Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 158
July 15, 2016
A Few Early Thoughts on the New Government
As we strive to absorb the true meaning of Mrs May���s reshuffle, please bear in mind that the Foreign Office is nothing like as big a department as it once was, having been dwarfed many years ago by Downing Street���s increasing power over foreign policy. The building is grand, the Foreign Secretary���s personal office enormous, but how many key Cabinet committees will he sit on? Also consider that the new ���Minister for Brexit��� is the one who will have to depart if the negotiations go wrong. (Picture the scene, two years hence, ��� I am so sorry, David, but it was after all you who were committed to this goal, and you had my full backing - but as it is���..���)
Optimism and gullibility are poor tools in politics. The real power in the May regime lies among her clever and astute special advisers, especially Fiona Hill (formerly Cunningham, famously involved in a row with Michael Gove which ended in tears and for which Mr Gove ���who forced the resignation of Ms Cunningham in 2014 is presumably now paying the price). There is also Nick Timothy, who probably crafted her campaign launch and doorstep speeches, and Stephen Parkinson. All of these will now have to learn to live with the Downing Street civil servants, who may be a good deal tougher to deal with than the Home Office officials they have up till now been working with.
Even so, these people are brilliant professional politicians, and , having turned Mrs May into a Prime Minister, they can presumably ensure that much of the media continue to treat her as if she really is an effective one. This will last until hostile objective facts eventually beat their way past the famous gates of Downing Street, especially the dire state of the economy.
But the general spirit of Mrs May���s government is demonstrated by her appointment to prominent and important active ministries of bland figures such as Amber Rudd, Jeremy Hunt, Liz Truss and Justine Greening, people who (like Chancellor Philip Hammond) have no recognisable politics and could easily be mistaken for Liberal Democrats or New Labourites. So, of course, could Mrs May. How funny it is that she is now being described approvingly in conservative media as a ���grammar school girl��� a fact she did her best to keep obscure, by leaving it out of her entries in Who���s Who and Dod���s Parliamentary Companion. Imagine what would have been said of Andrea Leadsom had she done this ( keeping unimportant facts out of her CV, no doubt). Had I not pursued several newspapers to set the record straight on this (I have done the same for the TUC leader Frances O���Grady) , I suspect the half-truth, that she attended a comprehensive, would be the standard story.
Very soon, she must turn her attention to the frightful state of the economy, handed over to her by Messrs Cameron and Osborne and bafflingly reported as a success by so many in my trade. And she must consider the crazy waste of money which is HS2, and the even crazier waste of money which is Trident submarine replacement, a weapon designed for a war that ended 25 years ago, against a country that no longer exists. Not to mention the strange, grandiose plans to make London���s airports even bigger and noisier If she is as bold as all the sycophants say, she will reject all these. There are much better ways of spending the money.
Oh, and before I go, some of you will recall an edition of Question Time in which I explained David Cameron's enthusiasm for same-sex marriage (if such it was) by the fact that he hated his own party. This was greeted with incredulity by David Dimbleby. But was he right to be incredulous?
The prominent journalist Ian Birrell, who has also worked as a speechwriter for Mr Cameron,wrote the other day in the Guardian :
'Shortly after David Cameron���s election as Conservative leader, we were throwing around ideas to underscore his determination to change the party. None seemed to excite much enthusiasm. ���Have you not got anything that will annoy the right a bit more?��� he asked. Such was the mood in his early days, driven by his fierce desire to plant the Tory flag firmly on the centre ground and stop ���banging on��� about Europe.'
Well, I think my point is made. The whole article is here
July 14, 2016
Fun with Theresa and Ed - Which of them said which?
I enjoyed this quiz from ���the Guardian���, in which you are asked to guess correctly whether the quoted statements were made by the alleged Christian voice of Middle England, Theresa May, or the Son of the Man Who Hated Britain, Ed Miliband.
I actually got 80% right, but I am an annoying know-all.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/12/who-said-it-theresa-may-or-ed-miliband
Why the applause? Goodbye Mr Cameron, and don't come back
Whatever has happened to Britain? It seems as if the whole day has been taken up by the elite congratulating each other. But about what? A Prime Minister who destroyed his own government because he would rather play clever games than develop any principles, but who wasn���t as clever as he thought he was.
