Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 170

Here's the entire EU debate in 9 words: Do you want to be a servant of Brussels?

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

I don���t care what the Queen thinks about British membership of the European Union. Her opinion on the subject, just like everyone else���s, is her affair. And it wouldn���t influence me one bit.

But if she���s as against it as some claim, then it���s odd that she allowed herself to become an EU citizen, a status which means she can���t legally be our Sovereign any more.

Her neutrality is a myth, though we have to wonder whether her Ministers press her to make contentious statements from time to time.

In this populist era, the monarch must either fight and face probable removal, or do as he or she is told.

Nobody really doubts that she sought to influence the Scottish independence referendum last year. And in 1998 she went out of her way to endorse the Blair Government���s surrender to the IRA.

In her 2004 festive broadcast she proclaimed ���diversity is indeed a strength��� ��� a Royal endorsement of political correctness that a lot of us could have done without.

Last Christmas, five years after heaping praise on the timeless beauties of the King James Bible, she quoted scripture from an ugly, modern translation.

This odd record doesn���t suggest to me that she is hiding a fervent desire to return to the days of national independence.

I don���t think, when it comes to it, that many people do have such a desire. I have had it, for years. It is almost painful in its intensity, a choking, sometimes overpowering sense of loss.

But I have been struck by the normal response to the subject ��� shrugs and yawns. I am frankly baffled by the arrival in the ���leave��� camp of so many people in politics and the media who never showed any sign of caring until the day before yesterday.

So no wonder their arguments are so uninspiring. David Cameron is dead right that people like me are prepared to pay a pretty stiff economic price, if necessary, for national liberation.

As a great Polish patriotic poet once said: ���Your nation is like your health ��� only after you have lost it do you really appreciate its worth.���

I couldn���t care less what the CBI or the TUC or the Bank of England or the British Chambers of Commerce think about the EU. This isn���t a business transaction. You might as well go to the MCC or the British Federation of Lepidopterists, or a convention of stamp collectors, and ask them how to vote.

It isn���t about money or about jobs. It���s an instinct and an intuition. It is about that priceless thing, governing yourself, going out if necessary, into the biting cold ��� rather than staying warm and comfortable by being someone else���s servant or subject.

Each of us must decide this for himself or herself. If you need to know what anyone else thinks, then you don���t care enough and you���d be better off remaining the obedient citizen of a subject province that pretends to be an independent kingdom. No wonder this is such a dull campaign.

A THREAT FAR BIGGER THAN PUTIN

The noisy promoters of a ���New Cold War��� rage and shriek at the wrongdoings of Russia���s Vladimir Putin, even though Russia has no designs on us and poses less of a threat to this country���s freedom and autonomy than Jean-Claude Juncker or Angela Merkel.

How odd that these people seldom if ever say anything about Turkey���s swollen and increasingly dangerous despot, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

President Erdogan, who rules his spectacularly corrupt country from a gigantic new palace, kills his own people by thuggishly suppressing peaceful demonstrations. He hates criticism. His political opponents are arrested at dawn and tried on absurd charges.

He throws journalists into prison and seizes control of newspapers that attack him. He has been one of the keenest promoters of the disastrous Syrian war, which has turned millions into refugees and hundreds of thousands into corpses.

He is an intolerant religious fanatic, and curiously unwilling to deploy his large armed forces against Islamic State. And now he seeks to blackmail Western Europe into allowing his country into the EU and dropping visa restrictions on Turks, not to mention demanding trainloads of money.

If we do not give him these things, then he will continue to do little or nothing about the multitudes of migrants who use Turkey as a bridge into the prosperous West.

And yet for years he has been falsely described as a ���moderate��� by Western media flatterers, and his country has been allowed to remain in Nato, supposedly an alliance of free democracies.

He is a direct threat to us. Yet the anti-Putin chorus never mention him. Is it because they cannot pronounce his name?

Or is it because they have a silly phobia about Russia, left over from the real Cold War, and aren���t paying attention to what���s really going on?

A year ago we were all fascinated by the horrible crash of a Germanwings A320 jet, brought about by its suicidal pilot.

