Conviction Politician
‘WE all applaud politicians who are prepared to gain first-hand experience of their subject.
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| ‘Where to, Mr Prescott?’ ‘Anywhere, so long as there’s lots of lovely traffic’ |
You know – Home Office ministers who spend time at Her Majesty’s pleasure, Health Secretaries who die on the operating table, disabled rights ministers who get paralytically drunk
Remember Patrick Nicholls? He was the transport minister in the last Tory government who was forced to resign after being convicted of drink-driving.
What about Sir Nicholas Scott, a disabled rights minister who got so drunk at a Tory party conference that he lost his ability to walk and was found face down in a gutter?
And of course there’s Mr Two Jags himself, John Prescott.
As the man in charge of the country’s transport network, he can share the misery of motorists up and down Britain every day by taking his own mini-traffic jam with him wherever he goes.
It is a long and distinguished list – and to it today we must add the name of Shane Collins, the Green party spokesman on drugs.
Mr Collins was last night enjoying his fourth night behind bars after police found 19 cannabis plants growing in the basement of his Brixton home.
The Independent calls it ‘an unusual example of a politician practising what he preaches’.
And, far from disowning 41-year-old Mr Collins, the Green party says his conviction is proof that the drugs law in this country needs to change.
For the past six years, Collins himself has called for the ‘possession, trade and cultivation’ of cannabis to be legalised and for drug ‘pubs’ to be set up.
The Coke And Horses, The White Line, The Brown Horse, The Camberwell Carrot
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Posted: 1st, August 2003 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
