‘End of “slaps on the wrist” for middle-class drug users’, says the Telegraph, announcing plans by the Boris Johnson administration to clamp down on recreational drug use.
Perhaps the clampdown should start at the Palace of Westminster where, as Breitbart has reported, cocaine use is supposedly so rife it makes Scarface look like The Muppet Christmas Carol…
Having spent more than enough time among MPs and their seedy hangers-on, I’m in no doubt whatsoever that the reports of flagrant drug use in Westminster are accurate. Politics tends to attract high-risk chancers addicted to naughtiness and stimulus. So it hardly comes as a surprise to learn that the lavatories in the House of Commons are heavily speckled with traces of cocaine, as I’m sure they have been for decades.
What does come as a shock, though, is to read the government announcing the very next day after these scandalous revelations that it now intends to punish recreational drug users, middle-class ones especially, with much stiffer sentences including curfews and confiscation of passports.
The hypocrisy here is so rank it almost beggars belief. Whoever ends up being punished by these strict new laws you can bet it won’t include any of the sleazy coke-snorting reptiles in the Houses of Parliament.
It’s possible, I suppose, that the Sunday Times expose of Westminster drug use was released as a ‘spoiler’, designed to humiliate the government on the eve of its drug crackdown announcement.
But it would have been perfectly possible for the government to have delayed its announcement a few days or weeks after the Sunday Times story had appeared. The fact that it chose NOT to do so suggests to me something much more worrying and depressing: that this government has reached the stage where it no longer even cares about perceived hypocrisy; where, even worse, it actively exults in it.
We’ve seen this a lot during the last 18 months: strict mask-wearing and social distancing rules for the general public, mask-free mingling at parties and meetings behind closed doors for the Westminster Nomenklatura; quarantine after travel for ordinary folk but special exemptions for ministers like Michael Gove whose international jet setting is apparently so vital to the national interest that no virus dares go near it.
Boris Johnson’s government, like so many other debauched, corrupt, anti-democratic, and increasingly tyrannical governments around the world right now, is starting to resemble the Capitol in The Hunger Games, where an effete, selfish, decadent elite indulge themselves grotesquely while their populace suffers.
These powers won’t be used against the governing ‘elite’, only against the people they despise. That will be you and me, then.