At a time when the relief maps of most politicians’ souls can only be expressed in negative figures, Josh Russell is surveying the deep dark abyss that is David Cameron

It’s getting worse and worse. I can’t even make it through a whole night anymore. It starts with a gut like millstones, grinding last night’s lasagne into so much greasy flour. Drenched in my own sweat, I flop about like a humpback beached in a shallow brackish estuary. Branches tap at the window, their leaves whispering the word ‘change’ with each gust of wind. There is the stench of pre-packaged charm, charisma that has died a slow death choked in plastic. My throat makes a fist. My sphincter trembles like a nervous Chihuahua. Even now I can feel the shape of the knowledge lay heavy in my brain, a coarse breezeblock wedged squarely between the frontal lobes. It’s out there. Waiting.

Screwing my eyes shut I mutter psalms under my breath, wishing it were not true, that some deity would come down from the sky and exorcise the dark dawn that faces us. I hear a noise; the words ‘old politicss isss failingg’ hissed through a mouth of broken teeth. Terror gurgles through my arteries like air bubbles in a knackered central heating system.  I stare into the black, limbs pretzel-knotted in fear as a cruel shape emerges from the shadows. It swoops down on me in all its savage glory. There’s no hiding from it anymore.

David Cameron is going to be our next Prime Minister.

The idols of the old religions have been cast out. Margaret stares out of the window in her retirement community, sighing wistfully and telling her nurse once more about the time she gave the impudent proles a thorough sorting. John Major scurries about in the gutter fishing for titbits, a look of fathomless understanding in his wide lugubrious eyes. At number 10, Brown huffily crosses days out of his calendar and occasionally takes trips to the stationary cupboard to see whether there are any mini post-its or exotic coloured highlighters he hasn’t stolen yet. And somewhere deep in a cave, shying from the dim light of day, Cameron sits googling his own name and waiting for the day he will finally be free to stamp across our country his own brand of obsequiousness and buffoonish ineptitude.

Cameron preaching to the clergy of Conservatism

Okay. I’ll concede there are points thus far where I have laid on the melodrama with an Ingersoll Rand industrial digger. But there is unarguably something deeply unsettling about David Cameron. When you watch him kiss his kids whilst he cooks his no frills, everyman cuisine or slyly drawing attention to his England wristband with consummate skill and characteristic deftness of touch, the illusion is so expertly woven that you would be forgiven for missing it altogether. But peer a little deeper and under that carefully constructed public image lurks a shocking truth. Cameron is a cipher. A zero. A gaping void. The man has a hole at his centre that would make a polo throb with glucose-boiling envy.

And where is our future Prime Minister meanwhile? Updating his YouTube account to show he’s ‘with it’, whilst the world around him burns to the ground.

It’s not hard to picture the future under a man as insipid as David. Burnt out cars lay at the sides of the road like the mangled husks of deceased arachnids. Investment bankers are forced to lick the moss and lichen-encrusted ruins of HBOS for sustenance. Gangs of recently terminated postmen patrol council estates, setting fire to post boxes and occasionally stopping to spit at bewildered old ladies. And where is our future Prime Minister meanwhile? Updating his YouTube account to show he’s ‘with it’, whilst the world around him burns to the ground. In days gone by, we had leaders we could turn to when times got tough, who could lead us out of disaster by their shining example. Now we have to face the prospect of a Premier whose idea of a contribution to the world is to tweet every time he takes a dump.

Modern politics has wandered so far from any true desire to improve the world around us that it has now become a mere arms race of gimmicky campaigning techniques and toe-curlingly embarrassing media spots. You can’t turn on the TV anymore without watching Tony Blair endorse Pepsi with that rabbit-in-the-headlight stare or seeing Boris Johnson awkwardly bumble around the set of the Queen Vic as if genuinely unaware he has slipped out of his seat in the House of Commons and into a post-modern nightmare. Witnessing these moments is embarrassingly like watching a drunken uncle sing along to the Black Eyed Peas in the middle of a crowded room; you find yourself chewing your tongue into pâté just to distract from the agonising spectacle right in front of you.

