The French say that everyone has two countries–their own and France. Some of us are even luckier. I have three countries and my lifestyle has involved living in all three. I was born in Australia, I live most of the time in Britain and in 1960 I discovered India.

It was a good time to do so. Bombay, where I landed from the old British India ship, the Dumra, was still a sleepy city where you had to beg the taxi-drivers to go a little faster. The Raj had not quite gone. There were still a few British banks pretending nothing had changed, with the occasional English remittance man queuing to collect his monthly cheque. A posse of English jockeys came down for the racing season, the Bombay Gymkhana still played Rugby, and if you were an Indian it was not easy to get into Breach Candy swimming pool.

Using Bombay as a base I explored the rest of India but found nowhere else if would rather live. Then in 1962 the Indian Army liberated Goa and as soon as the shipping service from Bombay to Panaji opened I was on the first ferry.

I loved Goa from the start. It was India but it wasn’t. It was as if the Goans had carefully selected those parts of Portuguese life that suited them, absorbed them and rejected the rest. The English gave India sport and clubs, a lasting legacy still well entrenched. (It is easier to get into a gentleman’s club in Pall Mall than it is to be accepted as a member in many an Indian club.)

The Portuguese gave Goa song and drink. The first things I noticed as I wandered around Panaji on my first night there nearly 40 years ago was that nearly every second place was a bar or a liquor shop. From the bars and from shuttered window and dimly-lit houses came the sound of wonderful singing.

I left India and went to live in Australia and then London. But after eight years I was back in Bombay. It had changed. Progress had caught up with it. Success had taken over. It was all hustle, bustle and expansion. So I took the ferry again and went down to Goa for another look. It was the same, still as sleepy and laid back as ever.

After some hesitation my wife, who is from Bangalore, embarked on the daunting task of building a house in Goa. It was supposed to take two years. It took five. Still it is now finished and up and running and the whole of my family and some chosen friends stay there as often as possible.

Adapting to a Goan lifestyle, rewarding though it is, requires a lot of effort. Over the years the family has developed a series of rules which I am happy to pass on to non-Goans in the hope that it will ease their rites of passage.

1. Lower your expectations. If you expect too much you will be disappointed. The Goan lifestyle has developed over 500 years and remains very different from that of non-Goans. Do not fight it. Accept it for what it is.

2. To this end, do not attempt to do too much in one day. My elder daughter, Aliya, a great list-maker, began by making lists of everything she planned to do each day but gave up when she became depressed each night at how few items she was able to cross off. Now she sets herself a target of just one task a day and goes to bed happy.

3. Realise that Goans lived in a different time zone. If they say that will turn up they will, but they may be several hours late. It is no good taxing them about this because their excuse will be impeccable.

4. Avoid dealing with government officials wherever possible. Engage the services of a local to do it for you. It will not be any quicker but it will save you a lot of emotional energy.

5. Gossip is a mainstay of Goan life. Be prepared to have some to exchange but try to stay out of family quarrels–of which there are many.

6. Goa is the last stronghold of the afternoon nap, progress have destroyed it in the rest of India. So never ring anyone between 2pm and 5pm.

7. Have a project, so you won’t become bored. I feel I know Catholic Goa reasonably well so my next project is to explore Hindu Goa and the fusion between the two religions that I am told is in many ways unique.

After that, who knows? Who cares? In good Goan fashion, something will turn up.

Published in The Bulletin, 9 December 2003

The year 2003 marked the end of professional politics and the return of the celebrity politician, the man or woman whose face is instantly recognisable because we’ve seen it on the TV or the cinema screen but whose policies we neither know nor care about.

The election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California after a campaign in which he refused to define what he stood for, offer the slightest hint of what he planned to do about the state’s economic crisis, or debate anything at all with his political rivals, is bound to be copied and is another blow to democratic process.

Let me remind you what it was once like. Politicians joined the party they felt best represented their political principles. At election time they went around their electorate explaining to the voters what their party’s policies were and how they planned to implement them. The voters expected the candidates to turn up in a hall in their constituency or in the street–if they were brave enough–and submit themselves to questions.

Television took away some of that intimacy between voter and politician but in Australia, the United States and Britain there would be at least one major televised debate at which the issues would be discussed. The only issues discussed in the Schwartzenegger election campaign were whether he was a serial groper of women. The split went three ways: “Yes, he was”, “No, he wasn’t”, and “Why didn’t he grope ME?” What had happened to the politics?

