05.03.2026

Sinking into the gutter

Labour ran a low-life campaign against the Greens in Gorton and Denton, saying that under them playgrounds would be ‘turned into crack dens’. Eddie Ford takes a rather more principled position

Of course, the usual suspects lined up to launch mad attacks on the Green Party during the Gorton and Denton by-election.

The Daily Star got excited about “the Greens’ bonkers plan for Britain” with “free porn, high street brothels and drugs legal!!”¹ Similarly, the Daily Mail had an ‘exclusive’ on how “loony Greens call for free-for-all on prostitution and porn”: they back “legalising prostitution and freeing up access to sexually explicit pornography”.² The Mail article talked about the “outcry” over the Greens wanting to “legalise all drugs - including crack cocaine, heroin and date-rape chemical GHB”.³ Not wanting to miss out on the fun, The Sun talked about the “leafy lunacy” of the Greens wish to “legalise heroin” and “letting in all illegal migrants”, while the paper’s Julia Hartley-Brewer warned its readers that the Green leader’s “communism-on-ketamine policies” would destroy the UK.⁴

But, if anything, a desperate Labour Party and Sir Keir Starmer sunk lowest into the gutter, as they began to realise that defeat stared them in the face. According to Sarah Jones, the policing minister - which seems like the only correct job for her - the Green’s plans to liberalise the drug laws would “unleash a drugs epidemic” that would see “our parks and playgrounds turned into crack dens”, with “lives shattered, anti-social behaviour through the roof, and public drug use running rife”.⁵ Quite obscenely, having no problem with inverting reality, she boasted about how the fact that drug seizures had reached a “record high” under Labour represented a “common sense” approach to keeping communities safe and drugs off the streets - never mind the social devastation caused by a punitive, ‘law and order’ approach. As for the increasingly beleaguered Starmer, he denounced the supposedly “disgusting” Green plan to make it lawful to provide his 17-and-a-half-year-old son with heroin and crack cocaine, and at PMQs - no doubt thinking he was being clever - he accused the Green Party of being “high on drugs, soft on Putin”. He was referring obviously to Zack Polanski’s view that you cannot reform Nato “from within” and should instead be “reviewing” US bases on UK soil as part of a “genuine” strategic defence review, and “a different approach to defence”. Even though Sir Keir’s strategy of highlighting the dangers posed by “the extremes” of politics proved disastrous in Gorton and Denton, he said he would continue unchanged - fighting “the extreme of the left in the Green Party”.

Venomous

Interestingly, it has since been revealed that the deputy leader, Lucy Powell - the only member of the NEC to vote in favour of Andy Burnham standing in that constituency - expressed doubts about the venomous attacks on the Greens, as you could not succeed by trying to “out-Reform” Nigel Farage’s party. Other senior Labour members declared that the party’s campaign was misjudged and too negative: one MP was quoted as saying that she could not “understand the choice to attack the Greens on their drug policies with sensationalism and misinformation” - it “did the party no favours whatsoever”, with Labour crashing down to third place behind Reform as well as the successful Greens.

In reality, whatever the lies and slander of Labour and the rightwing press, our readers will not be surprised to learn that the Greens were not militantly demanding the legalisation of all drugs - which is the long-stated position of the CPGB. Heather Spencer, the winning candidate in Gorton and Denton, said in an interview with the BBC that “decriminalising is a conversation that we need to have” - which hardly sounds like someone from Keir Starmer’s “extreme” of politics. In its 2024 election manifesto, the party proposed setting up a “regulated market” for drugs “that stops criminal supply and profiteering, and that reduces harm, including by preventing children accessing drugs” - also calling for a national commission into “an evidence-based approach to reform of the UK’s counterproductive drug laws”⁶

Spring conference

Zack Polanski, who says he has never taken drugs or drunk alcohol, personally wants to legalise all drugs, but party members will vote on whether to adopt the policy at their online spring conference (March 28-29). He argues, not unreasonably, that for the Labour government to be “playing political games with people’s lives is totally unacceptable” and that we are “seeing people who aren’t taking issues seriously” and “aren’t doing the things that need to be done to protect people”. Instead, he wants a “public health approach” to “make sure that children absolutely can’t go anywhere near drugs”, because at the moment they “can often get drugs if they want”.⁷

He states “very clearly” that he wants to “regulate and control drugs” - something favoured by “public health professionals”. For example, he cites alcohol - “we regulate it because we know it’s dangerous if anyone can get it, any time, and so it should be the same with drugs” - which is not the same as saying it “should be fully accessible to everyone”.

