Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 176

An interview of P.H. by Eric Metaxas

Here is the video version of an interview I gave last summer (in St Aldate's Church*, Oxford) to the American author Eric Metaxas, who has published a powerful biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Protestant leader and opponent of Hitler, murdered by the Nazis. Bonhoeffer, incidentally,was a close friend of the late Bishop George Bell of Chichester, whose reputation I am currently trying to defend, after the Church of England publicised anonymous allegations of child abuse made against him many years after his death. The interview is mainly, but by no means entirely, devoted to topics linked to religion. 

 

http://socratesinthecity.com/

 

 

*St Aldate must be the most obscure saint in the calendar. Almost nothing is known of him. His name now dignifies an Oxford street, the main southern route into the heart of Oxford,  formerly known as Fish Street - a name probably not grand enough for Christ Church, the grand and wealthy college which dominates it. TV dramas abnout Oxford usually mistakenly refer to it as 'St Aldgate's. 

Revolutionaries and Why They Matter, Even When They Seem Absurd

This is a review of  'Party Animals: My family and Other Communists' by David Aaronovitch, published by Jonathan Cape ��17.99. It first appeared in 'Event' Magazine, the Mail on Sunday's cultural review, on Sunday 10th January 2016.

 

Revolutionaries are both terrible and pathetic. Having been one, I should know. Utopia appeals especially to people who don���t fit in with the normal daily world, the socially awkward, the hopelessly unfashionable, the too-clever-by-half.

But, weird and ill-sorted as they are, such people can and do become monsters, especially when the world dives unexpectedly into the chaos of war or slump.  

In the last days of peace in 1914, you might have seen a myopic, wild-haired young man eking out a single cup of coffee for hours in Vienna���s Caf�� Central, engaging in spluttering arguments with others like him, furiously scribbling or equally furiously glaring at some dense volume. How absurd and marginal he would have seemed.

But a few years later, the same young man, one Leon Trotsky, was the key organiser of the coup d���etat which began 70 years of Soviet Communist tyranny, and later the commander of vast revolutionary armies, changing the world for the worse and forever. It is impossible to work out how many deaths he was responsible for.

That is why David Aaronovitch���s strange, sad memoir of a Communist upbringing in London is worth reading. If things had turned out differently, the forgotten, peculiar people in the world he describes might have mattered a lot. The Kremlin certainly valued them, and not just because some of them spied for Moscow (though some of them did). In the end, they wanted to overthrow the old conservative, Christian, unregulated England. And now that task has been achieved without the aid of Red Army tanks, but through a hundred institutions quietly infiltrated by the left, it���s worth wondering what part they played in it.

Someone thought they were important. Every few weeks the KGB would hand bundles of used fivers in shopping bags to a Communist Party official called Reuben Falber on Barons Court Tube station in London. He stashed them in the loft of his Golders Green bungalow. Aaronovitch airily dismisses this interesting handout, vehemently denied at the time, as ���a small amount���.

Some of the money went on founding a magazine called Marxism Today, which, hilariously but rather interestingly, became the Blairites��� favourite publication. This subsidy, sometimes reaching ��100,000 a year when that was a lot of money, carried on arriving long after British Communists condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Perhaps the Kremlin didn���t think they really meant it. 

And even now, what has happened to them? Do they perhaps still exercise influence? Well, look at David Aaronovitch. David attained early fame by being part of a ���University Challenge��� team which leadenly answered every question with the name of a revolutionary hero. He is to this day a BBC favourite. He writes that he was ���told��� in 1987 by an unnamed BBC person that  it would be better to leave the Party, not because it was in itself a bad idea to be in it, but in case the right-wing press found out.  And so he did.

Since then he has also become a prominent columnist on ���The Times���, and was for years an important media supporter of the Blair government and its wars. He now recognises he was fooled over Iraq, but he still seems keen on intervening in other people���s countries, also an old Communist habit.

David (I know him slightly) is clearly marked by his strange and rather upsetting upbringing, and his parents��� disastrous marriage. Some of the book is so sad and distressing that I am amazed that he has revealed these deeply personal things in his memoir. I feel it would be cruel to repeat or refer to them here.

It is in many ways a clever and moving portrait of a strange unexplored subculture, of dedicated self-education by desperately poor young men, of undoubtedly good causes adopted for the advancement of a wicked and dangerous purpose.

And it confirms in many ways that sexual revolution, seldom mentioned, always pursued, is a driving force on the British left.  He records one ancient comrade, reminiscing happily that the Communist Party was ���a feast of sex. You���ve no idea! We were hippies before it was even thought of. I never s*****d around so much in my life. The Party was full of charming, charming women���.

Maybe so. But the men weren���t half so charming, and I still wonder if Britain���s Communists didn���t exercise a good deal more influence on British politics than most people realise.  Perhaps, in a way, they still do.

 

 

Justice for George Bell - The Story So Far

I think I can now say that the anonymous claim that the late Bishop George Bell was a child abuser is now widely accepted to be just that ��� a claim. It may or may not be true. It cannot and should not be treated as if it has been proven. 

