WHERE ARE THE POLICE IN THE FIGHT AGAINST DRUGS?

Inspector Knacker of the Yard has never been afraid to state the
obvious. Thus the former Chief Constable of Kent, now chairman of the
Association of Chief Police Officers, Mr Ken Jones, told The
Independent earlier this week that drug prices in the UK had reached
a historic low "which, he conceded, was a good indication that drugs
were readily available".

Good thinking. If only Mr Jones had gone on to concede that one of
the main reasons why drugs are so cheap and therefore readily
available is that the police have utterly failed to control the
traffic. You can tell that just from the way drugs are sold quite
openly on the streets of London and other major towns.

The Jones solution is simple and will be endorsed by any number of
pundits. Hand out hard drugs on prescription. That way you get rid of
all the crime committed by addicts. The fact that you may thereby
recruit more addicts is not considered.

Nor is it mentioned that one happy consequence of any such move would
be finally to relieve the police of a great deal of hard and unpleasant work.

The same sort of thinking is now going on in the great debate about
guns. If guns are widely available and being used to terrible effect,
then that is an indication that the police have failed in their duty
to the public.

But nobody will say that. Instead we will be asked by the likes of
David Cameron to consider the tragic breakdown of family life, the
need for the community to do this, that or the other. What a relief
for the inspector to be let off the hook.

I Couldn't Possibly Comment

Prompted by the sad death of the actor Ian Richardson, I watched
again a sequence of the famous House of Cards drama in which he gave
a tour de force performance as the Tory Prime Minister Francis Urquhart.

You could not of course equate the likeable villain FU with our own
dear Prime Minister. All the same Michael Dodds's fantasy had one
thing in common with Alistair Beaton's recent TV play The Trial of Tony Blair.

Both Blair and FU were portrayed as modern-day Macbeths. Both had
pushy, ambitious wives and both were haunted by terrible visions of
their past misdeeds - FU by the young hackette he murdered when she
was about to expose him, Blair by the victims of the Iraq invasion
including dead British soldiers. I doubt very much if in real life
Blair loses any sleep over those poor people. Anyone listening to him
talking to John Humphrys on Thursday would have found it hard to
detect a single note of regret, let alone remorse, for the awful
consequences of the Iraq adventure.

Yet, a normal person in Blair's shoes would by now have taken to
drink and/or committed suicide. The fact he has done neither is proof
that those people who speak of Blair being insane have a perfectly
good point. Perhaps, after all, the right role for him is not Macbeth
but King Lear - with Mandy playing the part of the fool.

* A hatred of religion underlies much that is written in the press
these days but in a great deal of the comment there runs a strong
vein of cowardice. It is most inadvisable to make fun of Judaism, for
example, because you will be branded an anti-Semite. As for the
Muslims, you might get a bomb thrown in your window if you speak out
of turn about the Prophet.

The result is that Christians who played so big a part in creating
those so-called civilised values we are so keen to uphold get all the
stick. Instructed by their scripture to turn the other cheek they are
not going to retaliate.

One difficulty the debunkers of Christianity face is that they have
to explain why it is that over the years so many great men and women
have subscribed to a religion which they deride as ludicrous.

You could make a list as long as your arm and it would include not
just great thinkers and writers long dead but those of our own times.
To take one example, W H Auden, whose centenary we are celebrating,
was a committed Christian, though this is not a point all his
admirers are likely to stress in their tributes.

I remember asking the late A J Ayer, an obsessive atheist, how he
could explain his admiration for his fellow philosopher Michael
Dummett when the latter was a Catholic whose beliefs Ayer regarded as
nonsense. Ayer had the humility to admit that he couldn't answer the question.