Blogs by Kathy Gyngell

18 April 2013 - Prisons & Addiction

The drug consumption rooms that Brighton’s committed drug legalising Green MP, Caroline Lucas, proposes, risk inflating the very public health and social problems she claims they would mitigate, writes Kathy Gyngell. Brighton has an acute drug problem.  But the much media-hyped ‘independent’ report laid before Brighton Council today offers no analysis ...

08 April 2013 - History

CPS Research Fellow Kathy Gyngell writes on her relationship with Baroness Thatcher, getting to know her as a result of an invitation to Downing Street and after her exit from power. Unlike most people my interactions with her were mostly woman to woman and surprisingly intimate.I first met Britain’s Iron Lady, ...

20 March 2013 - Social Policy

George Osborne’s reformed ‘modern’ state finds the family on the brink of extinction and one earner couple families under siege argues Kathy Gyngell. Liz Truss’s nanny subsidy policy announcement yesterday (£1200 pound per child for couples earning up to £300,000) put paid to any hope that the Coalition would honour their promise ...

25 February 2013 - Prisons & Addiction

Kathy Gyngell authored the Addictions reports for Breakdown and Breakthrough Britain, the Conservative Party’s 2007 Social Justice Policy Review. Her recent reports, The Phoney War on Drugs (CPS, 2009) and Breaking the Habit: why the state should stop dealing drugs and start doing rehab (CPS, 2011) have attracted widespread media coverage and attention. She researches, writes and ...

01 February 2013 - Social Policy

The hard headed Elizabeth Truss must be wondering what has hit her. Ever since the Resolution Foundation Report, published last October, the word is that the cost of childcare is forcing  mothers, unwillingly, out of the work force; that childcare here is more expensive here than in Europe; that maternal ...

12 December 2012 - Prisons & Addiction

With the publication of their “Breaking the Cycle” report, the Home Affairs Select Committee has thrown its weight behind the reverse case – the case for increasing demand and, in time, for the legalisation of all drugs in the UK, writes CPS Addiction expert Kathy Gyngell. Far from ‘Breaking the Cycle’ of ...

07 November 2012 - Prisons & Addiction

‘Let ‘em use’ or ‘lock ‘em up’. Recent demands for drug legalisation suggest that drugs policy is a matter of ‘either/ or’. And that’s what the voters of Colorado and Washington must have believed to risk this ‘putting the lunatics in charge of the asylum’ moment.But this polarisation is misinformed ...

15 September 2012 - Prisons & Addiction

Kathy Gyngell authored the Addictions reports for Breakdown and Breakthrough Britain, the Conservative Party’s 2007 Social Justice Policy Review. Her recent reports, The Phoney War on Drugs (CPS, 2009) and Breaking the Habit: why the state should stop dealing drugs and start doing rehab (CPS, 2011) have attracted widespread media coverage and attention. She researches, ...

06 March 2012 - Prisons & Addiction

The challenge for the international community has been to establish a regulatory system that ensures that the legitimate medical and scientific needs for opiates are met, whilst preventing diversion to illicit markets. Its achievement has been to limit worldwide adult illicit drug use to 5% while meeting these needs, says ...

24 February 2012 - Social Policy

CPS Research Fellow Kathy Gyngell argues that despite the focus of politicians on schools as agents of social mobility, evidence points that whatever the 'radical change' made, they actually have little effect. In the furore over Professor’s Ebdon’s appointment to Offa (or OffToff as it has now been indelibly named) one ...

31 December 2011 - 2012 Policy Resolutions

In the fifteenth of the CPS' 'UK Policy Resolutions for 2012' series, CPS Research Fellow Kathy Gyngell suggests reforms to the Payment by results method of drug rehabilitation. Yesterday, in the fourteenth in the series, Kieron O’Hara suggested some priorities for the Coalition in 2012.UK ...

07 December 2011 - Social Policy

Yesterday the Telegraph reported that, for the first time, the morning after pill was to be given out free over the phone; that the British Pregnancy Advisory Service will encourage ‘women’ to stock up on the ‘emergency contraceptive over Christmas and the New Year’ - despite that girls would ‘not ...

01 December 2011 - Prisons & Addiction

The Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC) is fast becoming our new public moral arbiter. With its urbane and intelligent chair, Keith Vaz MP, it has increasingly taken centre stage, dissecting in turn, responsibility for the riots, phone hacking and border control.Their launch this morning, of a comprehensive review into drug ...

22 November 2011 - Prisons & Addiction

Drug policy has become ‘a taboo area’; politicians lack the ‘courage’ to contradict ‘crude’ assertions about going ‘soft’ on drugs; “‘kneejerk’ opposition to change is allowed to continue unchallenged”. So Baroness Manningham Buller would have us believe. This is why politicians won’t take up her confused pro drug legalisation and ...

09 November 2011 - Prisons & Addiction

Watchdogs need watching, regardless.  Lost in debate over regulation versus a free and independent press is the detail of human failure. Last week we heard that safeguards intended to protect individuals from unnecessary and illegal surveillance, though statutory, had been completely ineffectual. A report on the working of the Regulation ...