Two contenders in the Tory leadership race have now admitted to taking drugs. Michael Gove has owned up to snorting cocaine on multiple occasions, while Rory Stewart admits that he smoked opium.
Now I'm certainly not going to moral high horse about drug use because I'm a strong believer in rational drugs policy aimed at regulation, harm reduction, and treatment rather than the prohibitionist orthodoxy of unregulated black markets, criminalisation, and imprisonment.
But it's impossible not to clock the absolute hypocrisy of these men.
They've both served in a militantly prohibitionist Tory regime for nine years which not only maintained draconian punishments for possession and use of the very Class A substances like cocaine and opioids they've admitted using, but actually introduced a raft of harsh new punishments on substances like the mild stimulant khat (which is mainly used by the Somalian immigrant community) despite their own scientific advisers pointing out that khat is such a mild stimulant that it would be inappropriate and disproportionate to criminalise it [source].
One of the most absurd new anti-drugs laws these hypocritical Tories supported was Theresa May's kafkaesque legislation banning all drugs that haven't even been invented yet!
These hypocrites believe in other people suffering severe criminal punishments for possession of mild and virtually harmless stimulants and even drugs that don't even exist yet, but feel absolutely fine snorting cocaine and smoking opioids themselves!
These Tories firmly believe in criminalisation and imprisonment for thousands upon thousands of people from poor and ordinary backgrounds for using much less harmful and addictive substances such as cannabis, magic mushrooms, khat, MDMA, and mephedrone, while they've used much more harmful and addictive drugs like cocaine and opiods without the slightest worry that they'd ever end up in jail for it.
Politicians like Gove and Stewart support the draconian prohibitionist orthodoxy because they quite simply don't believe that the laws apply to people like them in the elitist establishment class.
As far as they're concerned the drug laws exist in order to keep the "lower orders" in line, while the wealthy and privileged like them can do whatever they like with absolute impunity.
So it's not the fact that they've used drugs, it's the sheer hypocrisy of these wannabe Prime Ministers actively supporting harsh prohibitionist drug laws for ordinary people because they know that the rules simply don't apply to elitists like them.
Who on earth wants to be led by people who believe in one harsh and punitive set of rules for the majority of us, and another extremely lax and forgiving set of rules just for them and their elitist mates?
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The Question Time panel for Thursday September 13th 2018 is a clear demonstration that the BBC claims of political impartiality are absolutely ludicrous.
They've managed to stuff their panel with four right-wing pro-austerity figures, countered only by a single left-wing pro-investment figure (and by far the lest famous of the five to boot).
The four right-wing panellists are the Tory government minister Rory Stewart, the Tory party donor Theo Paphitis, the hard-right Daily Mail polemicist and Brexiteer Julia Hartley-Brewer, and former Labour Shadow Chancellor and one of the chief architects of Labour's disastrously unappealing austerity-lite strategy that lost them the 2015 General Election.
Chris Leslie is such an anti-Corbyn right-winger that he's actually starred in a Tory attack ad, which features one of his trademark economically illiterate rants against Labour's agreed manifesto policy of investment-based growth strategies and in favour of even imposing even more ruinous hard-right Tory austerity dogma!
Putting Chris Leslie on the panel means that any discussion of Labour's fantastic manifesto commitment to actually invest in the economy will be marred by the sight of a rebel right-wing pro-austerity Labour MP dynamiting his own party's economic policies!
The one left-wing panellist is the virtually unknown Faiza Shaheen from the centre-left think tank CLASS.
At the 2017 General Election the UK public was absolutely split down the middle when it came to right-wing austerity dogma with the number of people voting for right-wing pro-austerity parties almost exactly matched by those voting for pro-investment parties.
Ever since then the popularity of right-wing austerity dogma has been waning further, with ever more people cottoning on to the fact that austerity was always just a massive Tory wealth transfer con to enrich the mega-rich at the expense of the rest of us.
But the BBC remains absolutely determined to keep the Tory austerity con going by stacking the Question Time panel with as many right-wing pro-austerity figures as they can get away with.
There's little doubt that they'll resort to their usual trick of planting Tory party Councillors/activists in the audience to be given the opportunity to ask ridiculously loaded questions too.
It's absolutely impossible to imagine the BBC ever stacking the Question Time panel 4-1 in favour of left-wing pro-investment figures, but a panel loaded 4-1 in favour of right-wingers is depressingly unexceptional by the BBC's ridiculously biased standards.
The decision to cobble together such a transparently biased Question Time panel makes an absolute mockery of the BBC's claims to political impartiality.
Such transparent political bias at the BBC is unacceptable because they're a public service broadcaster with a duty to impartiality. They're not like the right-wing billionaire-owned propaganda rags like the S*n and the Daily Mail, and they're not like small independent blogs like this one either. They're funded by licence fee payers and they have a public service duty to avoid displays of overt right-wing pro-austerity bias like this.
But the BBC know that the Tory party control their purse strings, and appoint their Board of Directors, so they're going to ignore their obligation to political impartiality, and continue actively promoting hard-right Tory austerity dogma just as hard as the right-wing propaganda rags do.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