Three of the media organisations which originally printed or broadcast stories treating the claim as a fact have now printed articles (by me in The Times, behind a paywall, by Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/12077435/The-Church-the-police-and-the-unholy-destruction-of-Bishop-Bell.html and by the Revd Giles Fraser in The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2016/jan/07/doesnt-bishop-george-bell-deserve-the-presumption-of-innocence

��� in which the true status of the accusation has been made clear.  I think any serious person searching the archives will know immediately that the charge is contested and unproven. Actually, I think this is evident from the Church of England���s statement on Bishop Bell���.  https://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2015/10/statement-on-the-rt-revd-george-bell-(1883-1958).aspx

���which on examination contains no actual words which support the unadorned claim ���Bishop Bell abused a child���. Yet this unqualified claim was asserted as a fact by several media on the basis of this statement. There is no other on-the-record authority for these stories. How did they come to say what the statement didn���t?

  

Others, including those who first publicised the accusations,  have yet to make any serious effort to redress the balance.

The astonishing thing is the gigantic difference between the way in which media must behave towards the living, and the way in which they may behave towards the dead. I am not arguing for the living to be allowed to sue on behalf of the dead. But I am saying that death does not free us from any obligations of honour or justice.  And that when it comes to accusations of serious criminal behaviour, we have as many obligations to the deceased as we do to the living.  The fact that these are not enforced by the courts doesn���t mean that we shouldn���t impose them on ourselves by our own moral rules. On the contrary, if we are moral, then we are obliged to do so.

But at present, the situation is as follows: To treat an unproven allegation of criminal behaviour as a fact, in the case of a living person, opens those who do it to the possibility of severe action under Contempt of Court rules, and to the danger of lawsuits for defamation.

To do the same to a dead person opens those who do it to���absolutely nothing. Death is a powerful thing - but should it allow such complete freedom? If it does, we shouldn't allow such freedom to ourselves, perhaps the reason for the old maxim 'Do not speak ill of the dead'. 

I append below the two responses from Anglican Bishops - the first to my article in The Times , and the second to Charles Moore���s in the Daily Telegraph:

'Sir, In response to Peter Hitchens's Thunderer (Dec 4) I would like to emphasise that the decision to issue a statement about the settlement of a claim against Bishop George Bell was an agonising one taken only after a long process. We have always affirmed and treasured his principled stand in the Second World War, and his contribution to peace remains extraordinary. We also have a duty and commitment to listen to survivors of abuse, to guard their confidentiality and to protect their interests. As our statement makes clear, a thorough process of evaluation took place.

Had we not published ��� and others would ��� we would also rightly have been criticised.  

The Right Rev Mark Sowerby

Bishop of Horsham'

****

My responses to this are as follows: No doubt the decision was agonising and the process long. That does not mean that it was the right decision. No-one disputes the Church���s duty to listen to those who allege that they have been abused, to take their charges seriously and to investigate them thoroughly.  But it also has a duty of justice to those against whom the accusations are made. A charge is not a conviction, and nor should it be. Imagine what the world would be like if, merely by accusing someone, you could destroy him or her and bring about his or her imprisonment or even death.  It is to protect us from such a nightmare that we have justice and the presumption of innocence, and that is why we have a moral and social duty to defend these principles and abide by them in our own discourse and conduct.

 

For instance, to term a complainant ���the survivor��� is itself to prejudge the legal process. For me, I am afraid, those who choose to accuse others of crimes, thus exposing the accused to the risk of ruin and incarceration, must do this in the open and be prepared to see their allegations tested in open court before a jury.  I do not see the ���confidentiality��� of the accuser as virtuous in the justice process. The evaluation of the charge was not thorough by any standard, let alone those of the English courts, because Bishop Bell���s interests were at no point represented.

 

I am genuinely puzzled by what the Bishop of Horsham means when he says others would have published. I have never understood why this unproven claim against a deceased person who, even if guilty, poses no risk to any living person, needed to be made public. And who are these 'others'? 

***

'SIR - Charles Moore identifies the bewilderment and anguish that exist in the diocese of Chichester, and well beyond it, following the announcement of an allegation against Bishop George Bell and the settlement of a civil claim.

This goes deep. It has inevitably been linked with the trial and conviction of other clergy from the diocese of Chichester who have been convicted of sexual abuse, among them Peter Ball, a former bishop of Lewes.

However, the impact of an accusation against a person of Bishop Bell's stature is far more profound. We have not lost sight of that. The suggestion that we would trade the reputation of Bishop Bell for a moment of political, social or even media advantage is seriously mistaken.

The perspective that receives little acknowledgement in Mr Moore's article is that of a survivor. Within Britain, and certainly within the Church of England, we are seeking to move on from a culture in which manipulation of power meant that victims were too afraid to make allegations, or allegations were easily dismissed.

In future we must provide safeguards of truth and justice for all, victim and accused alike.