Cameron is the final evolution of this brand of ‘neo-politics’, definitive confirmation that genuine leadership skills and an ability to deal with the important issues come a distant second to an impish grin, an Etonian education and a personality about as engaging as stale tap water. As far as policy is concerned, Cameron is remarkably like the prize conveyor belt at the end of the Generation Game. No matter how astutely you watch its slow procession of financial regulations, immigration policies and educational reforms, once the screen has rolled back all you can picture is that insincere smirk and end up dribbling “… guh… mhn… cuddly toy!” in pop-eyed desperation. Under his leadership, the Conservative party is a legislative vacuum.

The political compass is no longer a clear-cut guide to finding your way. It is instead like a Sat-Nav that keeps telling you to take right turns even if that means driving off the quayside.

Politics in this country are reaching an event horizon, a point from which we cannot return. Most of us have noticed the gradual centralisation of the major political parties over the years. The compass is no longer a clear-cut guide to finding your way, with Labour to the west and the Tories to the east. It has instead become increasingly like a Sat-Nav that keeps telling you to take right turns even if that means driving off the quayside. This narrowing of partisan politics may seem like a process of hedging two extremes but decreasing voter turn-outs as time goes by are showing that the lack of true choice is choking the life out of our political system.

William and David share a quiet moment, waiting to brief MPs on Europe

Whilst New Labour’s claims to liberality have been rather dubious since the party’s conception, the change in the Conservatives has been far more pronounced. The fact it has taken us only twenty years to move from the Iron Lady to the Marshmallow Dandy speaks volumes about how rapidly the face of the party is changing and in the face of this global meltdown Cameron is metaphorically running his air conditioning with the windows open and chain-boiling his kettle. The rise of modern Conservatism has introduced me to an entirely novel sensation; actually feeling sorry for the old-school hardliners who have watched their political views being eroded by an increasing onslaught of spin and electioneering.

Cameron's time in power is hardly likely to be the balls out, Mumbai Hotel Massacre of Tony and G.W.’s reign. He’s far more likely to be a sort of central London Travelodge.

I am prepared to acknowledge that David Cameron probably won’t be the worst leader in the world. His time in power is hardly likely to be the balls out, Mumbai Hotel Massacre of Tony and G.W.’s reign. He’s far more likely to be a sort of central London Travelodge, losing your passport and heinously overcharging you for the four minutes of ‘Busty Under-Secretaries of State’ you struggled through before giving up in cock-shrivelling exasperation. Cameron is almost certainly a lesser evil than his last elected predecessor and yet in some ways this is actually far more frustrating. After 12 years of nail-shredding, nigh-on apocalyptic terror, it is going to be hard to adjust to a return to governance by lackadaisical incompetence.

And what can we do to avoid what is lying in wait for us? In short: we can’t. There is nothing we can do. Nada. Not a jot. We have lost before we can even begin as we are once more faced by the most common of all cultural problems: the fact that our species has all the cumulative common sense of a pile of mixed nuts. Though as individuals we may consider ourselves to be articulate, discerning and urbane, collectively we’re all twenty stone morons that guffaw inanely at Jim Davidson whilst flicking cigarettes at the cat. As a cohesive unit, our country simply doesn’t have the wherewithal to realise that a vote for Cameron is a vote for more of the same. We just see his happy smile, hear his reassuring tone of voice and switch our minds off.

The only really productive thing you can do is to bolt your doors. Sell your TV. Cancel your RSS feeds. Stop gathering Metros like a news-starved magpie. Rip out your Ethernet cable. Smash your modem with a steak tenderizer. Bury your head in the sand or, better yet, a six-ton lead block. Something dismal this way comes.

And there is nothing we can do to stop it. 

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CF4_8348: an original photograph by Clive Flint. Appears here under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works license.

David Cameron and William Hague: an original photograph by the Conservative Party. Appears here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license.

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CMEC 1 009: an original photograph sourced from the Wikimedia Commons. Modified image appears here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

There are some things that you cannot escape unless you are fortunate enough to live in a cave. A cave that is isolated. Away from any poorly secured wifi connections, radio transmitters or vociferously bothersome newsmongering town criers. A blissful cave of ignorance. Free from insurance comparison website advertisements, people who walk 3-abreast on pavements and those who are only slightly better - racists on TV. Unless your cavemates are a trio of rather inconsiderate pathway-hogging bigots. If you happen to be taking part in an underground version of Strictly Come Troglodyte then the chances of you being able to avoid inevitable showers of ignorant mouth muck are about as slim as a silver Rizla with a Tapeworm. For the higher-end professional recluse these things aren't going to be an issue but for those of us left to fend in the world above they come thick and fast.

