were a cause of the impertinence seen in an increasingly disrespectful youth. Britain was struggling to understand the changes that were transforming the social landscape. Many old orthodoxies were being challenged, the sandbagged bulwarks of conformity in danger of collapse.

  In the Home Office, officials were instructed to monitor the spread of heroin and in particular a new group of young users in London’s West End. Their dealer, a man called ‘Mark’, was arrested in September 1951 for theft from a hospital pharmacy. But what particularly concerned the drugs inspectorate was how this one pusher’s activities could be traced through to a wave of new addicts spreading across the capital. Heroin abuse was likened to a contagious disease infecting the young. By the time the 1950s careered into the 60s, Whitehall had become convinced that the use of dangerous narcotics was threatening the established order. The papers were filled with scandalised commentaries on the craze for ‘purple hearts’ (pills containing a mixture of amphetamines and barbiturates) said to be sweeping Soho dance clubs.

  It wasn’t just a challenge for Britain. At the United Nations, attitudes were hardening and Harry Anslinger was on hand to encourage the worldwide community to sign the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which described addiction as a ‘serious evil’. It was an important victory for the prohibitionists, confirming in an international treaty that addicts were sinners rather than sick; drug abuse was a moral rather than medical problem. The British System now seemed quite at odds with the UK’s global obligations.

  However, in London, a few so-called ‘junkie doctors’ were continuing to supply the vast majority of heroin users, their activities reported to and ne
atly recorded inside the Home Office. The drugs inspectorate noted that numbers, although still only in the hundreds, were rising fast and they were terrified at the prospect of criminal gangs muscling in on the growing drugs trade. One senior Home Office staffer, Bing Spear, took it upon himself to stand outside Boots the chemist on Piccadilly Circus at midnight as addicts picked up their prescriptions. If a user didn’t have a ‘script’, Bing would point them in the direction of a helpful doctor. Far better that, it was felt, than lining the pocket of some underworld pusher.

  When a Whitehall committee investigated the escalating use of narcotics, they interviewed a psychiatrist who was known to prescribe heroin to some of her patients. After listening to her evidence, the chairman, Lord Brain, turned to the Home Office inspectors and said: ‘Well gentlemen, I think your problem can be summed up in two words — Lady Frankau.’

  Lady Isabella Frankau, wife of the venerated consultant surgeon Sir Claude, is said to have almost single-handedly sparked the 1960s heroin epidemic in Britain. Records confirm that in 1962 alone she prescribed more than 600,000 heroin tablets to hundreds of users who flocked to her Wimpole Street consulting rooms.