It is for that reason that I welcome the Goddard Inquiry as a more balanced forum than the media might be for a judicial and forensic assessment of our handling of child abuse cases. If, in the matter of Bishop Bell, or any other case, we in the diocese of Chichester are shown to have acted without proper attention to our responsibilities as guardians of the Christian faith, the vulnerable and the voiceless, then I would expect public censure and its consequences to follow.

Rt Rev Martin Warner

Bishop of Chichester

Chichester, West Sussex'

****

Many of the same points apply to Bishop Martin Warner's epistle as apply to Bishop Mark Sowerby���s. They are answered, in my view, by Giles Fraser's article,  linked above.  But there are others. The case against Peter Ball has been proven in open court and so cannot be compared with the charge against George Bell. The Bishop of Chichester���s assertion that ���The suggestion that we would trade the reputation of Bishop Bell for a moment of political, social or even media advantage is seriously mistaken��� is pretty strong. But he offers no reason to disbelieve such a suggestion. The statement ���The perspective that receives little acknowledgement in Mr Moore's article is that of a survivor���  is remarkable. Why should it have done?  Charles Moore was addressing the failure to afford George Bell the presumption of innocence, and this riposte, with the use of the word 'survivor' implying  - without ever openly stating - that the charge is proven,  is another example of this very failure.

 

I must repeat that we (and that includes the Bishop of Chichester)  know, as yet,  of no proven ���survivor��� in the case against George Bell . We know only of an accuser, so anonymous that we do not even know his or her sex, whose first accusation was made decades after the death of the accused (thus making it difficult for the accused to protect himself through supposed manipulation of power). Accusers must be heard, and their accusations treated seriously. But the truth of their accusations must be properly tested in the clear light of day. These have not been.

If the diocese of Chichester ���are shown to have acted without proper attention to our responsibilities as guardians of the Christian faith, the vulnerable and the voiceless���, they will indeed be open to censure.  But what is proper attention? Does it necessarily involve a one-sided secret process in which the accused has no voice?  Would the mere existence and deployment of a defence be in some way a mistreatment of the accuser?  And are not the dead voiceless, and their reputations vulnerable? Don���t they too need us to pay proper attention to our responsibilities? In justice, you cannot choose one side or the other, before you have heard all the evidence, and heard it properly tested. Ultimately, this may be an argument about liberty itself. 

You need Dinosaurs to Defend the freedoms liberals love

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

Every educated and intelligent person glories in the freedom of women in Western societies to exercise their talents to the full, and their freedom to walk safely in the streets of our great cities.

So what are the enlightened minds of the Left to do when news comes of revolting assaults on women in front of Cologne Cathedral, one of the jewels of European Christian culture in one of Germany's proudest cities? And how are they to react when growing evidence suggests that at least some of the culprits are newly arrived migrants from the Muslim world?

With mumbled embarrassment and nasty jibes against those who have long opposed uncontrolled mass migration, that's how.

 

 

Police drive back right-wing demonstrators with a water cannon in Cologne in the wake of the sexual assaults around Cologne's main station on New Year's Eve

As an illustration, I had a radio clash with the Guardian writer Gaby Hinsliff on Friday (details here http://dailym.ai/1K6xp0W )

 

after she admitted that 'liberals like me are reluctant to talk about it'. While rightly chiding her own side, she couldn't resist dismissing opponents of mass migration as dinosaurs and their views as 'frothing rage'. Here is the news, Ms Hinsliff. Those who for many years warned against non-selective mass immigration (and were dismissed as bigoted dinosaurs by people like her) were concerned about just this sort of problem.

If migrants from other cultures arrive too fast and in numbers too great for society to absorb and integrate them, they begin to impose those cultures on the host country. Germany is witnessing this now, and so are we. 

The louder our governments shout about their dedication to fighting Islamist extremism, the readier they are to Islamise our own society. The sheer size of the Muslim population compels them to do so.

 

 
 




 
 

That is why exams in England are to be moved to accommodate Muslim pupils taking part in the Ramadan fast. And it is why the Mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, reacted to the first reports of women being molested in her city by advising them: 'It is always possible to keep a certain distance that is longer than an arm's length.'

Of course she has now been mocked so much that she has backtracked. But the point is that it was her first instinct, and what she really felt.

Radical multicultural types will in the end destroy the things they claim to like, because they don't understand that liberty and reasonable equality are features of stable, free, conservative societies based on Christian ideas, which guard their borders and are proud of their civilisation.

The people who really want to defend our enlightened society, in the end, are dinosaurs like me.

****

 

Where's the fury about these beheadings?

I have endured endless pious lectures about the wickedness of Vladimir Putin and Syria's President Assad from supporters of the Government's wild and ignorant foreign policy.

So how startling it was to see the same people mute themselves when Saudi Arabia, now seemingly Britain's closest ally, killed 47 people on one day, many by beheading.

Some of these victims were no doubt real criminals, though the expression 'Saudi justice system' is a grim and bloodstained joke, so we cannot be sure of the guilt of the condemned. But some were political dissenters.