Ships��� captains who run their vessels aground in broad daylight are not, in general, piped ashore with much ceremony, let alone surrounded by applauding crewmen and passengers. They slip away out of sight, while others quietly appear on the bridge to see if they can salvage anything from the wreck.
Indeed, Prime Ministers who lose elections or retire have traditionally slipped quietly away, without Huw Edwards on the BBC describing their uninteresting journey down the Mall as if it were a great state occasion, or BBC helicopters clattering overhead.
The great thing about this country used to be that a change of government was *not* a great state occasion, but a routine matter, without expensive armoured cars and grandiose police escorts. Real authority resided with and derived from the Monarch, who granted it to those who had been blessed by the electors, for as long as they could keep it.
I loathe this change. We do not have a president. We do not normally permit applause in Parliament, which is supposed never to forget that it contains an opposition, and that many in this country have not given their votes to the government. Why couldn���t he just go?
Mind you, as the man who chivvied his (pathetically pliant) MPs into applauding the Blair creature on his last appearance in the House of Commons he so disliked, he must have hoped to get the same.
The Prime Minister is so only because he or she can command a majority in the Commons (it is by no means sure that Mrs May can count on maintaining such a majority, for various reasons, including known unknowns and unknown unknowns). He or she has no popular mandate (I am glad to say) . We do not have to love or even like him or her. Rather the contrary.
These sentimental speeches in the Commons and Downing Street (the only street in London which normal human beings are forbidden to enter) are just not constitutional.
Anyway, why the applause? What is it for? Mr Cameron gave up his job because he realised that he had struck himself such a blow that he could no longer claim to have a mandate, despite his bought-and-paid-for ���victory��� in the 2015 election, perhaps the most cynically-achieved election result in the modern era.
Having gone, he should have made a resignation statement to the House and departed quietly.
What is there to applaud?
A 1.5 Trillion public debt, matched by a private debt nearly as large, and a budget which continues to require heavy new borrowing every minute, to bring it into balance . A debauched currency, now finally showing the effects of years of printing money through ���quantitative easing���. A total failure to control mass immigration. A total failure to achieve significant improvement in state education. A total failure to get a grip on crime and disorder (the prisons are bursting and restive). Two utterly disastrous foreign interventions, in Libya and Syria, with the second one less bad than it could have been only because Parliament for once had the sense not to vote for war. National defences (especially the Army and Navy) in tatters.
And a successor who is personally associated with the government���s greatest failure, and disagrees profoundly with her government���s principal aim, an absurdity which still causes the mind to boggle.
Applause? What is it for?
July 12, 2016
The Tories Can't have Their Own Jeremy Corbyn
What a funny country this is, and what funny political parties it has. Both appear to be more or less mad, as if designed by Lewis Carroll for a larger-than-original Mad Hatter���s Tea Party.
The governing party has just lost its leader because a majority of voters rejected his principal policy, British membership of the EU. It has loopily replaced him with a successor who *also* favours British membership of the EU.
In doing so, it has perhaps accidentally avoided a vote in which someone else might have been picked.
The Labour Party is embarking on a leadership struggle between its old-fashioned left-wing members and its fashionably Blairite MPs, who barely speak the same language. Bizarrely, the week after Labour���s Iraq War was shown definitively to have been a colossal and inexcusable mistake, the supposed standard-bearer of common sense, rectitude and goodness is a Labour MP. A Ms Eagle, who voted for the Iraq war at the time (when the average Natterjack Toad could have seen it was a daft idea) and repeatedly voted against any investigation of it later.
She is, however, an accomplished producer of clich��s, as she showed at her campaign launch. What she stands for, apart from stupid wars, it is very hard to see.
Ms Eagle's main task will apparently be splitting her party down the middle, possibly aided by lots of lawyers, and I can only wish her the best of British luck with that.
Mrs May's main task will be leaving the EU, a policy she disagrees with and campaigned (rather feebly) against, perhaps hoping nobody would notice (they did, Theresa, they did).
Thus, they have picked a leader who actively disagrees with her own government���s main and central task. Almost every significant policy decision from now on is affected by the EU question. How can this possibly be sensible?
One has to ask why Mr Cameron bothered to resign, if this is the best they can do.
