Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 165

PETER HITCHENS: Think extremism's a crime? You'll change your mind when they come for YOU

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

As an extremist, I am very worried about the planned Extremism Bill, which our Prime Minister is about to ram through Parliament.

So should you be. You are probably extremists, too, or will soon become extremists.
You may well remember when many opinions now viewed as despicable and more or less criminal were freely expressed ��� often by the same people and media who now condemn them.
I certainly do. Much of the conservative patriotic Christianity which my parents��� generation saw as normal has now been driven underground, and those who express it ��� especially in the public sector ��� face discipline or the sack, and are sometimes prosecuted.
Many of the current establishment���s attacks on Labour aren���t disagreements among free people in a free society. They are demands for abject recantations expressed by people who clearly think such views should not be allowed.
And the expression ���extremism��� doesn���t mean anything objective or measurable. It just means a view that is out of favour with the current government and establishment.
What���s more, new and startling evidence from France (barely noticed here) suggests strongly that all these ���anti-extremist��� strategies are wholly useless anyway for their main stated purpose.
It���s not the robed and bearded Islamist zealots we need to fear at all. An undercover French journalist, who infiltrated a jihadi cell in Paris, described those he found there as ���fast-food Islamists��� who knew nothing of their supposed religion.
���I never saw any Islam in this affair,��� the reporter told Canal+ TV. The cell members had ���no will to improve the world��� but were ���lost, frustrated, suicidal, easily manipulated youths���.
This is what I have been pointing out for many months. Track the backgrounds of the perpetrators of these crimes, here and abroad, and you do not find fanatical Wahhabi hard men, trained in the arts of death.
You find, almost invariably, low-life drifters in a haze of dope, on the borders of mental illness (and sometimes beyond it), capable of murder because they have fried their brains for so long that they no longer know right from wrong, or fantasy from reality. Some of these commit crimes which they then justify with a political purpose; many just commit crimes.
This is where we should be looking ��� and what we should be discouraging by enforcing our criminal laws properly.
Yet, instead, we waste our time and destroy our freedom by futile attempts to control what people think.

Poor Maxine���s not shocking anyone

Someone should tell the BBC that nobody is actually shocked any more by lesbian kisses. They���re so common now, verging on the compulsory, that I���m surprised
when they don���t feature in the weather forecast. I absolutely decline to be shocked.
So poor old Maxine Peake, who has to perform one of these osculations as Titania, left, in a new production of A Midsummer Night���s Dream, is wasting her time.
The desire to shock us has taken over drama. So, apart from the same-sex snogging, Richard III (or Julius Caesar, or Henry V, or Coriolanus) dresses in Nazi uniform, Hamlet���s a girl (Maxine Peake again), War And Peace has incest in it, Sherlock Holmes is a bad copy of Doctor Who, and it can���t be long before someone stages a version of Peter Pan played entirely by pensioners, or A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge is the hero and Christmas never happens.
Is it possible that the people who do these things haven���t understood that the books and plays they spoil were perfectly good and interesting before they meddled with them? It is. They���re taking a free ride on top of someone else���s talent and genius.
The really shocking thing these days is a production of anything which sticks to the text.

Butchering our lovely language

I had a proper old-fashioned education, and I have forgotten almost all of it, apart from the times tables and poems learned by heart, which I still use every day, the passable French vocabulary, which sometimes comes in handy, and a bit of geography.
My mother taught me to read, using what I now know was synthetic phonics. The Latin has almost all gone. The history was a good starting point, but I loved it anyway and have carried on learning it ever since. I must be one of the last people alive who had to sit for hours doing parsing and analysis of English sentences. It has never been any use to me at all, and I make my living by writing.
But until last week, I had no idea what a digraph is. Having found out, I have now deliberately forgotten. English is not Latin, and its beautiful, flexible, living architecture is best learned by being read to, and then by reading.
Yet many children never learn to read properly and are never read to. This is what the schools should be doing, not pestering the poor things with wearisome fronted adverbials and dreary trigraphs. You might as well try to explain the beauty of a goldfinch by killing it, pickling it and cutting it up on a slab ��� when all you need to do is to see the lovely bird in flight, full of grace and truth.

As I write this, news has just been brought to me that the Conservatives have retained control of Basingstoke, which fails to thrill. But the word ���control��� is important. A small number of votes can decide whether someone keeps or loses enormous amounts of power over money, lawmaking, people, war and peace.

So our voting system should surely be absolutely fair and beyond reproach. I think it used to be. But apart from recent sordid scandals over postal voting, which never got the attention they should have done, we now have major new worries.
One is the very serious accusation that the Tory Party broke legal spending limits by bussing supporters into target seats. If big money is to be allowed to decide elections, then we are absolutely lost. And the other is the Third World chaos on Thursday at polling stations in one part of Greater London, with properly registered voters turned away by officials. I foresee worse problems in the EU referendum, especially as so many people have yet to realise they are not on the new voting roll, thanks to a major change in the registration rules, which has been poorly advertised. If this happens, and there is a close result, will the losers respect it? And then what?
A broken voting system can poison the whole country. Severe reforms are needed, and fast.

