Dinner party cocaine users ‘are fuelling the spate of knife killings’

Middle-class drug users should feel ‘guilty’ for fuelling a knife crime epidemic, the Justice secretary has said.

david Gauke claims that those who take cocaine at dinner parties are responsible for the rise in violence on city streets.

‘People who do that have to recognise they are fuelling the industry that’s resulting in the knife crimes, resulting in the difficulties we’re having in prisons,’ he said.

‘The violent crime we see inside and outside prison is strongly linked to the drugs trade, and there’s also a point about the damage to the fabric of our society. There’s a responsibility for middle-class people who take cocaine at a dinner party that when they see a story of a 15-year-old boy stabbed in Hackney, they should feel a degree of guilt and responsibility.’

Police Federation deputy treasurer simon Kempton has also blamed the affluent for creating the demand for cocaine, while security Minister Ben Wallace has warned the UK is ‘fast becoming the biggest consumer’ of the class a drug in europe.

The Justice secretary, who said he had never taken drugs himself, blamed the rise in new psychoactive drugs such as spice for an increase in prison violence. ‘in the early part of this decade new psychoactive substances became a much bigger problem within prisons. That has increased the tension within prisons and it has fuelled violence within prisons,’ he told sky News.

Mr Gauke also suggested there are too many women in Britain’s prisons, with many being jailed for non-violent offences.

He said: ‘a lot of female offenders are themselves victims of crime, quite a high proportion are victims of domestic abuse, so we need to make sure it’s properly focused.

‘a lot of them are non-violent, a lot of them have complex mental health issues we need to address.

‘Non- custodial sentences are certainly something to look at.’

He said a female offenders strategy would be published in the next few months. Knife crime is now at the highest level since comparable records began.

Police recorded 39,598 offences involving a knife in england and Wales last year – 22 per cent up on 2016. There have been more than 30 fatal stabbings in london alone so far this year. The capital has seen a 44 per cent surge in killings over the past year.

‘They should feel guilt and responsibility’