Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 184

Grammar schools create real equality...no wonder our leaders hate them

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday Column

There aren���t enough public sector houses to go round. Would it then make sense to demolish all those houses and make everyone except the rich live in tower blocks?

Of course not. Yet this mad principle ��� that if everyone cannot have something, nobody can have it ��� governs our education policy, and no major party disagrees with it.

Half a century ago, everyone agreed that secondary modern schools were not working. Everybody knew that the technical schools, promised in 1944, had not been built.

The one good part of the system was the grammar schools. They were enabling a wonderful revolution in which the very best education was flung open to anyone who could pass an exam, and our obsolete class system was finally being overthrown by unfettered talent.

 

Alongside them, and based on the same kind of selection by ability, was a brilliant scheme known as the direct grant, by which scores of the finest private day schools in the world took in large numbers of state school pupils free of charge.

Girls and boys from grammar and direct grant schools were storming Oxford and Cambridge by the end of the 1960s, elbowing aside public school products without any special concessions or quotas.

The sane response to this would have been to build the technical schools (which we still badly need), improve the secondary moderns and encourage and expand the grammar schools and the direct grant schools.

The actual response of Tory and Labour governments was to destroy hundreds of superb grammar schools, some of them centuries old, and abolish the direct grant system. You could fill several books with these follies, and I have.

One of the many crazy results was the revival of the dying private schools, which held open their ornate gateways to paying refugees from the comprehensive madness. The comprehensives were so bad and so disorderly that basic competence and order could be sold as top quality for fees of ��25,000 a year.

It was a typical example of our governing class���s habit of finding the things that are healthy, good and beneficial, and destroying them.

As it happens, this particular mistake is reversible, and has been corrected in recent times. When communism collapsed in East Germany, thousands of parents petitioned their new free state governments to restore the grammar schools which their Stalinist rulers had ruthlessly replaced with comprehensives.

Comprehensive schools, as too few understand, have never been designed to improve education. On the contrary, their inventor, Graham Savage, actually admitted that his plan would hold back bright children.

They are a revolutionary scheme designed to enforce equality of outcome. That is why it is against the law to open any new grammar schools, and why this week���s odd legal fiddle in Sevenoaks is causing so much fuss.

But a tiny rump of grammar schools continues to exist. They are so much better than the comprehensives which replaced them that even Labour politicians, such as Harriet Harman, have readily endured derision and career damage to send their children to them.

This is why the remaining few grammars are so besieged. Their enemies repeatedly lie about this. Because a tiny few oversubscribed schools are dominated by the middle class, they claim that a national system, available to all, would have the same problem. This obviously isn���t true, yet they keep on repeating the falsehood.

Why can���t we restore the lost grammar schools when huge numbers of parents want them and they are proven to work?

It is time for these lies to end. As things are, state schools are rigidly and cruelly selective, but their pupils are picked on the basis of their parents��� wealth and ability to live in the right catchment area, or their public piety ��� or both.

The rich and powerful (including many Tory and Labour politicians and some of the keenest campaigners against grammars) play a constant Game Of Homes to lever and wangle their offspring into the best postcodes and the best ���comprehensives���. Many of these are so socially selective that they have hardly any poor pupils receiving free school meals, though you never hear this fact mentioned.

Why do we put up with it? Why can���t we restore the lost grammar schools when huge numbers of parents want them and they are proven to work?

How dare we laugh at the Germans for being subservient and obedient, when we tolerate this stupid, dishonest policy, which wrecks the hopes of thousands each year and madly wastes the talents of this country?

 

What's so saintly about destroying a happy family?

 

It was absurd to deny votes to women for so long. But the fashionable new film Suffragette is deeply misleading about how this came about, and rather nasty. Did Meryl Streep know what she was doing when she lent her stardom to this production?

It makes a saint out of a (fictional) working-class woman, played by Carey Mulligan, who ruthlessly destroys her small, happy family for the sake of an abstraction, ignoring the pleas and kindly advice of good men.

 

 

Film Suffragette makes saints out of fictional working class women like this one, played by Carey Mulligan. But what is so saintly about the way they destroy their families?

And it makes a heroine out of another fanatic, played by Helena Bonham Carter, who is in fact a terrorist, and helps to blow up a Cabinet Minister���s home.

Film Suffragette makes saints out of fictional working class women like this one, played by Carey Mulligan. But what is so saintly about the way they destroy their families?

I hope the makers are not prosecuted under the absurd and unBritish 2006 Terrorism Act, which created the offence of ���Glorifying Terrorism���, though some may think that is what their film does.

There is quite a lot of evidence that the militant suffragettes actually damaged the cause they so noisily pursued. The film doesn���t even mention the First World War, which did far more to bring about votes for women than hunger strikes, broken windows or arson.

David Cameron���s twin bungles in Libya and Syria, where his ignorant interference helped cause the huge migrant wave, have transformed the EU referendum campaign.

Cameron's pro-EU argument has been so weakened by the migrant crisis that a vote to leave Europe may now acually be possible

He has been doubly unlucky. First, he unexpectedly won the Election with a majority, so he has to keep his promise of a vote. Second, a largely indifferent public has spotted the connection between EU membership and our undefended borders.