Reality television did seem to have a monopoly on widely broadcast racial slurs until last week, when the news media broke into a chorus of dysphoria as it announced that there was to be a new king of controversy - the BBC's 'flagship' show, Question Time, was to don the dubious crown, which is believed to be made of three parts genocide and one part child abuse. It's kept clean with a few sprays of Cillit Ethnic Cleanser. BANG! And the tribe is gone.

For those who are unaware the British National Party is not, as you would like to think, like the halcyon days of Noel's House Party. Mr Blobby was clearly mixed-race.

There are two reasons this story broke into my otherwise ignorant sphere of unconsciousness. The first was because I never knew Question Time was the flagship show of the BBC; I had always assumed that honour went to Match of the Day or Groundforce. I'm not even sure Groundforce was on the BBC. That's how little I knew about the flagship and how little I know in general. I could easily research these things but that would take time away from watching the high definition episode of 'Life' I'd recorded. I may be woefully uninformed about anything other than unusual frogs but I am so at 1080p. David Attenborough is the rightful BBC bellwether. Get fucked Dimbleby.

The second reason the story aroused my torpor is because it spoke at exhaustive, repetitive, length about the BBC giving the leader of the far-right British National Party a hugely visible platform on state media. For those who are unaware the British National Party is not, as you would like to think, a super-happy-sunshine-shindig for everyone in Britain. It's not like the halcyon days of Noel's House Party. The British National Party are friends of the common man - but only if those common men happen to be holocaust-denying, white-supremacist, homophobic xenophobes. It's unlikely that any of Noel's charges would be welcome even if the British National Party were the non-stop sovereign fiesta it's name promotes. Mr Blobby was clearly mixed-race. There are, however, sickening BNP adaptations of Noel's House Party stalwarts 'Beat your Neighbour (if they don't look like you)' and the self-explanatory 'Wait Till I Get You, Homo'.

Unite Against Fasicsm counter demonstration against the Welsh Defence League, Swansea

My life has never been intruded upon by the BNP quite so much before. I was aware of them in the same way I am reluctantly conscious of horse racing. It exists, certainly. It is to be ignored, for its core demographic is 'The Idiot' - not the Dostoevsky story, the other kind. The dimwitted stupid-head kind. The only brush I’d previously had with this party, who clawed their way from the ashes of the National Front as they learnt to fasten a necktie or at least work a clip-on, was when their membership list had been leaked last year. Inevitably I had to check it to make sure my relatives weren't on there. The grandparents can be trusted not to donate to anything other than the National Trust but their eyes aren't what they used to be and 'Trust' does have a marked similarity to 'Front' when viewed through the opacity of their cataracts.

Not since that bit in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves goes to see that women in her flat and breaks that cup has a self-fulfilling prophecy been so evident.

There were arguments for and against why the leader of the BNP, Nick Griffin, should be allowed on the BBC show. It was the arguments about the argument that the televised argument might give the BNP a wider audience that gave it a wider audience. My lack of research has shown that regular audience figures for Question Time were consistently around the 14 mark - which is actually the number of people the controversial party figurehead believes died in The Holocaust - whereas the edition of Question Time featuring Griffin drew in 8 million. That is around about 8 million more people than usual. An increase of over 700 million per cent - even athletes can't boast that kind of percentage boost when they talk of effort they expelled. Not since that bit in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves goes to see that women in her flat and breaks that cup has a self-fulfilling prophecy been so evident.

If nobody had mentioned who the guest was to be, there would have been no more interest in the show than usual - I, for one, regularly have no clue who is on Question Time and I'm sure most people only tuned in because they had heard the hype. If you remove the incestuous media coverage of media events, it is likely to burn itself out without attracting unwarranted attention. Fight ignorance with ignorance!

Failing that you could always do the most important point. A point that was, shamefully, not highlighted by anyone on the QT panel - vote for anyone other than the BNP. Get a few people together get a garden gnome, put it in a Barbie dress, nominate and vote for that. A cardboard cut out of a week-old dog poo in a fez. Anything. Anyone watching the show would not have been enamored with the politicians involved. This will probably only serve to alienate more people from the main political parties, causing more people to 'protest' by running away from the polls to live as hermits in their blissful cave. Leaving the fiercely active BNP members free to roll stones over the cave entrances and waddle down to cast their vote - struggling as they remember how to write an X.