And thus Mrs Theresa May, who appears to have been elevated to her new eminence largely by ���The Times��� newspaper, will shortly go to Buckingham Palace to see the Queen, before she formally assumes her duties.
It appears that the interview with Mrs Andrea Leadsom, which appeared in ���The Times��� on Saturday ....(I have been struggling since to find any quotation from Mrs Leadsom which justifies the headline : ���Being a mother gives me edge on May ��� Leadsom��� . I mean, I cannot find any words from her which contain this sentiment, which seems to me to be a problem given that it is so stated in the splash headline).... seems to have frightened Mrs Leadsom into giving up her campaign for the Tory leadership.
I am not especially keen on Mrs Leadsom, who doesn���t appear to be a social or moral conservative, and whose collapse on Monday suggests she lacks the stomach for a fight. But she might have done better than I or anyone expected. At the weekend I began to pick up signals that the Tory membership might be going to do to the Parliamentary Tory Party what the Labour membership have done to the Parliamentary Labour Party ��� choose a leader who was more loyal to the party���s aims than they were.
They may actually have been planning to vote for Mrs Leadsom. They would have done this on the very sound grounds that she supported the main task of the new post-Cameron government ��� taking Britain out of the EU. They may well have thought it ridiculous that, having ejected a pro-EU prime Minister, they then chose a pro-EU successor, who opposes her own government���s main aim.
Well, now they can���t. Mrs May, who I believe will be a grave disappointment in office to those who have become her cheerleaders, has thus escaped the possible danger of a grave humiliation. But she has also lost the chance of a proper unquestionable mandate from the Tory members, who are now free to mutter against her that they were never asked. Which they will, soon.
I will return to this in more detail later in the week.
July 10, 2016
PETER HITCHENS: Want to see who started the Iraq War? Look in the mirror
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
Oh, for goodness��� sake leave the pathetic Blair creature alone. He will never understand what he did and probably didn���t understand it at the time.
He isn���t very bright and now lives a lonely, meaningless life of empty speeches delivered to bored businessmen in return for money, which will have to be penance enough.
If you want to blame anyone for the Iraq disaster, look at yourselves. I opposed it at the time, and remember how few others did. I don���t really count the Leftist demonstrators, who oppose all wars, just or unjust.
I mean the great mass of patriotic Middle Britain, normal decent people, who were so willingly misled. I mean those scores of MPs of both parties who scuttled, bleating, through the war lobby and now claim, falsely, that they didn���t know the facts.
I mean my media colleagues, who have been trained from their earliest years to doubt what they are told, yet swallowed Alastair Campbell���s great dish of steaming tripe without a thought.
Come on, how hard was it to see that the danger was invented, that the war was illegal and that it was none of our business? I have no prophetic powers but I could see it.
And yet, diddled so blatantly that even an official report now confirms it, you still don���t learn. How many supposedly responsible voters are currently being fooled by today���s attempt to spin us into a stupid conflict with Russia, a country almost nobody in Whitehall knows anything about or understands?
At least as many as were misled by claims of a fictional massacre into supporting the Libya disaster. At least as many as were persuaded by a media chorus to admire Hilary Benn���s feeble, poorly argued speech urging us to bomb Syria.
Is there no idiocy you can���t be gulled into by a bit of atrocity propaganda or the endlessly recycled claim that the chosen target is the new Hitler, who must not be ���appeased���? A word of advice: if you don���t like atrocities, don���t start wars. Wars are the mother and father of atrocities, and one day they will come home to us, if we keep launching them against others.
Vladimir Putin is already being turned into the new Hitler. Nobody who knows anything about Russia thinks this is true. But a couple of weeks ago we more or less secretly sent British troops to Ukraine, a country with which we are not in any way allied, and which is a war zone. Was Parliament asked about ���Exercise Rapid Trident���? I can find no record of it.
We have just made the daft decision to send 650 scarce troops to Poland and Estonia. This is supposedly in response to a ���Russian threat��� to these countries for which there is no actual evidence. Apart from the tiny exclave of Kaliningrad, Poland doesn���t even have a border with Russia. As the wise academic Professor Richard Sakwa, whose father served in the pre-war Polish Army, has rightly said: ���Nato grew to meet the threat it had itself provoked.���
If we are not careful, we shall once again create a war out of our own exaggerated fears and by believing our own propaganda. Any of you who are taken in by this have no right to attack Mr Blair. You are as bad as he is. He and his like couldn���t do what they do without your help.
