Middle-class ‘care where coffee comes from but not their cocaine’

MIDDLE class drug-users care more about where their coffee comes from than the origin of their cocaine, a Tory peer said yesterday.

Victims’ commissioner Baroness Newlove said they were as guilty as the moped-riding criminal gangs for the wave of knife and gun attacks across the UK.

She told peers the perpetrators of ‘this wave of violence’ did not just include gangs but also the ‘middleclass drug users who are funding’ it. She said: ‘City workers who drink their Fair Trade coffee out of reusable cups during the week think nothing of the supply chain of the stuff they snort up their noses at the weekend. In my view they are as guilty as the moped riders.’

Lady Newlove, whose husband Garry was murdered by three youths in Warrington, Cheshire, in 2007, said social attitudes needed to change to stem the increase in crack cocaine use. ‘The franchising of drug supply across our country... has brought violent crime into provincial towns and villages, right into the heart of our countryside,’ she said.

‘It’s a symptom of the rotten supply chain of middle-class drug taking.’ Former Metropolitan Police commissioner Lord Hogan-Howe told the debate on the Government’s Serious Violence Strategy the increase in gun and knife crime was linked to drugs and called for the appointment of more officers.

He said too many people were carrying knives and called for an increase in the use of ‘intelligently targeted’ stop-and-search powers.

Opening the debate for the Government, Baroness Manzoor said ministers were extremely concerned about the increase in knife and gun crime and homicide.

She said too many young people had lost their lives in a wave of ‘senseless violence’, which had to stop. Independent crossbencher Lord Bird, founder of The Big Issue magazine, argued poverty was a major cause of ‘why we have crime in our streets’.

Of those caught up in crime, he said: ‘Very rarely do they come from the comfortable classes, they come the discomforted classes and the discomforted classes are the people who have been shortchanged on the kind of education that they desperately need.’

Tory peer Lord Balfe was deeply critical of the introduction of police and crime commissioners, branding the posts ‘totally useless’. He said: ‘What I would like to see is the police going back to doing a bit more policing.’

For the Liberal Democrats, Lord Paddick called for cuts in police budgets to be reversed to tackle the ‘epidemic’ of violent crime.

‘A rotten supply chain’