Unanswered questions

Total number of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan = 309

The new government are not good at answering questions. I asked two oral ones today. The answers were abysmally vacuous..

First was to Theresa May. She had just said that the UK has 325,000 drug addicts, more than any other EU country. It was fewer than 1,000 in 1971 before we got tough on drugs. I asked her,

'The UK has the harshest anti-drug laws in Europe and the largest number of addicts. Portugal has the least harsh laws and the lowest number of addicts. Why is that?'

The answer was to say that I had always been interested in drugs and the Government plan to be even  harsher on drugs - or some similar make believe fantasy.

David Cameron seems to be seriously unhinged on Afghanistan. His message is  that everything is going well. We will leaves when it's a little bit more stable than it is now. This will be difficult to measure so David and his coalition partners plan to fake it. I asked him,

'Why doesn't 11 British deaths in 10 days persuade him that his Afghan objectives are unachievable and that the Taliban is growing stronger. How can a stable county be built on the crumbling foundations of an election rigging President and his criminal family, a drug-addicted mercenary army and a depraved corrupt police. We are now in the exit game. The question that should haunt the Prime Minister is the same one that disturbed Americans in the final year of the Vietnam war, 'Who will be the last soldier ordered into battle to die for a politician's mistake?'

The image is a powerful and a truthful one. I hope it struck home. David Cameron's answer's was a dribble of non-sequiturs that said nothing. My hope is that question may well beneficially haunt him. If so, we might have a new strategy.

Comments

[john]

THe coalition response to drugs policy is going to be even more blinkered than the last Government. We are going to have abstinence forced onto heroin users rather than the successful use of prescriptive heroin as the 3 UK trials have shown.
Our War on Drugs is in an even worse state than our war in Afghanistan.

The recent leaked email of the FOI response to the Labour Governments Home Office commissioned value for money study (of the UK drug strategy) shows that any scrutiny of drugs policy is hindered at the highest level shows how entrenched we are in this stupid mindset.
See Mark Eastens blog about this http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2010/06/foi_home_office.html