In the new era which I believe 2003 has ushered in, celebrity status and presentation will replace politics. Advertising gurus, spin doctors, public relations advisers and those journalists who have taken the walk of shame to become government press officers, will be kings. First, as they did with George W. Bush, they will be the ones to find the candidate. After Swartzenegger’s success it was seriously suggested in America that Oprah Winfrey should stand for President against Bush. What next–a “Pop Idol” contest for political candidates?

Next, they will coach their man or woman in how to handle the people. You can already see their influence at work everywhere, and especially in Australia. If there’s a scandal and the media seeks information, refuse to answer. If forced to answer, deny everything. If the press persist with it, appoint a committee of inquiry and hope that by the time it reports the public will have forgotten what it was all about. (see: the Hutton Inquiry in Britain.)

Using these tactics, politicians can be so thickly coated in Teflon that no scandal will stick to them. Journalists and authors can uncover as much as they like, turn the searchlight, for example, on the waterside workers’ strike and the government’s plans to break it using troops, or on the behaviour of leaders before and after the Tampa affair, party slush funds, or the lies told to justify the war against Iraq. What happens? Nothing. Yes we know the public feels it has been misled because the polls tell us so, but where’s the outrage? The calling to account? The sackings? The criminal charges?

This year showed us that it is not apathy–look how many people turned up at the anti-war rallies–but despair, the feeling that nothing the public can do will really make any difference to governments who are confident that they have finally mastered the art of managing the electorate. Look at how cleverly President Bush is handling the growing American casualty rate in Iraq. Other presidents have turned up at the funerals of servicemen killed in wars like Vietnam and were filmed comforting the bereaved relatives.

“No, no, no,” said Bush’s advisors. “That links you with the casualties. The perception will grow that you have something to do with the soldiers’ deaths.” So the bodies and the wounded from Iraq are flown into US Air Force bases in the USA at night. Press and TV are banned. TV is discouraged from covering soldier’s funerals and Bush does not even talk about them. Iraq was a clean, surgical war and no one died.

There is a glimmer of hope. The American press, since 9/11 the most servile in the Western world, is at last asking some hard questions. But they are nowhere near as tough as those raised on the web, the people’s forum of 2003.

When Bush won the Senate’s approval to spend another $87.5 billion on Iraq, the mainstream media saw it as a victory for the White House over over Democratic and Republican senators who had baulked at saddling the American taxpayer with the costs of the war.

It took the website MoveOn.org to express what many American citizens felt. It noted that $87.5 billion could have paid for 10,0000 new schools or two million new teachers in the US. “If there is money for Iraq,” MoveOn asks, “Why isn’t there money for America.”

At least we began to calm down a little in 2003, to move away from the mistaken perception since 9/11 that we faced danger everywhere. The truth has always been, of course, that in the very aspects of our life that seemed to have caused us most unease, our safety has immeasurably improved. Most of our forebears did not live long enough to be worried about the things we have been worrying about this year because they died early from industrial accidents, poverty and disease.

Our problem has been that modern media tells us more than ever before about what is happening around us and does it in a manner that frightens us. Matthew Engel, a journalist himself, says newspaper distort the facts, TV news distorts the facts utterly, and 24-hour non-stop news distorts the facts utterly, totally and completely. “We don’t mean to do it, guv,” he says. “We don’t lie. But the parameters under which we operate just ensure that we mislead.”

It’s a dilemma for the media that is probably unsolvable. It can hardly ignore terrorist acts, even though to do so would defeat one of the terrorists’ main aims–publicity for their cause and an advertisement for new recruits. But the way terrorist acts are presented–a drama with each episode crafted like a thriller, with no proper assessment of the real risk–causes alarm, concern and faulty perceptions.

Out there in the rest of the world there has been a perception–over the past, say, 25 years–that the British, who have had more experience of terrorism than just about anyone else, went around in fear of IRA bombs. In fact most of them were getting on with the reality of their everyday lives. The fact is that more people died on British roads each year than were killed in the entire history of the Irish troubles. As the Qantas pilot told his passengers as he approached Sydney airport, “Folks, the safest part of your journey is over. The most dangerous is about to begin, so drive carefully.”

