Professor David Nutt's account of events regarding #NuttSack

Correspondence has been released between various protagonists in the saga of the sacking three weeks ago of Professor David Nutt from his position as chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.

One of the letters is from Professor Nutt to the Science and Technology Select Committee outlining the sequence of events from his perspective. As Evan Harris has already made clear in a very detailed blogpost here the sequence of events and the behaviour of Professor Nutt was in accordance with the rules and regulations he was working under. You can read Professor Nutt's letter for yourself here to see what you think of his comments on this.

Two things struck me about the letter. The first is in one of the things that Jacqui Smith said to him when she called him to discuss the "esctasy and horses" comments he had made:

9th Feb 2009 – I received a phone call from the Home Sec in my out patient clinic, criticising the ‘equasy’ paper and stating that her office had received multiple complaints about the article from parents whose children had been harmed by ecstasy. She claimed it was not logical to compare the harms of an illegal drug with those of a legal activity. I explained that for a drug to be controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 there had to be some threshold of harms exceeded so it seemed reasonable to explore what this threshold might be by examining other harmful activities. She did not accept the value of this approach and demanded that I apologised to the parents. I explained that I had not intended to offend anyone and was simply trying to put some balance into the drug harms debate. However, under the pressure of a phone call from the Home Secretary in the middle of my clinical working time, I apologised, through her, to any families that were upset by the article. She also asked if I was a “legaliser” and I replied that I was not and had repeatedly made statements to this effect in public.

This last comment seems almost sinister to me. Is it illegitimate for scientists, having looked through all the evidence to conclude that drugs should be legalised (and regulated)? It is far from an uncommon conclusion for people to draw once they have studied this subject for a while.

It actually seems almost McCarthy-like for this question to be asked. The implication seems to be that is he was a "legaliser" then there would be no way that he could advise the government. If the government is so sure of its case, surely they should welcome robust debate with people who may wish to challenge them? Not that this is what Professor Nutt was doing of course, he was simply presenting the evidence as we know.

The other thing that leapt out at me is the last thing that Professor Nutt says in his letter:

Relevant aspects of the code of practice defining my roles are

representing the ACMD to the public or the media as arranged by the secretariat

and

acting in the public interest

sharing in the general responsibility to consider the wider context in which their

expertise is employed;

acting with a presumption of openness

I my view my actions in relation to the Eve Saville lecture and the subsequent

reactions of the media and the government have been fully within this remit. Indeed

one could take the view, as I have, that many of them are required by it.

I also refer you to the Seven principles of public life one of which is:

Openness

Holders of public office should be as open as possible about all the decisions and

actions that they take. They should give reasons for their decisions and restrict

information only when the wider public interest clearly demands.

Professor Nutt is right here. He did what was expected of him given his responsibilities. In my view drawing the committee's attention to the "Openness" principle is spot on. He followed that principle exactly.

The problem of course is that despite all the words the government spews out about wanting to be "open", when it comes to drugs policy they are not interested. They just want to close down the debate for fear of the tabloid headlines that could come their way if they are seen to do anything that goes against being seen to be "tough on drugs". So this is a situation where their supposed principles clash with what they actually wanted to do, i.e. ignore the evidence but not be straight with the public about why they are doing so because it would show up their lack of an evidence based approach and also their political cowardice.

Will David Nutt be listened to by Alan Johnson?

Professor David Nutt has made some more comments today about the relative harm of drugs including alcohol and tobacco and has accused politicians of distorting and devaluing the debate. It sounds like he agrees wholeheartedly with me! Perhaps I should see if he will do a guest post for this blog....

Anyway, I have written a more detailed article about this including the media coverage and questioned whether Alan Johnson will turn out to be any more sensible on this subject than Jacqui Smith was in one of my regular pieces for Left Foot Forward today.

