Is anyone in Britain, apart from the drug-abusing community, genuinely outraged when British citizens are punished abroad for drug offences more severely than they would be here?
I am astonished that Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Jeremy Hunt, has personally raised the case of Ye Ming Yuen, now in a Singapore prison for drug trafficking, and likely to be flogged.
In fact, I was so amazed that I checked with the Foreign Office to see if it was true. And yes it is. Mr Hunt brought up the matter with his Singaporean opposite number, Vivian Balakrishnan.
Mr Yuen’s offences include two counts of drug trafficking involving more than two ounces of marijuana and half an ounce of crystal meth.
Jeremy Hunt, has personally raised the case of Ye Ming Yuen, now in a Singapore prison for drug trafficking, and likely to be flogged
As far as I know, nobody is questioning his guilt. If they were, it would be another matter. But they aren’t.
Mr Yuen, as we are frequently told, was highly educated at an expensive school. He cannot possibly have been ignorant of Singapore’s stern penal code.
By going there and doing what he did he waived the protections of his British passport.
Yet he gets the direct attention of a senior Cabinet member, and is discussed at a high-level ministerial meeting with an important country’s government. Surely this sort of thing should be reserved for genuine cases of oppression and injustice?
Consular help is one thing. Active government intervention at the top level is quite another.
What is it, exactly, that we object to? On paper, Britain’s Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 is in some ways tougher than Singapore’s law, as it sets a maximum sentence of life imprisonment and an unlimited fine for Mr Yuen’s trafficking in crystal meth.
For marijuana supply, the maximum British sentence is 14 years.
There are pretty stiff penalties for possession too. But, hypnotised by the propaganda of Big Dope’s slimy hidden persuaders (and gosh, they are slimy.
Mr Yuen’s offences include two counts of drug trafficking involving more than two ounces of marijuana and half an ounce of crystal meth
I have met a lot of them), the police and the courts have quietly decided to ignore the law and do next to nothing.
As it happens, I dislike the Singapore state. I think it is a narrow despotism, which lacks crucial freedoms. I do not swoon at its supposed achievements and I am against corporal punishment of prisoners.
Criminals, as we know, are very much in favour of such punishment and use it against those who transgress gang codes. But we should not sink to their level.
The issue is a broader one. I suspect that a very large number of British people would whoop with joy if we started caning drug criminals and locking them up in bare concrete cells.
Far too many of our police-free neighbourhoods stink of dope. Its users, mentally ill and often violent and armed with knives, roam about, menacing and unchecked.
In fact, I fear that 40 years of failure by our criminal justice system may one day lead to demands for a strong despotic state here, like Singapore’s.
That is why I keep pointing out that the free, democratic, law-governed nations of Japan and South Korea enforce their drug laws as we used to do 50 years ago.
This is not because they are ‘culturally different’ but because they are still run by serious educated people, as we once were. And, as a result, they have much lower levels of drug use.
But when I say this, the legalisers pretend they have not heard me and ignore it, or mutter racist comments about Japan’s supposedly different ‘culture’.
They are so set on their greedy project that they don’t care how much damage they do to our society to get it. Be warned.
The only end of the chaos we are now creating will be a despotism that makes Singapore look like Toytown. And there’ll be no Jeremy Hunt to come and bail you out.
A classic too gentle for this brutal age
Thoughtful and witty: Robert Redford in The Old Man And The Gun
Robert Redford’s neglected new (and probably last) film about an elderly bank robber, The Old Man And The Gun, is agreeably slow, thoughtful, witty, moving and worrying.
It’s worrying because it’s quite closely based on an astonishing true story, and it actually makes you sympathise with a thief, not something I’d expect to feel.
Given how immoral so much of Hollywood now is, I don’t think that’s why the movie is so hard to find in cinemas. I think it’s because it’s too gentle.
Vital lesson I learned on a rollercoaster
We have been so safe here for so long that we have a silly belief that nothing can really go wrong.
This is basically childish. I well recall my brother and I, aged about 11 and 13, persuading my long-suffering father to accompany us on a rollercoaster ride at a South Coast beach resort.
My father, who had seen all kinds of horrors on the Russian convoys in the 1940s, and hated heights, reluctantly agreed.
We could see he thought the contraption was highly dangerous. My brother and I were quite sure that nothing could go wrong. He wasn’t so convinced and we laughed at that, especially afterwards when we walked away unscathed.
A few years later, a boy, about the same age as I was then, was horribly and permanently injured when that very rollercoaster went very wrong.
I recall seeing it in the paper and feeling very sorry indeed for my bumptious overconfidence.
It was a small lesson in the folly of British smugness. The next was much bigger.
As I watched the dying convulsions of the Soviet system, while living in 1990s Moscow, I mainly felt exhilarated at the end of an evil regime.
But then I saw the sad queues outside the banks, of people no different from me, blameless for the misdeeds of their rulers. Their life savings had vanished overnight.
And soon after that I began to see those people selling their possessions by the roadside, simply to live, and to hear of people losing jobs they had held for decades, and being forced out of homes they had thought safe.
Catastrophe had happened to them. But it had not been the end of everything in some great explosion of flame and smoke. They had survived it.
They had to carry on living reduced, pinched lives as the ghosts of their former selves. Think it can’t happen here? Our oblivious MPs, who act as if leaving the EU is a game, think it can’t. What if they are mistaken?
Such a lot of gush about Brampton Manor, the state school in deprived East London where 41 students have been offered places at Oxbridge.
It’s all about self-belief, apparently. Twaddle. The secret is tough academic selection, illegal at 11 or 13 but legal at 15.
The school website states: ‘Our Sixth Form is heavily oversubscribed. Selection is based on academic achievement.’
That means a minimum grade 7 at GCSE (9 is the top) in all subjects they intend to study at A-level, and a very high average in all grades.
It warns: ‘Where courses are oversubscribed, the best grades will prevail and significantly higher grades may be required in order to secure a place.’
This sort of selection works, but by the time it kicks in, at 15, many bright children from poor homes have already given up.
That’s why we need a national system of selective state grammar schools at 11 or 13. Why can’t anyone in power see this?
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News Photo PETER HITCHENS: Think flogging drug dealers is barbaric?
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