I see 2003 as the year when we realised that if, in the end, to defend ourselves against terrorism we had to change our way of life so radically that it became unrecognisable from what it once was, then the terrorists would have won. Yes, we continued to take care but we got on with our lives while recognising what the real risks were, and reassured by the fact that if we didn’t smoke, didn’t get involved in a road accident and were not murdered by someone we knew, then we’d probably make it to a happy old age.

It was a year of strange alliances, none quite so strange as that between Zionists and Christian fundamentalist groups, some from the extreme right. In France French Zionists formed an alliance with some neo-Nazi groups to confront the Muslim community of France. There were similar unions in Holland, and in Britain right-winger Martin Webster warned against what he termed the “pro-Zionist turn of the British extreme right.” In October 3,000 Christian Zionists from all over the world celebrated the Feast of the Tabernacle in the streets of Jerusalem as a show of solidarity with Israel.

What’s going on? There is a religious explanation and a political one. Christian Zionists oppose any territorial concessions at all to Palestinians because they believe that Jewish settlements built on Palestinian territory in the Holy Land will bring about the Second Coming of Christ. Politically, the extreme right believes that Israel is a key country in the on-going war against Islam. An American extreme right website, http://sm.org/exegesis, preaches, “Saving Israel is even more crucial than defeating the Left. We should not relax in the battle against cultural Marxism, but even more urgent than waging war on Marxism is the need to save Israel from its own leaders and from total destruction.”

It is certainly true that Israel had a lot to worry about in 2003. International reporting concentrated on the military struggle with the Palestinians and overlooked Israel’s economic situation, which in the long run may prove more important. Strikes were widespread, unemployment high and rising. Deflation–as per the Consumer Price Index–was running at the crippling minus 4.6 per cent and there were no obvious remedies in sight.

This gloomy outlook in Israel, with no sign of any let-up in suicide bomber attacks, could explain the deepening divisions in the Australian Jewish community–as witnessed in the controversy over the award of the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize to Palestinian scholar Dr Hanan Ashrawi. The attempts at silencing debate and the level of abuse in website exchanges over the issue marked a sad moment for a community previously renowned in Australia for its tolerance.

At least one American commentator, historian George Feifer, was concerned that even the American military establishment was forming strange alliances. “The military’s scorn for constitutional principles, its growing conviction that it is morally superior to the civilians it supposedly serves, its turning into an agent of the far religious right, is scarier than most people imagine.” British critic Hugh Brogan went further. “Today the thoroughgoing militarisation of the US foreign policy is the most worrying of all the worrying portents of the 21st century.”

Perhaps a better contender was an event that took place on 15 October–China became the third state on the planet (after the former Soviet Union and the United States) to launch a manned spacecraft. The Pentagon saw this as further evidence of a “China threat”, more proof that China’s huge population and booming economy was providing it with the potential to challenge America. It looked as if the now infamous neo-Conservative document, “Project for the New American Century”, was proving prophetic–”The focus of strategic competition has shifted from Europe to East Asia.”

But have the Washington think-tanks missed the real thrust of China’s strategy? What if instead of trying to confront the military might of the United States, Confucian Asia began in 2003 the process of “buying” the United States. Over the year China bought $43 billion of Treasury Bonds and $35 billion in agency bonds, worth about 20% and 16% respectively of its total overseas purchases. This means that China was helping finance the Bush administration’s enormous budget deficit, one which US Treasury officials keep telling us is “manageable”. If so, why do they look shifty when they say it?

Washington and the International Monetary Fund complained bitterly that China was deliberately keeping the exchange rate low and called for China to let market forces determine the value of its currency. This is a bit rich when it is clear that neither the IMF or the Bush administration really believes in free markets. They interfere with markets whenever it suits them. As Joseph Stiglitz, professor of economics at Columbia University and a Nobel prize winner, points out, “Bush supported bailouts for the airlines, unprecedented subsidies for agriculture and [illegal] tariff protections for steel.”

China is lucky that its huge foreign currency reserves give it the freedom to ignore the US and and IMF because once again it has shown its mastery of basic economic principles. Is it really possible that the US does not realise that every time an American company chooses to cut its costs by ordering from China, it effectively exports American know-how and brings closer the day when American manufacturing skills are lost forever? Or is it that short-term profit now so dominates the American business mentality that no one cares about the future?