Ministers need to be better prepared for office

A comment by Jacqui Smith in her rather candid interview with Iain Dale in the latest edition of Total Politics chimed with something I have thought for a long time. This is what she said:

If I ever describe the process of becoming a minister - moving from one ministerial job to another - to somebody in almost any other job outside they think it is, frankly, pretty dysfunctional in the way that it works. That's not just this government... To be fair, Gordon had talked to me about whether or not I wanted to do a different job but you have to get to a pretty senior position in government - and you have to be pretty powerful as hell - before you can even express a view, let alone expect to influence where you go. I think we should have been better trained. I think there should be more induction. There's more now than when I started as a minister but it's still not enough. I think there should be more emphasis given to supporting ministers more generally in terms of developing the skills needed to lead big departments, for example. When I became Home Secretary, I'd never run a major organisation. I hope I did a good job but if I did it was more by luck than by any kind of development of those skills.

It seems odd to me that people are put in charge of huge sprawling departments with thousands of people working under them and budgets of billions of pounds often without any experience of running anything except a constituency office. Also, the skills required to be a good minister are in some ways different to those required to become and remain an MP.

It is crazy that we just drop people into these jobs with minimal if any training. Our political system of course makes it almost impossible for it to be any other way. Can you imagine the furore if George Osborne decided to go on a training course on how to be an effective Treasury minister, or Liam Fox openly took a week out to do a course run by Defence Secretarys past? Labour and the media would make their lives hell and it could easily lead to their positions becoming untenable as the cry of them "not being ready for office" reached fever pitch.

I suspect a fair bit of readiment goes on behind closed doors anyway but they would not be able to admit to the extent of it for the reasons given above. For some reason we seem to expect politicians to be ready for the demands of office straight away, almost as if they were born to it.

One of the problems is that we don't have fixed term parliaments. This means that a charge from the Labour party against the opposition right now that they weren't ready for office would be all the more potent because an election could be called at any time. If we knew for definite when the election would be called then the environment would make it easier for opposition politicians to make sure they were fully up to speed before entering office.

Another problem is that it seems to basically be in the gift of the incumbent government how much access a putative incoming administration has to the civil service and hence allows them to play political games with this access in order to try and wrong-foot the opposition and make it harder for them to be ready should they win. This is a crazy situation and is one of the things that should be taken out of the hands of the government. The politicians who are in power don't own the apparatus of government, they are custodians of it and it is simply wrong that they can make life harder than necessary for their potential successors. This can lead to bad government further down the line which will affect all of us.

The other big problem is how quickly the newly elected administration is expected to be up and running. The election is held on a Thursday. The count happens overnight. If a new government is elected then the outgoing PM hot foots it down to the palace part way through the Friday. The new PM then gets the seals of office from Her Maj. an hour or so later and (s)he appoints their cabinet and government over the next day or two. So next year we could have most of the cabinet and most of the government dropped in at very short notice with no previous experience of government and very little if any training. Contrast this with how it works in say the US. There, the incoming administration gets almost 3 months to prepare. They are given full access to everything they need to get up to speed and a "transition team" is in place to make sure the process is smooth.

I doubt anything in the UK will change soon. Cameron said he would "look" at the case for fixed term parliaments. I strongly suspect that this is code for "do nowt" once in office. Also, as I said the political culture mitigates against it. Politicians find it very difficult to admit weakness of any kind when in or seeking office so I think we are destined to suffer poorly trained and prepared ministers for the forseeable future.

Jacqui Smith may not get away with it after all...

A few months ago I lamented on here that despite what appeared to me to be the possibility of fraud having been committed by the then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith in relation to her second home claims, that the media and the authorities were basically going to let her get away with it.

Then more recently the police indicated that they were not going to investigate her. I always thought this was very suspect and the anecdotal evidence I have seen from neighbours etc. would suggest to me that her sister's home was not her main residence. Frankly it beggars belief that a box room in her sister's house could ever have been considered her primary residence when she had a proper house in Redditch.

