In Britain, there were calls for the expansion of pilot schemes allowing GPs to prescribe heroin once again. Billions were pumped into drug treatment programmes as police drugs officers were quietly told their principal aim was now harm reduction rather than strict law enforcement. But the politics of drugs proved almost as toxic as the narcotics themselves.
In 2008, with the government deeply unpopular in the polls, ministers launched a new and ‘relentless drive’ against the drugs menace. Rejecting the advice of official experts, the Home Secretary announced the criminal sanction for possessing cannabis would be increased to a maximum of five years in prison. The move was welcomed in the tabloid press, but set government on a collision course with its own scientific advisors.
The following year, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs said the harms associated with ecstasy did not justify its Class A status; the committee chairman, Professor David Nutt, argued that the dangers were equivalent to the risks from horse riding. Again, the government rejected the committee’s evidence because of concerns about ‘public perception’.
In October 2009, following the publication of a paper that suggested harsher penalties for cannabis possession might cause more harm than good, Professor Nutt was fired by the Home Secretary. His dismissal led to numerous resignations by government scientists who accused ministers of putting politics before evidence.
Ironically, as the professor was clearing his desk, the previously hawkish UN drugs chief Antonio Maria Costa also published a paper. ‘Punishment is not the appropriate response to persons who are dependent on drugs,’ it read. ‘Indeed, imprisonment can be counter-productive.’ Within the once prohibitionist microclimate of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the weather was changing. ‘I appeal to the heroic partisans of the human rights cause worldwide,’ Mr Maria Costa wrote, ‘to help UNODC promote the right to health of drug addicts: they must be assisted and reintegrated into society.’ The United Nations appeared to be nudging the international drugs debate towards something that looked a bit like the long-forgotten British System.
Despite a broad political consensus in Britain against moving an inch from the approach of strict prohibition, the towering cultural orthodoxy around drugs is weakening. Policy makers are unsure where the co-ordinates of accepted wisdom currently lie. They must act as though the map remains as it was, but a fog has descended. When it lifts again, I expect the walls of principle and prejudice to have shifted.
P is for Poverty
…but public attitudes towards poverty in Britain mean that debate almost inevitably shifts to P for Plasma screen televisions, Packets of twenty, Pints of lager and Punts on the 3.30 at Chepstow. ‘Poverty’ is an explosive term in the UK, exposing a deep fault line in our understanding of what it means, what — if anything — should be done about it, and whether it even exists at all. Our response to poverty, therefore, reveals something of the disposition of the British people — our values, our heritage and our morality.
In the mid-1970s, a survey across the European Economic Community asked people in different countries why they thought there were people in need. Was it inevitable, bad luck, injustice or was it because poor people were lazy? In Britain, 43 per cent of respondents said the primary cause of poverty was laziness or lack of willpower — the most judgemental attitude of any country in the EEC.
Although subsequent polling in the 1980s and 90s showed the proportion blaming poverty on idleness going down as unemployment went up, over 60 per cent of the UK population continues to assert it is either unavoidable or the fault of the poor themselves.
There is much to suggest that the UK is a generous and compassionate nation. Analysis of charitable giving habits around the world following the South East Asian tsunami and other natural disasters in 2004–5 found that two thirds of Britons had each donated more than $100 to good causes that year, compared to 21 per cent in Germany, 30 per cent in Spain and Italy, and 34 per cent in France. But such levels of empathy do not appear to extend to the domestic poor, with campaigners complaining of harshly judgemental attitudes and government research suggesting that public sympathy for the poor in Britain has actually declined in the last decade.
Attitudes appear to be shaped by the use of the word ‘poverty’ itself. A significant proportion of the population simply does not believe it can exist in a country like Britain, with its wealth and welfare system. Around 40 per cent of people think there is very little poverty in the UK and, where families are in need, it is their own fault.
