Just get rid of them
While Tim Macindoe has taken the trouble to distance himself from psychoactive substances, he must surely be thanking his stars that he doesn’t have a puff shop on his patch. Meanwhile, David Bennett continues to dither in his usual way, hoping to offload the problem to the council, which, in turn, finds the whole issue difficult and is also dithering.
What Mr Bennett doesn’t seem to grasp is the vast majority of Hamilton residents don’t want psychoactive substances sold at all, anywhere. They are a social evil.
Mr Bennett also fails to understand that his voters will surely punish him if he does not drive through a solution in banning the sale of these drugs. He seems to think that it will all just go away within six months. Only the most naive would believe that. Stopping the sale of these products can be done only by central government; he knows it, and has the chance to do something useful for once. Straight away, I can think of two really easy ways:
1. The 41 substances sold at the puff shop can be reclassified as class 3 drugs.
2. The Psychoactive Substances Act can be amended to permit local authorities to refuse to allow (at their discretion) their sale anywhere in their jurisdiction. SP GARDNER Hamilton It’s a ‘‘treacherous attack’’ and a ‘‘dirty conspiracy’’, claimed Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose image as a devout Muslim and an honest man is the key to his political success. But he didn’t deny that the voice on the recordings was his, nor that the other voice was that of his son Bilal. He explained the phone calls by saying that they were a ‘‘shameless montage’’ of various things that he and his son had said in other, quite innocent conversations.
The four telephone conversations allegedly took place on December 17, the same day that the Turkish police arrested the sons of three cabinet members in Erdogan’s government for corruption, bribery and tenderrigging. This might easily have caused some alarm in the families of other cabinet members, especially since the dawn raids also uncovered large sums of money whose presence in the sons’ houses was hard to explain.
The police even found a moneycounting machine in the house of Baris Guler, son of Interior Minister Muammer Guler, and $4.5 million in cash was found hidden in shoe boxes in the house of Suleyman Aslan, director of the state-owned Halkbank, who was also arrested. In all 52 people, almost all of them connected in one way or another with the ruling AK (Justice and Development) Party, were arrested on that day.
In the alleged phone calls on December 17, the prime minister is asking his son Bilal to dispose of millions of euros in cash that are currently sitting in a house somewhere. Bilal is to entrust the money to several businessmen for safekeeping, and make sure that none is left in the house. In the first 24 hours after somebody posted these conversations on social media, they got 1.5 million hits. Now, if the calls are genuine, they were probably recorded by people who knew the arrests were going to happen on that day. (It’s unlikely that anybody was tapping Bilal’s phone all the time, and it’s too hard to tap a prime minister’s phone). So there is definitely a plot to hurt Prime Minister Erdogan – but it might be a plot whose weapon is the truth.
Here we have either a panicstricken prime minister instructing his son to hide the evidence of massive corruption – or a ‘‘shameless montage’’ that strings bits of innocent conversation together to lead people to a false conclusion that slanders the prime minister. Which is it? Well, it all sounds pretty normal to me. What son has not had occasion from time to time to tell his father that there are still 30 million euros to be removed from the house? What father does not sometimes have to warn his son not to go into details on the phone, as the line may be tapped? But some people have nasty, suspicious minds.
The phone calls are just the latest episode in a cascade of events that has shredded the carefully constructed image of Erdogan’s government, which has won three elections in 11 years with steadily increasing majorities. The trigger for these events, according to most observers, was a bitter but unexplained split between Erdogan and his erstwhile friend