Anyway, Guido announced today that he is donating £5,000 to fund for the Sunlight Centre for Open Politics which is gathering evidence for a private prosecution against Ms Smith. I support this action as I think this particular example needs to be tested in court properly as it seemed so blatant a contravention of the spirit and possibly the letter of the rules. I cannot afford to give anything like £5,000 but I will give a little bit to this and hopefully many others will so that they can get to the £100,000 they think they will need to launch this prosecution.

I am well aware that Guido helped set this centre up. He has been accused in the past of being partisan although he claims he is against all "sleazy" politicians and I therefore hope that it does not just focus on Labour but that they also look closely at some of the Tories who have been implicated in serious wrongdoing. Bill Wiggin for example would seem to be a prime candidate for an investigation of this nature also.

You can find out the ways to donate here.

Fisking Polly Toynbee

Polly Toynbee has written a comment piece for the Guardian today which tries to argue that we should keep things regarding our MPs in perspective. I have tried to address some of her points below:

This isn't even the beginning of the end. After Jacqui Smith, expect a stream of MP expense scandals drip-fed into papers week by week. Rumours abound: is there a mole in the Commons fees office? Is it a Tory? Is someone selling these scoops? One thing is certain: deep-pocketed tabloids are chasing ministers, hiring Benji the Bin Man-type rummagers, bribing officials or just calculating MPs' property profits from expenses.

You are doubtless correct Polly, but the "deep-pocketed tabloids" would have nothing to uncover if the MPs had not been so greedy in the first place.

All parties are in for a roasting. In the autumn every MP's bath plug and lightbulb claim will be published. By bad luck, yesterday saw their pay rise by 2.33% to add to public anger.

Bad luck? They are in control of their own pay rises and have chosen to do this in the middle of a recession. Each individual MP is at liberty to give away their rise to charity or back to the Exchequer. Let's see how many of them do.

If moral instincts fail them, then every political sinew should alert MPs to do nothing they wouldn't want splashed across front pages, whatever the custom and practice of the house. Talk to MPs who don't claim much and they boil over at those claiming more than they need. Jacqui Smith calling her sister's back bedroom her main home looked all wrong, even if, apparently, officials said it was OK. The £10 blue movie fiasco is an embarrassing error, but hardly a high crime. For years no spotlight shone in this dark corner.

The blue movie fiasco will amost certainly destroy Smith's career and will become as emblematic of the sleaze of New Labour as brown envelopes and Neil Hamilton were for the Tories.

Now the system must change - and fast. What's up with the dilatory Committee on Standards in Public Life, refusing to lumber into action until September, not reporting until after the next election? This slo-mo response risks bringing the committee into the same disrepute as the MPs. Public thirst for blood spilled over on Question Time when Eric Pickles was booed and barracked for utterly failing to catch the angry moment. He looked shocked: frankly, they all do. If party leaders were wise, they would rush together to announce new rules, draw a line under the past and try to staunch the anti-politician bile.

I agree with all of this and indeed Nick Clegg has already written to the other two main party leaders suggesting this.

(Read online comments after this for waves of cynical hatred.)

This seems to be a pretty flagrant attempt to smear any criticism of her article before it has even been published (assuming this was not added afterwards but there is no EDIT comment attached to it). I have read some of the comments and they are largely polite but just disgusted with politicians and Polly's attempts at defending them.

But keep all this in perspective. Our politicians are among the cleanest in the world - 16th out of 180 nations and bunched less than two points from the top, according to Transparency International. Below us are the US, Belgium, France and Spain. But from the uproar, MPs stretching expense rules has been made to look like the pork barrel, backhander and bribery scams that plague other countries.

And? So what? We want a clean politics for this country. I don't care whether we are "not as bad" as some other countries. This is a red herring argument.