Baffled by the barmy NHS
A member of my family had to hurry to a major hospital casualty department at the weekend. It was the usual NHS mixture ��� dedicated, overworked and kind doctors and nurses cunningly concealed behind a barrier of wooden bureaucracy bad enough to make you scream, even if you weren���t already in pain.
All ended quite happily. Soon afterwards she received this ludicrous text, which I at first thought was a joke: ���We would like you to think about your recent experience at the **** **** hospital.
How likely are you to recommend our Emergency Department to your friends and family if they needed similar care or treatment today? Reply 1 for extremely likely, 2 for likely, 3 for neither likely nor unlikely, 4 for extremely unlikely, 5 for don���t know.���
How does one begin to respond to this? She was in considerable pain and distress. She did not consult the Good Hospital Guide (not that there was any choice, given the sparseness of A&E facilities in modern Britain). It���s not a market. It���s organised mercy, and it would be better if it concentrated exclusively on that.
The campaign for justice for the late Bishop George Bell goes on. Bell has been denounced by Church and media as a child abuser without the semblance of a trial.
This was recently the main subject of a powerful debate in the House of Lords. The Church���s response, as ever, was to use the alleged victim as a human shield.
Arrayed in his flowing clerical robes, in a chamber where all speak ���upon their honour���, the consecrated Bishop of Chelmsford asserted that campaigners for justice for George Bell had ���made hurtful comments about her��� (the alleged victim).
Have they? I have challenged him to say who these people were and what these comments were. He has not replied, though the Church press office has emitted some irrelevant and evasive guff.
A florid face we should save for the nation
How we shall all miss Ken Clarke. This week, while looking like some hedge-dwelling creature roused early from a comfy hibernation, he accurately summed up modern British politics in a few very funny words uttered when he thought the TV cameras weren���t rolling.
Typically, he hasn���t complained about the recording being leaked. I disagree with almost everything he thinks, though he was dead right about Iraq and gets too little credit.
But he is a modest, thoughtful and funny person, with a real life outside politics, whose wisdom we badly need. Can���t he be saved for the nation?
Look, I am resigned to the coronation of Mrs Theresa May as our next Prime Minister. In a cynical way, I am quite pleased by it, as she is so Left-wing that she may well achieve my main aim in life ��� the final and utter destruction of the Useless, Fraudulent Tory Party.
But spare me the suggestion that she is the new Margaret Thatcher. I���m not actually a Thatcherite, and disapprove of a lot of what the Iron Lady did.
But I did meet Mrs Thatcher, and talk to her, and watch her in action. And Mrs May is no Margaret Thatcher. She is in fact the new John Major.
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July 8, 2016
A discussion of mass immigration
A few years ago, I took part in a discussion (organised, I think, by the Spectator magazine) about mass immigration. sparked off by David Goodhart's book on the subject, 'The British Dream' Some kind person has assembled my contributions ( and the interruptions form the chairman, Andrew Neil):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgn0c...
July 7, 2016
Why Blairites would rather be led by Theresa May than by Jeremy Corbyn
I urge anyone genuinely interested in British politics to set aside the time and quiet needed to read this truly gripping and original article by Rafael Behr from Tuesday���s Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/05/how-remain-failed-inside-story-doomed-campaign
leave aside its tiresome assumption that all those reading it will sympathise with the pro-EU case. Its portrayal of the deep and committed collaboration between the Tory Party and the organised Blairite Left is superbly telling.
I have long maintained that there is no profound political division between New Labour and the Tories, and that the two are in effect one party. Here are factual details to demonstrate that this is truly so.
This passage
���With non-partisan zeal that impressed their colleagues, the Tories on the team agreed to a script aimed at core Labour voters, which included the threat that Brexit would ���turn industrial heartlands into wastelands��� and ���finish the job that Thatcher started���.
