So it has come to this. A government so insecure in the fragility of its mandate, so lacking in confidence in its own arguments that it sacks a scientist for telling the truth. Namely that legally available alcohol is considerably more harmful than a number of high profile controlled subtances.

The fact is it was perfectly possible for the handed down decision of the Prime Minister to go against the advice of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (an awkward title if ever there was) to be robustly defended, politically if not intellectually. It was equally possible while doing so robustly to defend the independence of free academic enquiry and the right of scientists to present the evidence.

These are not incompatible things. The very point of ‘advisors’ is to provide ‘advice’. The point of scientists is to study the evidence and reach scientific conclusions. They do not make policy, neither do they justify the policy that is made. It is not their job. It is perfectly reasonable for politicians and policy makers to disagree with their advisors. To take in other considerations - social, political, even moral is an entirely acceptable approach..

The Government’s justification for its continuing a failed policy of prohibition and the enrichment of organised crime need only to be that is the alternative - regulation and taxation -remains unacceptable to the ’silent majority’ or to ‘middle England’ or to the Daily Mail. In other words, the scientists may be right but our reading of those we represent says that they are not convinced of the alternatives to prohibition.

One might think the Government wrong, but fair enough - it’s their view. However that would, of course, beg the question - ok now, so where’s the debate? But a debate would require a Government confident of their arguments. Instead we have a Home Secretary that has chosen to act like the Interior Minister of a banana republic. The sacking of David Nutt is the single most authoritarian act of any Home Secretary, certainly since the Miners’ Strike and perhaps in my lifetime.

Using organisational means to strangle debate and suppress dissent has been a failure of Labour’s apparatus for as long as I can remember. There have long been disturbing tendencies within the people’s Party to shut down discussion rather than take it on, to attempt to use rules, procedures, whatever power is available to kill opposition. The justification is usually the need for self-discipline. But it doesn’t work. The reality political battles are rarely won by procedural mechanisms alone. When Labour faced the treat of Trokskyite infiltration years of manipulating the rules had failed it require an intellectual and political confrontation to defeat cancer within the party.

But they don’t learn. The sacking of Professor Nutt by a former Union apparatchik is the politics of Labour’s internal fixing in the Government arena. I know about Labour internal fixing - I worked in it and I left.

Had Professor Nutt desperately wanted to keep his unpaid advisory role it would probably have been better not to draw a perfectly logical analogy between the relative safety records of horse riding, a dangerous business in which regularly results in hospitalisation, paralysis and death (even for Superman) and ecstasy where such incidents are rare and largely as a result of a lack of regulation. His statement was part of an argument that the classification of drugs should be based on the harm they cause. Truthful, certainly, wise, less so.

Professor Nutt’s answer was not that of a politician - that’s because he isn’t a politician. That is supposed to be the point of independent advisors.

The downfall of the new Labour project has not been so much about what new Labour did or did not do in power but the failure of many of its disciples to understand that Stalinism doesn’t work, never did, never will.