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Blair accused of drugs hypocrisy Maurice Chittenden and Michael Prescott The Times, UK Sunday 26 Oct 1997 Oasis and a scene from the controversial film Trainspotting were featured in a video promoting Britain. The eight-minute video, which was shown last week to representatives of 51 Commonwealth leaders at the summit in Edinburgh, provoked outrage in the shadow cabinet. "Many people in this country will be appalled that Tony Blair's vision of so-called new Britain has at its heart people like the Gallagher brothers with their well known views on drug taking," said Sir Brian Mawhinney, shadow home secretary. "Many will be ashamed that theirs was the image that was portrayed to the Commonwealth leaders." The Gallaghers, who are featured in a short clip, prompted a storm of protest when they used four-letter words and supported drug taking in an interview on Radio 1 last week. Noel Gallagher met Blair at a recent arts party in Downing Street. In the radio interview, he said the only reason anyone would want to go to No 10 was to use "the bog". More contentious was the decision to include an image from Trainspotting showing Ewan McGregor, in the role of Renton, a fast-talking heroin addict, falling backwards in a trance. In the scene before this in the film he injects himself with the drug. The Tories claimed the video exposed the hypocrisy of Labour's supposed hard line on drugs."New Labour says it is tough on drugs but it is clearly soft on those who would like to persuade young people that drug taking is harmless. It is another example of Mr Blair saying one thing and doing another," Mawhinney said. Another senior Tory said: "This a disgrace. Why on earth did Tony Blair select scenes of heroin addiction as the image of Britain he wanted to be projected abroad?" The Oasis management rejected the criticism, saying the group had spearheaded a renaissance in British pop music which now earned more in exports than the steel industry. A spokesman for Alan McGee, who runs Creation Records, Oasis's label, said it was a case of "the usual suspects" attacking the culture of young Britain which has brought the youth of Europe flocking to London. "Oasis are a great British success story. They have contributed incredibly to the growth of the music industry in the past few years," he said. "Trainspotting has been one of the major factors in the renaissance of the British film industry, as has the work of Irvine Welsh [who wrote the book] in the flowering of British literature in the 1990s." Welsh's seedy tale of heroin abuse was voted fiction book of the year in a survey of 160 MPs, including 42 Tories, by Dillons bookstore. Conservative MPs attending William Hague's bonding session last week were at pains to deny suggestions that any of the Bob Dylan songs included in a final singalong session had any drug connotations. McGee has bought 250,000UKP worth of shares in Chelsea football club.
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