 

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For those without UK postcodes who want to sign the George Bell Justice petition

I have now had this advice from the petition organisers, 38 Degrees:

 

 

'Unfortunately, at the moment 38 Degrees petitions can only take signatures from people based in the UK because the software relies in part on the UK postcode database to ensure that each electronic signature comes from an individual. 

People outside the UK who feel strongly about this issue could contact Richard Symonds who started the petition and ask him to add their names manually to a printed version.

You can contact him by clicking the black envelope icon by his name on this page:

https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/justice-for-bishop-george-bell-of-chichester '

Hitchens vs MacShane on the EU, the rematch

Readers who live in the London area may be interested in this forthcoming bookshop debate (6.30 in the evening on Wednesday May 18th) between me and the pro-EU enthusiast Denis Macshane at Waterstone���s Gower Street branch (the lovely old building that used to be Dillon���s University Bookshop). Some may not be. It���s ticket-only and I believe there���s a small charge.

https://www.waterstones.com/events/brexit-in-or-out-a-debate-between-denis-macshane-and-peter-hitchens/london-gower-street

We held a similar debate in Dulwich a few months ago. Denis is a good-natured and responsive opponent, who has been annoying me now for many decades.

More Notes on Marijuana Legalisation and Billionaire Big Dope

This sourly amusing story

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/05/california-cigarette-smoking-age-21-marijuana-legalization

from the Guardian of today (6th May) has many points of interest. Supposedly health-obsessed California (many of whose initiatives are followed by the other United States) is moving to make tobacco cigarettes harder to get, banning their sale to those *under* 21.This was of course opposed by ���Big Tobacco��� the universally-despised lobby which strives to fight against restrictions on cigarettes.

Yet the same state is about to have a ballot (in November) to allow the purchase and possession of Marijuana by those *over* 21 (the proposed legislation which would follow a successful vote to approve is to be called the ���Adult Use of Marijuana Act��� and is supported strongly by the billionaire Sean Parker, who made his pile through Napster and Facebook (and people ask me why I use the term ���Billionaire Big Dope���). Mr Parker is also an enthusiast for ���gun control���.

I���ve no doubt the tobacco law will be less effective than Big Tobacco fears. These things are not all that hard to circumvent, as US teenagers who often drink alcohol illegally well know.  In fact there���s another reason to suppose this.

Colorado���s new Marijuana laws prohibit sales to minors. Yet, as Melanie Phillips wrote in ���The Times��� on 26th April:

 ���Colorado legalised medical marijuana in 2006 and its recreational use in 2012. Now it leads the country in cannabis use by 12 to 18 year-olds over the past month, with Oregon fifth and Washington in sixth place. Between 2007 and 2009, an average 5.6 per cent of Colorado's high school students tested positive for cannabis. By 2012 this had soared to 57 per cent.���

I am seeking Melanie���s original source for these figures.

I do have this link, which clearly shows a worsening situation

https://learnaboutsam.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/SAM-report-on-CO-and-WA-issued-17-February-2016.pdf

Meanwhile, my friend Mary Brett has written to me with some interesting estimates about the cost of heavy marijuana use even before legalisation (which would obviously increase it, thanks to marketing, advertising, sale on the Internet and in high street shops etc, probably undiscouraged by a government hungry for tax). Mary is a former grammar school science teacher who, worried by the effect of cannabis on some of her pupils, devised an effective education campaign warning of the drug���s dangers. She has since devoted herself to fighting this battle ever afterwards. I should note that, unlike me, she uses the term ���schizophrenia��� ��� I prefer to stick to ���mental illness���: She writes to me :

���It takes around ��2 billion a year to treat skunk-related schizophrenia. I naively thought that this should be headline news.

Robin Murray published a paper showing that in South London where he is based, skunk-related schizophrenia cases accounted for 24% of their patients. Robin is Chair of the Schizophrenia Commission so I asked him how much he thought it costs the country.

Total costs of all schizophrenia cases is ��11.8 billion. As he said usage in London is probably the highest so go down to 15%. Somewhere in between will be the costs. 24% of  ��11.8 billion is ��2.83 billion and 15% of ��11.8 billion is ��1.77 billion. So - maybe just over ��2 billion? Norman Lamb reckons he can raise ��1 billion in tax from legal pot! This wouldn't even cover half the schizophrenia treatment.���

A Good New Independent Account of the George Bell Controversy

Here http://bbc.in/1UBjubI is an unexpectedly good and clear account of the George Bell controversy, which new readers might find useful. If some other media had covered the story with such care and responsibility, we might not now be in the mess we are in, with the C of E still doggedly sticking to a version of events which has been shot full of holes by expert analysis and a contemporary witness, and trying to hide behind the alleged victim, falsely accusing George Bell���s defenders of attacking her.

