In January of this year, Carey Davies stood on a communist platform for student union president at Sheffield University. He won 78 votes and got a lot of stick for parts of his platform – including from some comrades on the left of the Education Not for Sale campaign. He explains the reasoning behind some of his more controversial policies

Some people took considerable umbrage at one or two of the points in my manifesto. A few even phoned me – I put the number on my election material – and gently suggested I was a drug-addled kiddy-fiddler totting an AK47. Which I am not, by the way. On one level, I’m pleased to have provoked a reaction! But there are serious politics here that need to be explained …

Abolish the age of consent!

The one that caused the most outrage, of course.

Whenever I have the chance to have a calm conversation with people about this, I emphasise that what we were actually talking about is the sexual rights of youth - a separate and distinct category, even if it is hard to establish precise age parameters for it. We are in favour of children being protected and of government legislation to enforce this.

Society has an obligation to protect those people – children in particular – whose level of emotional comprehension limits their ability to understand the meaning and consequences of sexual activity. They must be shielded from exploitation by people with a dysfunctional sexuality and urges that drive them to seek gratification without meaningful consent. The notion that the age-of-consent laws do this in today’s world is just nonsense.

In effect, all they do is criminalise youth sexuality. The idea that the state should stipulate an arbitrary age when everyone becomes emotionally equipped for sex is absurd – we are all individuals and develop relationships at our own pace. All these laws do is give legitimacy to the idea that the state should have a right to say what goes on in people’s bedrooms, to police consensual sexual acts between informed people who are aware of what they are up to and why.

As a consistent democratic – a communist – I am totally opposed to that and said so in the election campaign.

Legalise all drugs!

We used the Communist Party’s Draft programme quite a bit in the campaign and this demand was picked out by a number of people. Initially, a lot of students who took me up on it couldn’t understand the importance of the question. OK, drugs are illegal, they said – but, as everyone does ‘em anyway, so what?

I found the historical example of the prohibition on alcohol in 1930s America made most sense to people. When you ban massively popular recreational drugs, all you do is make a gift of their supply to gangsters. That’s a good way of guaranteeing that their quality will be totally unmonitored and potentially dangerous to users, that society will be afflicted by huge levels of crime and that people with addiction problems will be driven to despair and destitution. Not generally a good idea, is it?

Of course, it suits the state to have large numbers of people – the millions who use drugs every week – criminalised. Similarly, panics around drugs legitimise a more repressive society, a more strictly policed population – something that all democrats should oppose.

Our alternative is simple. It is for the complete legalisation of all drugs and the socialisation of their use. This position is based on the understanding that the whole phenomenon of drug consumption in our society, with all its malign manifestations, stems fundamentally not from the nature of the drugs themselves, but from the way they are distributed, produced and monitored. In other words, the most harmful thing about drugs is the fact that they are illegal.

We can look at heroin as an example. In 2003, it claimed nearly twice as many lives as cocaine, methadone and MDMA/ecstasy put together – but these statistics are only half the story. It is true that heroin, as it can currently be bought, kills more than other drugs; but this does not make a case for its continued illegal status or even stricter ‘control’. Quite the opposite. Street heroin is cut with a mix of substances that bring their own risks: sometimes powdered milk and talc; other times foul poisons. The drug itself can range in purity from 3% to 99%. In other words, users never know what they are getting: their fate is in the hands of the criminal cartels and gangs that mix the stuff. The incentive for them to produce a dangerous substance comes from the drug’s very illegality – who is going to stop them mixing in shit to make a bigger profit?

The irrationality surrounding the use of drugs tells us that the ruling class has no rational programme for society as a whole any more – all it proposes in response to these real social problems are increased measures of authoritarian social control that actually make the problem worse. The ‘war on drugs’ is totally unwinnable.

Arm the working class!

Again, something that is in our Draft programme and caused a degree of merriment.

After I had reassured students that we were not talking about the right for individual nutters to revenge themselves on society – like I was giving the nod to the two blokes who shot up Columbine – the logic is a pretty inescapable one.

We are for socialism, a social system that will take the social privileges and wealth away from today’s ruling class. That class has ruled for hundreds of years, is wrapped up with the state and its armed components, is massively rich and has connections with other ruling classes across the world. Do we really expect them to simply let us take everything off them?

In fact, by spreading the idea of the need for the working class – collectively, not individually – to arm itself, we actually decrease the likelihood of ruling class violence against any democratic movement. Especially if we combine this agitation with demands for democracy in the army and trade union and democratic rights for soldiers – a way to open them up to wider political influences and actually win them (they are overwhelmingly working class, after all) to the cause of socialism and liberation.

Why stand on a communist programme?

This was an odd question. ‘Ordinary’ students expected me – as a communist – to stand up for things I believed in. Lefty students told me I was making a mistake and said I shouldn’t stand on a “full communist platform”, as they put it.

I wonder why …?