Let's repeat this: our MPs are rarely corrupt. Our feral press, however, finds growing transparency and freedom of information - brought in by Labour - offers easy meat for cheap stories. These hyped up "scandals" are frivolous compared with serious investigations such as the Guardian's arduous and risky revelations on company tax avoidance. If only more newspapers gave the same space to investigating opaque corporate bad behaviour that they devote to exposés of minor MPs' misdemeanours. Eternal trivia is not eternal vigilance.

Hmm. I agree with the need for us to more vigorously pursue tax avoidance but it is not an either/or situation. We should pursue things like that and also pursue public servants who have structured an "allowances" system to line their own pockets. The total amount of MPs expenses according to the figures released yesterday is over £80 million. This is not trivia.

But here's the wake-up call. MPs have been caught napping by the new wave of puritanism. Others will now come under unaccustomed scrutiny. Let this be a warning to all public officials, quangos, councils, NHS officials, sports authorities or anyone holding even minor power. Something has snapped. If public trust was always low, it has fallen down a crevasse in this financial crisis.

Absolutely. People are furious with our politicians and public officials and they have to respond to this right now. Right now. No kicking it into the long grass with inquries led by the great and the good reporting after the next election. Now.

Historians will see why: people feel a grand conspiracy by a well-paid elite has failed them. They were told this was a golden age, that astronomic pay at the top was yielding rich returns for the nation. They were told their soaring property values came thanks to the brilliance of the governing and banking classes. When your house price rose by £50 a day, why question the very clever, very well-paid people overseeing this great tide of wealth? Polls showed surprisingly little indignation as top pay rocketed. People believed those in power who said the golden geese were delivering the eggs.

I still thought there were problems with the current system as I am sure did many others even when times were good. However Polly is right that now times are tough there will be much more focus on this subject.

But no longer. MPs are getting the first blowback of the new mood. Everyone earning in the top tax bracket had better watch out: the real nature of inequality has been rumbled. Remember, only some 10% of people earn over £40,000. That means 90% earn less. All those with power - leaders, managers, controllers, commentators, decision-makers - inhabit a very small elite paid far above the norm. Median pay is around £23,000, so half the population earns less. Now trade unions no longer have the power to rattle the cage of the powerful, the upper 10% has lost its grip on reality, failing to realise how well off it is. MPs and others feel entitled to more if they compare themselves upwards, with the top 1% earning a monstrous swag. Extreme inequality causes pay dysmorphia - failing to see your pay in proper proportion to everyone else's.

But MPs earn more than 2.5x the median in salary alone (and that's before the tens of thousands of pounds of "allowances" are factored in). Do they really, honestly think they are badly paid?

It is unjust that the public sector - less greedy, less rich, more motivated by civic sense - will feel the blowtorch of this new mood. Beware throwing public-sector leaders into tumbrels. But as an easy target in a downturn, they had better cut back those top rates that have been infected by the private-sector pay virus. Meanwhile, businessmen flying "executive" class for no good reason, eating Michelin stars and conferencing in golf-friendly foreign spas pilfer public-company funds from other people's pensions under far less scrutiny.

No, I am sorry Polly but when times are tough, everybody has to share the burden. The caricature of businessmen eating swans and swimming in caviar is an attempt to distract from this. I am in business myself and we are having to be very careful on expenditure as I am sure most other businesses are. There are pay freezes, pay cuts, short time working, downsizing, suspended pension contributions, you name it going on in the private sector at the moment. the public sector cannot go on expanding whilst the private sector takes all the pain. It goes against natural justice and is economically wrong headed.

Beware of joining the general denigration of MPs. There are few Jonathan Aitken bad hats: you know them by the pricking of your thumbs. Most MPs in every party go into politics to change things for the better. A salary set today at £64,766 is fine, but most (not all) could do better outside.

This last bit is absolute rubbish. £65K per year is a huge salary and many MPs these days, certainly Labour ones are time servers who have never done a job outside politics. Once you factor in the "allowances" we are talking well over £100K. I simply do not believe that most MPs could earn this sort of money outside of politics and it insults our intelligence to suggest they can. Oh, and if they really do think they can, they should resign from the house and do it. There are no shortage of people waiting to replace them.