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Unite Against Fascism march, Swansea: an original photograph by Mike Mantin.

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Anti-BNP Demonstration: an original photograph by James M Thorne. Modified image appears here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

Eyes bleeding, legs bowed and skin two shades off ‘Oyster Taupe’, Daniel Smith offers a sofa-side perspective of rolling news

As you sit, hunched, unwashed, blearily counting the syllables of the words in the rolling news ticker at the bottom of the BBC News 24 screen, the voices start to sink in. Stories start to take shape. It's not a big news day. It's a slow news day. The news ticker hasn’t slowed to a crawl, reflecting that nothing warrants it's continual attention. No. The scrolling ticker scuttles by at the same rate as usual (approx. 114 syllables per minute) but with nothing good for it to really grasp with its many hands and bite with its many teeth. There are no child kidnappings/discoveries. No natural disasters. No opportune celebrity homicides to condense to haiku. It just trudges along, blissfully unaware of the gravity of its cargo of letters. Like a sluggish, yet reliable postman carrying a birthday card and a letter bomb in the same unquestioning sack.

One of the papers is even writing about itself on the front page. 'EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about us' they seem to cry.

The presenters know different. They continue the vacant badinage as they review tomorrow's newspapers, like the most impotent, condescending and vainglorious episode of Early Edition ever to be poorly penned and inadequately acted. Grinning toothily, they casually dismiss each of the main headlines in turn. One of the papers is even writing about itself on the front page. 'EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about us' they seem to cry as they inform the Labour Party that it has lost their vote. Like Icarus, flying too close to The Sun, so too the Labour Party has got its wings burnt and is falling to its soggy demise. Satire. The presenters seem to avoid picking up on the fact that one of the country's biggest selling newspapers is admitting its lack of impartiality and therefore further undermining what little credibility it should have as a news source. Instead they choose to concentrate on the fact that the BBC and The Sun's owners, NewsCorp, have had a bit of a spat recently, with James Murdoch calling the BBC's ambitions 'chilling', and the BBC responding by saying something like “chilling? No, he probably meant just chillin', without the 'g', our ambitions are just, k'now, chillin”. Probably.

Next up for dismissal by the flippant, fickle wags (not the appalling acronym for those betrothed to football players, the other type) on the future news conveyor belt is The Sun's sister paper, The News of The World. In a family where the brains and beauty were long ago left, ironically, to drown like an ugly cat in a bag at the bottom of a canal. The sister, herself a kitten sporting a gammy eye, fat whiskers and a butch meow, would seem to have escaped the undertow it deserves and instead landed a cushy place by the fire, mewling the family ethos in a desperate effort to please her father. In recent times however, with little natural gifts of its own, the paper has been reduced to selling itself for 20p or just giving itself away free whenever someone picks up her older sister or a Twix, the sluttiest of chocolate bars. Caramel covered fingers. All the while The Times, an altogether more supercilious relative, just sits back and does its own crossword like an incestuous hermit masturbating into its dinner while smoking a pipe and wearing a monocle. You would think the addition of pipe and monocle would make it better than its simpler siblings but that is not the case. A pipe and a monocle make you far more odious, as is proved by the fact that Hitler, Huntley and Shipman all wore monocles, smoked pipes and knew exactly what they were doing.

You would think the addition of pipe and monocle would make it better but that is not the case. Hitler, Huntley and Shipman all wore monocles, smoked pipes and knew exactly what they were doing.

The News of The World was recently accused of tapping voicemail messages to try and gather information about celebrities and sport, only to find out that most people's answerphones contain an average of three messages – one from your mother asking, yet again, what size pants you wear, despite it being nowhere near either your birthday or any form of religious festivity, one that you have left yourself, leaving carefully-timed gaps for yourself to reply back to yourself so you can converse with yourself and feel like you've actually got someone to talk to, proving your life is not just a cyclical vortex of Lovejoy repeats, LucasArts point and click adventure games and decisions over whether to wipe your arse with the tear-soaked, flaking, tissue in your pocket, the semen-encrusted sock in the linen bin or the hand towel... and another phone message from a vet. You own no pets. You drowned your only cat because it was not pretty enough. You weren't attracted to it sexually, or otherwise. The messages are meaningless. That information should not be on any legitimate news provider’s agenda. Having it present reeks of a crisis of priorities, like sewing buttons in place of a zip on your cardigan when you should be thinking of similes.