'Old party rivalries were largely banished from the campaign ���war room��� at Stronger In���s Cannon Street headquarters. Researchers and press officers who had been savaging each other���s work for years now collaborated amicably. Residual tensions stayed below the surface. Former Labour staffers, moderate refugees fleeing the hard-left takeover under Corbyn, sometimes bristled at what they saw as unmerited swagger in the step of the Downing Street contingent, who expected to easily replicate their victory in the previous May���s general election. ���They arrived like an occupying force,��� recalls one former Labour staffer. ���They came in with a sense of, ���Step aside and we���ll tell you how it���s done.������
'But over the course of the campaign, the most senior remainers found collegiate sympathy in a shared world view. As one put it: ���We were the pluralist, liberal, centrist force in British politics.������ (my emphasis, PH)
Followed by this one
���Pro-Europeanism became a proxy for the fusion of economic and social liberalism that had been a dominant philosophy of the political mainstream for a generation, although its proponents were scattered across partisan boundaries. These centrists were the ruling class of an unrecognised state ��� call it Remainia ��� whose people were divided between the Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems; like a tribe whose homeland has been partitioned by some insouciant Victorian cartographer. (My emphasis, PH)
'In the days when the politics of the fringe did not threaten their intellectual security, adherents of New Labour, the Lib Dems and ���Cameroon��� Conservatives had never seen themselves as a fellowship of moderation. Before Corbynite radicalism seized the left and Ukip���s vinegary nationalism suffused the right, debate was conducted in shades of difference within a broad consensus. But as the referendum approached, Stronger In became the informal party of defensive liberalism ��� the unpopulists ��� although that had never been the intention.��� (my emphasis, PH)
And you have the core of it.
In the same issue of the Guardian you can also find this equally fascinating analysis:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/04/post-referendum-politics-eu-vote
by Andrew (Lord) Cooper, a Tory peer and pollster, who advised the ���Remain��� campaign
which correctly grasps the real divide in British politics. Again, ignore the petty caricaturing of the traditional conservative tendency ���nationalist��� instead of patriotic, ���fearful��� of globalisation rather than damaged by it and therefore rationally hostile to it, ���preoccupied��� by immigration rather than, once again, reasonably concerned by it . The analysis is broadly, even strikingly right. One should also note that the statements with which they are said to be in agreement (���I hardly recognise the country I live in any more��� and ���If I could wave a magic wand and take the UK back to the 1950s, I would��� were devised by liberal elite pollsters, and were not the original words of the people polled, who might well have expressed their sentiments in ways a little less like Polly Toynbee���s idea of what they think. Even so, it is a good analysis of the state opinion in this country,. There���s certainly no ���silent majority���, but there is a large and vigorous if shrinking, minority, which feels mistreated and left out.
Note first of all Lord Cooper���s point that ���The research that informs political campaigns is much more sophisticated than published polls. We don���t just want to know who is going to vote one way or the other. We need to understand what perceptions and arguments cause people to come to the voting conclusion that they do. This means looking beyond demographic and regional factors to map the electorate on the basis of attitudes and behaviour. We need to identify our core vote ��� and our opponent���s ��� and to define, with as much nuance as possible, the voters who are genuinely in play: what they think and feel about the choice before them and which messages, messengers and modes are the most effective in persuading them.���
And then : ���The foundational research showed Britain divided into three almost equal chunks. The first chunk ��� 34% of the population ��� was internationalist in outlook; socially liberal; positive about globalisation, immigration and multiculturalism; and optimistic about the future. For these voters, the economy was by far the most important issue in the referendum. They were overwhelmingly going to vote remain, regardless of the terms of the debate.
'The second chunk ��� at that stage, 32% of the population ��� was diametrically opposed: nationalist in outlook; socially conservative; fearful of globalisation; opposed to multiculturalism; preoccupied by immigration; pessimistic about the future; and very hostile to the EU. For these voters, immigration was far and away the most important issue in the referendum; most of them favoured ending free movement, even if this made Britain worse off. The attitude that most characterised them was ���I hardly recognise the country I live in any more���. More than half of them agreed with the statement ���If I could wave a magic wand and take the UK back to the 1950s, I would���. Their imperative was to shut out the consequences of globalisation and open markets. These voters were overwhelmingly going to vote leave, regardless of the arguments.
