Home Secretary Alan Johnson certainly lost his cool when being interviewed on Sky yesterday.
Finger pointing and everything! I would assume that the Home Secretary thought he was being clever, and pointing at the interviewer in an ‘oh, I’ll teach you a lesson’ kind of way.
He’s exacerbated, it’s been a long weekend for him. He looks tired. He’s just sacked someone, and two more have resigned. Poor thing, feeling all trapped in the corner like that, he sure tried to come out fighting.
I’m definitely glad that Prof Nutt has said what he has, as now we know that the Government aren’t listening to its advisers, as well as the country. The UK Government recently conducted a paper pushing exercise to reclassify cannabis. The Home Secretary says he took the advice of the scientists, and mixed it with police and medical opinion. The medial opinion has since been disproven, the Police at the time were watering down their approach to cannabis, and the scientists were saying the drug isn’t all that harmful. The only people who were really making a noise about cannabis were the Tories, and Labour pandered to them.
Thing is, I’m not sure who I want to vote for now.
Labour – vote for the party which has become so complacent it doesn’t feel a need to listen to its advisers, and then gives a holider-than-thou interview on Sky News.
Conservatives – David Cameron has got his party into bed with some easter European MEPs, ones who don’t agree with fundamental rights of others to live their lives how they wish. Cameron has also reneged on his promise to rejuvenate politics, he was going to show us how it should be done, but have you seen his mad Chimpanzee impresson on Prime Ministers Questions? Nothing about his style is rejuvenating politics.
Liberal Democrats – as I said previously, they gave partial control of a local council to the Conservatives. The Tories were third, Labour were second. The Liberals discounted a huge portion of votes to get into bed with the also-ran. Why would I bother.
There’s a plethora of others, of course, like the Green Party. I’d rather not vote if that’s my option. Why would I want to waste time watering down the politics between the top three parties.
Was Johsnon Wrong?
From reading the report from the huge inquest that followed the BSE scare, which found that Tory ministers did not take heed of scientific fears that the mad cow disease could spread to humans, paragraph 1300 of the report said:
1300 Everyone agreed that the Government had a problem with credibility. A number of Government Ministers told us that they had lost credibility with the public, so that it was necessary to get independent experts to lend credibility to public pronouncements about risk. Mrs Bottomley spoke of the need for the public to receive information free of ‘political overtones’. She told us that she did all that she could to promote the Chief Medical Officer as an independent expert who could be trusted by the nation.
Overall the inquiry found that “scientific investigation of risk should be open and transparent” and that “the advice and the reasoning of advisory committees should be made public”. This is a fundamental link between the people believing the political undertones of ministers.
Since we haven’t heard much from the Government to show that their own drugs advisory council were not giving the same information as the Government were projecting, I think it is safe to say that Alan Johnson failed in his remit, and Prof. Nutt was right to go public, shaming Mr Johnson and making him fight from his corner. Today, Mr Johnson has continued to fight his battle from his corner.
Alan Johnson has been vehemently saying over the last few days that a Government scientific advisor should toe the party line, and should not give his/her opinions. What’s the point of having experts, then? Lets just have a load of elected yet complacent politicians who think they know everything, devising policy on a whim.
In a few years time we’ll have another scandal similar to BSE.
Within the last few hours, Alan Johnson has ordered a review into the ACMD, the advisory council on the misuse of drugs. Alan Johnson needs to remember that the public are watching him. This isn’t an excuse for him to railroad scientific thought out of the drugs policymaking process. Anything less than a stronger, more robust version of the ACMD which reports openly will be a display of infantile behaviour.
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