PETER HITCHENS: A peaceable New Year occasion is now ‘harmful’ – as a result of we’re too tender on marijuana

We must all be punished because the British state will not enforce its laws against the dangerous and destructive drug, marijuana.

This punishment takes many forms, not least the stink of the supposedly banned drug slowly spreading across the entire country, and the ruin and misery of many families. But on New Year’s Eve it reached its maddest level yet. A major London park, Primrose Hill, was fenced off, barricaded and patrolled by security men to prevent the public from getting in.

I asked the Royal Parks why they closed it. Their response, as is so often the case these days, was actually not an answer. They said: ‘The decision to close Primrose Hill on New Year’s Eve was not taken lightly. In 2024 an estimated 30,000 people visited Primrose Hill to view the Mayor of London’s New Year’s Eve firework display.

‘This was not an organised event with an event organiser but a gathering in open parkland and we have limited controls that we can deploy to ensure public safety. Therefore, we decided that Primrose Hill would be closed and locked from 8pm on December 30, until January 1.’

People in north London have been going to Primrose Hill on New Year’s Eve to watch the fireworks for about 20 years. But on New Year’s Eve in 2023, there was a horrible murder there. I do not think it was the fault of the crowd.

A youth called Areece Lloyd-Hall, now 18, stabbed 16-year-old Harry Pitman in the neck for no reason. The two did not even know each other. The crime was typical of many similar acts of madness around the world, in which total strangers make merciless, inexplicable attacks on innocent people.

The court was told that Lloyd-Hall was ‘suffering from cannabis-induced paranoia’. This is one of many fancy ways of saying that the person involved has gone mad after lengthy use of marijuana, which is now common in British schools. Sometimes its victims just become tragically crazy. Sometimes they commit appalling crimes. Once you know this is going on, you will find it recorded everywhere. Lloyd-Hall has now been sent to prison for 16 years, for what that is worth.

My suspicion is that rather than act against the drug which lay behind the horrible crime, the authorities decided that a peaceful public gathering was too dangerous to be allowed, and stopped it. I have seldom seen a better example of a society that has gone completely off its head.

But the authorities will do anything to avoid acting directly against a drug which continues to have powerful protectors and advocates at the highest level.

No new law needs to be passed. The penalties for marijuana possession are already very severe. It is just that the police and the courts, and the politicians who guide their actions, don’t want to enforce them. For many years now it has been effectively decriminalised.

But because the law still remains in place, governments can pretend to voters that they still take a tough line. They don’t, and as far as I can discover, politicians and civil servants remain completely uninterested in the growing number of violent acts committed by people who have gone dangerously insane thanks to this drug.

So the rest of us will have to suffer, in many ways, for years to come.

The Night Manager and a hunt for an invisible enemy 

Without the wicked old Soviet Union, what do spy thriller authors have to write about? Not much, as the peculiar new series of BBC TV drama The Night Manager proves. I will never forget the words of Gennadi Gerasimov, the silky spokesman of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Rebuking unbelieving Right-wing journalists who could not grasp that Gorbachev was really dismantling the horrible USSR, Gerasimov sighed, smiled and said: ‘I am sorry that we have done to you the most terrible thing anyone can do to any country. We have deprived you of an enemy.’

He was right, and this problem explains much of the last 35 years of human history.

Politicians who talk tough rarely are

The more angry and militant they sound, the less I trust politicians on subjects such as immigration and deportation. And I was especially repelled by the behaviour of Tory Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp last week when he tried to make party capital out of the case of Alaa Abd El-Fattah, the unlovable Egyptian political activist.

Political dissidents in other countries, however heroic, are not always as nice as they look, and horrible bigoted anti-Jewish views are very common in Arab Muslim states. But you don’t cover up your mistakes, or cancel out the fact that you failed to protect our borders, by using mob language on the radio and TV.

Mr Philp repeatedly called Mr Al Fattah a ‘scumbag’ on broadcast media. Mr Fattah is pretty unappealing. But given that Mr Philp’s own party had granted citizenship to Mr Al Fattah in the first place, this sort of behaviour was embarrassing and futile.

I know all Conservative Shadow Ministers, including Kemi Badenoch, are in competition with the angrily militant Robert Jenrick for the title of noisiest person in the party. But men and women who want to be ministers need to learn to be measured in their speech. Otherwise, people like me will worry that they are untrustworthy demagogues who will undermine the law to get political advantage.

The same problem, a desire to appear effective when you are not, led to the lawless exile of Shamima Begum. I’d be quite happy for Ms Begum to face whatever charges are justified, when she gets back here.

But taking away her citizenship was a totalitarian gesture by feeble people trying to look tough.