In the absence of a sensible China policy from Washington, China’s other trading partners–Australia, the UK, Europe–need to engage in direct talks with the Chinese. This year has shown that to stand by and watch the growing tension between China and the US is no longer an option.

It was clearly unfair that business could move freely around the world looking for the cheapest labour but workers could not freely move to countries paying the highest wages. Their attempts to do so were met with punitive immigration restrictions, detention camps, and deportation. But 2003 will go down in the history of labour relations when the workers, helped by technology, struck back.

It began in Britain. A whole swathe of companies whose businesses involved telephone calls and computer operations decided to move their call centres to India–HSBC, British Airways, British Telecom, Lloyds TSB, Prudential, Standard Chartered, Norwich Union, Bupa, Reuters, Abbey National, Powergen and–wait for it–even British Rail timetable inquiries. You want to know the last train from London Paddington to Oxford, how much is the off-peak fare, and is there a buffet car? You telephone British Rail and a young Indian woman sitting in an air-conditioned office in Bangalore will be happy to tell you.

Since she will be paid about one fifth what her counterpart in Britain was getting, at first sight this is business seeking the cheapest labour. But her wage will be far more than she could earn in India, she didn’t have to emigrate to get the job, and there is a certain historical justice to the deal. Britain got rich during the industrial revolution by destroying the manufacturing capacity of India. It forced India to supply cotton for British mills and banned it from producing finished cotton goods itself. Now the jobs Britain stole two hundred years ago are going back to India.

It is wishful thinking to believe that something similar is not going to happen in Australia. Standards of education in India are as high as in Australia, and in some sectors higher. Almost all educated Indians speak English and are computer literate. As the process of transferring lowly call centre jobs accelerates, higher-paid jobs in the First World will be threatened–managers, accountants, computer programmers, IT consultants, biotechnicians, designers–even lawyers.

Britain expects to lose to India some 30,000 executive positions in the finance and insurance industries between 2003 and 2010. The United States expects to lose 3.3 million by 2015. Why should Australia be immune from this trend? As the Oxford academic George Monbiot says, “For the first time in history the professional classes of Britain and America [and Australia] will find themselves in direct competition with the professional classes of another nation.”

In mid-summer came a traumatic reminder that women’s rights still have a long way to go. Dozing in front of the TV set I was jerked awake by the most horrendous, heart-rending screams of pain. On the screen was a documentary called “The Day I Will Never Forget.” It was a graphic account of female circumcision. The screams were coming from a thirteen year-old girl being held down in her family home in Kenya and having her clitoris removed by an old woman with a needle and a knife.

The sub-titles told the viewers that the girl was screaming “Mama! Mama! She’s killing me.” But, of course, Mama was not going to help her because Mama was one of the people holding her down. The next day the TV critic of the Evening Standard said that in many years of watching all sorts of television for a living, no programme had ever made him actually vomit before. “Watching ‘The Day I Will Never Forget’ was like the very worst sort of nightmare, the one from which you can’t wake up”. He said it was not the gore or the screams–he had seen that on TV hospital drama series. It was the insane enthusiasm of a culture whole-heartedly in the grip of madness.

Not that dreadful things do not happen to children in Western cultures. A young couple appeared in a British court in October because either the father or the mother had punched in the face of their nineteen-months-old son so viciously that he died from brain damage. They weren’t charged with murder because each blamed the other and there was no independent evidence as to who had done it. The father was sentenced to two years jail for cruelty–the autopsy showed that the toddler had broken bones from earlier assaults. The mother was given a conditional release.

But altruism is alive and well. Christian Smith (24) heard a disturbance in the street outside his house in Oldham last August. He went out to investigate and found four schoolgirls being harassed by a gang of teenage bullies. Smith, who was 6ft 4in tall, remonstrated with the youths and drove them off. They returned soon afterwards with a larger group and beat and stabbed Smith to death. The mother of one of the fifteen year-old girls he tried to protect said, “I owe my child’s life to him. He did what he felt he had to do. He died in doing it but he died a hero.”

It was a year in which we all increased our use of the new international language–numbers. I swear that I overheard one side of a telephone conversation which went as follows:

Caller: Do you have FS8842571 slash 9607? No. 65973821? (Pause) 97535701 dash 83762. (Pause) 0603. 9471. (Pause) W25BS. 4. (Pause) 6824KK.