Yet a government that squawks mightily over every Islamic State death video was strangely measured over these very similar events, which incidentally menace the peace of the Middle East.

I took a careful look at Government statements. They all had the same odd, weak theme. We condemn the death penalty, whoever carries it out.

David Cameron said: 'We condemn and do not support the death penalty in any circumstances and that includes Saudi Arabia.'

The Foreign Office said: 'The UK opposes the death penalty in all circumstances and in every country.'

So, as far as Mr Cameron and the Foreign Office are concerned, the beheading of a political opponent after a jury-less, unfair trial in a country with no free press is just the same as the execution in Texas of a bloody murderer convicted after due process by an independent jury of free men and women under the scrutiny of a free press. And we condemn them both equally. And that's all we're going to say. Now, would you like to buy some aeroplanes?

Well, they don't speak for me. I'd much rather hang convicted heinous killers than bomb foreign countries (there's less chance of killing innocent people).

I have used the word 'feeble' so many times to describe this Government that the poor thing is quite exhausted and I have had to send it on holiday.

 
 

Dave and the invisible Tory disaster

Both our big political parties are badly divided, but somehow or other David Cameron's splitting pains get much less attention than Jeremy Corbyn's.

For instance, a BBC News programme last week arranged for some Blairite nobody to resign from his non-job, live on air. This event, plainly aimed at damaging Mr Corbyn, hardly fits in with the Corporation's duty to be impartial.

The fact that most Labour MPs can't stand Mr Corbyn isn't news. Next they'll be revealing to us that Ted Heath couldn't abide Margaret Thatcher. We know.

 

 







 

 
 



 

 

 

 

Mr Cameron is an EU-loving, pro-immigration, anti-grammar-school, politically correct social and economic liberal

What seemed like a century of speculation on whether Dave Who had been sacked to make way for Fred Whatsit wasn't really justified. But of course the BBC isn't impartial and its idea of what is news is tinged with pink. It's crammed with shameless Leftists from cellar to chimney. So if the BBC is actively helping the Tories, which it does these days, then that must mean the Tories are now the main party of the Left.

And that's Mr Cameron's problem. He's an EU-loving, pro-immigration, anti-grammar-school, politically correct social and economic liberal.

His MPs are mostly the same, though they do a bit of pseudo-conservative braying at elections. But his voters and his remaining party members are patriotic real conservatives. He hoped to bandage this rupture by promising the EU referendum. But now he has actually been forced to keep this promise, it isn't helping much.

If he does let Ministers campaign on both sides, it will quickly be clear that hardly any of the Tory top brass, and not many of the bottom brass, genuinely want to leave the EU. They don't mind criticising it a bit, but they won't quit, and they won't fight to do so.

Most of them would rather be gagged, so they can pretend to be straining against the leash. How long can the Tory Party stay in one piece, when its leadership and its core vote are so utterly divided?

 

Discussing the Events in Cologne with a Guardian liberal

Some readers may be interested in a discussion I had on the BBC Radio 4 programme The World At One, on Friday 8th January. For the moment, you can listen to it here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06tvsx0

The item begins (with several reports) at about seven minutes in. Our discussion begins at about 18 minutes in

Ms Hinsliff had written this interesting if disappointing article in the ���Guardian���.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/08/cologne-attacks-hard-questions-new-years-eve

Note its references to ���misogynist dinosaurs��� and the way it rather trails away at the end into largely irrelevant calls for ���more policing��� as if that was the point.  However, it shows commendable signs of dawning doubt, so I accepted the invitation to pedal across London to New Broadcasting House, the BBC���s unsatisfactory new plastic palace,   and discuss the matter with her (alas, she was in a remote studio, so we didn���t actually meet)

Letting Rip Against all This Reshuffle Garbage

It���s now plain that our supposedly super-accurate RAF bombers have done very little in Syria since the great Parliamentary vote on the subject. If the military need was so urgent, why is this so?

It seemed to me at the time and seems to me now that Parliament and the government���s regiment of media toadies were actually being invited to authorise raids on Jeremy Corbyn. The government also wanted to implicate us in some way in military action in Syria, presumably to make Saudi Arabia happy and to make deeper engagement possible later - if we can find a way of backing the pro-Saudi rebels who have done so much to turn Syria into anarchy and ruins.

But the ridiculous praise for Hilary Benn���s fatuous speech (regarded as Churchillian by the sort of people who think Downton Abbey is great drama), and the Labour applause for it, were the real victory. Had the Oldham by-election (the following day, on 3rd December)  gone the other way, the Blairites in New Labour would have mounted a putsch against Jeremy Corbyn, and tried to recapture their party from its annoying members. This sort of thing has been done to the Tories, when IDS ( a far less competent leader than Mr Corbyn) was overthrown by a supersmooth, pinstriped putsch.

