More broadly, the moral charge being made against the institution of banking makes little sense to me. Certainly individual banks have shown themselves to be grossly incompetent, but there seems to have been very little knowing malfeasance. The banks concealed the risk unwittingly, and could only do so with the (equally unwitting) aid of politicians, the financial press and the general public, all of whom wanted to believe in the Emperor’s Clothes.

The idea that substantial numbers of people had foresight of the banking crisis seems to be a fiction, but let us suppose for a moment that such people existed. I may be naive, but I don’t see how the actions of the banks can have damaged these people. In financial trading, knowing something that your peers don’t (about the instability of the global financial system, say) is typically profitable. Such people could have made vast amounts of money betting against the consensus, or if they didn’t fancy the risk, kept their portfolio safe by avoiding exposure to riskier stocks and bonds and taking a larger position on gold.

Where the shrill charge against the banks is coming from those who base it only on hindsight, I have little sympathy. These people seem to want to have things both ways: asking no questions about the run-up in asset prices during the good times, and demanding compensation in the bad. Those who dislike the banks are free to opt out of their services, but the banks do not owe us a living.

“Quite simply, not enough schools perform like the best. In fact, results tend to hover around the national average.” — A UK government minister explains education

On of Richard Stallman’s points was that software producers need to stop competing with each other in order to ensure our output is the best that it can possibly be. Ayn Rand argued that we need to compete with each other constantly in order to ensure our output is the best that it can possibly be.

The wish to make more things brilliant and less of them mediocre drives a lot of people, from the greatest entrepreneurs and inventors to whichever hapless minister produced the quotation with which I began this article (I was unable to find any source on the web, and I’m forced to admit it may have been apocryphal.)

But the method by which we make the world a better place is a fiercely contentious question, and many of the people on the extremes will, when push comes to shove, put ideology ahead of results. Nothing wrong with that, but it leaves those of us in the middle lacking clear role models when it comes to pursuing a more consequentialist approach. This is particularly difficult to do when we identify strongly with their goals, if not their ideologies.

It seems to me that in making a statement like this, Professor Nutt is speaking about the risk of physical harm to the person undertaking the activity. This kind of statement is well within the professor’s area of expertise, and I have no reason to doubt its veracity. Various people in the government have attempted to play this statement down, quibble with it or sweep it under the carpet, and I believe they are wrong to do so. This statement is a verifiable matter of fact, and if it is wrong we should be able to produce sufficient evidence to contradict it. Assuming it is correct, it is also a pertinent observation in setting out drug policy.

There is another sort of harm though, which drug policy needs to take very seriously: the issue of harm to a society. I’m thinking here of the difference between a society where people are happy and benefit from their interactions with others, and a society that thwarts people’s ambitions and harms their development.

It seems to me that society is a system that is complex beyond any one person’s understanding, and full of feedback loops and non-linear effects that can make unintended consequences irrevocable. This would support caution in decriminalising substances even where the risk of physical harm were small, since we don’t know whether decriminalisation will increase or decrease consumption, nor the effect of having a greater or lesser number of people experiencing altered states of mind.

Ecstasy and cannabis have the potential to do harm to society in the same way that television and the internet have harmed society—and the potential to help it as well. We don’t have the luxury of choosing whether drugs exist, only whether we use criminal punishment or not, and neither stance is obviously correct. If we wish to work out which is which is the best path we need a robust debate, and sacking advisors is not the way to achieve that. If the key difference in opinion is that Professor Nutt was talking about physical harm, while Alan Johnson wishes to emphasise social harm, then the latter ought to say so.

Having said that, I’m saddened to see people who would presumably describe themselves as liberals fighting with the police in order to prevent a politician from speaking his mind. It seemed a shame that some of the people who had applied to be in the audience of Question Time (which is after all a debate programme) were unwilling to let Mr. Griffin speak in his turn without shouting him down.

At the very least, Mr. Griffin’s brand of clearly-worded racism can be answered directly, as I believe it should be. This is in contrast to the “dog-whistle” crypto-racism that marred the last UK election, and which may well still exist in parts of the mainstream parties.

What bothers me most about the whole affair is the lack of faith in open debate that has been displayed by some of those on the left. Is the ideal of free speech really so easily abandoned? Do people not believe that, when ideas are pitted against one another in debate, that the right idea will win out and that both sides can be enlightened? If we are secure in our belief that racism is wrong, why can we not back our ideas up calmly and rationally, by pointing out the flaw in their arguments?

Postscript

A few hours after writing this, I stumbled across the following quotation, which seemed apposite:

Let me add a certain virile reply recorded by De Quincey (Writings XI, 226). Someone flung a glass of wine in the face of a gentleman during a theological or literary debate. The victim did not show any emotion, and said to the offender: “This, sir, is a digression: now, if you please, for the argument.” (The author of that reply, a certain Dr. Henderson, died in Oxford around 1787, without leaving us any memory other than those just words: a sufficient and beautiful immortality.)

J. L. Borges, The Art of Verbal Abuse, 1933