An amazing double life...and some thoughts on justice

A quick Google looking for an old friend's blog accidently revealed two street slang words for the club drug ecstasy.

Apparently both "Adam" and "Hug drug" are commonly used synonyms. The seemingly respectable Adam Hug has a bit of a sideline it would seem.

I am also reliably informed that Liverpool slang for the same pill is "Gary" in honour of Gary Ablett ('Tablet' gerrit?) the jobbing defender for both Liverpool and Everton during the 1980s and 1990s.

All of which brings back the memory of a young man who was recovering from drug addiction coming to talk to my class at school about the dangers. He proudly told us that there were 24 words for marijuana and could we name some of them? 57 different slang terms later (some of which the more mischieveous members of the class had clearly made up to labour the point) he gave up and starting trying to scare us with implausible stories about his friends.

The truth is that teenagers are always going to be one step ahead of whoever comes in to -school to tell them about the dangers of real life - because real life happens to them whilst the meetings discussing what people can and can't talk to them about rumble on in the background. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try but let's be honest with ourselves - teachers telling kids how to live their lives is never going to solve society's problems on it's own.

David Cameron says he's sat at the back of the class and seen the impact recovering addicts talking to children have but this is just so much fashionable nonsense. Here's Cameron waffling at the "Centre for Social justice" the disingenuous excuse for a think tank set up by "mister social justice" IDS;

"You cannot have a smaller state unless you have bigger, more responsible people. Growing levels of social breakdown are creating growing demands for welfare and other forms of government intervention. Limited government is impossible without renewing the forms of behaviour and social structure that prevent poverty and create community. Communities are not created from the top down, but built from the bottom up."


"Here, I don't think the voluntary sector has an important role to play. I believe that the voluntary sector has the crucial role to play."

Haven't we heard all this before? The deputy editor of Conservative Home, Sam Coates, who says he joined the Tories as an 'idealistic scouse teenager' (obviously can't have grown up in the same Liverpool I grew up in) thinks we have heard it all before - and he can't get enough of it;

"This is the kind of government our country desperately needs. We need Reagan-esque optimism now more than ever, not the cynicism British Conservatives can be prone to"

Well I know what Reaganite optmimism can lead to - and Mr Coates should too. It was Reaganite optmimism that led Maggie to "trickle down" and unemployment being a "price worth paying". He should know what that quack economics did to our city - and he should know that without state investment - in the New Deals, Objective one funding, Excellence in cities, our schools and hospitals and without the minimum wage and sure start and working and childrens tax credits and the regional development agencies the regeneration of Liverpool would have been held back for a generation.

The people of Liverpool do have the talent, skills and motivation to rebuild their city - we've shown that in the past few years. But as recently as 1997 parts of my local ward had unemployment of over 40%. (Some "golden economic legacy" eh, Gordon?) How is that a platform to build on? How can a city start to think about it's future when there's no hope for the present for so many of it's citizens? The voluntary sector plays a vital role in regeneration and in tackling social problems - but when Tories start talking as if it can somehow take over the role of government in tackling head on the major problems of today's society I start thinking about the last time they used this language and I shudder.


So bring in the ex-addicts and the teenage parents to tell the scare stories- but they'll never seem scary next to a life without a future. Take that hope away and all you're left with is a nervous teacher trying to explain how to put a condom on a carrot. Nothing but patronising words and phrases - and nothing will change, yet another generation will be lost and we'll just carrying telling them we told them so.

The majority of that class who could name 57 varieties of ganja, spliff or toke, left school that year - 1997, aged sixteen and many with barely a GCSE to their name.

Social Justice isn't some buzz word you can pick up and drop whenever you stop needing to rebrand yourself. I'll believe David Cameron is serious about tackling poverty and all of the ills that come with it, drugs included, when he starts recognising that there are real injustices in life that can't just be put right by some warm words and bit of a tax break for the charity sector. But when he realises that he'll realise that a lick of paint won't make up for his party having no real answer to poverty and injustice other than a few soundbites and a vain hope that it could all be sorted out without government, or the better off in society, having to lift a finger.