Billions of dollars wasted, thousands of communities ruined, but one simple fact about the "War on Drugs" remains: it doesn't work

If you missed The House I Live In, a brilliant documentary about the colossal failure of America's so-called "war on drugs", shown on BBC Four last night as part of the Storyville strand, I urge you to watch it (you can view it on iPlayer here).

Directed by Eugene Jarecki, the film's take-home message was simple: while hard drugs ravage communities, the war on drugs finishes them off. If you've ever watched The Wire and wondered if it was over-egging the pudding, Jarecki's film made you realise it was virtually a fly-on-the-wall documentary (the show's creator, David Simon, popped up as a talking head discussing his time on the streets of Baltimore as a journalist observing the results of current drug policy).

The film contained some fascinating insights. For example, while Nixon is credited with launching the war on drugs, his hard-line rhetoric was actually offset by some relatively progressive policy ideas, with two third of the money spent on treatment for addicts and only a third on tougher policing.

Best of all, Jarecki also took the time to talk to young men - mostly poor, black young men - who dealt drugs or had been convicted of doing so. He dismantled the idea that drugs were simply a matter of personal choice. As Simon pithily put it: history shows that if you take a company town and remove the company [or rather outsource all its jobs to China], new illegal industries will spring up to fill the vacuum. In some places becoming a drug dealer is the only logical career choice.

In case you think that sounds like bleeding heart left-wing cant, the film featured interviews with judges, law and order-loving prison officers - check out, for example, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) - and weary-looking drugs cops, all saying pretty much the same thing. The war on drugs not only isn't working, it's actually exacerbating the problem.

Surely if everyone agrees the war on drugs is ineffective, things are set to change? If only it were so simple. For one thing, only a tiny minority of US politicians are prepared to put their head above the parapet on the issue - most, perhaps rightly, assume that anything other than a hard-line stance on drugs would be electoral death.

The other thing that keeps drug reform off the agenda is perhaps even more disturbing: America's prison industry. At present the US has 2.3 million citizens incarcerated, the highest in the world, and there is a burgeoning industry with a vested interest in building more prisons, which means more prisoners are needed to fill them. It should come as no surprise that these corporate interests are lobbying hard for a continuation of the status quo.

Is it possible to have a rational debate about drugs? Films like The House I Live In would suggest it is. But until politicians truly commit themselves to evidence-based politics and lobbyists are challenged, the war on drugs will continue to destroy lives and communities across the globe.

As we bid farewell to the welfare state, it's time to get on board with the latest development in lefty anger: "Coalition rage"

After reading Aditya Chakrabortty's brilliant obituary for the welfare state in today's Guardian, I coined a new term: "Coalition rage". It's that seething, uncontrollable anger you feel when you read about yet another example of the Government's wanton disregard for Britain's most vulnerable.

I initially scoffed when I heard people earning £55,000 boo-hooing about the loss of their child benefit - or part of it, at any rate - but I actually think Chakrabortty is right to say that removing the benefit from Britain's richest has two negative effects. Firstly, it turns it into something that can be dismissed as "for the poor". And that means only one thing: that it can be reduced further in the future without raising the ire of pushy middle-class parents.

He also points to interesting research in the piece which backs the idea universal benefits (i.e. benefits that everyone gets, regardless of income) are more efficient and actually cheaper than means-tested ones.

Food for thought.

Are burglars really "cowards"? Or was Judge Bowers right to say housebreaking requires courage?

A Crown Court judge caused a media hurricane-in-a-teacup back in September for claiming, during sentencing, that burglary required "a huge amount of courage". I remember thinking at the time that saying that aloud in open court itself required a fair degree of bravery.

This week Judge Peter Bowers was issued with a reprimand by the Office for Judicial Complaints for his comments, which he made as part of his justification for sparing the defendant a custodial sentence. Back in September op-ed writers threw their arms in the air in outrage and magistrate's son David Cameron duly took to the Daybreak sofa to froth self-righteously and declare from on high that "burglary is cowardice". Thanks for clearing that up Dave.

But few pundits at the time bothered asking: was Judge Bowers was right? At this point, it's worth looking at his actual wording:

I might get pilloried for it … it takes a huge amount of courage, as far as I can see, for somebody to burgle somebody's house. I wouldn't have the nerve. Yet somehow, bolstered by drugs and desperation, you were prepared to do that.