The news has now moved on to jockeys and motorcycles. You have seen these stories four times already tonight. You deride the newsreader for using the same script each time. You mockingly shout the next predictable turn of phrase at the helplessly bland night watchman of sports news. You have not considered chastising yourself for failing to change channel or leave the flat in three days. It is not you who is the problem. It is the news. It's never new. Oh hang on. The ticker's just mentioned something about Sumatra. This might be good. No.

Enough of the BBC News 24 ticker. Time for Sky News. Their ticker is 46 syllables a minute quicker. A victory for speed. This should keep me you busy for a while.

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TV Chair: an original photograph by Mike Seyfang. Modified image appears here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

An industry of lies or window to a more perfect world? Josh Russell asks whether life could do with a rebrand.

In the world of adverts we are all either young and beautiful or old and oozing with proverbial wisdom. There a very few problems that cannot be overcome with a cup of tea or a watery microwave korma. No one is ever lonely or sick; there’s no stain on the soul that can’t be shifted with a squirt of Vanish or a spoonful of Cillit Bang. Pets comfort us in our darkest hours, distracting with their boundless mischief and never once taking it upon themselves to lick all the upholstery or piss all over your new shag carpeting. People bend the dimensions of space with their flexible phone contracts. Technicolour TV screens chase each other down the street. Car headlights dance in the desert to the soundtrack of a rising sun.

It is undeniably a seductive world and one that any sensible human mind rails against like Rupert Murdoch against state-owned broadcasting. There is very little truth to the promises we are made and yet somehow, infuriatingly, it is incredibly difficult to break the hold advertising has over us. The question we have to ask ourselves is that given the fact we all know there is little actual substance lurking behind the sleek veneer, why do we fall for it time and time again? Is it that we are so desperate to part with our hard earned cash that we’ll buy any old tat endorsed by a familiar face or is there something deeper going on?

I am here to propose a new theory to you. The thrall advertising holds over us is nothing to do with gross commercialism or greed. It’s not even that we have grown used to its ubiquitous presence like an unpleasant odour in a stairwell or the hum of a laptop fan. Our love affair with advertising is based on one fundamental truth: the glossy world of adverts has it right. It’s our world that has got things wrong.

Billboards in Union Square, San Francisco

A bold claim you may think but give it some thought. Consider what we have to deal with in our daily lives. Global debt is rising. Britain is still acquiring enemies like an art student acquires STIs. In the face of mounting pressure from all quarters, Gordon Brown is starting to tremble and make deeply unsettling clunking noises. And yet at the flick of a switch we can immerse ourselves in a fantasy world where sofas are cheap all year round and drinking mineral water for 14 days will make you anything apart from considerably less well off. We can plug ourselves up with cats offering advice on which pet food contains the most nutrients and toddlers that are CEOs of major corporations, despite having a woefully limited knowledge of European commercial regulations.

The more you look, the more savage injustices you find hiding behind every line of copy, yet more reminders of how our world lets us down. Freedom is not only a drive away. A man can’t win his beautiful neighbour’s affections by merely finding the right shade on the Dulux paint chart. Chemicals don’t make you look younger; they just help you die quicker. The world of adverts has cute little fuzzy-felt cows that get up to amusing antics in velveteen fields. What do we get as an alternative? Lumping, great monsters that stand around looking lugubrious and occasionally squeezing out shit. No matter how you look at it, reality seems to be as resistant to the concept of a narrative conceit as a Yorkshire bus driver is to make change.

Travel also seems to suffer a bit of a deficit between perception and actuality. A tour operator shows you cream coloured sands. You and your partner are on the getaway of a lifetime. They show you eating in wonderful restaurants, drinking good wine, swimming in the azure expanse of a gentle sea. You hang a shell a wonderful shell souvenir around your partner’s neck, bought from a local market store. A bronze skinned 20-year-old guides you around the island, showing you sights that the average tourist will never get to see. A holiday you will never forget.

