Actors Of Parliament

This issue’s look at parliamentary gobble-de-gook.

Squall 12, Spring 1996, pg. 17.

John Carlisle (Con MP Luton North) has made regular appearances in the pages of SQUALL with various selections from his collected works of hysterical bluff and bluster. It was he who was taken to court by the Commission for Racial Equality after publicly expressing his desire to see “all gypsies banished into the wilderness”.

The latest nonsense, however, concerns his highly selective campaign for and against drugs. Carlisle has always been a vehement critic of drugs and their implications for a healthy society. But when a Liberal Democrat MP recently introduced a private members bill designed to put curbs on those who profit from the UK’s most deadly recreational drug, Carlisle strongly opposed the measure.

Indeed, he was the only MP to get to his feet in the House of Commons and verbally slate the Tobacco (Protection of Children and Restriction of Promotion) Bill when it was presented in January.

As the author of the bill, Simon Hughes (Lib Dem MP Bermondsey and Southwark), had pointed out to the House that the tobacco industry spends a staggering £100 million pounds a year on advertising. The need for curbs on their techniques of increasing sales were a matter of the utmost medical urgency argued Hughes.

Carlisle, on the other hand, described the bill as “unnecessary.... stupid and illogical” because the “existing system [of controls] works”. What he didn’t address is the fact that five out every six regular smokers begin smoking by the age of 15.

Instead, he launched a pathetic attempt to rubbish Simon Hughes’s opinion, by suggesting that, as the Liberal Democrat Party Conference had voted in favour of a more sensible political debate on cannabis use, all its MPs’ views on drugs should be considered with contempt. He further accuses Hughes of promoting a “nanny state”, saying his bill “is based on pure emotion rather than pure fact.” Here are some facts.

Tobacco is the directly attributable cause of 100,000 deaths a year in the UK. This compares with 25,000 deaths attributable to alcohol, ten attributable to Ecstasy and none attributed to Cannabis. “Illogical”? “Stupid”? Words certainly befitting for John Carlisle’s epitaph.

Having been a backbencher since his election in 1979 and looking likely to remain there, Carlisle is considered to be a bit of a political buffoon; not safe to promote. The prime reason for his lack of promotion prospects however, is his inability to hide what the rest of his party are better at masking - that despite all their hysterical rhetoric on drugs, they are quite happy to say the opposite when there are profits to be made from doing so.