Section:GDN 1J PaGe:2 Edition Date:190730 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 29/7/2019 19:08 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
- The Guardian Tuesday 30 July 2019
2
The cabinet is indeed a scary spectacle
of die hard, hatchet-faced rightists and Ayn
Rand fans. Designed to spook the EU, they
are likely to repel UK voters, this rogues’ gallery with a
high quotient of shysters, liars and low-calibre egotists,
without the brains or crowd-pleasing bonhomie of
their leader – he chose none to outshine him. (Gavin
Williamson in charge of the nation’s children? Really?)
Johnson’s heavy hitter is Michael Gove, not a public-
friendly face. The very name Dominic Cummings,
deviser of “take back control”, is supposed to strike
panic into all hearts, but the dark arts master with a
strong belief in genetic determination is no more a
wizard than Lynton Crosby, deviser of Theresa May’s
miserable “strong and stable” campaign motif. There
are good reasons not to fear any of them.
Johnson’s hard-right, hard-Brexit crew alienates at
a stroke at least a quarter of 2017 Tory voters who are
remainers, and maybe more who won’t like the smell
of this cabinet’s hostile environment. Dominic Raab’s
fi rst outing as foreign secretary on yesterday’s Today
programme gave an unsavoury fl avour of what to
expect: he suggested Vote Leave always said no deal
was on the cards – but it never did. As is his wont, Raab
turned nasty when rightly challenged by presenter
Mi shal Hus ain. They will say anything: he claimed
negotiating a free-trade deal would be easier after a
no-deal crashout , as if the chaos caused to both sides or
Britain’s £39bn unpaid debt would ease future relations.H
ere is the Johnson government’s
predicament: he is not elected, he
has no mandate, and no deal was
never raised in the referendum. No
deal is not the will of the people
then or now, only 25% supporting
it. His new term, “the undemocratic
backstop” is a nonsense. Downing
Street yesterday confi rmed that Johnson is refusing
to meet EU leaders until they abandon the backstop
that keeps the Irish border open, as in the Good Friday
agreement, and the EU single market intact, as created
by Margaret Thatcher. Though Johnson said in Scotland
he wanted to “go the extra thousand miles”, he stuck to
that impossibilist position. He may sweep up Faragists
but he will not take most of the country with him.
His new-leader bounce has been modest: an average
of polls gives him 30% , his 6-7% increase taken from the
Brexit party – no sign of reaching across lines. With four
parties in play, Johnson is not yet the proven winner
he promised his party – and has no hope of “uniting
the country”. As he tours the land with a bag full of
spending promises, he will need to make them good
soon – but no deal will leave him with thin Treasury
receipts and heavy compensations to pay for all the
losers, before any new spending.
Better to run for an election before his promises turn to
dust. Best to go before 31 October , the disaster date when
either he compromises, the European Research Group
explodes and Nigel Farage eats a fat slice of his vote , or
he crashes out of the EU when the chance of winning an
election amid no-deal mayhem bodes even worse. Either
way, the Johnson regime will not last long: the only
question is whether he brings down the country as he
goes, leaving us ruinously Brexited with no deal.
His one hope is the feeble opposition, letting Jo
Swinson sweep up remainers appalled at Labour’s
pitiful response to Johnson’s Brexit plan. There is no
predicting the outcome, but there is great strength in the
anti-no-deal plotters in the Commons, with Keir Starmer
gathering with the immensely powerful Tory backbench
rebels ready to prevent no deal. The serried ranks of
grandees, from Oliver Letwin and Philip Hammond, to
Rory Stewart and Dominic Grieve, will be formidable
opposition to Johnson. Either they will bring him down,
or Johnson will call an election himself to avoid that fate.
In that rebellious atmosphere, and despite the
handicap of Corbyn, an election foolishly fought on
a no-deal Brexit platform would be winnable by the
considerable combined forces of reason. No deal is a
losing cause that not even Cummings’s dark arts can
turn into a winner. Bring it on and Johnson stands a high
risk of being seen off before his 100 days are up.Boris Johnson is insouciantly reluctant to be seen
travelling cap in hand to Berlin, Paris or Brussels in
pursuit of new Brexit terms. He has not even bothered to
make a phone call to the Irish taoiseach , Leo Varadkar,
even though the Irish border is the crunch Brexit issue.
His attitude to the European Union is to try to make the
foreigners sweat, even if the result is a slump in the value
of sterling, as it was yesterday. And yet, like Theresa May
before him, Mr Johnson felt the need to go to Scotland
yesterday at the very start of his prime ministership.
Why did he come? Why the exception? It is, after all,
improbable that the prime minister will get a political
dividend from his meetings in Edinburgh. The fi rst, with
the Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson , was
at best an exercise in damage limitation. Mr Johnson’s
casual embrace of a possible no-deal Brexit (which he
just as casually denied in an interview ) has undermined
both Ms Davidson and Tory credibility on the issue in
Scotland. Meanwhile, although the brutal sacking of
the former Scottish secretary, David Mundell, last week
may not have received much attention in England, it has
been widely seen in Scotland as an act that pulls the rug
from under Ms Davidson.
The second meeting with the SNP leader and Scottish
fi rst minister, Nicola Sturgeon, was hardly any easier.