Khezr Beach, Hormoz Island, Iran

Unfortunately, the reality is slightly different. The gritty grey sand is littered with condoms and sun-bleached turds and you become so paranoid of the weird wriggly things on the seabed that you don’t put even your little toe in the murky water. The local plonk gives you a fucker of a hangover; on the third day a substandard restaurant introduces a gut-blending parasite into your lower intestine. Your partner spends more time eyeing up the young local than sighing over beautiful sights. When you reach the border, a disgruntled guard fingers the memento around your partners neck and disapprovingly tells you that removing shells from the country comes with a five-hundred-pound fine. A holiday you will never forget. No matter how hard you try.

Something has clearly gone wrong somewhere. For years we have been promised a future of golden health and technological wonder and yet, year on year, all the world has given us is an encroaching obesity epidemic and instant-access porn. Growing up, I truly thought we were reaching an age where we’d be able to taste colour and beautiful music would issue forth with every movement of our limbs. Now I know my future only contains disappointment, bedsores and wanker’s wrist, I feel decidedly let down by our version of events.

I’m not claiming for a second that the rampant commercialism of the world of advertising doesn’t rankle slightly but you do have to admit that they’ve kind of got us up against a wall. Reality just can’t compete with what they’re hawking. When asked to choose between a world of terrorist attacks, testicular cancer and David Cameron for one of Sony Bravias, Honda Accords and Mylene Klass, very few people with any common sense would drop Mylene and her bikini for David and his intolerable smugness. The soft lies beat the hard edges of truth hands down.

Burger King logo amongst pile of scrap

The fact is that humans find it far easier to deal in abstracts and lies than in actualities. We treat life like a film, with peaks and troughs, working towards an epiphany that we secretly know won’t come. The way we view our world is permanently tinted by our expectation that things should obey certain narrative conventions, despite the massive amount of evidence to the contrary. Adverts, with their fabrications and aspirations, seem to make more sense to us than a cold, hard reality because the world of advertising cossets us, makes us feel like we can obtain a charmed life that so far we have been denied. The mistruths of adverts offer a far more aesthetically pleasing view of the world and, as the late, great Douglas Adams once propounded, given that “beauty [is] truth, truth beauty”, surely in this case the “guilty party [is] life itself for failing to be beautiful or true”?

The aspirations of advertising, the aesthetic we are all sold is undeniably more palatable than the reality. Rubicon is sunshine in a can. Elderly men can break into a major football stadium without being rewarded with a night in a cell and a couple of cracked ribs. We are happy to believe any lie thrown at us, that cooking is “as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4” and that a spritz of after-shave will secure a quick clinch on a rain-drenched street, no matter how many burnt woks and eyefuls of pepper spray proclaim otherwise. Cherry-lipped kisses are somehow far more appealing solution to sore throats than a musty lozenge that tastes of perfume and death.

Like or loathe advertising, you have to admit that it offers a breadth of experience and emotion that few ever get to realise in their daily lives. During my commercial break I can watch a man trace colours around city streets with his fingertips. A harem of women pout and preen at me, stirring what little life my shrivelled genitals can muster. I live a thousand different lives an hour, from successful businessman in New York to an animated germ under someone’s toilet rim. Every road practically pulses with life changing events; sentient cars play hide and seek and crazed electronics companies flood whole districts with bubbles.

It’s a vibrant existence, living through advertising, one that trumps reality hands down.

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The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – Fit the Tenth, [radio programme] BBC, BBC Radio 4, 23 January 1980.

Slogan from recent Marks and Spencers promotion.

Images:

Union Square Advertising: an original photograph by Shearer Family.

Khezr Beach, Hormoz Island, Persian Gulf, Iran: an original photograph by Hamed Saber.

Dec07 261: an original photograph by Lord Jim.

All images appear under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

Title Image:

Advertising imitating art: an original photograph by Dan Taylor. Modified image appears here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

As life imitates art, Josh Russell says it’s about time we called a ceasefire on the ‘War on Drugs’

It’s late at night. Drug users roam the streets. Dealers push their products; a persistent call and response of street names yelled like the banter of twisted market criers. Children run around at waist height, trying to scavenge whatever they can. A fight breaks out, uninterrupted by onlookers. Wasted addicts are visible in every doorway; babies cry, their mother’s oblivious. The area is poorly managed; a lack of social support and community policing has reduced these few blocks to a private hell. It is one of the city’s new decriminalised zones.