The timing of the Syria debate, in retrospect, looks rather suspicious. There was no special military or diplomatic reason, as is quite obvious now, for holding it that night. The only reason for hurry was the Oldham poll. There was nothing else on the grid that couldn���t be altered. A humiliation for |Mr Corbyn on Wednesday night at Westminster and another one on Thursday night in Oldham Town Hall, and the brave boys of New Labour would have acted.

Alas for Blairism, the people of Oldham didn���t do as the Blairites wanted. This, of course was immediately said to be in spite of Jeremy Corbyn, and not to his credit. If it had gone the other way, it would (I promise you) have been entirely his fault, and the people���s verdict on Corbynism.

David Cameron and his media helpers really, really want to destroy Jeremy Corbyn.  Mr Cameron���s attitude towards Mr Corbyn at Question Time is one of real, venomous enmity. He ignores Mr Corbyn���s actual questions (this week those questions were by common consent pertinent and well-asked) and instead fans the undisguised and inevitable hostility between Mr Corbyn and his MPs.

Why does he do this? You���d think he���d want to keep Mr Corbyn there, if he���s as awful and useless as we are constantly being told.

On Channel Four News last night ( a programme which might once have been a good deal more sympathetic to Corbynism than it would now like to admit, having become a Blairite organ like all the rest) , there was speculation after the supposedly disastrous Labour reshuffle that we were heading for a one-party state, as Labour is now so enfeebled.

Again, you���d think the Tories would like that. But they plainly don���t. The identifiable sycophants of David Cameron in the media are dedicated to attacks on Mr Corbyn, attacks so relentless that you would think there was nothing else to write about, that the economy was fine (rather than poised on a precipice) that the NHS was perfect (rather than in increasingly deep difficulties) and that the Prime Minister���s attempts to escape his EU referendum pledge (a hopeless, illogical tangle) were going well. Not to mention disasters visible to me daily such as the hopeless delay on the electrification of the Great Western mainline, miles behind timetable and mountains of money over budget. Let���s forget HS2 and the Heathrow expansion, or the relentless slither towards a Scottish secession, and the utter failure of all attempts to control our borders.  

No, the most important thing in politics turns out to be whether Mike Who swaps jobs with Brenda What, and if Stan Nobody has quit his non-job as deputy minister for Tramways and Fine Arts, in protest at the easing out of Albert Whatsit from his non-job as Shadow Secretary of State for Wind Farms.

Billed for weeks as the ���revenge reshuffle���,  it was supposed to be a sort of Westminster version of the Red Wedding in ���Game of Thrones���, with the Shadow Cabinet corridor knee-deep in blood and littered with grotesque political corpses and the weltering, obscene figures of the dying,  crying ���treachery!��� and ���murder!��� What, I wonder, was the source for this fantasy? I don���t think Mr Corbyn talks much to the Parliamentary Lobby, who he rightly recognises are not his friends.

The actual event (in which great crowds of reporters hung about stairwells and lift-shafts trying to find something, anything interesting to write about)  involved Jeremy Corbyn boring  a few colleagues half to death with conciliatory, polite conversations, and getting rid of a few people from (unpaid, unimportant) jobs because they disagree with him about major policy issues. Well, I never. A party leader who wants allies in his Shadow Cabinet.

Well,  I never, a party leader whose authority comes from the old-fashioned left-wing party membership clashing with a new-fashioned left-wing Parliamentary Party whose authority comes from their endorsement by the media and the money men who decide who���s top in politics.

For the first time in my life, this country is actually coming to resemble the Marxist caricature of crude money and power, concentrated in a power elite,  versus the disdained people ��� a caricature that has never hitherto been true at all and which does not prove that the Marxists were right.

For the power and the money are all lined up on the side of the revolutionary radicals of Blairism,  whose origins (even if they don���t know it) lie in the raw pre-Lenin, (and pre-Kautsky) Marxism of 1848  - fanatical egalitarians ready to wreck the education of millions for an ideology , wild, dogmatic warmists ready to wreck our economy for the sake of their faith, flingers-open of borders at any cost, wagers of liberal wars and bombing campaigns, overthrowers of foreign governments which don���t conform to their desires,  servile slaves of foreign authorities which accord with their desires, viciously intolerant promoters of the most all-embracing social and cultural theory since the Reformation.

To these people, now dominating the House of Commons, the media and the academy, Mr Corbyn is (paradoxically) an infuriatingly conservative person, who (for the wrong reasons, but never mind) keeps open the possibility that they might be wrong, and (worse) that they might one day be defeated by discontent. He thinks in categories they have long ago abandoned, nation, class and history. His old-fashioned good manners alone are a reproach to the modern go-getter who has none.

No, no, I don���t agree with him. Don���t get carried away. But they loathe him just as much as they loathe me ��� and for what is basically the same reason - anyone with a memory is an obstacle to their project

The only opposition they are ready to tolerate is one that doesn���t raise any awkward questions. They expect to beat Labour whoever leads it. But they don���t want the Leader of Her Majesty���s Opposition  - still an implicitly influential position - to haunt them with memories of when this country had a genuinely two-party system and all that went with that. As Richard Neville said so perceptively right at the start of this revolution 50 and more years ago ���There is an inch of difference between the two parties ��� but it is in that inch that we all live��� .