But now that the likely explanation has come out, there���s almost total silence. Could this be because that pilot, Andreas Lubitz, turns out to have been taking a gigantic dose of ���antidepressant��� pills, among whose known side effects are terrifying dreams, suicidal behaviour and ���severe thoughts of suicide���?

Just as nobody pays any attention to the presence of benzodiazepines and amphetamines in the flat of the San Bernardino mass murderers, or the use of ���antidepressants��� by at least one of the Columbine school killers (the other shooter���s medical records, absurdly, are sealed), nobody wants to know about this either. Time we did.

Carol���, the anonymous accuser of the late Bishop George Bell, alleges this once-revered man sexually abused her nearly 70 years ago. Last week the same ���Carol��� took to the airwaves to accuse Archbishop George Carey of ignoring a complaint of abuse from her, which she claimed to have sent him while he was in office (1991-2002).

This highly damaging charge followed Lord Carey���s attack, in The Mail on Sunday, on the way the Church has handled the case. Now ���Carol��� has apologised personally to Lord Carey. It turns out that she had got the wrong archbishop, and was thinking of someone else.

Hurrah for the MPs who halted the nasty plan to make Sunday even more commercial. People need a common day of rest, when families can gather. Germany, which seems to have a far more successful economy than we do, still maintains a near-total ban on Sunday shopping. People somehow manage.

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Morality, Garbage, Gum, Bike Baskets and Emigration

I half-expected my remarks about litter in my bike-basket to excite the religious bores who congregate in the nice warm bar on the ground floor at the back of this blog, with its agreeable coal fire, worn leather armchairs, patient staff and well-kept ales, and above all the ready audience and the reliable regular wiseacres who can be relied to give them the sort of argument they want. No wonder they never leave. Other members of the club flee upstairs when they see them coming and hide in its stately, austere library, where they can read in peace.

But I didn���t expect them to pile in to the extent that they actually did. Most of those who expressed views on this entirely missed the point. First, I was not talking about picking up litter as such. Under the laws of common decency, anyone might reasonably pick up litter in his own neighbourhood (I do, from time to time, and I don���t expect any praise or credit for it, as I recognise that my motives are selfish). Litter near one���s home encourages more litter, vandalism, graffiti and other bad behaviour. By picking it up we make these things less likely, and maintain the price of our houses and the good character of the neighbourhood on which these prices, and many other good things,  tangible or intangible, depend. Some of us do this, though you will find, when you do, that you get some funny looks from the silent majority, who find such actions incomprehensible.

We might also pick up the occasional bit of garbage left disfiguring a rural beauty spot or park  which we are visiting, so making the experience more pleasant for ourselves. Few of us, by contrast, will bother to pick up litter dropped on a  busy city street which is already liberally scattered with rubbish, blobs of gum, used tissues, fag-ends and disgustingly grease and sauce-smeared fast food containers. We���d need a barrow to cart it away, and the bins are often overflowing , if there are any. So please don���t lie about this. Hardly anyone does it.

I wasn���t talking about any of these things, though I cannot see why an atheist would think it ���good��� to do any of them since atheists have no basis to define any action as ���good���. That���s the whole point about being an atheist. Good and bad shrivel into ad hoc relativism and cease to have any meaning.  Why else would anyone bother to embrace this spiky, arid faith, lacking as it does any consolation or aesthetic joys.?

I was talking about an entirely specific thing, quite different from litter being left thoughtlessly on the ground (I���ve seen people doing this. It falls from them or emerges from their cars much as sleet falls from the sky, impersonally. They are wholly unaware that they are doing anything wrong and, if challenged, are often enraged).

It was about finding, in the basket of my bicycle, litter left there by people who both lack the nerve to dump it on the ground and the manners and consideration to put it in a bin. Not merely that. They know perfectly well that my bike basket isn���t a bin, and that they have passed to me the burden of disposing of these objects, which are quite often unfinished buckets of sickly sweet fluids, or grease-dabbled remnants of fast food meals. Sometimes it���s just free newspapers they have abandoned.

This takes place just off a busy street in one of London���s richest boroughs, but (and this is their only defence) one very poorly provided with litter bins. I know this because I now know exactly where they are, having to visit them so often.