Ms Sturgeon was evidently determined not to welcome
Mr Johnson to Bute House with a smile. Inside, though,
she must have been laughing. Mr Johnson embodies
the kind of Englishness that grates most on nationalist
sensibilities. He is often seen as a recruiting sergeant for
the SNP. His visit provided Ms Sturgeon and her party’s
formidable media operation with an ideal platform from
which to promote their independence agenda in a way
that is already gathering some momentum in the polls.
Very clearly, Mr Johnson came on what was otherwise
likely to be an unrewarding visit because he could notDrug laws should be designed to minimise damage.
This might sound obvious. But the UK’s drug laws – along
with those of most other countries – arguably do not
have this eff ect. Indeed there is a strong argument that
in many respects the blanket prohibition, under criminal
statutes, of substances from cannabis to heroin along
with the myriad synthetic substances now widely used
to mimic their eff ects, does more harm than good.
This is not a novel point of view. Drug experts in the
UK and around the world have been pointing out the
fl aws and inconsistencies in current policies for ages,
with former Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos,
among those who have argued for a new approach
focused on human rights and public health. In the UK,
polls show a majority supports liberalisation of the
law on cannabis, following the example of countries
including Portugal. But since this shift in public
attitudes has so far been ignored by the Home Offi ce,
which instead brought in a sweeping ban on so-called
“legal highs” in 2016, this week’s call for reform by
a cross-party trio of MPs is refreshing.
Two former ministers, Lib Dem Norman Lamb and
Conservative Jonathan Djanogly, along with Labour’s
David Lammy, have been to Canada to report onaff ord not to. Scotland voted heavily to remain in the
EU in 2016. Yet few in Westminster, particularly on
the Tory benches, have ever taken the likely eff ect
of Brexit on Scotland seriously. Mrs May came north
in 2016 and said how much she loved the union,
but she then went away and forgot about the issue.
Mr Johnson, like most fervent leavers, never gives
Scotland much thought either, any more than he
bothers with Ireland. But it became shockingly clear
during the leadership campaign that the Tory party is
now full of people who simply do not care whether or
not the UK remains together as long as they can have
Brexit. Belatedly, even Mr Johnson now appears to
get what is at stake, although he characteristically has
no plan to address the issue.
This was embodied by the fi rst part of Mr Johnson’s
Scottish visit. His morning visit to the Faslane nuclear
base yesterday can be explained in two ways. The
fi rst was that the security at Faslane ensured that he
could give his press interviews against a strong visual
backdrop without any interference from protesters.
The second was that he was happier emphasising his
commitment to the UK’s nuclear submarines and all
they symbolise about Britain than in worrying about
the signal that this gives to anti-nuclear opinion in
Scotland. It was, in short, a visit aimed at the English
audience rather than the Scottish one.
Mr Johnson made one important thing explicit in
the interviews. Asked if he would rule out a second
independence referendum in Scotland, he said the
2014 vote to stay in the UK had been “a once in a
generation consultation” and that another vote would
undermine trust in politics. That certainly sounded
like a no, though it was not as clear as Mrs May’s
rejection of the idea. It nevertheless throws down
the gauntlet to the SNP, who have said that Brexit
may justify a further independence referendum.
This renews the possibility that Ms Sturgeon may
fi nd herself having to consider a Catalan scenario , in
which the Scottish government holds a referendum
that is not legally binding and potentially illegal. That
would be a fraught possibility, as events in Catalonia
have shown only too obviously. But Mr Johnson
would be reckless to assume that his own eagerness
to leave the European Union will not encourage Scots- and others too – to abandon the British one.
the legalisation of cannabis there for a short BBC
documentary. The answers they have come back
with are mixed. Regulation, it turns out, is no miracle
cure, with a black market still thriving. But the MPs
have shown it is possible to think about this subject
in a nuanced way, and to learn new things.
To say that such openness to change is overdue
is an understatement. Evidence of the vicious and
destabilising eff ects of the illegal drugs business on
both producer and consumer countries is not new.
Drug cartels, blamed for up to 200,000 deaths in
Mexico over the past decade, have now branched
into the synthetic opioids that caused an American
addiction epidemic. In the Philippines, President
Rodrigo Duterte has overseen the killing of 5,000
people in his uniquely murderous version of the
global “war on drugs”.
While the impact in the UK is less extreme, the
entanglement of drug dealing with other forms of
exploitation is apparent from recent “county lines”
cases in which children have been manipulated
by traffi ckers. The rate of drug deaths in Scotland
has jumped to among the highest in the world.
As in the US, those convicted of drugs off ences and
incarcerated are disproportionately black men and
boys. When Michael Gove, a senior government
minister, has admitted taking cocaine multiple times,
such disparities leave a particularly bitter taste.
Spurred on by the confessions among their own
ranks, ministers should bring calm and wise heads
together at the earliest opportunity. Policing and
sentencing are crucial pieces of the jigsaw. Britain
should not have to wait any longer for a rational,
evidence-based approach to drugs. Continued from frontLegalisation is no panacea.
But an alternative must
be found to the status quo
Drug laws
Boris Johnson in Scotland
The penny has dropped:
leaving a union is a
game that two can play
Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust No 53, 786
‘Comment is free... but facts are sacred’ CP Scott
Johnson’s crew will repel voters
– there’s no need to fear him
Polly Toynbee
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