The research company Ipsos MORI conducted a series of focus groups on poverty in 2007 and concluded that the British public generally thought there was no excuse for poverty — it was down to bad choices and wrong priorities and therefore not a subject for public help. People, they found, had a mental model of ‘people like us’, the strivers, versus ‘freeloaders’ or the skivers. This image of strivers versus skivers chimes precisely with the familiar political rhetoric of ‘hard-working families’ as opposed to ‘welfare scroungers and benefit cheats’, a contrast that has its origins in the historical notion of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving poor’.
The Reformation marked a fundamental shift in attitudes to poverty in Britain. Before the dissolution of the monasteries in the mid-sixteenth century, close-knit devout communities would have looked to the Bible and religious orders for guidance on moral expectations in responding to the poor and needy. Instructions were set out in the Book of Matthew, Chapter 25: ‘Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, visit the sick, visit the prisoner, bury the dead.’ Being poor was to be closer to God: monks, nuns and friars swore an oath of poverty, that material concerns might not distract them from seeking salvation.
However, the collapse of the feudal system, the enclosure of common land and Henry VIII’s suppression of monasteries and convents prompted a profound change in the country’s relationship with the poor. Neither the church almshouses and hospitals nor the philanthropic traditions of Lords of the Manor were able to provide for the needy in the way they once had: begging, destitution and starvation stalked the kingdom, with tens of thousands of peasants deprived of land, work and succour. Amid fears of widespread civil disorder, the state was eventually obliged to take responsibility. Parliament required that assigned parish officials should collect charity for the relief of the poor. Those who refused to donate voluntarily might be taxed and ultimately imprisoned.
The move from charitable donation to enforced taxation, from the personal and moral to the bureaucratic and rational, effectively marked the conception of the welfare state and changed the relationship between wider society and its poorest members. The Poor Laws attempted to mitigate resentment at the new tax by spelling out who was entitled and who was not entitled to state aid — enshrining in statute the concept of deserving and undeserving poor. The former included ‘the impotent poor’, those deemed too old, too sick or too young to work. They might receive ‘indoor relief — lodging in almshouses, orphanages, workhouses or hospitals. The deserving category also included those who wanted to work but couldn’t find a job. These strivers, as pollsters might categorise them today, were entitled to ‘outdoor relief — clothes, food or perhaps some money.
The undeserving poor were the equivalent of today’s ‘skivers’: people deemed able to work but who chose not to. Rather than blaming poor policies for extra taxes and social strife, citizens were encouraged to blame poor people. The Poor Law of 1572, for instance, justified itself by stating that ‘all parts of this Realm of England and Wales be presently with rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars exceedingly pestered.’
Cast as enemies of the state, they were accused of ‘horrible murders, thefts, and other great outrages, to the high displeasure of Almighty God, and to the great annoy of the common weal’. For this group, therefore, poverty was not a grace but a sin requiring punishment. Those convicted of a roguish or vagabond trade of life were liable to be ‘grievously whipped and burnt through the gristle of the right ear with a hot iron’, branded as identifiable scapegoats for what were arguably the political and economic failings of others.
This was the birth of the underclass, the detached and dangerous group the Victorians referred to as the ‘residuum’, whose fecklessness and criminality threatened the law-abiding and hardworking majority. Culpability for every social ill would be routinely pinned upon this subset of humanity, a cultural group whose pathological behaviour was said to pass down through the generations.
For centuries, politicians would argue they were supporting the impotent and deserving in society while pointing an accusatory finger into the shadows. The outbreaks of looting and arson across parts of urban England in the summer of 2011 were widely blamed on an idle and immoral ‘underclass’. The warnings going back to the Poor Laws of how the undeserving might rise up in a tempest of flame and greed appeared to have come to pass.
It is this historical narrative that has shaped our attitudes to the poor, framing the debate in terms of ‘them’ and ‘us’. As Britain got richer in the late twentieth century, so the argument shifted: from deserving and
