Meet the Ostrich Class, that great swamp of silly, self-regarding people who decide how we shall live, suffer and quite possibly die.
They know nothing about anything but they share the conventional view of what is good, so their inability to think or observe does not matter.
By some strange process – such as sharing a flat or a legal chambers with a future Prime Minister, or just being hugely complacent – they rise to positions of great grandeur and importance.
Yesterday’s Ostrich-in-Chief was Charlie Falconer, or Lord Falconer of Thoroton as we must call him, Lord High Chancellor in the Blair government and now a general power in the land.
There are several fun facts about Charlie, one being his startlingly successful diet, which has made him unrecognisable to those (like me) who met him on the political lunch circuit in his weightier days.
Then, he looked like Mr Pickwick. Now he is an austere fellow. With his carefully-mown beard and serious glasses, he resembles the Vice-Chancellor of one of those new universities nobody much wants to attend.
Another fact is that he really did once share a flat with Sir Anthony Blair in the London suburb of Wandsworth, famous for its prison.
Another is that he was refused selection as a Labour Parliamentary candidate because he wanted to send his children to private schools. So he was ‘elected’ to the Lords instead.
Yesterday, Lord Falconer was promoting a 300-page pro-drug diatribe on behalf of London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan. It calls for the decriminalisation of marijuana, something that happened in practice in the mid-1990s in most of this country. How can he not know?
Another is that his son Hamish (who attended the fee-charging Westminster school, thanks to his papa’s rebellion) is now, doubtless entirely through the exercise of talent, Labour MP for Lincoln and a junior Foreign Office Minister.
Others recall Charlie’s remarkable decision to have no formal inquest into the strange death of the government scientist David Kelly, who unwisely spoke to the BBC about disquiet in the security services over the accuracy of the Government’s Iraq War intelligence dossiers, and soon afterwards became dead in an Oxfordshire field. Nevertheless, the Hutton Report was deemed to be enough.
I mention all these things because Lord Falconer is almost a caricature of the sort of person he is: well-connected, a safe pair of hands on committees, lawyerly, well-off – and so protected from the real world of which he knows very little.
Yesterday morning, Charlie was promoting a 300-page pro-drug diatribe on behalf of London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan (another member of the Ostrich Club), who had commissioned this wad of piffle.
It calls for the decriminalisation of the drug marijuana, something that happened in practice in the mid-1990s in most of this country, and had been under way for 20 years before that. How can he not know?
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan at a licensed cannabis factory in Los Angeles where the plants are legally cultivated
He went on to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, there to undergo a soft-hitting interview by presenter Amol Rajan – another Ostrich, who likewise can see little wrong with modern Britain and was keen to show off his knowledge of different kinds of marijuana (‘a bit of squidgy hash’ ‘psychoactive THC crystals’ or ‘a bit of grass’).
For some reason, it is rare indeed for the BBC to give a hard time to any scheme to weaken the laws against marijuana. And this was no exception.
So Lord Falconer, who seems to think that London is not already full of people openly smoking dope, was able to say that ‘byelaws’ (enforced by who?) could be used to stop people smoking it in parks. Well, ha ha.
On April 20, the Feast Day of the Marijuana lobby, parks all over Britain fill up with dopeheads emitting noxious-smelling clouds. More or less nothing happens to them, just like every other day of the year.
Where does he live? Probably not in Wandsworth any more, by my guess. Generally, there is a ‘report’ of this kind at least once a year. They are all carved out of the same solidified drivel.
We are told police use drugs as an excuse for stop and search, and this harms race relations because most of those searched are black. My solution, stop and search lots more white people in Chelsea, and indeed round the gates of Eton College. Suits me.
Though Lord Falconer vaguely admits that some marijuana users (he guesses 10 per cent) may have mental health problems, he really hasn’t caught up with the catastrophe of marijuana use among schoolchildren, making them irreversibly mental ill to the ruin of their lives and those of their families.
The first really large-scale serious study of marijuana’s effects on the brain, launched by King’s College London, has yet to report. Why not wait?
Nor he is aware of the work done by my friend Ross Grainger, in a book called Attacker Smoked Cannabis, which scoured local newspaper reports for hideous violent crime committed by habitual users of this drug – not because they were high, but because they had become irrecoverably mad.
Any careful reading of news reports will find the drug in the background of so many violent horrors. Yet the Ostrich Class won’t move.
They won’t emulate Japan and South Korea, where possession of the drug is still punished and public figures caught with it are still shamed. And in the UK the air is full of its stench, and the airwaves are full of ‘musicians’ advertising it to the young.
You’ll have to guess how much of this attitude is made up of self-interest, and how much of stupidity. All I know is that even with a prominent platform I can make no impression on them at all.
They will carry on saying the same thing. And that is because they do not know anything about the subject and swallow whatever the conventional wisdom is.
It’s the same with so many of these things. I haven’t seen anyone say or write an intelligent thing about police or prisons for many years.
It’s obvious that those in charge, and the licensed BBC commentators, know nothing of the history of those things, at least not before the age of Blair.
Lord Falconer went on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, there to undergo a soft-hitting interview by presenter Amol Rajan – another Ostrich, who likewise can see little wrong with modern Britain and was keen to show off his knowledge of different kinds of marijuana
They even believe police claims that they cannot patrol as they should because they lack the people. In fact, they have more officers than they did in the days of foot patrol – in total and per capita.
They no longer do many jobs they once did – parking enforcement, securing commercial premises and prosecution. And they have thousands of back-office staff they never used to have. It is not numbers or money. It is will.
It’s also quite clear that no good school can function without selection. You have to keep out disruptive children and those who do not want to learn. The question is, how you do it.
Since 1965, when we abolished selection by ability, we have done it by wealth instead, so wasting untold amounts of talent among the poor.
In the pre-1965 days of grammar schools, we had a great flowering in the arts and sciences, because for once we gave that talent its opportunity.
Now we waste it, and the schools are far worse too. But selection by ability just cannot be considered as a solution – and has been illegal for almost 30 years.
In defence, housing, transport, support for the married family, public health, there are, in the same way, workable, proven answers to our main problems. But they are never even considered. For in every area, the post-1960 generation rules.
Even if they are nominally Conservative, they have swallowed the ideas of egalitarianism and social work and rejected better ideas of personal responsibility and opportunity.
They will not look back to the times when, as the Tory manifesto of 1970 proclaimed: ‘Despite all the failures and frustrations of recent years, Britain is still the best country in the world in which to live’. Though actually, it was.