The streets are pretty untidy, partly as a result of this shortage. One more cardboard cup, one more cigarette packet, one more handbill, one more wrapper, won���t make much difference. The street cleaners (who are quite active and busy) will eventually come along and take it away, just as hugely expensive devices will trundle by every few weeks trying to remove the gum. The vaguely ���good��� (those who know that dropping litter is sort-of wrong but have other things on their minds)  often give up before they find a bin. The same kind of garbage is left on sills and in corners and doorways.

Putting this muck in my basket is a deliberate act of petty spite, aimed against me as the owner of the bike. I imagine them sniggering as they do it. Under the rules of common decency, why should I do what these people aren���t prepared to do,  and take their muck to the bin for them?  It wouldn���t make the streets any filthier or any more untidy than they already are.  I reckon I���m absolutely entitled to take it out and put it where they lacked the guts to put it themselves, on the pavement.  

And yet my conscience told me this was wrong, and in the end I heeded it. There is, as I say, no serious prospect of being caught or prosecuted. The action makes no material difference to the general squalor of the street. It is just a small, civilised act which I do only because I believe my action is absolutely good and right regardless of these immediate effects. And if I were an atheist, I���d dump the stuff on the pavement with a flourish, and enjoy doing so because it would help me express my anger at the people who have put me to this trouble.  

As I said, this is just one of the millions of things people do (and don���t do) , which are right and good absolutely in themselves and have no other evident purpose, and no conceivable advantage to those do them or restrain themselves form doing them, and if they were all left undone, or all done without restraint, you���d notice.

The atheists often erect a particularly silly straw man to avoid this argument, and claim that the believer is saying that there can be no morality without religion. I say nothing of the kind. Common decency and the golden rule can be observed without any religious impulse.

But these forms of morality, based on enlightened self-interests, involve no conscience (a concept which is meaningless if there is no God, for if it is not divine in origin, why should you pay any more attention to such promptings than you pay to your bile-duct, your appetites,  or your bladder?) or knowledge (on the part of God ) of the true state of the human heart.

And so in practice the golden rule amounts to ���appear to do unto others what you would wish them to do unto you���.

As I said in the interview, this has many weaknesses; ���If we exist in eternity, then what we do here matters somewhere else, and at some other time, and the immediate consequences of our actions aren���t the most important things about them.  It might lead to more public acts of self-publicising ���goodness���, but this is the problem of all Godless ethical systems. They rely on the appearance of goodness rather than on the inner heart seen only by God, and anyone who has attended a school or worked in an office will know that people are not always exactly as they seem to be.���

 

This is why I get into so much trouble when I say, quite candidly, that morality is about how you behave when you think nobody is watching. People really dislike hearing this, because they know in their hearts that it is absolutely true.

Of course this doesn���t mean that a post-Christian society immediately descends into a cauldron of murder and robbery. These things are initially only available to the strong and rich, who will in many cases hire others to do the killing and robbing for them.  But they spread down the scale of strength and wealth, in the end. Don���t be weak or poor in the society to come. Neil Kinnock was dead right about that, at least.

 

You end up with the situation so evocatively described by W.H,Auden in what may be his greatest poem, in my view, 'The Shield of Achilles'

'A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who���d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.'

Finally, why am I so exasperated by the dingbat response  ���But where should I go?��� to my point about emigration? Because it is a stupid, trivial response to an important point.  I am actually saying, as graphically as I can, that a whole civilisation is finished. And people want travel advice?  It���s like asking if there���s a dining car  on the train to the gulag.

Anyone dim enough to respond in this way has entirely missed the point of what I am saying, and will as a result ignore my advice while it is valuable, and so possibly be among those clutching the sinking dinghy and wondering whether he will get ashore wherever it is that a harsh fate has driven him when the moment comes, and his education, savings and status are all so much shrivelled paper and thin, cold, air. Work it out for yourself, who may take you in, if you get the point. This is truly serious.