Whilst this is perhaps the image that comes to mind for some when we talk of decriminalisation, more avid TV fans may recognise it as a scene from the third season of HBO’s excellent series The Wire. In the programme, tired by the losing struggle against drug dealers in his district, a Major Howard Colvin decides to act under his own initiative, putting into place zones where dealing will be tolerated. His officers encourage pushers to move away from residential corners into uninhabited safe zones that are dubbed locally as ‘Hamsterdam’, allowing the district police to focus on the violence associated with the drugs trade.

In a bizarre twist of fate, the UK Drug Policy Commission has announced in the last week that ‘smarter’ tactics are needed to reduce the harm that the drugs trade has on our society, tactics that bear a striking resemblance to David Simon’s critically acclaimed series.ⁱ It seems to be another case of life imitating art but the question that must be asked is can the reality be sweeter than the fiction?

It is undeniable that over the years the current policy on drugs has received more than its fair share of criticism. Chris Huhne, Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesman, has described its impact on the problem as “negligible”, remarking that policy needs to focus “on what works to reduce the damage done by drug abuse”. Former leader of the Conservative Party, Ian Duncan Smith, has referred to current drugs policy as “a mess”.ⁱⁱ The press criticism has been, if anything, more severe. Last year, in his damning Guardian article on prohibition, Danny Kushlick made reference to former head of the UK Anti-Drug Co-ordination Unit Julian Critchley’s commentary on current policy, saying that “criminalisation [is] causing more harm than the drugs themselves” and went on to describe the current situation as “one of the great social policy disasters of the last 100 years”. Given the fact that both their major rivals and the press are staunch critics, you’d think you would be fairly safe in assuming that at least the Labour Party must have solid evidence of its merits to adhere so staunchly their current policies.

And yet you would be mistaken. In 2003 a report was commissioned by the Government on our present tactics for combating the prevalence of drugs in the UK. Oft cited as a major source for opponents of the policy, the ‘No 10 Strategy Unit Drugs Project: Phase 1 Report: Understanding the Issues’ states in brief that “our commitment to a global ‘drug war’ that cannot be won is costing the UK billions in wasted expenditure and crime costs”. The report, a study of the economic and social cost of international and domestic drug policy, has some truly disturbing findings.

Its initial statements are that prohibition:

• has failed to prevent or reduce the production of drugs
• has failed to prevent or reduce the trafficking / availability of drugs
• has failed to reduce levels of problematic drug use

The report asserts that attempts to reduce drug trafficking are failing as “UK importers and suppliers make enough profit to absorb the modest cost of drug seizures” and this can be evinced by the fact that “despite interventions at every point in the supply chain, cocaine and heroin consumption has been rising, prices falling and drugs have continued to reach users”.

However, by far and away the worst implication of the report is that current tactics are actually contributing to raising levels of drug-related crime, rather than lowering them. Supply side busts are only succeeding in reducing the availability of drugs, “inflat[ing] prices of heroin and cocaine, leading some dependent users to commit large volumes of acquisitive crime” to feed their habits. Statistics show that a vast proportion of certain types of crime are drug related, including “85% of shoplifting, 70-80% of burglaries, 54% of robberies” and it is clear that driving up prices artificially will do very little to combat this long term. In fact this factor may go a long way towards cancelling out any positive effects that may be achieved by supply side intervention as “determined users commit more crime to fund their habit and more than offset the reduction in crime from lapsed users.” Rather worryingly, the summary to the report states that it can only be assumed that the reason it was not originally released publicly was because “its findings undermined the tenets of global drug prohibition.”

There are also other problems with an extended campaign against suppliers. Whilst space can be cleared in the market, it is unrealistic to expect it to stay vacant for any real period of time because as long as a demand exists there will always be people willing to supply for that demand. In addition, it has been suggested that the arrest of high level dealers and gang members can often cause a vacuum at the top and the resultant power struggles can cause a massive spike in the levels of violence.

Worst of all, current policy is also punishing addicts for their addiction, costing millions of pounds in taxes and failing to approach an actual solution to their problem. Drug addiction is a sickness and should not be punishable with lengthy jail sentences, especially as the ready availability of narcotics in prisons does not cut the addict off from a supply. Equally, court-mandated coerced treatment often has a high rate of failure because a patient forced into treatment may often lack the willpower and desire to quit long term.