Those of you who have yet to sign the petition for Justice for George Bell may do so here http://bit.ly/1rq31vQ . Almost 1,200 people have signed it already, which is good but not nearly enough. I would think at least 10,000 signatures are necessary before the Archbishop of Canterbury will take the slightest notice, and urge readers to sign themselves, and encourage friends to do so. This is an excellent cause, the cause of justice and truth.

London is a Republic with a President. Why aren't we more interested?

Why aren���t people more interested in the Republic of London, which tonight chooses its next President? Far more attention is paid to Scottish independence from the UK (an inevitability) than to the fact that the national capital has more or less seceded already, and has a republican form of government.

It is all part of an enormous constitutional revolution launched by the Blairite Eurocommunists but unimpeded by the ���Conservative��� Party at the time, and unreversed by it later.

Let us sum this up:

The expulsion of most of the independent and uncontrollable hereditary peers from the House of Lords, and their replacement by nonentities appointed by party leaders, and so easily biddable by the executive. This did not merely weaken the Lords and strengthen the elective tyranny of Downing Street. It directly threatened the monarchy. If inherited office was improper for members of Parliament, how could it be defended in the case of the head of state. The rapid collapse of Tory opposition to this reform left the monarchy exposed to a future attack on the same lines (which I confidently predict not long after the next Coronation). It also produced a House of Lord s whose size and character is now almost entirely indefensible, and which likewise cannot last. No prizes for guessing that it will in time be replaced by an elected senate which will be controlled, like the Commons, by the political parties and their whips and apparatchiks, and so by the executive.  

The creation in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland of legislative chambers which use continental systems of election, designed to abolish the adversarial system which had until recently been such a strong safeguard of liberty in this country.

The creation of a special semi-detached status for Northern Ireland which can at any time be transferred to Dublin sovereignty by a single referendum.

These are big changes, and reflect the struggle for mastery over these islands between the declining and weakening federation known as the United Kingdom and the increasingly powerful rival federation known as the European Union. Two rival federations ( as Yugoslavia found) cannot contend indefinitely for the same territory, and the creation of devolved governments in the outlying nations made and makes it easier for them to form direct relationships with the true capital in Brussels, bypassing London more and more. Devolution, so called, is actually part of the Europeanisation of these islands, and cannot be properly understood unless this point is grasped. The EU superstate finds it can digest former nation states much more easily if they are first broken down into smaller sections. Hence its near-obsession with ���regions��� which are gradually being created in England by a salami-slicing process in which the ancient system of counties is emptied of all real power and becomes purely ceremonial. Functions such as planning, ambulance and fire services and (probably soon) police, have been or will be transferred in fact if not in name to regional authorities.

But back to London, whose form of government daws its legitimacy not from a  Royal charter or anything so foolishly |English, but to a referendum, a thing which can only happen if the government wants it to and whose result is usually fore-ordained.  

The Greater London Authority is not elected like any other city or county council, but through a Continental Additional Member system, in which some members are picked from a list rather than suiting for actual wards or constituencies. I think it true to say that every new elected body created since the Blair revolution has spurned the traditional British system of simple first-past-the-post election. I suspect this is so that, by the time they get round to doing this to the House of Commons, nobody will think it odd or strange, or wonder why.

But this is as nothing to the election of its head of state, the Mayor. Even this (though it is bound to be a two-horse race in reality)  is done on a  supplementary vote system rather than on first past the post.

But that is as nothing to the real unexamined point. The head of state of this very large and strategically important part of a supposed Kingdom is elected.  Mayors until this time has been constitutional monarchs, neutral, powerless figures usually chosen as a reward for long service and affability. The Mayor of London is a President, a thing repugnant to our style of government. The post is American. The method of election is European. He is not picked by the majority in the Assembly, as Prime Ministers are (more or less) picked by the majority in the Commons. He is directly elected and his own personal authority derived from direct election. The Assembly may question him, but lacks the power to remove him by a simple vote of no confidence.  

You may like this or not(I do not) but it seems to me that it is quite revolutionary. I note that George Osborne is trying (as Labour once did ) to spread the idea of elected mayors. I suspect this will probably end up by taking a ���regional��� form, which will of course please the EU. But it also spreads the idea of an elected head of state, who is obviously not a hereditary monarch. I have always said the Tories would guillotine the Queen in Trafalgar Square if it thought this would help them gain or retain office. But obviously a softer, kinder, gentler sunshinier way to a republic would suit them better. This may be it.

 

An Interview with PH, mainly on the EU issue

Some readers may be interested in this interview

http://www.newsredial.com/2016/05/01/peter-hitchens-speaks-newsredials-peter-stephenson-brexit/

Some may not. 