An Interview with Laura Perrins of Conservative Woman'

From time to time I draw attention to the excellent 'Conservative Woman' website, which attempts to reclaim the word 'conservative' from the fraudulent party of that name, and which points out that modern feminism is by no means unequivocally devoted to the betterment of the lot of women.

 

Here  is an interview of me by Laura Perrins, on the site:

http://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-laura-perrins-interview-peter-hitchens-on-why-it-is-time-to-emigrate/

Some Thoughts on Paul Daniels and on 'fighting' diseases

I just wanted to say how moved and impressed I was by Paul Daniels���s response to being diagnosed with an inoperable tumour. He has stuck to his view that ���When it���s your time, it���s your time���.

I know almost nothing of Mr Daniels except that he and his wife have responded with good humour to a great deal of mockery over many years.

But I am personally very weary of reports and obituaries saying that someone has been engaged in, or is engaged in a ���battle��� against a disease, especially cancer.

From what I have seen, this is a very poor metaphor. You do not ���battle��� or ���fight��� against cancer. The doctors may attack the disease and you may, if you wish, permit them to do so. But you are the battlefield, not a combatant.

Obviously cancer treatment has advanced hugely in the past few decades ( see, if you can, the original TV version of ���Shadowlands��� starring Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom as C.S. Lewis and his wife Joy Gresham, far superior to the later film), in which the mortally ill Joy Gresham is shown being exposed unsuccessfully to the latest anti-cancer technology of the 1950s, all bulbous cream-coloured enamelled machines, Bakelite knobs and menacing electric hums. The sight of this clunky equipment, from the era of the Morris Minor 1000,  fills you with a sense of hopeless doom  and of the approaching triumph of death ��� though I have to say it also makes me wonder how all our advanced techniques will look to an audience 40 or 50 years hence.

My own second-hand experience of other people���s ���battles��� against cancer has been such that I very much hope I will have the resolve to follow the example of Paul Daniels,  should I be given a severe cancer diagnosis. Obviously, one must distinguish here between those cancers which can, as often as not, and with some reasonable hope of success, be destroyed by heroic surgery or by the violence and venom of radiotherapy and chemotherapy.  But where the balance is even or the prognosis poor, or less than good, why should the spirit of the age praise only those who opt for the treatment, and not those who don���t?

This choice, of letting the illness run its course and resorting only to pain-relief,  is in my view no more and no less courageous than climbing on to the conveyor belt of treatment, which can be more gruelling than the disease itself and leaves its subjects blasted and physically shattered. The whole thing about serious illness is surely that it is a giant force which takes hold of you, which you yourself have no power to resist. If you could resist it, you wouldn���t have the disease in the first place, or you would be able to drive it from your body by sheer willpower

The use of battle and fighting metaphors in this case seems to me to imply that those who, after thought, decline treatment are in some way inferior to those who, after thought, decide to take it.  I wouldn���t dream of judging anyone else���s decision in this fashion. It���s up to them, not to us, and I am haunted by the possibility that in some cases those who decline to ���fight��� may suffer less than those who opt for ���battle���. If we talked less about ���fighting��� and ���brave battles���, perhaps some people  might spare themselves.

Major New Development in George Bell case- Lord Carey Speaks Out

The following story was published in the Mail on Sunday today. It is a major development, showing the level and extent of disquiet over the Church of England's haste to condemn the late George Bell without a hearing on the basis of a single ancient,uncorroborated allegation:  

Carey's fury at Church over abuse case bishop: Ex-Archbishop accuses officials of destroying dead priest's reputation with unproven claims

Lord Carey slams Church of England over Bishop George Bell's treatment
The late Bishop Bell accused of sexual abuse against woman in 1940s
Church paid out compensation and issued an apology over the claims 
But Lord Carey 'appalled' at the way his memory has been treated
The peer was Archbishop of Canterbury between 1991 and 2002 

By

 

The former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey has lambasted the Church of England for destroying the reputation of a celebrated bishop over unproven child abuse claims.

In a fierce attack on the church he once led, Lord Carey said he was ���appalled��� at the way it handled the accusations against Bishop George Bell ��� whom he said had been judged guilty without a fair hearing.