Firstly, it's worth saying that we have no evidence that this was a dearly held belief judge Bowers had been dying to share with the world for years. Maybe he spoke without thinking, or maybe he was suffering from postprandial somnolence. But let's suppose for a second that he meant what he said: that burglary requires balls.

Now let's look at what burglary entails: the brazenness to walk into someone else's property, knowing that if you get caught you face arrest or, if you're an American housebreaker, the possibility getting shot. Yes, it's an incredible violation of other peoples' personal space. And yes, offenders should be punished. But notice that at no point did Judge Bowers say "I think burglary is, like, totes jokes" or "people who have been burgled should just shut their mouths and just suck it up."

To say that burglars are cowards is to play into the conventional narrative that criminals turn to illegal activity because they are too lazy to make it straight. Which simply isn't true. Watch this video of an interview with an American burglar, and listen to the phenomenal level of detail he puts into the planning. Read about drug gangs or mafia bosses expanding their empires, and chances are they are working longer hours than your run-of-the-mill workaholic CEO.

While Judge Bowers was pilloried for his remarks, I think his real crime in the eyes of the tabloid press was compassion. He concluded his sentencing that day:

I think prison very rarely does anybody any good. It mostly leaves people the chance to change their own mind if they want to. I don't think anybody would benefit from sending you to prison today. We'd all just feel a bit easier that a burglar had been taken off the streets.

After all, to claim, even for a second, that criminals are anything other than worthless scum is to treat them as human beings, which opens a very complicated can of worms indeed.

Is the UK set to become part of the "post-developed" world?

Britain's politicians and business bosses like to paint our country as a "world leader": a thriving, socially-progressive First World hub of technological  innovation and ruthlessly efficient public services.

But the other day, as I sat at my computer writing a story about the cut to local councils' road maintenance budgets - further reducing their ability to patch up our ever more pockmarked roads - it occurred to me that a new term was needed to describe Britain's socio-economic status.

Just as we use the term "post-industrial" to describe a society that has moved beyond heavy industry and instead employs people to make flat whites and work in "creative design agencies", web start-ups and investment banking, we need a fresh phrase for a country that is dismantling its national health service, savagely cutting social care and even reducing weekly bin collections.

My friend, a fiendishly clever policy wonk (think Data in Star Trek) who works for a local authority, suggested "post-developed de-developing countries," which, while not particularly catchy, captures it quite nicely.

But while my friend and I were being light-hearted, the implications here are far from funny. Think this is just petty scaremongering? What the majority of people don't realise when talking about "the cuts" is that most of them haven't happened yet (as my friend put it: "we've only eaten a polo mint so far, but the main course is on its way").

Plotted on a graph, you can see local authorities budgets plummeting just as service demand from Britain's ageing population is set to sharply spike - and that isn't taking into account the extra demand created by the cuts to services (for example, cuts to adult social care will mean a rise in pensioner hospital admissions).

The satirical news site the Daily Mash ran a story this week headlined: "Britain to probably have some electricity in 2014." The scary thing is, I wouldn't have been that surprised if it had been genuine.

Why do we need elected police commissioners? Don't be fooled, this isn't about devolving power to local communities, it's a chance to shift the blame

After election fever comes the comedown.

As those days and nights spent sweating over the prospect of a Romney victory, watching Karl Rove's mathematical meltdown, and wondering whether Obama really could take Florida dissipate into the cold reality of "fiscal cliffs" and "grand bargains", elections junkies the country over are being forced to go cold turkey. The  psephologists have crawled back to their academic lairs and Nate Silver has been returned to his magic box.

But just when it seems nothing could top the thrill of seeing Romney vanquished and Obama re-elected as only the forth Democrat President to win two terms since 1900, a new election hoves into view. And this one you can actually vote in! Yes, that's right dear voter, this Thursday is the elections for England and Wales' 41 police and crime commissioners (PCCs).

Except, inexplicably, it seems the rest of the UK isn't exactly radiating with enthusiasm. Large numbers are completely oblivious to the fact it's even taking place, with voter turnout expected to dip below 20%, a record low for a national UK election, while the vast majority of people are unable to name any of their local candidates.

All of which suggests this was not a burning issue for the UK electorate. So why exactly is it happening? And what will the new commissioners actually do? According to the Home Office website, the PCCs will have influence over key areas like CCTV, street lighting, graffiti and tackling gangs, but their central purpose is to

ensure the policing needs of their communities are met as effectively as possible, bringing communities closer to the police, building confidence in the system and restoring trust.