As you might have guessed the caller was ordering an item from a mail order catalogue, paying for it by credit card, providing his post code and taking down his order reference number. But a visitor from outer space overhearing conversations like this–and they are becoming more frequent– would think that we converse largely in numbers.

If a look around the world in 2003 upsets you, if war, famine, man’s inhumanity to man, political skullduggery, the lies of our leaders and their minions, the rape of the environment, the greed of individuals and corporations–in short, our failure to be able to organize things so that we all benefit from our short time on this planet–fills you with despair, then I suppose there are really only two things to do.

You can take Voltaire’s advice and concentrate on cultivating your garden. Or you can listen to Alasdair Gray, the Scottish novelist and science fiction writer. He says, “Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.” Australia is still in its early days and still has a chance to be that better nation.

Kennedy’s Wars
Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam
by Lawrence Freedman
Oxford University Press, £20
528pp

In the middle of the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff came to President Kennedy and gave him the bad news. The Cuban-exile troops were trapped on the beach. Kennedy would have to reverse his public pledge and openly introduce American air and naval power if the invasion to topple Castro were to succeed.

Kennedy’s reaction was interesting. He did not say, as he well might have, that he could not risk such a move because it would provoke Moscow. Instead he was inclined to agree to protect his public image. He said he would “rather be called an aggressor than a bum.”

But when his military advisers failed to come up with a clear and credible proposal to save the invasion, Kennedy’s political instincts took over. Faced with impending failure, he either had to raise the stakes and risk conflict with the Soviet Union or quit. As this brilliant and perceptive study makes clear, Kennedy’s claim to be a great American president probably rests on that single strength–he knew when to quit.

Kennedy was in charge during some of the most dangerous days of the Cold War. He confronted communism in Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam. He and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev took the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust during the Cuban missile crisis of 1963. But again Kennedy knew when to quit and Khrushchev responded to his mood and quit too–just in time.

Freedman, who has made full use of all the new sources available since the fall of Communism, says that the wars which often seemed so close during Kennedy’s few years in office, were in the end not fought–at least by Americans. “He left the Cold War in a far less dangerous state than he found it.”

Freeman is a sympathetic historian. He points out that the historian knows what happened next and therefore has to resist the temptation to highlight missed opportunities, recklessness, misperceptions and miscalculations. Kennedy never knew that his enemy, Castro, would outlast another seven American presidents with his revolution intact, that Vietnam would turn into a cruel and tragic war, and–most important of all–that Soviet Communism would collapse.

He had to fight the Cold War on a day-by-day basis, defend the free world with all the vigour he could muster and yet avoid a nuclear war that could end civilisation as we know it. His strength was that he had a strategy for doing just that. Freedman explains this with admirable clarity–and throws in a few surprises.
For example, he says that Kennedy had respect for the Soviet Union as a competitor for international influence, believed that there could be peaceful co-existence, had no plan for winning the Cold War and wanted a nuclear test ban treaty from the start of his administration. This was no “better dead than Red” president.

Yes, he made mistakes. He had an exaggerated view of the extent to which communist insurgencies around the world were controlled by Moscow. Only late his in presidency did he realise that these conflicts were better dealt with on their own terms rather than by big power bargaining.

He thought the Soviet economy could sustain the growth of its military indefinitely and he took Khrushchev’s bluster seriously. “It took until 1963 for him to get the measure of Khrushchev and start to appreciate the severity of his opponent’s problems–in agriculture, economics and alliance measurement.”

Kennedy’s strategy for handling the Soviet Union developed over the years. It was one that came naturally to him as a politician but, says Freedman, might well have been taken from a book, “Deterrence or Defence” written by the British strategist Basil Liddell Hart and which Kennnedy had reviewed for the Saturday Evening Post in 1960:

“Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent and always assist him to save his face. Put yourself in his shoes–so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil–nothing is so blinding.”

As applied by Kennedy, this became known as the graduated or flexible response, moving forward in crises one step at a time, raising at each stage pressure on opponents, probing their will, exploring opportunities for a settlement even while preparing to up the ante.

For Kennedy it seemed to work. He looked for military measures that were enough to satisfy conservatives at home without risking major war while “negotiated outcomes were pursued to the extent that any conservative revolt could be contained.”