Bishop Bell, who served in Chichester for 30 years until his death in 1958, was renowned during the Second World War as a peacemaker and almost certainly would have been Archbishop of Canterbury but for his denunciation of the Allied bombing of Dresden.

But last year an unnamed woman alleged that he had sexually abused her in the 1940s. The diocese gave credence to the claims, issuing an apology and paying compensation.

Chichester cathedral has now renamed its education centre ���previously called Bishop George Bell House ��� and plans to change its prominent memorial to the bishop.

But in a move that will embarrass his former colleagues, Lord Carey has added his weight to protests that the diocese���s investigation into the claims had been flawed and unjust, saying an individual had been crushed by a ���powerful organisation���.

He said in a letter to Bishop Bell���s niece Barbara Whitley that he had been ���frankly appalled by the way the Church authorities have treated his memory.���

He said: ���Your uncle was a man whose contribution to this country and the Church was outstanding. 

'He was without question one of the greatest Church leaders of the 20th Century��� The Church has effectively delivered a ���guilty��� verdict without anything resembling a fair and open trial.

���His reputation is in tatters and, as you sadly point out, all references to him in the diocese he loved and served have been removed and renamed.���

Lord Carey, who was Archbishop between 1991 and 2002, told The Mail on Sunday he wanted a public inquiry to scrutinise the matter.

But the Church has said that although it could not release full details of the investigation for reasons of confidentiality, it accepted the woman���s account as true.

The Church said allegations ���must be taken seriously ��� however high profile the individual may be���, and that the process had been ���long, complex and carried out with all the sensitivity a case of this nature demands���.

Lord Carey is himself facing questions over his support for convicted sex-offender and former Bishop of Gloucester Peter Ball, but says he has done nothing improper.

The link to the story online(which is on p.20 of the Mail on Sunday) is here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3478678/Carey-s-fury-Church-abuse-case-bishop-Ex-Archbishop-accuses-officials-destroying-dead-priest-s-reputation-unproven-claims.html

The relevant part of Archbishop Carey���s letter to Mrs Barbara Whitley (George Bell���s 92-year-old niece) is here. Mrs Whitley wrote to the Archbishop to seek his support in clearing her late uncle���s name.

���March 3rd 2016

George Bell, Bishop of Chichester

Thank you for your letter of February 1 and please accept my apologies for the delay in replying. My wife and I have been in Houston since January 23 and it was only on my return this week that I discovered your letter.

Let me say at once that I share your distress. Your uncle was a man whose contribution to this country and the Church was outstanding. He was without question one of the greatest church leaders of the 20th Century.

I am frankly appalled by the way the church authorities have treated his memory. When this matter became public knowledge several months ago I questioned the Church���s approach with someone at Lambeth Palace and was advised that it was in everyone���s interest to keep the matter low key. I have however kept a watching brief on the matter and your letter has now prompted me to seek ways of re-opening this.

The fact is that the Church of England has effectively delivered a ���guilty��� verdict without anything resembling a fair and open trial. His reputation is in tatters and as you sadly point out, all references to him in the diocese he loved and served have been removed and renamed.

At the moment I am at a loss concerning where we go to reopen the case. I am quite certain that the authorities are hoping this will go away. It is unlikely that there will be any legal avenues open to clearing George Bell���s name, I hope instead we may be able to persuade some people in the media to take this forward. Newspapers are sometimes prepared to step forward when powerful organisations crush individuals.���

 

A recording of a speech and Q&A session on Russia at the University of Lincoln

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBzoMuJUrAU

If you pay for something, you have a right to get it... unless it���s a state pension, of course