 

What Was the Past Really Like?

What was the past really like? Can we know? A part of my life was spent so long ago, and in such unusual circumstances,  that it gives me a bridge into an era that existed and mostly disappeared before I was born.  Certain smells, the salty stink of harbours at low tide,  coal smoke, freshly-planed wood, wet laundry, the pungent exhaust fumes from an old car, stodgy cooking, paraffin, Dettol, can bring it surging back in vivid snatches. But it is still patchy and laid over with mistakes and things I only think I can remember, but have seen in photographs. This doesn���t conjure up a complete society.

I asked myself this the other day because I was wondering why I so enjoyed the extraordinary recording of Manchester schoolchildren, made in the summer of 1929, singing Purcell���s ���Nymphs and Shepherds��� accompanied by the Halle Orchestra, in the old Free Trade Hall. You can do so here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vkpqHECZtE . As the children sing, a camera slowly pans across a heart-rending photograph of the actual occasion ��� heartbreaking because Purcell���s music so often is, but also because a moment that must have seemed so fresh and joyous has now become a faint and dwindling echo from long ago, because of the great 19th century setting, wrecked by German bombs a dozen years later, because almost nobody who was there is left. There are other reasons, which I���ll come to in a moment.

I was reminded of the event (I had heard snatches of it before but never seen the picture or listened to the whole thing) by the obituaries of Victoria Wood, noting her play (which I have yet to see) ���That Day We Sang���, in which some of those who took part in this moment meet and reminisce in middle age.

Because the photograph cost five shillings and these were elementary school children from poor homes, very few of them were able to afford copies of their own. Because this was Manchester, and this was the era of received pronunciation, the children read the words from boards on which (for example) the word ���dance��� was spelt ���darnce���, so as to stop them singing it to rhyme with ���pants���.

Even so, you can clearly make out the Manchester accent in the repeated word ���now��� (���Your flocks may now securely rest���) , and immediately you know that the great blackened building is surrounded by square miles of L.S. Lowry streets and squares and mill chimneys adding smoke to the already gritty air. Even the June sunshine (if there was any in Manchester, that June) does not diminish its industrial workfulness. Far beyond lies the England of J.B. Priestley���s English Journey, slowly becoming suburban and Americanised but still recognisable as itself, an eighteenth-century colonial power blasted and enriched by industrial revolution. And beyond that is a world of empires and steamships. Yet the early use of a very modern technology, sound recording,  allows us for a few minutes to stand in the midst of it and savour it.

This is a portal into a different planet of town halls, hand-me-downs, high tea, bread and dripping, fishpaste sandwiches, tea leaves, mild ale, tripe shops, sheets and blankets, Children���s Hour, steam-whistles, wet raincoats, lamplight - and weeks which lasted much longer than wages, when five shillings was a lot of money and most things were mended.

I saw the end of it (I very much liked bread and dripping, a frequent break-time snack at the fee-paying choir school, I attended in the late 1950s, but my attempts to rediscover its joys have so far failed. Perhaps it���s the wrong sort of beef or the wrong sort of white bread, the chewy, crusty sort that���s so hard to find now, but it���s just not the same) .

This windy past with its grey skies, dutiful days and pungent smells seems to me to be believable and realistic. But was it really like this? In the last week I���ve read two utterly contrasting books ���Sweet Caress���, the new novel by William Boyd; and (under much female persuasion) ���Ballet Shoes���, by Noel Streatfeild which I���d always marked down as a girls��� book, and quite rightly so, except that it���s also a rather good modern fairy story, involving three foundling girls living in genteel poverty in an interwar London now unrecognisably British and as lost to us as ancient Palmyra.

Boyd���s book is fun too, but follows a pattern set by several of his later novels, a wild series of improbable adventures on the frayed edge of modern history, involving a main character whose true nature is a bit of mystery and may be an elaborate joke about the fickleness of fame and acclaim  ��� in the case of ���Sweet Caress���, a woman photographer whose pictures seem to me to be pretty awful.  Mr Boyd is known to have taken part in an elaborate joke about a non-existent artist, which fooled several journalists and others, and I do sometimes wonder if he���s not playing a bigger joke in his books. I just can't quite work out what it is.

 

Miss Clay���s adventures take her (but of course) to decadent Weimar-era Berlin, involve her in a dust-up with Oswald Mosley���s Blackshirts (who always play a rather larger role in fiction than they ever did in historical fact), not to mention pre-1941 New York, liberated Paris, the Western front and Vietnam. There is so much cigarette-smoking in this book that one begins to expect all the characters to die of cancer half-way through, and the pages to smell of ashtrays, though they don���t. There��� s also a great deal of very heavy drinking and quite a lot of extra-marital or adulterous sex. Was life like this? Perhaps for a rather small number?

