In defence of grannies

Just as with Housing Minister Caroline Flint's dangerous kite-flying suggestion that benefit claimants should have a responsibility to seek work in order to establish their right to council housing, Family Minister Kevin Brennan now says that, "in return for benefit payments, claimants will have a responsibility to move successfully through treatment and into employment."

Ms Flint sparked fury throughout the civil liberties movement as well as the housing lobby for this suggested gross abuse of people's rights in society and there is no doubt that Mr Brennan will receive an equally furious response in the context of drug abuse.

Benefits for sick and unemployed people are supplied by this society as rights, not privileges conditional on their level of health and drug addiction and Mr Brennan appears to be ignorant of the basic fact of drug addiction, that it is an illness with a physical basis and not merely a wilful and irresponsible example of continued bad conduct by the addict.

And as for the effect that this would have on addicted people, is Mr Brennan so insulated from the realities of life in this country that he has failed to read the newspapers at all over the last few weeks?

Because, if he had read them, even he might have noticed that almost all the victims of Ipswich murderer Steven Wright, who preyed on prostitutes in the city's red-light district, had turned to prostitution to finance their addictions.

Is this the fate that Mr Brennan wishes on drug addicts?

Does he really feel that cutting unemployment benefits will somehow miraculously put them back on the straight and narrow? Because it won't.

Or is it more truthfully the case that this government is merely trying to find excuses to cut back on social expenditure? It would certainly appear to be the case when you look at his other ideas.

If anyone has ever seen the disruption, distress and pain that can be caused by an addicted person in a family, they would be wary indeed of suggesting that that family, let alone the grandparents, should be saddled with the supervision, treatment and care needed by that person.

Certainly, grandparents have been increasingly involved in the care of addicts, but that has been simply because of necessity, given the lack of sufficient services, facilities and finance supplied by government - ask any practitioner in the field.

And parent or grandparenthood does not automatically confer on anyone the skills and abilities to cope with people as damaged as an addict.

What has happened is that funds are increasingly being channelled to police action against the suppliers, rather than care for their victims and, as any honest appraisal of the so-called "war against drugs" will show, the police are by no means winning that war.

What are needed are a realistic attitude to the whole problem and a new approach to the issue of drugs supply and drug abuse.

What are emphatically not needed are pompous pronouncement of abhorrence followed by simply dumping the problem back in the laps of the families and communities that produced the unfortunate victims in the first place.