The most sinister thing I have heard all year was this week’s revelation that British government doctors secretly sought to drug troublesome teenagers in the 1960s – and we have only just found out.

One of the pills they wanted to use was called Haloperidol. Its side effects include incurable lifelong twitching, delirium and rigid muscles.

This plan was stopped, but another worrying substance, Beclamide, was given to boys at a Yorkshire ‘Approved School’ (a state-inspected home for troubled teens). Neither the boys nor their parents were told of this experiment.

One of the pills they wanted to use was called Haloperidol and its side effects include incurable lifelong twitching, delirium and rigid muscles

To qualify for the secret chemical cosh, you had to be ‘impulsive, explosive, irritable, restless and aggressive’, which for teenage boys is more or less a description of being alive and awake. Both schemes were endorsed by the Home Office’s own in-house psychiatrist, Pamela Mason. How many other such horrors happened – are perhaps still happening – without us knowing?

I have long suspected that the Home Office – and much of our elite – are quite keen on doping the population. Despite making various militant noises over the years, this secretive department has quietly filleted the drug laws so that they are now the boneless wonder of the western world.

For many years our prisons have pretended not to notice the epidemic use of illegal narcotics behind bars

And for many years our prisons have pretended not to notice the epidemic use of illegal narcotics behind bars. I suspect the authorities hoped prisoners would be so stupefied that they would not riot, or escape in large numbers – things the Government greatly fears, and which have destroyed many Cabinet Ministers.

This policy is now going badly wrong, as cannabis is not in fact the peaceful drug some claim. Many of the drugs readily available in jail, such as the synthetic ‘Spice’, make their users more violent, not less.

The Government has also been quite happy to allow pharmaceutical companies to run huge experiments on adults and children with sketchily tested and unproven tablets that I would not give to a dog, even if I disliked it.

Astonishing numbers of people are now regularly taking mind-altering drugs – Ritalin for children who get bored in school, ‘antidepressants’ for unhappy adults (and sometimes both together, as adults now have ‘ADHD’ and children are allegedly ‘depressed’). Having wrongly feared that George Orwell’s 1984 nightmare of drabness and surveillance would come true, we missed the much more accurate warning in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Huxley didn’t just foresee the state rummaging about in the womb, the abolition of parents, the family and private life, the cheery disposal of the old and ill, and the distraction of a wage-slave population by flashy entertainment and sex.

He predicted the invention of an all-purpose happiness drug called ‘Soma’. It would keep the middle classes content, and could be used in spray form to quell riots by the poor. He said it would have ‘all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects… there is always delicious Soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon’.

REWRITING OUR HISTORY? THAT'S HARD TO SWALLOW AS a child I never took to Swallows And Amazons. I had a boarding school headmaster who drove us ceaselessly out of doors, made us accompany him on to the heaving, open sea (without lifejackets) in an ancient ketch, taught us to make fires, camp in the rain, gut fish and endure more than our fair share of mud, wet and cold. I had no idea how lucky I was, and I am sure it was very good for me. But as a result I didn’t much want to read about such things, let alone do them on my holidays. And I only came to know Arthur Ransome’s books when I read them to my own children. The new Swans and Amazons film suffers from the constant problem of modern people. They can’t begin to imagine the recent past and know almost nothing about it (pictured, a still from the film) I instantly recognised the children and adults in them, the way they thought and spoke, and the lives they lived. I could guess in detail what their homes or schools were like, though they were never described. I knew (I still do) what a country station platform felt and sounded like on a summer afternoon just after the train had steamed away. I also knew (as the film-makers don’t) that British Railways didn’t exist in 1935. And I knew that pemmican (a joke in the books) was never on sale in tins in British grocers’ shops; and that telegrams came in khaki-yellow envelopes. But the new film suffers from the constant problem of modern people. They can’t begin to imagine the recent past and know almost nothing about it. One thing that struck me is that the children in the film (pictured above) seem to be much ruder to each other than I remember from the books. The girls are also a lot screamier. Of course, hardly anything really happened in most of the books. It was all imagination, a thing which has died in the age of TV and computers. And you can see why they inserted an absurd plot about Russian spies. Odd that it blames Russia for coming up with the idea for the atom bomb, when this was from the first a scheme dreamt up by Western idealist scientists horrified by Hitler. People keep telling me these things don’t matter. But they do. If we get the past wrong, we will get the future wrong, as we prove every day. Advertisement

They haven’t actually invented it yet. Huxley’s Soma was harmless, which today’s drugs somehow never are. But they are working on it. And you might like to know the name of the brilliant, subtle, well-funded campaign to legalise marijuana launched almost half a century ago by the late Steve Abrams (I discussed it with him at length before he died). It was ‘Soma’.

The real scandal of Corbyn's empty seats

Actually, I can quite see why Jeremy Corbyn thought that train was full. Rail companies punish anyone who just wants to travel when he feels like it.

So we’re all forced to make reservations we don’t want, and dozens of seats are blocked by this and festooned with silly labels.

Actually, I can quite see why Jeremy Corbyn thought that train was full. Rail companies punish anyone who just wants to travel when he feels like it

Then there’s the strange urge to make train travel even worse than going by plane, including nose-to-tail seats crammed close together, cunningly arranged to obscure the windows.

It’s increasingly hard to spot a vacant place. I suspect most of those having a go at the Labour leader haven’t done much second (sorry ‘standard’) class travel by train recently.

I see we now have flashily painted ‘Border Force’ cutters with go-faster stripes, just like the US Coastguard.

I detect the hand of Chairman May and her clever PR team when they were still at the Home Office. But what use is all this? It will be worth checking in six months what has happened to the six migrants picked up by HMC Valiant off the Kent coast on Thursday.

Your guess is as good as mine, but unlike Australia, we have no remote islands where we can put such people.