So how does the UK Drug Policy Commission intend to go about rectifying the flaws in the current system? The suggested changes to policy centre around reducing the most harmful drug activity, moving away from focusing largely on seizures and arrests and instead beginning to work together with local communities to combat crime and anti-social behaviour. More dramatic perhaps, it has been suggested that dealing that is kept away from residential zones and relocated to areas such as industrial estates is likely to be tolerated to allow police to tackle issues such as sexual exploitation, gun crime and the involvement of children in the drugs trade. The policy differs from its predecessor in one key respect; rather than attempting to reduce the amount of drug dealing taking place, it instead aims to lessen the impact it has on the community.

Whilst it seems a controversial idea, there have been some precedents for such a massive change in tack in narcotics policy. In 2001, Portugal became the first country in the EU to abolish criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, from ‘softer’ drugs such as Marijuana to hard drugs like Heroin and Methamphetamine. Instead of imposing harsh sentences on people caught in possession small amounts of drugs, their policy now means that those found guilty are referred to a panel for treatment options, which they may turn down without fear of prosecution or further punishment.

Despite the worry that this could actually lead to an increase in the personal consumption of drugs, the opposite is in fact true and statistics show that Heroin use in 16-to-18-year-olds has fallen from 2.5% to 1.8%. Since the introduction of this policy, deaths from hard drug use have been halved; new HIV infections in users have fallen by 17% and the number of people taking an anti-addictive drug treatment such as methadone more than doubled.ⁱⁱⁱ These impressive figures show the awesome potential of the proposed changes to our own policy and draw attention to perhaps the most significant connotation of the review.

Major Colvin’s Hamsterdam experiment in The Wire admittedly has a rather shaky start but where the model starts to get interesting is where community outreach is concerned. Disturbed by the “great village of pain” that he has witnessed the decriminalised zones, a local Deacon pleads with the Major, asking him to implement social reforms such as needle exchanges, HIV testing, drug rehabilitation programmes and free contraception, something that is much more viable now that the addicts are all in one place. Here the programme hits upon something incredibly important; toleration of drug use means that users are no longer being driven underground by the fear of criminal punishment. Whilst “it’s not pretty”, the fact that drug users are no longer forced to hide their addiction away means that direct hand-to-mouth treatment can suddenly reach a far greater number of people.

This is where the real strength of a change in policy lies. When there is not such a great need for the secrecy and isolation of the drug-taking community, direct support and tailored health schemes can be provided where needed most. In addition, it also means the extent of the problem can be accurately monitored rather than masking the numbers affected by forcing beneath the surface of our society. Perhaps this is how the Portuguese policy has found such success; rather than prosecuting addicts, they are now reaching out and offering treatment to those affected, treating the roots of the problem rather than punishing those who do fall under the influence of narcotics.

These ideas are difficult to swallow. Nobody wants to encourage a ‘fair game’ attitude to drugs. But we are looking at a real world problem and it is one that requires a real world solution; reducing the harm drugs cause to our society is a far more achievable aim than eradicating a nigh on inexhaustible supply of narcotics. Part of the problem with the ‘War on Drugs’ is that it is treated as just that; an endless battle with high casualties on both sides.

It is becoming clear that brute force is failing to resolve anything. Perhaps we need to accept that when sheer force fails it is high time we gave diplomacy a try.

ⁱⁱⁱ Figures appear as cited in TIME article: ‘Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalisation Work?’

Resources:

Author not cited, 2009. Focus: ‘Call for ‘smarter’ drugs policy’. BBC News, [internet] 30 July. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8175550.stm [Accessed 8 August 2009].

Szalavitz, Maia, 2009. Focus: ‘Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalisation Work?’. TIME, [internet] 26 April. Available at: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html [Accessed 8 August 2009]

Kushlick, Danny, 2008. Focus: ‘Drug prohibition – an untenable hypocrisy’. Guardian, [internet] 13 August. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/13/drugspolicy.drugstrade [Accessed 30 July 2009]

Transform Drug Policy Foundation, Strategy Unit Drugs report summary, ‘No 10 Strategy Unit Drugs Project: Phase 1 Report: “Understanding the Issues”’, 2003. Available at: http://www.tdpf.org.uk/Policy_General_Strategy_Unit_Drugs_Report_phase_1.htm [Accessed 30 July 2009]

The Wire: The Complete Third Season. 2006 [DVD] United States: HBO Home Video.

Title Image:

Bellevue Hospital: an original photograph by Oisin Prendiville. Modified image appears here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.