 I think that���s it, anyway.  I just felt like letting rip against all this humbug and garbage.

Notes on Vigilance. Should we be more worried about Saudi, and less worried about ISIS?

My trains returned to ���normal��� this morning, which means that the ���train manager��� now once again urges us commuters twice daily to ���report suspicious behaviour��� . Apart from telling us (after it���s too late to get off if you���re on the wrong train) where we are going in tedious detail, or shouting at us about ticket restrictions, they love this stuff about ���suspicious behaviour���.

Of course, there never is any. Then only thing that would make regular passengers suspicious on my line would be a train that arrived on time, and didn���t stop in Reading so long that the becalmed passengers became liable for council tax.

Fat businessmen who *don���t* shout into their mobile phones, and football fans who *don���t* sing loudly and tunelessly and laugh mirthlessly on Saturday evenings would also be suspicious.   

But I digress.

The reason I am annoyed by this appeal for vigilance is that I think it is propaganda, designed, by constant repetition,  to make us think we live in dangerous times (sometimes the warning is prefaced by the words ���in view of recent heightened security alerts��� ). No doubt there is a possibility of terrorism. Who can deny it?  

 

And I think a certain level of vigilance is always reasonable. I have done since the days when IRA bombs in London were quite common (one, in Harrods,  killed a colleague of mine on the old ���Daily Express���, mainly because he bravely did his job and went towards the danger to see what was going on).

 

From time to time one would hear the detonations, and worry about everyone one knew and cared about, until one knew they were safe.  That���s why I recently chided an idiot for leaving his tatty unlabelled backpack unattended for long minutes in a station concourse while he went outside to smoke. I���d asked everyone nearby if the thing was theirs and nobody had claimed it. If he hadn���t turned up at that minute I would have ���alerted the authorities��� as asked.  

But in truth the danger is pretty small. And I am tired of it being exaggerated to get us to give up our freedoms, and to submit to searches, surveillance and bureaucracy.

I���m also tired of the way so many of my colleagues fail to see that terrorism is called terrorism for a reason. The whole point of it is to make  us frightened of a force that actually isn���t that powerful.  Simon Jenkins is quite right to refer to our ���nationalising��� of episodes of murder which ��� horrible as they are  - don���t threaten our national existence, our general security or our economy. This is exactly what the perpetrators wish us to do, to treat their wretched, shameful crimes as military actions and dignify them as if they were major strategic blows. We can mourn the deaths of their victims perfectly well without doing this.

 

We also elevate the standing and importance of these petty crooks by going on and on about how these crude killers are ���trained���. What training, precisely, does it take, to murder unarmed civilians in a concert hall or on a beach or in a restaurant, when you have a sub-machine gun and they have nothing? And in answer to Douglas Murray���s claim that the Charlie Hebdo killers showed evidence of training by the way they bypassed the magazine���s building security, even bank-robbers, often not the brightest of people, know how to do this sort of thing. They don't need to be trained in Syria. 

These terrorists can be relied upon not to attack actual soldiers on duty or military installations, for they know that if they did they would be cut to pieces.

The main characteristic that these people need is not 'training' but a total lack of normal human kindness and mercy.

This is why it is so significant and worthy of inquiry that those involved (as I have repeatedly shown here with incontrovertible facts) are almost always long term drug abusers, out of their minds on potent psychotropics (I have heard it suggested that the ISIS killers in the Middle East are also drugged, and find it easy to believe,  but I have yet to see hard evidence of this).

But rather than examine this, we use the activities of these people as a pretext for ���security��� measures and irrelevant military adventures in the Middle East, whose main purpose seems to be to entangle us in permanent conflict.

But with whom and for whom? We rightly gag with disgust and shout in horror at the beheadings and other murders of ISIS, but the behaviour of the British government after Saudi Arabia���s mass executions at the weekend has been nearly as muted as our demands for law and freedom in China.

 

Many British media outlets initially and understandably concentrated on the fact that one of the 47 executed was Adel al-Dhubaiti, the murderer of a BBC cameramen Simon Cumbers and would-be murderer of the reporter Frank Gardner. This is an important story, especially since Mr Gardner has declined invitations to forgive the wholly unrepentant al-Dhubaiti.

I think he is quite right to take this view. I am amazed at the current view that Christianity requires unconditional forgiveness of those who trespass against us, even if they show no sign of remorse. I don���t believe anyone living at the time of the Gospels would have even imagined forgiveness without repentance, any more than they could have imagined dawn without the sunrise.  

I would not expect to be forgiven by anyone for something I hadn���t repented of, and I expect the same.

And The Gospel according to St Luke  (Chapter 17, verses three and four) seems to support me. Christ says : ���Take heed to yourselves: if thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him and *if he repent* forgive him. And if he trespass against thee seven times in a  day, *and seven times in a day turn again to thee saying ���I repent���*, thou shalt forgive him���. (emphases, of course, my own)

But again, I digress.