Few reach cabinet or even junior office. If they do, their powerlessness can still feel mortifying. Years of weekly graft in constituencies yield little personal benefit: most rise and fall with their party's fortunes.

MPs under collective omerta are usually better people in private than they are allowed to be in public. This era of Labour MPs has rebelled more than any other - though rebellion is not always as honourable as suffering under collective decision. We who comment on them do well to remember how plush is our perch, in comparison.

But the collective omerta is entirely their own fault. They control our system of government. If they want to be allowed more individualism, it is in their own hands. I agree it would be better if they were more independent minded but many MPs, certainly in the Labour and Conservative parties are politically cowardly when it comes to speaking their true mind on issues. Look at the conspiracy of silence for example on the failure of the "war on drugs". MPs are very quick to scream "Gaffe!" or "Soft on drugs/crime!" at each other as soon as one of them steps outside the ridiculously narrow bounds they set for themselves. It is their own fault.

Those who abuse, belittle and encourage popular contempt for MPs should consider that we need more good people in politics. Observing the excruciating public humiliation of the home secretary's husband for watching a couple of porn movies, with their children cringing indoors, how many potentially good future politicians decided they would rather not invite the world to root through their private life after all?

It is richly ironic that Jacqui Smith who has done so much to undermine our liberties and to ensure the state can poke their noses into our private business is likely to be undone by someone poking their noses into her private business (although made public due to the claim on taxpayer's money). Good people have nothing to fear from going into politics as long as they keep their side of the street clean and do not engage in the sort of egregious practises we have seen recently.

The MPs are getting exactly what they deserve and they only have themselves to blame.

Derek Draper is damaging the blogosphere

I stopped reading Labourlist seriously a few weeks ago once it had become clear to me that it was largely a conduit for Labour party propaganda. If I wanted to read Labour party press releases and centrally coordinated attacks on opponents I would subscribe to them.

In Labourlist's first few days I posted this on one of their initial threads:


Hello.

I wish you luck in this endeavour (I am a Lib Dem activist and blogger) however I do have a couple of concerns.

Firstly the list of contributors seems to largely consist of very mainstream party figures. If a blog like this is to be successful, it cannot always parrot the party line. There has to be space to be able to question and constructively criticise your own party's approach. I hope you can find the right balance here.

Secondly, and I don't wish to get too personal but I am fearful that with such a divisively partisan figure as yourself Derek as the driving force behind it, there is a risk that the blog will reflect this too strongly. I saw you on BBC News 24 a while back and I was shocked at how unwilling to even engage in the discussion with your Tory opponent you were. You just kept shouting things at him like "Same old Tories!" and similar and also kept grossly misrepresenting your opponent's position on things. It was exactly the sort of performance that turns people off from watching political "debates" in my opinion. I hope you can curb these instincts and allow proper debate to occur on here. I know you will have problems with Tory trolls but not all Tories are in league with the devil and they often have valid opinions that merit debate. As do we Lib Dems and others from across the political spectrum. If you can engage in this way, the blog is much more likely to be successful.


To his credit, Draper did respond to my post:


mark. there will be more contributors added and many of those will be non-mainstream. we already have ken livingstone and another key left of centre figure is joining us tomorrow. i don't think that bbc 24 appearance was my best and will try and raise my tone (it'll slip occassionally though, i'm sure) - but the tone of this site should always be welcoming to constructive comments like yours...


However since then I have seen no evidence that he has followed through on the general thrust of what he promised. Every media appearance he has made has been as bad as, or worse than his News 24 appearance I referred to. He has been rude, hectoring and unwilling to listen to anything his opponents say as well as deliberately misrepresenting their positions. Also, there are numerous comments in threads on there that I have seen in a brief scan today that imply that censorship has been taking place on the site against people who post negatively about the Labour Party.