���The third chunk ��� 34% of the population ��� was conflicted. These people were the in-play voters: the primary target for both campaigns in the EU referendum. They were very clear that they didn���t like the EU, and why: uncontrolled immigration, the huge direct cost of membership, too much meddling in our laws and lives. They were torn between the appealing idea of insulating the UK from the pressures of an open world, and fear of the idea of a Britain outside the EU, isolated and alone. They were defined by the attitude that ���my heart wants to leave the EU, but my head says it may be too risky���.���
Amidst all this, Mrs Theresa May seems to think her main task is to reunite the Tory Party, an impossible alliance of people with wholly incompatible beliefs, and a major obstacle to intelligent thought or useful action. Surely that���s the last thing Britain actually needs? Many of her party (perhaps Mrs May herself) would surely be happier in New Labour, or merging with it, if unity is what they want. What's quite certain is that New Labour would be happier with Mrs May as their leader than with Jeremy Corbyn, which I for one find quite funny.
Then the rest of us would realise we need to start a party of our own, if we're to have any friends at Westminster.
What I said about the Iraq War in February and March 2003
I reproduce this from the Mail on Sunday of 9th February 2003:
'IF we go to war I shall not stop criticising this folly. Our troops will not be fighting for this country, but for another country and against Britain's interests.
Before the bombs start to fall I will try one last time to deal with the feeble, stumbling case for attacking Iraq.
Yes, Saddam Hussein is a dictator. So is Jiang Zemin, the Chinese leader, recently welcomed here on a State visit and guarded from protesters by British police.
Jiang Zemin's regime constantly threatens its neighbour Taiwan, illegally occupies Tibet, imprisons hundreds of thousands in its Lao Gai concentration camps and possesses weapons of mass destruction by the megaton, plus rockets to deliver them.
China is a much more potent threat to peace and stability than Iraq, and the free world should be taking firmer steps to deter and contain it. But America constantly appeases China. So do we.
Talking of appeasement, the pro-war faction claims that those who oppose the war are the same as those who would not stand up to Hitler in the Thirties. This is historical rubbish. When Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland, the democracies did nothing. They did nothing when he swallowed Austria and Czechoslovakia.
When Saddam invaded Kuwait, the West stood up to him, and threw him out. He is most unlikely to do it again, and if he does he knows he will be thrown out again. So why should he? Nobody is appeasing him.
If we know that Saddam has developed dangerous weapons, then we can simply destroy them, as Israel did when it bombed the Osirak reactor in 1981. No war followed though, stupidly, both President Reagan and Margaret Thatcher condemned this wise and sensible act.
This war is part of an ill-thought-out American plan to obtain a strategic foothold in the Middle East. This will only work if America stays in Iraq for decades, and even then will be very hard to manage.
Yet it is already clear that Washington does not intend to hang around in Baghdad any longer than it has to, and that British troops will be given the job of policing the 'democracy' which is supposed to appear by magic once Saddam has gone.
Why? We couldn't afford to do this in 1921, when we invented Iraq by drawing some lines on a map, and we certainly cannot now. In return for this humiliating role, what do we get?
America has already forced us to surrender to the IRA. It wants to shove us into a European federal state. If we are such valued allies, why are we treated like this? It is time we had a Government which stood up for this country's independence.'
****
And in case any Tories think it's not their fault, this from the MoS on 2nd March:
'THE worst government in modern British history is trying to hustle this country into a stupid and unpopular war which has nothing to do with us and is against our interests.
It hopes to get away with this even though our armed forces are not fit to fight, thanks to years of neglect and cheeseparing.
So what does the Opposition do at the moment of truth, when the ground is trembling beneath New Labour's feet and there is a real possibility of unhorsing this ghastly regime?
In the most important vote to take place in the Commons for decades, the Tory Party backs the Government.
I just cannot understand why so many Conservatives are in favour of this Left wing war.
Why don't they make the connections? Mr Blair wanted to disarm this country in the face of the Soviet threat, a real threat from a monstrous and bloodstained tyranny. Mr Blair was against retaking the Falklands. Mr Blair has handed Ulster over to rule by terrorist factions. Mr Blair is even now trying to sell Gibraltar to Spain. And, above all, he aches to abolish our national independence and liberty by scrapping the pound and placing us beneath the dingy shadow of a Brussels constitution.