In ���Ballet Shoes��� there is a bit of smoking, by adults (though not in the home, I think)  and no discernible sex. There is, in a middle-class household, and a great shortage of money which pinches quite hard. There is a lot of hard, disciplined school work and very little tolerance for shoddiness, Churchgoing is simply normal. Holidays, when they happen, are frugal. Treats are so rare as to be thrilling. Selfishness and petulance are reproved and punished, but with firm kindness. The possibility of failure, and what might follow, is ever-present.  On the other hand there is a great deal of adult self-sacrifice, quietly and unobtrusively made, to secure the children���s future, and as a result an overwhelming feeling of security despite the icy austerity all around. There is a fair amount of undemonstrative love, expressed through quiet actions rather than overt embraces and declarations.  This strikes a strong chord in me. Adults in my childhood all seemed to feel a kindly responsibility to look after children, anyone���s children ��� and reprove them too ��� whereas nowadays I think they are scared to get involved.

There is a strong expectation that children will be able to learn chunks of literature by heart and appreciate Shakespeare at quite young ages.

As the children are being trained in the theatre, they have to undergo stringent checks into their health and their education by the London County Council, which even cares how much of their wages they manage to save. I have a sort of memory of when Town Halls were like this, when councils proudly paid for scholarships for clever children, Mayors gave prizes, and children sang proper songs.

I like William Boyd���s books. There���s a pleasing mischief and lightness in  them, and some wonderful descriptions of human pleasure and defeat. But I am not sure he has really got the past right, at least as it was lived by most of us. No doubt there was always a louche, rackety world which kept its activities pretty private before the Cultural Revolution put them on the front pages and the TV.

But for most people it was bread and dripping, early bedtimes and hot water bottles as they fell asleep in freezing bedrooms after days of hard endeavour, thinly rewarded, and I���m not sure, in the end, that wasn���t more romantic.

Some Reflections about Thursday's 'Daily Politics'

Having been subjected to the usual grumbles that I ���didn���t do my case any good��� etc. by standing up for myself against presenters��� attempts to close me down,  I thought I���d subject my encounter with Nick Clegg on BBC-2���s ���Daily Politics to a light-hearted analysis, mainly because it���s interesting and the iplayer means I can. Even so, watching it is a bit of an ordeal, as I hadn���t been taking my ugly pills that day, and on top of that there is often a very good close-up view taken from below, straight up my nostrils, which I would have thought was the last thing anyone would have wanted.

First let���s take a look at the little introductory film (illustrated with copious film of people apparently breaking the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, not to mention jokey puns about ���weed��� and ���high���) which set the scene for the discussion. Note, this was largely about cannabis , the decriminalisation of which Nick Clegg supports. This was the general subject I thought I had come to discuss, not the specific and contentious depenalisation of several drugs in Portugal, which the presenter seemed most anxious to discuss with me.  

The reporter in the film also says that politicians risk being viewed as ���off their heads��� if they advocated weakening the law. This isn���t true. Two House of Commons Home Affairs committees have done so, and, if anything, were praised for their supposed courage and far thinking. The Runciman Committee suggested it and were likewise widely praised.

The film says the laws have been relaxed in some places because ���total prohibition��� ���doesn���t work��� . Is that so? What ���total prohibition��� was that?  For many years many US states have gone easy on marijuana possession with ���diversion programmes��� instead of criminal penalties, and/or through the legalisation of supposed ���medical cannabis��� a transparent excuse for legalising personal possession. Or is it because of well-funded lobbying first for ���medical marijuana���, prescribed under an extraordinarily lax procedure,  and then for decriminalisation?  

The reporter is (quite unconsciously)  tendentious, using terms such as ���prohibition���, the language of the legalisers. Their tactic for years has been to claim that the existing laws are oppressive in nature and oppressively enforced, and that this is the cause of the undoubted drug problems in our society. The use of the word ���prohibition,  summoning up vague and inaccurate beliefs about alcohol prohibition in the Al Capone era, is a favourite method.

 By using this questionable term, suggesting an iron enforcement of laws against drugs, without qualification or analysis, the film failed to do the job an impartial programme should have done. 

For example: ���Countries like Uruguay have relaxed their laws on cannabis because they say prohibition doesn���t work���.

As far as I can discover, cannabis use in Uruguay was low before the August 2014 declaration that the state would henceforth sell it, and that small-scale private cultivation would be decriminalised. There were 120,000 estimated users in a population of 3.3 million, and 22 tons consumed a year compared to 500 tons a year in California (source LA Times 21/8/2013) before this move was made (a move, incidentally, unpopular among two thirds of Uruguayans if opinion polls are anything to go by) . The New York Times of  July 29 2012 notes that ���personal marijuana use is already decriminalised in Uruguay���, two years before the 2014 change, so it is hard to see what exactly this ���prohibition��� was that ���did not work���.  