This is Peter Hitchens���s Mail on Sunday column

The really bad thing about modern politicians is the way they punish people for trying to be good. When a marriage is in trouble, the state takes the side of the spouse who wants to break it up. When a young student is starting out in life, he or she is forced to go deep into debt.
All around us we see dishonesty and crime flourish, cynical loan-sharks and gambling joints allowed to prey on the weak and foolish, as the greedy and selfish push to the front of the queue and the kind and considerate are left till last.
But until last week I didn���t realise what a horrible thing the Government has done to those on the verge of qualifying for their pensions after saving carefully all their lives. A reader, let us call her Kathy, wrote to me to explain exactly how this has affected her.
Kathy is now 61 and has paid full National Insurance contributions for 39 years. Five years ago, she was made redundant. At first she went self-employed and held several contract or freelance posts, and one apparently permanent job which did not last. In fact, there are few of these around for anyone, old or young, these days.
As she says: ���I should have been able to draw on my state pension at age 60 but due to government changes I won���t get a state pension for another five and a half years. I am therefore expected to work until this age, which I don���t have a problem doing ��� except that I can���t find a new job.���
No wonder. Far too many employers simply won���t look at job applicants in their 50s or 60s, leaving many thousands of men and women in a horrible limbo. To begin with, Kathy was able to get a small payment in the form of Jobseeker���s Allowance (not unjustly, as she has never ceased to seek work).
Kathy has always done what she was brought up to do. She thought she had looked after her future. She lived frugally to buy her own home, while saving carefully for her retirement. But as soon as she took money out of her (very modest) pension pot to make ends meet, the Jobseeker���s Allowance stopped. When she protested, she was advised by an official to sell her home. As she says: ���Why should I have to when I���ve now worked for more than 40 years, paid 39 years��� full National Insurance but am not able to draw on my state pension?
���If the Government had not been under-handed in advising this group of women who fall within this age category then I would not be looking for any benefit help as I would have drawn my state pension at age 60.
���It���s disgraceful that women caught up in this very unfair change to their state pension should end up in the stressful situation that I now find myself in. I have no husband or partner to support me and have never expected any help until now.���
I asked the Government about this, and they said blandly: ���We have to take income and capital into account when calculating someone���s entitlement to means-tested benefits.
���For those below state pension age, any funds held in a pension pot are disregarded, but if funds are withdrawn they will be taken into account.��� Well, yes, I can see that. But the nation owes Kathy the pension she paid for, and it���s dodging its duty.
Why pretend there is such a thing as ���National Insurance��� if it can simply be postponed for years to suit the Treasury which, as we all know, wastes money all over the place elsewhere? What would happen to a private company that promised a pension and then failed to deliver it on the promised date?
I���m all in favour of a welfare state, for those who genuinely cannot cope and also for those who contribute. Is it so hard to design it in such a way that it cares for the truly needy, rewards the provident and is tough on the feckless and the cynical? It seems so.

 

Charity means ALWAYS saying No to beggars

One of the wickedest things you can do is to take advantage of the natural charity of honest people. The springs of kindness will dry up if people conclude that beggars are cheats and frauds. Every person who lies for a handout helps bring this about.
Look at the wretched behaviour of Stewart Fenton, who pretended to be a homeless ex-soldier when he was neither of those things and was getting benefits.
Is he the only one? About ten times a week I harden my already far-from-soft heart and politely refuse a beggar���s request for money (on one occasion when I wasn���t so polite I ended up with a black eye).
Sometimes, if they claim to need the fare home from my local station, I say I will go with them to the ticket window and pay. So far they have always melted away at this point. But otherwise I try to prove to myself that I am not horribly mean by giving a fixed sum to a local homeless charity for each time I say ���Sorry, no.���
Actually, I think this is at worst a neutral thing to do. Giving cash seldom helps anyone, and often harms them. And these days you are often passing money straight to the drug dealers who sometimes stand visibly nearby, waiting menacingly for their money. What good does that do?
Once again, many of us make the basic mistake of doing what makes us feel good, rather than what actually does good.
Don���t feel guilty about saying no, as long as you help in other, better ways.

 

Of course France would never in a thousand years have considered giving a British firm the contract to make its medals. Quite right, too. The reason why we have even discussed awarding such a contract to the French is that we believe, as they do not, in  the absolute rule of law ��� the thing which distinguishes us from all the rest of Europe. So when we sign an agreement saying our markets are open, we mean it. And when they sign it, they don���t. The only way we would ever prosper in the EU is if we sank to their standards.