Yet suddenly this serial surrender merchant, appeaser and anti-British defeatist is hot for war against Iraq, a nation which, for all its many faults, poses precisely no threat to this country.
The truth is that attacking Iraq appeals to Mr Blair because it is not in British interests. It is a new kind of liberal imperialism which ultimately threatens the whole idea that countries are free to govern themselves as they see fit.
And what about these vague and grandiose promises of a new democratic Iraq? For Heaven's sake, the Labour Party still hasn't managed to introduce democracy in its one-party heartlands of Scotland and the North East. How likely is it Mr Blair can impose it on Basra?
These excellent arguments have been left to rust by a Tory Party which seems to think war is conservative. Wrong a thousand times. War, for the past century, has been the handmaid and herald of state control, Socialism, inflation and high taxation, doing limitless damage to the Church, marriage and the family, stability, order and morality.'
July 5, 2016
I Told You So
Yes, I told you so.
First of all, we seem to have the constitutional crisis I predicted here :
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/the-leave-campaign-may-well-be-winning-.html
and here
and , as it began to unfold, here
I was confident of this because the referendum had always seemed to me to be a violation of the supremacy of Parliament. How can you have two rival democratic mandates competing for supremacy over an issue of vital national importance? Who will decide which one is in charge? The political bog into which we are now squelching is a result. The pro-EU faction are determined, with the support of the BBC and many others, to de-legitimise the anti-EU majority. Supposedly, we didn���t mean to do it, we were misled, and we didn���t really vote for what we thought we were voting for etc. I said things of this kind would happen,as they did when the people of Ireland voted against the EU constitution - and they have, and they will.
The initiative launched this week by Mishcon de Reya http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-law-idUKKCN0ZK0HZ is just part of this effort, combined with squeaky Europhile demonstrations (where do they find them, people actually enthusiastic for this lumpish, disastrous thing?) mutterings from MPs, leftover former ministers, and other grisly creatures released for the moment from the Cupboard of the Yesterdays saying that Parliament must have its say, especially if that say means the decision is overturned. Meanwhile EU supporters seek to regain full control of both corpse parties, so that the struggle is properly one-sided and there is no danger of the corpses being declared dead and buried (there is some interesting speculation to be had, in future, about what might happen if the establishment fails to regain control over Labour in the weeks to come. I hope to turn to this soon).
It was disastrous that the ���Leave��� campaign was not a party, yet (thanks to our traditions) had to conduct itself much as if it was one, more or less issuing a manifesto. And yet there is now no-one responsible for implementing that manifesto, who is in a position to do so. Those who might be are busy trying to strangle each other. That���s why we needed a new party. That���s why we needed to destroy the Tories in 2010, and all those of you who helped miss that opportunity must now ask yourself whether you did the right thing in ���Getting Gordon Brown out��� (did you really get him or his ideas, out of anything?) by saving the Tories. I blinking well *told* you so.
The disintegration of the ���Leave��� campaign high command, shredded like a burst balloon into rags and tatters, may well have something to do with the fact that it was a strange and rather unprincipled coalition, made up in unequal parts of personal ambition, and with no permanent base or organisation. Did all its members really want to win? Just think how different this would be if we had got rid of the Tories when we had the chance, and a new political party determined to leave the EU, and with a clear stated idea of what it would do with our regained freedom, had won a general election. None of this rubbish would now be happening.
Elements inside both the two corpse parties have used the outcome as the pretext for things they had long wanted anyway. Scores are being settled, and ambitions pursued. I am still puzzling over being asked by a BBC presenter on the day of the result about something she seemed to think was a ���collapse��� of the Labour vote. The word itself derailed my thoughts. Far from collapsing, the Labour vote had poured in multitudes into the ���Leave��� camp, expressing a sentiment, long known to me, that metropolitan liberals never understood or acknowledged, and now spitefully and childishly deride.
By the way, as I am in general making the point that I told you so, I ought to mention here those contributors who have over many years told me that my belief in a majority coalition of voters from both parties united round a socially conservative platform was fanciful. I think we have now established that it is not, though how it will ever be assembled again I am not sure. The party which could have contained, led and consolidated it does not exist and is not likely to do so.
