2 posts tagged “crime”

To actually be tough on the causes of crime and immigration means doing almost exactly the opposite of Tory and New Labour's rhetoric.

Fortunately, even if it's only in one area, the Lib Dems are pushing something powerful through - if you legitimise those who entered the country illegally, but live productive and innocent lives here, then you cut off the lifeblood of the underground and criminal elements.

Taxation, representation, and removal of fear from reprisal turns the oppressed migrants into a powerful force against the system that encourages illegal immigration and illegal workers - the traffickers, the gangs, the dodgy networks organising sham marriages and finding work that pays well below the minimum wage and with no protection for workers.

Odd then that the Labour party that traditionally represented the workers, now targets them instead of the organised criminals that are the real problem.

The same kind of logic works well when applied to other key social problems that the electorate care about - drugs and prostitution : by legitimising and decriminalising, you remove these activities from the hands of organised crime, and can provide statuary protection and regulations, workers rights, safety / quality control, and reduce the resulting petty crime.

Hopefully, the Liberal Democrat party leaders will grow enough backbone to deal with drugs and the sex industry in the same mature, rational and sensible way as immigration. Daily Mail readers won't vote for a liberal democrat we would recognise anyway - why bother trying to get them on board - all we have to do is provide the public with enough facts and start a rational debate, there's no point trying to get the Diana-hugging-darkie-hating-middle-englanders onboard.

So, apparently the RSA report back in march was a "wake up call" according to our party leader, Sir Campbell, and since then Transform have also published a report on how we need to reform drug laws.

We've also seen a media backlash against the bad science and dodgy statistics linking Mental Illness to cannabis (quick summary - using cannabis could maybe increase risk of from 1% to 1.4% although you may have to an underlying condition, or self-medicate before diagnosis).

So where is the intelligent debate from our national political parties - Prime Minister Brown was going to have a massive consultation (predestined to pointlessly reclassify a couple of relatively harmless drugs back to class B in order to look tough on crime), it's all gone quiet after a bunch cabinet and shadow cabinet ministers confessed to using drugs but "regretted it" and preaching that just because they've tried it and got away with it and didn't do them any harm, they are terrible nasty illegal things and if you get caught you should rightly be imprisoned.

Liberal Democrat drug policy is hidden in the online equivilent to the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard', and ammounts to a couple of pages of double linespace A4 waffling about how decriminalisation would be nice, but not yet (just like nuclear disarmament would be nice, but not yet), and how we need some good reports to held decide policy.

....Well we've had reports, we have medical research on at least one drug (and I'm sure if MPs researchers and journalisists could be bothered) there is plenty of research on how much more harmful legal drugs like alcohol, etc are than illegal ones, so where is the intelligent discourse?

Where are our new innovative and fair policies and proposed legislation?

We had a recent party campaign on being tough on crime - but standing on the fence on social issues like drugs and the sex trade means being soft on crime - in a word the war on drugs (and failing to end it) means being soft on crime
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ps http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article2788634.ece