In other words, it's all about local democracy: "Bringing more of a public voice to policing and giving the public a name and a face to complain to if they aren't satisfied."

Which is convenient, because with a 20% cut to the police budget in the pipeline and the loss of 15,000 officers by 2015, one would imagine there's a whole lot of people about to feel very unsatisfied. Notice a rise in anti-social behaviour or a drop-off in police response times a couple of years down the line? Don't bother the Government with your quibbling, your PCC clearly just hasn't been doing their job properly. Off with their head.

The idea that this is a genuine exercise in localism just simply isn't credible, because the Coalition is only interested in devolving power to two sectors: the private and the voluntary. If you want to know what Cameron and Osborne really think of local government, go and count the number of empty offices at council buildings across the land.

While I'm sure the individual PCCs will, once elected, work hard for their local communities, they ultimately look set, as Polly Toynbee put it in Dogma and Disarray: Cameron at Half-Time, to be "squeezed into insignificance between an interventionist Home Office and the private contractors lined-up to take over large slices of policing." This is, after all, a Home Office determined to decide where and how the money is spent like never before. Ironically, it's with the privatisation of the police that the PCCs could have the most - indeed, a worrying amount - of influence. As shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper pointed out in a piece for the Guardian:

The new commissioners will face serious decisions on the future of policing and private contracts. A strong push is under way both from Tory government ministers and from private companies to contract out large swaths of public policing, yet there has been no debate about the risks or the safeguards needed.

The introduction of PCCs also further politicises our police force. While the founder of the modern police force Sir Robert Peel's claim that the police should act "in complete independence of policy" was always a pipedream - the Battle of Orgeave, anyone? - there's no question that the PCC system has the potential to turn policing into a microcosm of party politics.

But let's not be pessimistic. My hope is that individual PCCs will use their position to hold central government to account: speaking up on swingeing cuts, vehemently opposing further privatizations and loudly voicing the concerns of their local communities. They might have been intended as political window dressing, but who's to say they can't make their voices heard?

A personal, last-minute letter from Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to the American electorate

Dear America,

I think 47% of you are feckless types dependent on Government handouts. As a hedge fund manager I destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs and my people skills are so poor that I actually told an interviewer I preferred data to people.

I look forward to your vote.

Yours,

Mitt

Class, a new left-wing think tank, can help craft a coherent response to this Government's cruel indifference to inequality

Last Wednesday I attended the parliamentary launch of the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (Class), a new think tank set-up by Unite the Union to act as a lightening rod for left-wing debate and discussion.

There was a packed turn-out in one of the Commons' beautiful Committee Rooms to see speeches by, among others, Independent columnist Owen Jones, TUC deputy general secretary Frances O'Grady, and Professor Richard Wilkinson, co-author of the brilliant The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone.

The parliamentary launch centred around the release of Class's recent publication Why Inequality Matters (available to read online here), which draws heavily on the ideas of The Spirit Level. For those that haven't read it, the central thesis is simple: the larger a society's income inequality, the more devastating its social problems.

Whereas Peter Mandelson famously said that New Labour were "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich" as long as they paid their taxes, The Spirit Level empirically shows that material inequality actually leads to higher rates of mental illness, obesity, teenage pregnancies, and even murder, while severely limiting social mobility, trust and life expectancy.

Owen Jones rightly pointed out that a think tank can't single-handedly save the world, but the launch of Class is genuinely important as a means of helping the left present a coherent response to policy planners and journalists. As someone tweeted to me recently: "While the left thinks about things deeply, the right acts." And you know what? They're spot on. As right-wing economist Milton Friedman wrote in 1962:

Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. [my italics]

And that's precisely what a think tank can do: float ideas in the pubic sphere ready for when they are needed.

Take, for example, the banking crash in 2008, a time when the "politically impossible" certainly did become "politically inevitable" - large swathes of the UK banking system were nationalised in order to prevent the entire global economy going belly-up, something that even those on Labour's far-left could hardly have dared dream of.

Unregulated free-market capitalism was shown to be profoundly knickerless, but the financial system has largely carried on as if the whole thing was an unfortunate blip  thanks to the lack of a coherent left-wing response (I recommend reading Class's "think piece" on the effects of the crash, a brilliant summary of the idiocy of free market dogma: not only is it profoundly unjust, it's also economically unsound).

Faced with high unemployment, a rapidly vanishing welfare state and a shocking lack of social housing, Britain in 2012 is calling out for some fresh ideas. Let's hope Class can help deliver them.