Others have also made sure that the crisis does not go to waste. I had suspected that a sort of stage-managed crisis would be inflicted on us by the markets, and so it has been. No doubt they have done reasonably well out of it, though most of the falls and rises have no objective cause.
I note that the Chancellor who has now abandoned his ludicrous and impossible commitment to balance the national books, and the currency markets who have seized the chance to achieve at least part of the long-awaited devaluation of sterling, which I have long predicted
Secondly today���s events (the BBC seem to think that the resignation of a TV presenter is more important) have rather underlined the wisdom of my repeated refusal to take UKIP seriously as a political force. The one party which surely does not need to bite its own tail at the moment is UKIP which can claim(I���m not sure if this is true, but they can claim it) to have brought about the referendum.
Hasn���t Nigel Farage resigned at least twice before ? I think he first quit in September 2009, and then in May 2015. I shall wait and see how long this one lasts.
There has always been something fundamentally unserious about Mr Farage, epitomised for me by his foolish attitude towards the decriminalisation of illegal drugs (see http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/04/what-did-nigel-farage-say-about-drugs.html ).
And this has very much affected my view of UKIP, its tacky purple-and-yellow pound sign symbol, which always makes me think of a Pound Shop, its unfortunate Thatcherism, which has learned nothing from and forgotten nothing about that questionable and far from conservative era.
My repeated view that UKIP would never get anywhere has met with a lot of hostility here, so I open my barrage of ���I told you so��� with the latest news from the Blazer-and-Cravat-Belt. It would be hilarious if it were not so sad that, having managed to elect just one Member of Parliament at Westminster, Mr Farage cannot stand that MP, and that MP cannot stand Mr Farage.
But now to the main point, I have been irritating people ( I have even irritated myself) for months by carping about the referendum. For example : http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/02/why-i-wont-be-voting-on-referendum-day.html
I thought initially that the ���Leave��� side were bound to lose, and in that I was wrong. I explain this in two ways. I never imagined that two politicians of the stature of Alexander ���Boris��� Johnson and Michael Gove would actually side with ���Leave���. (This (be warned) very profane and mischievous parody suggests that Mr Johnson, at least, never intended actually to win : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a6HNXtdvVQ
Who can say how much truth there is in such speculation? The chaos which followed the ���Leave��� victory is suggestive.
And I foolishly believed that David Cameron had a coherent plan for the referendum which he himself created. After all, it was his choice, made deliberately some years ago. You would have thought he had some sort of idea a) how to conduct it successfully and b) what to do if he lost.
But when he came back from Brussels with a ���deal��� so worthless even his own supporters couldn���t think of anything nice to say about it, I knew for sure (having previously suspected it ) he hadn���t ever intended the referendum to happen, but assumed he would be spared it by a second coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Until that naked failure, I had still been prepared to believe that Mr Cameron had a plan. They only plan he seemed to have was to scupper Labour by changing the electoral registration rules, a plan which backfired quite badly when it led to many younger voters finding they weren���t on the register any more at referendum time. If Mr Cameron had really expected a referendum, would he have pushed this legislation through Parliament in 2013-14?
I can���t begin to speculate in what will happen next. Much depends on the behaviour of the Tory Party membership, who were massaged (mainly by a sycophantic media chorus) into choosing David Cameron last time. Will they be as biddable when offered Mrs May? It is at least possible to imagine that they may not be, just as Labour���s members may refuse to be bossed about by the same forces. I am not sure such rebellions will do any good, though I hope they happen anyway.
July 4, 2016
Me, The Kinks and the 1960s
A few months ago my fellow York graduate, the novelist Linda Grant, suggested that I submit to being interviewed by Ruth and Martin's Album Club , a web institution I hadn't heard of before (for obvious reasons,as you'll see). The chosen subject, or victim, agrees to listen to a piece of popular music he has never heard before, three times, and then writes about it according to a formula. (Martin (or Ruth) give their own introduction to the piece explaining why it's important and giving the background to it). In this case there's a bit of extra back and forth at the end.
It sounded like an amusing idea, and rather different from what I normally do, so I agreed to do it. The result is here:
http://ramalbumclub.com/post/146847032529/week-74-we-are-the-village-green-preservation
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