And then today Iain Dale has revealed that a very articulate and thought provoking piece written by Labour Party member Shamik Das criticising Jacqui Smith and submitted to them at about 4:00pm yesterday has at the time of me writing this (about 9:45am the next day) still not been published on Labourlist. Dale has (slightly mischievously) published it himself on his own site now.

Either Draper has deliberately censored the publication of an article that is critical of Jacqui Smith in which case Labourlist is not an independent grass roots site, or if he claims he has not got round to publishing yet due to time constraints then he does not have enough time to devote to this enterprise. Things in the blogosphere move fast and it cannot take many hours or even days to get things published if you want to be fresh and relevant. As Dale has shown, someone else will publish it anyway and you will be caught flat-footed. The old rules of the spin machine no longer work in the digital world and Draper would do well to heed this.

I think Labourlist needs someone else less partisan at the helm if it is ever going to be taken seriously as a force in the blogosphere.

UPDATE1: Labourlist has now published Shamik's article. It was posted at about midday today.

UPDATE2: This is now officially my most popular post ever by quite a long way largely due to Iain Dale having included it in his Daley Dozen yesterday. Thanks Iain! Also, Labourlist is still at it - publishing press releases and trying to pass them off as blog posts as I have detailed here.

UPDATE3: I now feel very strongly that Draper needs to resign as editor of LabourList following the "Sleazegate" revelations.

I don't care who is leaking this stuff - MPs must change

Guido is spot on with his post today about how the focus of anger of many MPs is on whoever is leaking embarrassing information about MPs expenses to the media.

This is exactly what I thought too when I heard last night that the Labour Party is trying to spin relevations that are coming out as politically motivated and being leaked by a Tory mole.

Frankly, I couldn't give a flying toss who is leaking this information and what their motivations are. I actually shouted at the TV last night (I try and stop myself but sometimes can't help it!) that this is utterly irrelevant. If the information is available in the first place then it is because MPs have been playing the system, even if it is within the rules it is clear that public opinion is massively against them and they have to face this and change their practises.

I was actually thinking about this the other day. When Harriet Harman was being questioned about Shred's pension she said that although his contract may be enforceable by law, it is not enforceable in the "court of public opinion" and hence the government would "step in". I wonder whether she takes a similar view about Jacqui Smith trousering over £100K by claiming that a room in her sister's house is her main residence whilst she has a huge house in Redditch where her husband and children live. It is clear that is also not enforceable in the "court of public opinion. Is she now going to "step in"?

It is a shame nobody asked her this at PMQs last week.

Jacqui Smith is now a liability

Following the weekend revelations about Jacqui Smith's husband and their claim against taxpayers money for him watching two adult films I think her career as a senior politician is finished. It is not so much what has happened in this particular case - it is a relatively minor oversight. The problem is that it comes after a number of other allegations against her regarding her expenses as I have blogged about previously. She has now become the politician most closely associated with seemingly dodgy expense claims.

For the good of her office and her party she should now resign.

Jacqui Smith's ban backfires

I seem to be posting a lot about Jacqui Smith at the moment. I don't fancy her or anything honest! She just seems to be doing a lot of stupid things lately.

Her latest wheeze to ban the contraversial Dutch MP Geert Wilders from entering the UK to promote an anti-Islamic film seems totally wrong headed as usual. Before a day or two ago, I had never heard of Wilders. If he had been allowed to come into the UK quietly and get on with what he wanted to, invited by a UKIP peer to the House of Lords to show his film, then I am sure his activities would have been reported in the news. It would have been maybe 3 or 4 in the running order of the headlines for one day. Instead, thanks for Jacqui Smith's political incompetence Wilders' boat has been all over our screens and his voice on the radio for the last 24 hours. Today on the BBC News channel it was the top story with a live interview from the airport with him, a reporter standing outside Heathrow and constant rolling "updates" on what was happening as well as an interview with David Milliband on the subject.