My old opponent Professor David Nutt . whom I once squelched on live radio on the issue of ���criminalisation���; of users, was then shown saying (in a recorded interview): ���Where countries have decriminalised the *possession* of drugs we���ve often seen very good health gains and the classic example is Portugal���.

Well, there are varying views of Portugal���s experiment. The claims that the supposed health benefits which followed depenalisation are the *results* of that are strongly disputed. Correlation, as I am often told by legalisers, is not causation. Nor is it, necessarily. Works both ways.

Nick Clegg���s own report, Drugs: International Comparators, acknowledges (on p.6) that:

���Much of the most relevant data in this area comes from Portugal, as its reforms were fairly recent, and data from before, during and after implementation is easily available. It is important to note, however, that Portugal made a number of changes to its approach to drugs around the same time as implementing decriminalisation, including widespread implementation of harm-reduction programmes and an increase in investment in drug treatment. It is extremely challenging to disentangle the effects of decriminalisation from the effects of these wider changes.���

Next, a Tory MP, Andrew Griffiths, was shown citing  the decriminalisation of cannabis possession in Colorado, and points out that this has been followed by an apparent increase in use by the young.  He seems not to know of England���s 40-year experiment in decriminalisation, or to connect our current plight with it, the simple leap from fantasy to reality that I ask all those speaking about this matter to make. He���s also a believer in addiction���. Like so many of my ���allies��� on this topic, he���s as unaware of reality as the legalisers.

Then the editorial presumption of ���prohibition��� and of its undesirability appears again, as the reporter asks: ���Does prohibition make underground drugs far stronger and open a gateway to experimentation with harder drugs?���

The answer to that might well be ���Eh?��� and ���what prohibition?��� and ���No��� and ���No���, plus a rejection of the term ���experimentation���, a euphemism for illegal drug abuse (i.e. crime) which is designed to suggest innocent enquiry and a thirst for knowledge. Believe me, these ���experiments��� do not involve anyone taking notes or measuring the effects accurately against a placebo in a controlled double-blind test. The word is entirely unjustified and its use belittles and in my view condones law-breaking. As I sometimes say, a Corporation which relies on the threat of prosecution backed ultimately by prison to get people to pay its licence fee should surely be very keen on upholding the law.

The reporter then asks : ���Would decriminalisation or legalisation (they���re not the same thing)  mean skunk, spice and other synthetic replacements would disappear?���

To which one might reply, why on earth should it mean that? (as Professor Sir Robin Murray immediately afterwards points out that ready availability of alcohol has not led to everyone drinking weak beer, rather than spirits). There���s no reason I can think of to believe that this might be true. It���s even dafter than asking (as people once did) ���Would opening pubs all day lead to a continental caf�� culture in British cities?��� self-evidently laughable, and only asked so that the proposition can be advanced.  But by posing it as a question, a pro-decriminalisation argument can be insinuated without openly being stated.

It���s true that for balance���s sake Robin Murray was allowed to mock this proposition, but Professor David Nutt was likewise allowed to sympathise with liberalisation. ���Balanced��� interviewees don���t overcome tendentiousness in the presentation. Readers here will know well that I have long pointed out that it is in presentation and the control of presentation that the real power lies in broadcasting. Merely appearing is nothing like enough.

The reporter also asks, for no apparent reason, the following questions. The first expecting the answer: no;  and the second expecting the answer: yes.

���Do people who are criminalised want to seek help? Does someone with a criminal record for smoking something arguably less dangerous in moderation than alcohol find themselves marginalised?���

These are assertions crammed with unwarranted presuppositions, dressed up as questions.

Again, I regard this as wholly loaded. People who buy and possess illegal drugs are not passively ���criminalised��� by a cruel despotism. This is a state of laws in which the laws are, by and large, clearly stated and well-known, and not applied retroactively.  People who voluntarily break such laws are not ���criminalised��� by anyone. They actively ���criminalise��� themselves by consciously and deliberately breaking the known law which in most cases has existed since before they were born. To ���criminalise��� someone or something you would have to declare something they already did legally to be illegal.  Also there���s the ���arguably less dangerous than alcohol��� claim. It may be ���arguable��� (the alleged flatness of the Earth is ���arguable��� if you want to try)  but it is not objectively established, nor could it be by any measure known to me,  and many people would argue that it was not so, given the growing correlation between cannabis use and mental illness. In any case it is not the reporter���s job to argue it. So why was this redundant passage not struck out by the editor, charged with ensuring impartiality on questions of controversy?

An editor who was truly concerned to be impartial on the subject would in fact have excised all these passages from the script of this pre-recorded item.

Then we begin the actual discussion. Mr Clegg is asked by the presenter, Jo Coburn: ���Were you very disappointed?��� with the outcome of a UN meeting which rejected attempts to relax international law on drugs.

This is an odd starting point. Who cares about his feelings?  Surely we should want to know what exactly he had desired and why he had desired it.