In this he was helped by Khrushchev, especially during the Cuban missile crisis. Khrushchev listened to the trigger-happy exhortations of his own generals, put himself in Kennedy’s shoes and decided that Kennedy to had to cope with a military establishment itching for battle. Further, Khrushchev was worried that the American military might overthrow Kennedy and seize power.

Freedman says that this issue was not wholly a Soviet fantasy. Two Washington journalists, Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey had recently published “Seven Days in May”, describing how a military coup might occur in Washington, and Kennedy had not dismissed such an idea completely.

The behaviour of the air force chief, General Curtis LeMay, certainly suggests that a coup could have been a possibility. LeMay told the president that his handling of the Cuban crisis in the early stages was “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich”. When Kennedy and Khrushchev reached a settlement, LeMay railed at Kennedy that this was “the greatest defeat in our history”. He even considered ignoring Kennedy’s deal and attacking in any case.

This book is scholarly yet very readable. It shows a new and softer side to Kennedy. Freedman suggests that Kennedy was lucky in that he presided over a turning point in the Cold War that was not so much to do with American policy as the fact that the Soviet challenge simply ran out of steam.

But he still gives Kennedy full credit for demonstrating in words and deeds that the superpowers had to co-operate to prevent a nuclear catastrophe–a lesson that has the same relevance today as it did during John F. Kennedy’s bright but all too brief reign.

Buy Kennedy’s Wars — US | UK

Three years into the government’s ten year strategy to fight drugs, the war is over. The government lost. Not only is Britain awash with drugs but they are more affordable and more easily available than ever before. The time has come to face the fact that drugs have become just another part of our leisure activity.

British kids spend as much on Ecstasy as the whole nation spends on tea and coffee. Cocaine is almost as freely available as alcohol and is nearly as popular. And it is not just the young, the trendy or the socially-deprived who are recreational drug users. Everyone’s at it.

Just a cursory study of the background of people mentioned in drug-related stories in the national newspapers turned up the following occupations: plumbers, photographers, psychiatrists, doctors, receptionists, accountants, actors, dancers, chefs, waiters, investment bankers, PR executives, TV producers, models, footballers, airline cabin crew, policemen, solicitors, barristers, doctors, and journalists.

No one wants to admit any of this because the subject is a political, emotional, religious, social and economic minefield. No one even wants to discuss the fact that the war is over and that we need to consider what we do now.

This is because accepting defeat would involve admitting that the whole drugs war–both here and in the USA–has been a sham. A strategy to bring the drugs trade under control has always been available but this strategy is not acceptable in the new global economic order.

If London and Washington were serious about the drugs war they would hit the drugs barons where it hurts–in their pockets. They could use their powers to regulate banking and the international electronic money transfer system to halt the transfer of illegal monies. But they would also have to eliminate all off-shore banks and tax havens as legitimate hide-outs for capital.

But, of course, they cannot do that because legitimate business in Britain and the United States does not want the off-shore tax havens closed. The hypocrisy of the drugs war is that Washington and London say that they are waging war on drugs when they know that there are more important issues–namely banking and free trade.

The accumulated profit from drugs, estimated at $500 billion, sloshes around the world banking system until it can be laundered and the money-laundering capital of the world is London.

True, the government has authorised the Bank of England, the British Bankers’ Association, Customs and Excise, the Serious Fraud Office, Scotland Yard, the City of London Police, the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service–all liaising through the National Criminal Intelligence Service–to crack down on drugs-money laundering.

But where are the ten year sentences for drug barons and the financial services advisers who helped them wash their money? Their absence is explained officially as the difficulty in defining legally at what point dirty money becomes clean.

But there is another, unofficial reason. City institutions welcome the flood of drugs money into Britain arguing that it is safer for it to be laundered and then go into legitimate financing rather than move around unaccountably in the black economy. And it’s good business.

And here we are at the crux of why we lost the drugs war–economics and the theory of the market. Everyone underestimated the power of the profit motive on the supply side and the appeal of drugs on the demand side. All the police, armies, secret services, prisons and executions in the world cannot buck a market where the tax-free profit on a kilo of cocaine is 20,000 per cent.

All the drugs education in the world cannot overcome the fact that many people find in drugs enormous pleasure and feel that the state has no moral authority to deny them that pleasure–even if there are health risks.

Another reason the anti-drugs campaigners lost the war was that their strategy was wrong. They should have said, “Mind-bending drugs have been part of human culture since time immemorial. Why, as recent as the early years of the twentieth century, heroin and cocaine were legal and popular–Coca-Cola was originally made with cocaine.

