BROWN AND KARZAI EXCHANGE HATS

06/11/2009

The scandal over sacked drugs advisor David Nutt must be a cruel blow to a boisterous Labour government who had just enjoyed several weeks of wagging their fingers at the BNP and saying: "ignore our immigration policy and detention centres, look! They're the real racists!" (Just for the record, the small island of Britain detains about the same number of children per year as the continental sized USA). With Home Secretary Alan Johnson's dismissal of Nutt we see the truth: Labour might be enlightened enough to portend to look past the cheap conservative ontologies of nation and race, but should an expert speak out of place the hijab of enlightenment falls, and he or she faces the chop.

Justifying his decision Johnson stated:

"Professor Nutt was not sacked for his views, which I respect but disagree with... He was asked to go because he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy."

So Nutt may have whatever views he likes, so long as he "advises" and does not "campaign." What precisely is the difference? Positionality close to the ears of power? Loudness of voice? Speaking to the press without getting government approval? In a way we should not be surprised at Johnson's dismissal. After all, Whitehall is used to being left alone for five years; it only needs to pretend to listen every half decade so as to win your vote, and therefore be autonomous for a further session in power. We see this with "debates" over nuclear power, or the Severn Barrage project, or policing. If it isn't election time, why listen; why not simply launch a consultation? That way the people have spoken; even if you ignore what they have said you can still maintain: "ahh, but the consultation was done, the voice of the people was heard." Experts have been shown by Johnson to be firmly in the "people" camp should they raise criticism (unless they are in the military or police, in which case politicians veritably dive through these expert's flaming hoops).

But what was so controversial about Nutt? His key crime seems not to really have been criticising Downing Street's  hard-line approach to marajuana, MDMA and LSD, but actually to have given us all a tangible reference point by showing how they relate in terms of danger to alcohol and tobacco (and the comparison was not favourable to these latter two). Of course it was Labour who brought in the idea of 24 hour liquor licenses, with a key justification being that most people drink responsibly, and so should not be blamed alongside those who do not. Why this logic would not be applied to other drugs is no mystery: it is a function of a certain kind of conservatism: better the devil you know, alcohol and tobacco (suggesting that, like so many politicians, Alan Johnson never inhaled).

On the plus side this whole story gives the lie to the narrative that we are at the end of history. Alright, nobody near power is really conceiving of anything to supersede the trinity liberalism-capital-democracy, but one of the dominant themes of the Thatcherite era (up to and including the Blair years, in which we ostensibly still find ourselves) is the alleged government deference to The Experts. If there is nothing better than liberal-capital-democracy then all we have to do is find technocratic solutions to its problems; Johnson chooses his own ideology apropos alcohol, rather than the technocratic ideology of Nutt. In a sense this is to be applauded, but the radical reproach to Nutt is actually Aldous Huxley's notion of a Brave New World, in which people are all doped with "soma". Maybe between alcohol and prescription drugs, we are already basically there.

But form is still important: note, Nutt was sacked, but expert panels were not dissolved. Just as consultations formally consult with the people, the expert panels formally support government doctrine (and if you speak out you are ignored or fired respectively). Interestingly this formalism reached an apex just a few days back, when Messrs Brown and Obama welcomed newly elected Afghani president Hamid Karzai to his throne. That he had no opposition in the election was by-the-by, the point was that an election had been run, so Karzai was elected. It can not help but bring to mind Pascal's wager: that if you do the actions of belief enough, eventually you will end up believing (or "fake it 'til you make it"). In governmentality this amounts to: "hire experts, consult and elect until you make good governance". Never mind that each of these processes is radically circumscribed, it is the form that matters, not the function.

John Gullick