I also noted that his silly claim about ���Asian countries that want to chop people���s hands off if they touch drugs��� went unchallenged. Do they? Which countries? This isn���t the language of a former Cabinet Minister and Privy Councillor. Ms Coburn also asks Mr Clegg about the UN summit as if liberalisation would have been an achievement. Surely an impartial programme would have accepted that either outcome ��� Mr Clegg���s reform or its defeat ��� would have been an achievement. I certainly regard the defeat of the liberalisers as an achievement. Thus an impartial account could not say that nothing had been achieved.  

Ms Coburn used these words in her opening question to me : ���Do you accept that,  because there are these polarised positions,  as Nick Clegg has just outlined,  it���s very difficult then to look at what some people would argue as the sensible view of decriminalising some drugs in order to reduce the number of people who are actually becoming addicted to harder drugs?���

It may be noticeable from my thunderstruck and weary tone of voice that I couldn���t quite believe I had been asked such a question. What was she on about?

What does it matter what I accept?  What is this about ���some people��� and a ���sensible��� view?  In a Wikipedia entry such words would quickly (and rightly) attract a tag saying ���weasel words���. Who exactly thinks it���s the sensible view? Give names and references. Who doesn���t? *Why do these words even form part of the question?* And what does she mean by ���polarised���? There���s a difference of opinion on this. She appears to suggest that ���polarisation��� (which has a faintly pejorative whiff, to me)  is a bad thing, preventing us from ���looking at��� what ���some people��� would regard as the ���sensible view���. But we can look at it. We do look at it all the time. What the division of opinion prevents is the *acceptance* not the examination, of the supposedly ���sensible��� point of view.  Why on earth is it ���difficult��� to look at the pro-decriminalisation view? Most public and broadcast debates on drugs discuss almost nothing else but decriminalisation and its alleged benefits. What are the words ���what some people would regard as the sensible view of��� even doing in this formulation? Which people? Some wouldn���t regard it as sensible. The fact that some *would* regard it as sensible doesn���t make it so, and an impartial broadcaster has no business choosing between those who would and those who wouldn���t. Why not just ask me what my view was of Mr Clegg���s position?

If she was being (the old excuse ) a ���devil���s advocate���, I didn���t notice much devilish advocacy directed towards Mr Clegg.  It wasn���t put to him (by the impartial BBC) that some people would say that decriminalisation was an irresponsible risk  How on earth would decriminalising ���some drugs��� (presumably cannabis) reduce the number of people taking supposedly ���harder��� drugs.(she says they���re ���addicted���, but let���s leave that to one side). It is a mass of ill-informed presuppositions including the contentious ideas that there are ���soft��� and ���hard��� illegal drugs, that making drugs easier to buy and possess will reduce the use of drugs,  that drug abuse does not involve wilful crime,  Why does an impartial  BBC presenter use these formulations?

Then Ms Coburn says to me: ���In your view,  Peter Hitchens,  there has been a sort of de facto decriminalisation.���. I don���t think she uses the words ���in your view��� to address or sum up any of Mr Clegg���s statements or assertions. Nor did she say that the statements she made about Portugal were made in anyone���s ���view���(though in my view they very much were). So why did she need to categorise my points (all of which are objectively checkable documented historical facts, and which Mr Clegg himself went on to concede as accurate) were ���my view���.

At  36:10 she said, even more amazingly ���You can argue for decriminalisation and we will cite statistics from countries like Portugal that have actually shown you can then remove the barriers to help addicts������

This extraordinarily contentious statement was the preface to a question about the links between cannabis and mental illness (which Mr Clegg avoided without interruption or correction by switching the subject to drug-related fatalities)

And then back we went to Portugal, favourite subject of the legalisers,   

After Mr Clegg���s amazing admission of de facto decriminalisation (obtained by my questioning of the former Liberal leader) we suddenly turn out to have run out of time (at 39 minutes 29 seconds ��� the item actually ended nearly two minutes later, most of that time occupied by Mr Clegg).  

There, now, wasn���t that fun?  And yet some viewers attacked me for daring to be interrupted while I was speaking. So rude of me.  