 

You may wonder what happened to the three people arrested and held overnight for daring to protest at last October���s visit by the president of China, that callous, touchy and aggressive despotism. One of them was barged and grabbed by a helmeted police heavy. All, disgracefully, had their homes searched. All were, in the end, released without charge. In that case, how can this heavy-handed treatment possibly be justified?

 

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PH on 'the Moral Maze' defends George Bell

On Wednesday evening I was the first witness on 'The Moral Maze' on BBC Radio 4, defending the late Bishop George Bell against attacks on his reputation made after his death - the theme of the programme.

 

You may listen to the programme here

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b071vjrm

 

 

 

An explanation for my absence

I must apologise to readers for the shortage of substantial blog posts in the past week. As well as travelling to the lovely city of Lincoln for a pleasant and productive visit,  I have been devoting a great deal of my time to making further enquiries into the Bishop Bell case, and a number of important and fascinating developments in it which I hope will soon become apparent.  I���ve also had to spend quite a lot of time spelling ���Mary Dejevsky��� to people who seem unable to cope with audio versions of this rather simple name.

On top of this I found myself preparing for the appearance on BBC Radio 4���s ���Moral Maze��� to which I link in an earlier post.

This has also been a curious period in politics and news, in which the initial clamour of the referendum campaign has gradually been resolving itself into a (to me) wearisome repetition of old, old arguments which I have been hearing or making for decades,  during which nobody cared at all. Whether they care now, we shall see.  I suspect they just want it to end, and will vote accordingly, but who can say in this febrile era in which all that was once solid is now quaking bog and treacherous quicksand?

And there have been the equally dreary primary elections in the United States, in which I struggle to be interested. I don���t even want to want to be. I want to want to be interested in cricket ( a useful Michael Frayn formulation,). But I am not, and cannot be, though I can remember that I was gripped by it round about the age of 11.

But I don���t even to want to want to be interested in US politics, which, to me, have all the fascination of a Parish Council election in Borsetshire.

Anyway, I felt I should explain.

The BBC admits, to its great credit: 'We got it wrong about Bishop Bell'

I am at last able to reveal that the BBC has, very much to its credit, and in contrast to many other media, regional and national, admitted that some of its reporting on the allegations against Bishop George Bell was wrong.

It has justly and properly accepted an argument I and others have made to several media, local and national.These media said that the late Bishop ���was��� a child abuser, without the qualifications normally used in reporting an unproven allegation. They were not entitled to do so, as no on-the-record statement or document justified this conclusion.  ���The Guardian���  has, as I have noted here earlier, specifically rejected this argument as has its 'Review Panel', a Scott Trust body which stoutly maintains its independence from the newspaper. Though the Panel has conceded , bizarrely, that it might have been better to use inverted commas around the claims that the Bishop ���was��� an abuser. Indeed it might.

The summary of the conclusions of the Editorial Complaints Unit (ECU) has just gone up on the BBC website, and can be seen at http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/comp-reports/ecu/southeasttoday051115.  There���s also a report on the Corrections & Clarifications page at http://www.bbc.co.uk/helpandfeedback/corrections_clarifications. 

The ECU concluded that the Church���s original October 22nd statement (in my view the unjustified basis of much misleading reporting on the matter, as it made no assertion of guilt) ���did not warrant reporting as a matter of fact that the allegations had been proven���

 

The key quotation in full is below:

���The original statement by the church authorities had not explicitly said they believed Bishop Bell to have been guilty, but a subsequent statement said they had accepted the veracity of the allegations on the balance of probabilities.  This, however, did not warrant reporting as a matter of fact that the allegations had been proven.���

I would add that in a letter to me on 28th January (which I have refrained from publishing until now because I was asked to keep it private till the final conclusion was published), Fraser Steel, the BBC���s Head of Editorial Complaints, said:

������Although the statement doesn���t say so in terms, it certainly implies that the church authorities have accepted that the allegations are true. That, however, is not the same as saying that Bishop Bell has been proven guilty of sexual abuse and, to the best of my knowledge, no information has been disclosed about the matter which might warrant the view that the allegations had in effect been proven, even though not through court proceedings.

���I therefore agree that both the broadcast and the online piece were inaccurate in that respect.��� (my emphasis, PH)