I suspect as well that now lots of people will download his film and watch it (far, far more than would have done).

Wilders is clearly a master at playing the media. He knew he would not get into the UK when he arrived at Heathrow but clearly saw it as a great opportunity to get a lot of free publicity. Smith and her moribund government have played right into his hands.

The only way to deal with people like Wilders is to engage with the debate that they provoke. How could Smith not see this coming and when will she realise that trying to ban things like this just makes it worse in the end?

There has been a fair bit of other blog reaction on this today too.

Jacqui Smith is getting away with it...

It's not often I agree so strongly with Simon Heffer but his column in the Telegraph today is pretty close to what I think about how some of the political class in this country behaves, with particular reference to Jacqui Smith.

Amongst others, he makes the following point:

"We know Miss Smith's game. She will struggle to hold her seat at the next election, as Labour will struggle to hold the country. Faced not just with the loss of a ministerial salary but also an MP's one (with all its juicy expenses), and with life in the House of Lords perhaps no longer a gravy train, it makes sense to coin it in while you can. This includes having her husband on her payroll, too. If lean times hit the Smith household, there should be a bit of fat to live off while the Job Centre does its work."

I am sorry to say that I think he is spot on here. I did not mention it in my previous post about lodgergate (as nobody else seems to be calling it!) but I did wonder if her behaviour could at least in part be explained by the fact that she has very little to lose because she will likely be out of parliament at the next election.

Irrespective of all of this, I find it shocking that the parliamentary standards commisioner can have dismissed the case against Smith so lightly. He claims that there is not enough evidence against her. So the only conclusion I can draw from this is that if with such an obvious case of manipulating the system to claim that kipping in a spare room round at your sisters (when your husband, children and most of your personal effects are in a house 100 miles away where you appear to spend the majority of your nights, your own website refers to you "still living in Redditch" and your own spokesman in an attempted defence referred to your Redditch house as your "home") can be claimed as your primary residence then the system is very, very broken. I am very saddened that more of a fuss has not been made of this by the media and other politicians.

Guido has been making a lot of running on this story (hattip to him for the Smith website bit above) and has written to the commissioner himself about this. I fully support his attempts to question this situation and keep the media's eye on it.

Jacqui Smith is the one trivialising this debate

I am very dismayed by Jacqui Smith's behaviour today in the Commons. She has made some disparaging remarks about Professor David Nutt's comment about the use of ecstacy. As I blogged about here on Saturday, Professor Nutt made some thought provoking comments about the number of deaths linked to ecstacy each year and how that compares with the number of people who die through horse riding.

I despair sometimes of how any sort of rational debate about issues like drugs goes completely out of the window. I will take some of her comments as reported in the article linked at above below and put my thoughts alongside them:


'Jacqui Smith said Prof David Nutt had "trivialised" the dangers of the drug.'

How can trying to raise an informed debate about society's attitude to something that hundreds of thousands of young people participate in each week be trivialising its dangers? Her behaviour today is trivilaising and debasing the entire debate.


'The council (ACMD), which advises the government, is expected later this week to recommend that ecstasy be downgraded from a class A drug to a class B one.

Ministers have outlined their opposition to any such move.'

So as I indicated in my previous post on this, the government is going to ignore the evidence and do what it thinks is politically convenient.

'Speaking during Home Office questions in the House of Commons, Ms Smith said: "I've spoken to him this morning about his comments. I've told him that I was surprised and profoundly disappointed by the article reported."

She added: "I'm sure most people would simply not accept the link that he makes up in his article between horse riding and illegal drug taking.'

Really!? Why is she so sure about this. Does she think that "most people" will not be able to look at the evidence and see that more people die from horse riding than from taking ecstacy? Why would they not accept this? Why are drugs put into some special undebatable category by politicians where any attempt to move outside the narrow confines of the status quo is met with tirades like this?