Everyone howls at batty Ken - but they wouldn't dare tackle racist Muslims

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I have known and disagreed with Ken Livingstone for nearly 40 years. I especially loathe his slippery excuse-making for the IRA, and I think he has done more damage to this country than almost any other figure on the Left.
But it is ridiculous to call him an ���apologist for Hitler���, or to suggest that he is an anti-Jewish bigot.
I was just leaving the BBC���s Westminster studios on Thursday when Mr Livingstone stepped into an over-excited knot of political reporters. They looked like what they are ��� simultaneously a pack of snapping wolves, buzzing with self-righteousness, and a flock of bleating, conformist sheep, all thinking and saying exactly the same thing.
After undergoing a minute or two of synthetic rage and baying, the former Mayor of London politely excused himself and went to the lavatory. The flock waited outside, restored for a moment to calm and reason. Then Ken popped out again and the wild shouting and pushing resumed, as if a switch had been pressed.
At one point this stumbling, squawking carnival was joined by a barking dog. If it had gone on much longer, crowds of tourists would have gathered, mistaking it for an ancient London tradition. This is how politics is reported in this country, almost completely without thought.
I am, as it happens, a keen Zionist, a confirmed supporter of Israel���s continued existence as an avowedly Jewish state. Anti-Semitism ��� or Judophobia as I call it ��� gives me the creeps. So does the extraordinarily selective criticism of Israel, which does many bad things, by people who never seem to notice the equally bad crimes of any other country. I ask them: ���Why is this?��� They can never answer.
And as it happens I had on Wednesday evening taken Mr Livingstone to task (at a London public meeting) for the Left���s feebleness in face of Muslim Judophobia.
This is a sad fact. On visits to the Muslim world, from Egypt to Iran, Iraq and Jordan, via the Israeli-occupied West Bank, I have repeatedly met foul and bigoted opinions about Jews which people in this country would be ashamed to speak out loud.
I have no doubt that there are plenty of Muslims who do not harbour such views. But there are those who do, and British political parties which seek the support of Muslims have often been coy about challenging this. As for all these people who have suddenly got so exercised about Judophobia, and wildly worked up about Ken Livingstone���s batty views on Zionism (standard issue on the far Left for decades), I have some questions for them.
Are you prepared to put the same energy into challenging and denouncing Judophobia among the Palestinians you support abroad, and the British Muslims whose votes you seek here?
Because, if not, I might suspect that you are just using the issue to try to win back control of the Labour Party, which you lost last summer in a fair fight.

The crude murder of a gripping story

This country seethes with scandals brought about by excessive political correctness. Yet many police dramas end up reaching for a particular sort of child sexual abuse, in which seemingly respectable conservative people are exposed as corrupt villains, as the root of the mystery they seek to solve.
Line Of Duty, the BBC���s latest much praised cop drama, took the same line. It���s a failure of imagination, mixed with Leftish politics. Perhaps that���s why its author also resorted to a ludicrous closing scene, in which a real, tense drama of interrogation, slowly moving towards a stinging conclusion, was abruptly ended by a crude shoot-out and a cruder car chase.

I am not interested in football and do not like it. I am loathed by many in the police because I criticise their aloof arrogance and their lack of interest in our problems. I dislike The Sun newspaper. I think Liverpool is a great and majestic city.
So don���t bother accusing me of serving any agenda when I say that I don���t like the unanimous Diana-style hysteria that seems to be developing over the Hillsborough tragedy. It is beyond belief that every police officer present was the devil incarnate. It is beyond belief that every football supporter present was a shining angel.
Those accused of criminal wrongdoing in this horrible event must be permitted to defend themselves and their reputations without being attacked for daring to do so. The presumption of innocence, never more important than when an unpopular defendant is on trial, must be enforced. In our free courts nobody is indefensible, and nobody should be denied the liberty to defend himself. Tragedy is no excuse for injustice.

Clegg's drugs confession

Some things are unsayable in British politics. One such is the truth that cannabis has been, for many years, a decriminalised drug. The police, the CPS and the courts have given up any serious effort to arrest and prosecute users, just as evidence starts to pour in that it is extremely dangerous.
Instead our elite moan about ���prohibition���, which does not exist, and the cruel ���criminalisation��� of dope-smokers, which would be their own fault if it happened, but actually doesn���t. Arrests for this offence are rarer every week, and some police forces openly say they don���t do it any more.
Only two years ago, when he was Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg claimed in The Sun newspaper that we were throwing supposedly harmless drug users into prison at the rate of a thousand a year. I���ve never been able to find out where this figure comes from. But on Thursday, he dramatically changed his tune. I extracted from him, on live TV, the most honest thing any senior British politician has actually said on the subject.
���There is sort of de facto decriminalisation of cannabis going on��� it���s not a very remarkable discovery. Everyone knows it.
���Of course there is de facto decriminalisation ��� let���s have a bit of honesty that decriminalisation is happening de facto.���
He acted as if he���d been saying this all along. Has anyone else ever heard him do so?
The incessant lie that we are waging a failed ���war on drugs��� with prohibition and persecution only fuels the cynical, greedy campaign for full legalisation. If this succeeds, we will get advertising of drugs, drugs on sale on the internet and in the high street, and untold irreversible misery.
Now at least Mr Clegg, of all people, has exposed that lie. Let���s hope it���s not too late.

****

Yet another report, this time from the London School of Economics, identifies Synthetic Phonics as an excellent method of teaching children to read. It is by far the best. But many schools still resist it, or dilute it in a ���mixture of methods���.  More than 60 years after Rudolf Flesch explained ���Why Johnny Can���t Read��� in a famous book, we still refuse to act on the evidence.  

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