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UK: Can Oliver's army defeat the forces of disorder?
Stuart Wavell Sunday Times
Sunday 07 Jul 2002 Oliver Letwin has a dream. The shadow home secretary's prescription for reversing the ascendancy of drug dealers and street gangs draws on the lessons of 19th-century Dickensian Britain and, to a lesser extent, on his days at Eton. Letwin's vision of young thugs singing hymns in Sunday school emerges at our meeting in his offices at the House of Commons. But first he is keen to rubbish the notion that the Brixton experiment of not arresting people for the possession of cannabis had been a success and should be extended elsewhere. "The drug dealers have moved in," he says. Last Tuesday, Brian Paddick, the Metropolitan police commander who introduced the "softly, softly" approach, claimed the policy had been vindicated by a halving of street crime and a drop in burglaries in Lambeth, south London. "He's absolutely right," Letwin says. This sounds odd, especially from someone who in January admitted two burglars into his house in Kennington before they fled, clutching their booty. Then he supplies the punch line: the cause of this drop in crime is the government's "safer streets" initiative, supported by the Conservatives, which has released up to 300 police from other duties to target robbers and muggers in Lambeth. "That has nothing to do with relaxing the attention to cannabis, which is a completely separate policy," he says. "According to Metropolitan police figures, the total release of resources that occurred as a result of the cannabis policy is 2.5 officers per year." In his opinion, the real effect of turning a blind eye to cannabis is that Brixton has become a "hot spot" for hard drugs. "When you go round Brixton and talk to people about what life is like, what you hear is that everyone knows who runs the estates. They mean it's like the Krays: the people in charge are not the local bobbies but the local drug dealers." He believes Paddick's experiment has exacerbated the drug problem that was already present in Brixton and a few other places. Which is why he will be opposing David Blunkett when the home secretary makes his expected announcement this month reclassifying cannabis from a class B to a class C drug. Letwin's ambitious solution manages to combine the liberal social values he espouses and the "boot camp" threat so beloved of Tory annual conferences. "The last time we had an equivalent social crisis of young people and family breakdown in Britain was in the 1850s," he begins. At the time, many of today's problems were described by Dickens, but written on a larger scale as society struggled to cope with the "vast dislocations" of populations pitched from rural life into the urban horrors of the industrial revolution, he says. Society was not policed and there were no schools for millions of children. Indeed, Letwin's account of visiting the Kids Company in Peckham sounds like something from Oliver Twist. "There you see children of four or five walking in without their parents in search of a hot meal, bedclothes or simply someone who could bother to take them to school. There were also children of between eight and 12 who have led lives that to many of us are unimaginable. Cannabis is offered to them as a way out." Letwin believes these young children and their families have to be "rescued" before a drug habit takes hold. Regular cannabis use, he claims, leads to dependency, mental impairment and exclusion from society and the workplace. The Victorians provide his inspiration. "What happened was that between the 1850s and the 1880s a vast army of volunteers, assisted and sustained by the state, moved in," he says. "By the 1880s there were 8m children in Sunday schools." Sunday schools? "If the worst result we were to produce is that every young person now mugging an old lady were instead to be found chanting hymns, I'd go for this solution every day of the week." His remedy is not limited to Sunday schools or volunteers but is, rather, a modernised idiom in which non-statutory bodies intervene in and nurture failing families to "put the pieces back together". For young people already on drugs, he is looking for solutions in other countries. He is very taken with the Swedish model of rehabilitation, which does not involve locking people up or giving them criminal records that make them unemployable. Is there a stick to make them toe the line? "With young offenders, yes by golly there is a stick, because you cannot capture their attention unless there is a stick," he says. He talks wistfully of a Turkish reformatory in Ankara that has a 3% recidivism rate - "70% better than us," he says. Pre-empting my next thought, he asks: "Is it a hellhole with people on racks being flogged and tortured? Not at all. You can come and go. But there are almost no cases of absconding because for the first few days of their sentence they are in an adult jail, which they see as a sword of Damocles hanging over them." To him this is plain common sense, redolent of his time at Eton. "I went to a school that was very tough on discipline but it was almost never used," he says. "I had the sense that our teachers cared about the kind of person I became. I also knew that if I did things they didn't approve of, wham!" Did such conditioning explain his reaction at university when he discovered friends had spiked his pipe with cannabis? "Yes, I was very angry. My reaction was to say, 'I don't want this'." Had his burglars - one of whom inveigled his way into Letwin's house on the pretext that he was desperate to use the loo - been on drugs? "Not as far as I know. Although I rather regret the loss of my possessions and found myself profoundly embarrassed by my naivety, in other ways it was slightly reassuring." In what way? "They didn't knife me, they didn't shoot me, they didn't try to sell me drugs. They were, I suspect, good old-fashioned con men." Ah, happy days.
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