'For me that makes light of a serious problem, trivialises the dangers of drugs, shows insensitivity to the families of victims of ecstasy and sends the wrong message to young people about the dangers of drugs.'

Why on earth would she think that Professor Nutt is making light of this? As far as I can see he is doing exactly the opposite and trying to be measured and sensible. As for the insensitivity charge to the families of people who have died whilst on ecstacy, well this is just politics at its worst. Using the deaths of people as a political football to try and score points in a debate is about as low as it gets. To follow this through to its logical conclusion, any subject that is related to an issue where someone has died cannot ever be discussed because one could be accused of "insensitivity".

Evan Harris MP has it spot on when he says: "What's the future for scientific independence if she [Ms Smith] asks that scientists apologise for their views?"

If people are not allowed to raise this in the public sphere without being denounced under parliamentary privilege then I despair at where we will end up. Does Smith really think that the current system is working so well that we cannot even debate it? If she is intellectually sure of her ground she should be happy to debate this, on the real issues instead of throwing up straw men all over the place and appealing to emotion.

Sadly, this has been the level of debate in this area of policy for years and there are few senior politicians brave enough to confront the issues involved head on.

Jacqui Smith and Lodgergate

This story in the Mail on Sunday does not look at all good for Jacqui Smith. There are allegations that she is claiming her primary residence as being a house in London that her sister owns and hence can have claimed up to £20,000 per year for this residence. The estimated cost of the police protection she requires because of her residential choice is close to £200,000. As Home Secretary she could have a grace and favour apartment which already has police protection anyway but she refuses to.

In order to be able to legitimately claim the £20,000 per year, the rules state that MPs must get value for money. According to the article they are also warned to "avoid any arrangement which may give rise to an accusation that you are, or someone close to you is, obtaining an immediate benefit or subsidy from public funds".

The part of that article that seems most damning to me however is this:

The allowance must not be used to meet the costs of rent or a mortgage from 'a partner or family member'. And the rules say an MP's 'main home' will normally be 'a matter of fact' and 'where you spend more nights than any other'.

So if the primary residence is to be claimed against, then she should be there on average for the majority of nights. Her spokesman when asked stated: "She tends to go home Thursday evenings and returns on Sunday or Monday." which has been pointed out is an average of three and a half days per week, not a majority and it will be interesting to see how many Mondays as opposed to Sundays there actually are.

The thing that I found most interesting here however is that when this was pointed out to the spokesman, he said: "She doesn't count the number of nights.". In that case, how is she supposed to be able to know which is her primary residence!? The spokesman is trying to make it seem like a trivial irrelevance that is beneath the HS to be bothering with details like how many nights she spends at her primary residence. However because it is critical to determining if the rules have been broken, this is nonsense. Either she has not spent the bulk of her nights there which means it looks like the rules have been broken or she has. Ignorance should be no defence. Imagine if I could not be bothered to count how much tax I needed to pay each year and just submitted what I reckoned was right? Would I be able to get away with this?

I think it is worth mentioning also that the spokesman said "She goes home on Thursday evenings...". This could be a slip of the tongue but even he seems to be referring to her Redditch residence as her home which most people usually use to mean her primary residence.

Guido has pointed out that her advisers claims that the fees office have cleared her claim is disingenuous as they take the members word for it. This is typical Campbellesque spin to try and limit the damage which shows how deep the mire the HS could be in here.

This all smells very bad to me and does not augur at all well for her prospects of holding onto her position as Home Secretary.

Morus of Political Betting thinks that she will be able to tough all of this out and that Gordon Brown will do everything he can to save her. I was going to argue against this and that the allegations are so serious that once the media feeding frenzy starts her position will become untenable. However I have just had a look on the BBC News website and I cannot see any reference to this story, even on the Politics page so maybe he is right. It will be a disgrace if this is not followed up rigourously by the rest of the media. Perhaps this is another situation where bloggers may have to do the media's duty for them...?

Further blog reaction here, here and here.