Actually, for communists this is the wrong formulation. We do not want to stop alcohol or drugs that are currently illegal – say, cannabis or cocaine - from being “fully accessible” as such. Instead, we want an informed choice based on the best science available, and effective quality control, so people know exactly what they are taking. In that way we would be able to regulate ourselves as individuals and minimise any potential harm.

But Polanski recognises that the ‘war on drugs’ is unwinnable, which in a rational debate would “not be a contentious thing to say”. He further makes the simple point that “all around the world, when people have tried to have the same policy … with drugs, it hasn’t worked, and it’s not worked in this country”. The Green leader gives the example of Portugal, which in July 2001 decriminalised the personal possession and use of all drugs. This measure reduced drug deaths, HIV transmissions and - in the words of Polanski - “what’s often labelled as anti-social behaviour”, rather than “allowing drugs to be in the hands of drug gangs or to be on the black market or in the streets”.⁸

It almost goes without saying, at least pre-spring conference, that the current official Green position is not for the legalisation of all drugs - though for communists the legalisation of cocaine and heroin would be a perfectly logical policy decision, given Polanski’s general concerns. We are told that the focus “needs to be shifted from suppressing these substances” to instead “tackling the social and public health issues which lead people to use drugs” - not viewing drug abuse as a “criminal justice issue”.⁹

Cowardly

For all the Greens’ shortcomings, their drug policy is far bolder than what is offered by Your Party. To be more exact, YP has not offered anything so far. Presumably it is keeping silent, as it does not want to offend anyone or appear too radical or ‘extremist’.

Jeremy Corbyn has previously said that “criminalising people for possession of small amounts of cannabis is not a particularly good idea”. He thinks that medical use of cannabis oil is “good”, as it is “clearly beneficial to people” and therefore “should be decriminalised and made readily available as quickly as possible”.¹⁰ Actually, you can get cannabis on the NHS (though not directly) … and civilization has not collapsed. Apart from that, Corbyn appears to be incredibly conservative on this issue, never calling for across-the-board decriminalisation of cannabis, let alone the legalisation of all recreational drugs. Forget it!

As for Zarah Sultana, her record is only slightly better. As a Labour MP and Socialist Campaign Group member, she signed an early day motion in parliament in May 2021 stating that the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 “is not fit for purpose”, as it has failed to reduce drug consumption, and only increased harm and damaged public health.

The fact of the matter is that taking drugs is as old as human culture itself, going back hundreds of thousands of years. Human beings have drunk, sniffed, snorted, ingested and smoked - either for spiritual reasons or because they want a good party. But for the vast majority of human history we have known what we were consuming - it was a communal activity, not an individualistic or alienated one. The older generation would advise the younger about what to do and what not to do: evidence-based wisdom was passed down. But nowadays young people are often left to their own devices and that is an unhealthy situation - leaving some people vulnerable to criminal gangs.

We sometimes forget that at one time not so long ago your doctor could legally prescribe heroin (diamorphine), until regulations became more restrictive in the mid-1960s. Then there was the Misuse of Drugs Act that made it an illegal Class A drug, in the same year that Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs in the US.¹¹ Cannabis also was listed as a Class B drug, remaining that way except for 2004-09 - when it was classified as C (a lower punishment category) - before being moved back to B.

That is why in our Draft programme, under ‘immediate aims’, we say “end the war on drugs”: “… recreational drugs should be legalised and quality standards assured” - people with a “dependency problem should be offered treatment, not given a criminal record” (3.17: ‘Crime and prison’).¹² Anti-drug legislation has done far more damage than the drugs themselves and banning them magnifies the problems rather than solving them. Many people use something, legal or illegal, to pick themselves up and help them get through the day - they should not be punished for that.