“True, the world might be a better place if nobody took anything that could harm them. But since they seem determined to do so, we need to learn to live with drugs in such a way that they do the least possible damage. Let’s work out what this way might be.”

Instead they embarked on a Crusade that was based on racial and religious bigotry. American racial contempt for the Chinese became focussed on their opium-smoking habits, and the Protestant missionary societies in China and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union set out on a moral campaign to protect the white world from the horrors of opium.

Even today, the war against drugs remains in many ways a religious matter rather than a law-and-order one. The anti-drug lobby speaks of drug-taking as “evil . . . immoral . . . a sin . . . an offence against God that can result in the loss of your soul”.

Yet how can a campaign be a moral one when, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman says, “It leads to widespread corruption, imprisons so many, has so racist an effect, destroys our inner cities, wreaks havoc on misguided and vulnerable individuals and brings death and destruction to foreign countries?”

He might have added: how can the campaign be a moral one when it so terrifies American doctors that they turn away from their patients’ cries of pain and refuse to prescribe morphine for them in case they run foul of the Drug Enforcement Administration for over-prescribing?

With the war over, where do we go from here? How about licensed sales outlets for drugs, a sort of drugs off-licence, where initially cannabis and Ecstasy would be on sale at reasonable prices. There would be a minimum age for purchase, just as there is now for alcohol and tobacco. The drugs would be supplied by licensed manufacturers to ensure the purity and safety of the product. Driving under the influence of drugs would carry the same penalties and stigma as driving under the influence of alcohol.

Drugs off-licences would save Britain the £800 million a year spent on enforcing anti-drug laws. If the drugs were taxed at the same rate as alcohol and tobacco they would provide the Treasury with revenue of at least £1 billion a year. They would cut the prison population by ten per cent at a stroke, reduce crime and violence and put the drug bosses out of business.

I have little hope that such a scheme will be adopted. It is too logical and as the American psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Szaz has pointed out, it is useless to present facts and logic to the anti-drug lobby. He says the war on drugs is a mass movement characterised by demonising certain objects and persons–”drugs . . . addicts . . . traffickers”–as the incarnations of the Devil.

Hence there is nothing to be gained by trying to point out to its supporters that the anti-drugs lobby has lost the war. “Since he wages war on evil, his very effort is synonymous with success.”

The Notting Hill Gate, where I have lived for the past forty years, is a very different place than the one portrayed in newspapers during the Peter Mandelson affair.

There may be a few stars of politics, stage, screen, radio, TV, the modelling and fashion world who have chosen Notting Hill–often in the hope of a quiet time–but there are also a lot of hard-working, ordinary people just getting on with their lives who are none too happy to see their neighbourhood described as “exclusive. . . chic . . . fashionable . . . trendy.”

We all came here because of pleasant, tree-lined streets, tasteful, understated architecture, not much traffic, good public transport, and–at the time–reasonable prices. And even before Lady Porter, Westminster City Council would give you a generous mortgage with interest at 6.5 per cent fixed for the whole 25 year period and then offer you a grant or two to help refurbish the place. Was this a suspect deal? Should I have registered it?

We stayed because the cosmopolitan nature of the area represented multi-cultural London at its best. There are restaurants of seventeen different national cuisines within five minutes walk of my house. The local junior school, Hallfield, counted 26 different nationalities among its pupils when my three kids were there–the broadest cultural mix in the country.

We even enjoyed the notoriety the area once had–Christine Keeler, “Lucky” Gordon (I had a Christmas Card from him from Jamaica just the other day), the Mangrove cafe in All Saints Road (the best flying fish in London), and the excitement of the biggest street carnival in Europe.

All right, everything in the area is now expensive. A house is going to cost you half a million, an ordinary drink at the Cobden–once a working men’s club, now a chic, members-only nightspot–is £4. But Notting Hill is not exclusive. It remains, as it always has done, an inclusive area, a real melting pot. Where else in London would you find as next door neighbours a European merchant banker, a West Indian schoolteacher, and a Cockney window cleaner.

Moreover, all things considered, we get on well with each other. As the kids at Hallfield sing every morning:

“And the creed and the colour and the name don’t matter,
When I needed a neighbour you were there.”

Precisely.