“The narcotics trade provides financial basis for almost every other form of organized criminality. In Britain alone, remember, the market is worth 7 billion a year. It costs a further 7 billion in policing – and that’s without the associated costs of imprisonment and public health and everything else.“

Published in 2016, this crucial recount & trove of blistering inner details & insight from veteran NARC Neil Woods (who has since become a campaigner & writer) is a little out of date considering the staggeringly dramatic mutations that are exploding under the malicious social violence of the Conservative’s remorseless & extreme cuts to all & sundry (except the rich of course, who continue to be regaled with new peaks of corporate welfare munificence & yet more tax reductions & exemptions). The current, growing & spreading epidemic of gangs, drug expansion, the ‘county lines’ phenomenon, knife crime & violence, just relating to the ballooning drugs field alone is proliferating rapidly & regularly breaking new records. The “new poverty” & social deprivation wrought on the country & its communities, in all its savage arduous extremity, which was spearheaded by the Conservative led coalition government, creates the perfect conditions for this kind of societal festering. Just to confirm the kill, the Torys coincided this sweeping range of cuts & impoverishment with a massive reduction to police numbers & spending. You would think, given this marked, repeated tenacity & commitment for disaster & calamity that the Conservatives were actually representing the drug dealers themselves. But then again, they probably are aren’t they?

This was all precipitated, nurtured, secured, solicited & as far as I am concerned “planned” by the Tory party in entirety & the sole responsibility for this massive decline in safety, civility, security, fairness & quality of life lies with them & them alone in entirety. The ceaseless volley of admonitions, dire warnings & strenuous, earnest predictions from leaders & specialist within the front echelons of their professional fields (care workers, police chiefs, councils, civil servants, NGO’s, charities, journalists et al) to the unraveling, fallout & bloating of the incoming wave of crime that we are now witnessing, were consummately ignored, unheeded, sidelined or downplayed. They chose to never listen. It was a blanket & systemic insouciance, almost like a written response template or recorded message. Whilst the cuts continued to slash & carve into some of the most rudimentary, bare necessity & vital accoutrements of a developed society/rich country/first world nation, the Conservatives negated the previous governments target to eradicate child poverty, redefined the official term of child poverty as they knew & had chosen to increase both its severity & the ginormous amount of people that would be shoveled into such penury & crisis, & actually terminated the Child Poverty Unit enmass, both permanently & completely. You really see the heart & soul of that party in these actions & conscious decisions. As living, if not survival, conditions became harder, rougher & much more insecure, the infrastructure, departments & personnel that were present to help those deal with the spiraling crisis & expanding emergency were also ruthlessly destroyed, removed, effaced & starved. One of the worst & most unforgivable examples of this was the targeted destruction of Kids Company (that decision belonging more than anything to David Cameron & George Osborne which you must never ever forget), an immensely valued & successful organization that was basically the last palisade for troubled youth. As the organization was greatly cherished, they had to fabricate a smear & attribute the excuse of austerity in a demolition of gargantuan cynicism & hysterical mega hypocrisy. We can publicly bail out the banks for their own illegal wrongdoing with the victim’s funds (without a referendum or direct consultation), we can bail out abusive, Flybe or incinerate huge sums of tax payers toil on brain-melting folly like Hinkley Point C, HS2, Carillion, Norton Motorcycles or the “no ifs no buts” “lie down in front of the bulldozers” assured apocalypse of the Heathrow Third Runway death project, but when it comes to our kids, the most vulnerable of them, fuck em! – & vote conservative. This is the evil & a stratospheric criminal nature that we are dealing with in that cursed, perverse, malignant party of plutocratic vulgarian hooligans. Wise-up & rise-up.

“We need to take a moment and just consider the possibility of not confronting the issue of drugs as a war. Legalise and regulate the supply of narcotics and at a stroke you deprive the most vicious gangsters in the world of the 375 billion annual income that enables all their operations. At a stroke you would allow some of the most vulnerable people in society to seek help for their addictions, instead of being shoved into prison cells.”

Back to Neil Woods. Although his undercover work predates this recent deformity & broad scale worsening in criminal expansion, it is a very’ very valuable account & critique. The guy spent years under cover all over the country infiltrating gangs, criminal networks & gathering intelligence to make arrests. As the author is keen to stress, observing the drivers & social conditions, the corruption within the police & the futility of the whole, utterly & irrefutably discredited & sunk ‘War on Drugs’ mega failure (there are more drugs in circulation than ever with profits/annual turnover that just keep escalating) which was an imbeciles endeavor from the beginning (the ‘War on Terror’ is another total failure proving just as preposterous & ridden with the dumbest of shit-think). A war on poverty? A war on paedophilia? A war on corporate/white collar crime? A war on disinformation/deception/lying in political policy & decision making? A war on corruption in public institutions? No such thing. No such intention. No such thinking. & now, the Tory’s are actually posturing the “tough on crime” shit-gurgle. They conceived it, pushed it, stoked it, conjured it, fed it, baited it, bolstered it & unleashed it upon the nation, all with 100% commitment, full volition & labored premeditation, then they stand back & say that they are the candidate/body to stop what they just spent years fomenting & formulizing – the signature still fresh, the ink not even dry. The Conservatives are the biggest criminal entity in the whole country. The gravest & most severe threat, the most pernicious & wounding source of danger, catastrophe, ruin, harm & damage & the countries single largest security risk & direct detriment.

Good Cop Bad War is an excellent book. Besides its main focus, there is also a wealth of social journalism, psychology & other valuable deposits of information from various cases, operations & imbeds the author experienced. Neil’s powerful scurrility towards the ridiculous War on Drugs, which he obviously has exceptional clarity & credibility to pass precise & highly developed judgement on is withering & necessary. The Tory’s will never listen, as their criminal enterprise uses & even relies on any additional crisis for distraction, blame & justification for greater plutocracy, exploitation & abuse of power.

Neil woods with JS Rafaeli, 2016, Ebury Press, 312 pages