It���s an interesting part of the story, but I suspect that the great majority of those shot or beheaded by the Saudi state on Saturday were not unrepentant murders. And the execution by Riyadh of a government opponent and Shia Cleric (in a very Sunni country),  Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a blatantly political execution, seems to have been much more typical of this mass slaughter. It has provoked fury in Iran, led to a breach in diplomatic relations between Tehran and Riyadh,  and brought the region closer to open international conflict than it has been for years.  Who knows how it will end?

Shouldn���t we be much, much more interested in this than in the headline-seeking ISIS film?

Shouldn���t be we, in general, be much more interested in and perturbed by Saudi Arabia than we are? And perhaps a bit less focussed on Islamic State, whose power and wealth are so much less? Oddly, ISIS wants our attention. Saudi Arabia, normally closed to western media and so uncommunicative it makes the Sphinx look garrulous, definitely does not.  Shouldn���t this make us wonder whether we are getting this right?

The initial reaction of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was very telling. Its press office issued a ���line��� on Saturday stating that  

���The UK opposes the death penalty in all circumstances and in every country.  The death penalty undermines human dignity and there is no evidence that it works as a deterrent.

���The Foreign Secretary regularly raises human rights issues with his counterparts in countries of concern, including Saudi Arabia. We seek to build strong and mature relationships so that we can be candid with each other about those areas on which we do not agree, including on human rights.���

Apart from its generally limited and understated nature, and its obvious desire not to single out Saudi Arabia for particular criticism, nature, this is an astonishing thing to have said.

There have, it is true,  been subsequent, fuller statements* as the inadequacy of this response has become more and more obvious. But this was the first reaction of the government department charged with Britain���s standing abroad.

I am seeking clarification, but this ���line��� appears to mean that the FCO  is equally exercised about the execution after due process in a free country with separation of powers, invigilated by a free press, of a convicted murderer in, say, Texas as it is by the political snuffing out of a government critic in a despotic unfree monarchy, Saudi Arabia. Can this really be true? But what else does the very categorical statement, with its use of 'all' and 'every', otherwise mean? 

*A junior and obscure foreign Office Minister, Tobias Ellwood, was produced on Sunday to say  

���I am deeply disturbed by the escalation in tensions in the last 24 hours in the Middle East.

The UK is firmly opposed to the death penalty. We have stressed this to the Saudi authorities and also expressed our disappointment at the mass executions.

We have discussed with the authorities in Riyadh, and expect that Ali Al-Nimr and others who were convicted as juveniles will not be executed. The UK will continue to raise these cases with the Saudi authorities.

We are deeply concerned to hear of the attack yesterday on the Saudi Embassy in Tehran. It is essential that diplomatic missions are properly protected and respected.

There are those who will wish to exploit the situation and raise sectarian tensions higher. This would be against the wishes of the vast majority of those in the region. I urge all parties in the region to show restraint and responsibility.���

The coverage of the Islamic State video on Sunday night and Monday morning must have delighted the cynics who made it. And while we let these not-very-clever manipulators make our flesh creep with their filmed murders of helpless prisoners, and their vague threats, we ( as a nation and a government) seem utterly unable to make sense of our national relationship with Saudi Arabia. It's time this became important. 

Charles Moore Calls for Justice for Bishop George Bell

My old friend Charles Moore, former editor of the 'Spectator' and 'The Daily Telegraph', now the distinguished biographer of Lady Thatcher, has written a fine article criticising the treatment of the late Bishop George Bell by the Church of England. I recommend it highly. It can be found here:

http://bit.ly/1Ss2NOn

A review of Robert Tombs's 'The English and their History'

Some of you may like to read this review, in the New York Times, of an enjoyable and interesting history book. already published here but recently released in the USA.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/books/review/the-english-and-their-history-by-robert-tombs.html?_r=0

 

 

It's astonishing, I know - but once, a long time ago, Oliver Letwin got something RIGHT

This is Peter Hitchens��� Mail on Sunday column

Oliver Letwin doesn���t want to be defended by me. That���s why I���m doing it. How funny it is that he, of all people, should have been the target of the Leftist Thought Police last week for his 30-year-old memo about the Broadwater Farm disorders.

Giggly Mr Letwin, known among Tories for years as ���Oliver Leftwing���, long ago embraced the ���equality and diversity��� political correctness that now screams and howls at the slightest whisper of dissent.

He would have been quite capable of attacking his past self as a disgraceful racist, if he had been allowed to do so. Alas, he has an almost magical power to mess up anything he says or does in public, so Government spin doctors hurried him into hiding till the squall was over.

In fact, quite a lot of what he said in the memo was perfectly sensible, if it hadn���t been for the juvenile remarks about discos and drug dealers.

One part of his reviled memo has a lot of truth in it. ���Riots, criminality and social disintegration are caused solely by individual characters and attitudes. So long as bad moral attitudes remain, all efforts to improve the inner cities will founder.���

This statement is not racially bigoted. In fact, it is the opposite. It judges people by their characters, not their skins, as Martin Luther King urged us to do. Mr Letwin���s 1985 remarks came at a time when there had been several outbreaks of disorder in areas where West Indians were concentrated. But they were not mass political uprisings. They were outbreaks of individual crime.

The great majority of West Indian migrants to this country were, are, and always have been respectable, hard-working, law-abiding and Christian in a way that sometimes shames the rest of us.

But liberal reformers, who wanted to change Britain profoundly anyway, saw these disorders as an opportunity. They ignored the truth ��� that the trouble came from a lawless minority in such districts, some of them white, who were disliked and feared by the majority. And, in a deeply racialist policy, they sought to treat all West Indians as if they could not be expected to behave well without special measures.

Those who wanted to live peaceful, honest lives and desired proper deterrence of crime would be abandoned.

From then on proper, old-fashioned policing (there and everywhere else) would be classified as ���racist��� and ���oppressive���. The first big step towards this stupid policy was Lord Scarman���s 1981 report into the Brixton ���riots��� of April that year. The actual evidence, which few have read, suggests strongly that the conflagration was deliberately started by troublemakers who whipped up a mob against police who were trying to get an injured man to hospital. They did this by spreading false rumours of a death that hadn���t happened.

It also suggests that the disorder was not random but directed by leaders, that the supposed rioters (several of them white) rapidly took to robbery, and that petrol bombs were being systematically made, stacked and distributed. Scarman admitted that the hooligans were enjoying themselves, which anyone who has ever seen a riot will know, but which people like me get into trouble for mentioning.

Scarman, a liberal of the woolliest sort, recorded but ignored these facts. He even said that ���street crime in Brixton was a grave matter, upon which the silent law-abiding majority of residents felt very strongly���. Yet he was against actions which had been intended to stand up for that majority.

He did at least have more sense than to swallow the ludicrous claim that the police were ���institutionally racist���. That had to wait for Lord Macpherson���s even more liberal report into the terrible murder of Stephen Lawrence. Lord Macpherson also called ��� quite astonishingly ��� for the police to treat different ethnic groups differently. ��� ���Colour-blind��� policing must be outlawed,��� he said. Yet I don���t remember anyone accusing his report of being ���racist���. It���s odd what causes a fuss, and what doesn���t.

In Blairite Britain, the old Soviet rules apply to anyone with an independent mind: ���Don���t think it. If you must think it, don���t say it. If you must say it, don���t write it down. If you must write it down, don���t sign it. If you must sign it, don���t be surprised.���

There are no simple answers to this misery

York is one of my favourite places in the world. I used to attend Bolshevik meetings beneath a set of buffalo horns in an upstairs room in The Lowther, the solid old pub that features in almost every picture of floods pouring through the heart of the ancient walled city.

I knew when I heard the names of streets affected by the latest inundation that something had gone extraordinarily wrong. Such places did not get flooded.

The temptation to fall in with the crowd and say ���It must be global warming��� was strong. But I also know enough about York and its rivers to be sure that this isn���t so. I���m still talking to the Environment Agency about exactly what went wrong with the barrier that failed. But it wasn���t global warming.

There are so many reasons for what���s happening ��� the El Nino effect, the deforestation of much of England, which makes the earth much less absorbent, the straightening and canalising of rivers, speeding up the flow, the silting up of side channels that used to take the pressure off big rivers. Not to mention building houses on flood plains.

And then there���s just the slow decay of skills and structures which our forebears handed on to us. When a bridge collapses, after standing for centuries, isn���t it at least partly our fault for not having maintained it properly? Beware of single-cause merchants. Every crisis has many fathers, though they���re not always keen to admit it.

Ugly secret of our 'private schools'

Solid proof that there are now two kinds of privileged private education comes from Tatler, a magazine I bet Jeremy Corbyn doesn���t read. If he did, he���d find from its guide to the top state schools that quite a lot of his beloved ���comprehensives��� are now besieged by wealthy and influential parents.

They quickly learn the complex admission rules, which religion to pretend to have got, or which tiny expensive catchment area to move into. It won���t be long before such schools ��� like the Grey Coat Hospital in Westminster, chosen by two Tory Cabinet Ministers ��� are as socially selective as Eton and Harrow, and sending their smooth products out into the world on gap yahs. Pity about the people who can���t afford the local house prices. But that���s how egalitarianism works.

It���s always nice to see my opponents tying themselves up in knots of their own devising.

Those who claim absurdly that ���dyslexia��� is a disease rather than the result of bad teaching have now been caught by their own propaganda.

A major sperm bank has been turning away donations from alleged ���dyslexics��� ��� and from supposed sufferers of that other invented complaint, ���ADHD���, the result of bad parenting or boring schools. The simple way forward is to point out that these aren���t real diseases.

They can���t say that, because then a whole industry would collapse. But I can.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down