This means that a vote to leave is actually possible, which I must admit I hadn���t thought it was. The pro-EU argument has always been feeble and dishonest, as the comically useless launch of the ���Stay-in��� campaign last week showed. And the Prime Minister���s ���renegotiations��� were always hopeless. But now this is becoming painfully obvious to those who would normally not have cared.

I just hope that, if we do decide to leave, we have enough strength and wealth to act as a nation once again. Our national muscles have shrivelled and wasted in the 43 years since Westminster was turned into a glorified county council.

And we still have no major political party that supports national independence. So will we know what to do with it when we get it?

A False New Dawn for Grammar Schools

It is being incorrectly stated by many media that a new grammar school is to open in Kent. That would be illegal, and the ���new school��� is only allowed in the form of an ���annexe��� to an existing school. In most of the United Kingdom, where academically selective secondary schools were vandalised and destroyed by egalitarian fanatics 40 or 50 years ago, this dodge is impossible. There is nothing to which to ���annexe���. In any case, David Cameron and Nick Morgan (both privately educated)  are themselves opposed to academic selection. Mr Cameron himself (like many influential left-wingers who use exceptional and anomalous parts of the state system to preserve their political image) has managed to get his child into a wholly untypical and highly selective single-sex London secondary school, of a sort wholly unavailable to 90% of the population.

 

 

For a full explanation of the ���selection by ability versus selection by wealth or public piety��� argument, please go to page 167 of this excellent Civitas pamphlet, where I ask 'Why is Selection by Wealth better than Selection by Ability?' and demonstrate that (though selection by wealth and public piety is the preferred policy of our elite) it is not better. 

 

http://www.alansmithers.com/reports/InsAndOuts.pdf

 

 

Votes for Women!

Who on earth would oppose votes for women now? Not I, for one, and I like to think I���d have been against the denial of votes on the grounds of sex had I been alive and able to express an opinion 110 years ago.  In fact, the formal exclusion of women from the vote in Britain was quite modern and like many bad things, achieved by reformers. It was part of the 1832 Great Reform Act, generally viewed as an unmixed blessing by modish opinion (the Act, as well as taking the votes from some women householders also disenfranchised quite a few industrial areas, according to the interesting account of it in Robert Tombs���s ���The English and their History���).

 

But I wasn���t very impressed by the new film ���The Suffragettes���, launched this week amid warm waves of praise. The good things about it seem to me to have been things the makers didn���t intend to be good. We are, I think, supposed to admire the guts and determination of the (fictional) working-class suffragette from the Bethnal Green laundry, who throws herself into the fight, incidentally destroying her family as a result ; and that of the bomb-making pharmacist, and would-be woman doctor (said to be based on a real person, though I���ve been unable to find full details) , played by Helena Bonham Carter; and of the Suffrage martyr Emily Wilding Davison, who died (very probably by accident ��� she bought a return ticket to Epsom) beneath the hooves of the King���s horse at the Derby.

 

I found myself more taken with the men who tried in various ways to persuade women known to them to stay away from dangerous and tragic fanaticism, which almost always (I should know, as an ex-fanatic) eats the souls of those who engage in it. The film doesn���t really address the argument always made in my schooldays, that the suffragettes, with their violence, arson and  vandalism, alienated more people than they inspired, and that it was the conscription of women into the workforce in 1914 that actually led to the social revolution we then had, including votes for (some) women.

 

It was an interesting campaign, quirkier and more paradoxical than many now recognise. Quite a lot of women were against the suffragettes, and there���s a strong suspicion that the Liberal Party feared that women voters would tend to be Tories (women in those days were famous for their conservatism)  and so did their best to postpone the matter. Republican France, it is interesting to note, didn���t give women the vote till 1944.

 

But I���ve always been struck by this most effective poster favouring women���s suffrage from the pre-1914 era

 

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Replica-Suffragette-Poster-What-Woman/dp/B003DHSDCY

 

I can���t find a bigger or clearer representation of it, but the message is clear. It is absurd that educated, wise, hardworking or dutiful persons should not have the vote.  By implication (though this is not explored) it is strange and perhaps wrong that convicted criminals, and various other categories of subject should keep it. Today we should be (rightly) unhappy with such terms as ���lunatic��� or ���unfit for service��� , and many nowadays regard habitual drunkenness as a blameless disease (I do not take this view).    But if we are honest, most people would have some doubts about the continued granting of votes to those whose behaviour has been or is criminal, or otherwise damaging and marked by habitual irresponsibility and rashness. That impeccable liberal, David Cameron, is (for instance) almost obsessed with his noisy desire to keep votes away from serving prisoners. Whether he really cares about this, I do not know. But he is not ashamed to appear to care.

 

We are still allowed to agree with the top half of the poster. But thinking about the bottom half is more difficult. The idea that suffrage must and should at all times be universal is now an unquestioned (and unquestionable) pillar of modern secular faith.  The absolute belief in the absolute virtue of the masses has already achieved a threefold victory in this country since 1948 ��� the abolition of the quirky University seats in parliament, which were often occupied by distinguished and exceptional individuals who would have been hard put to enter Parliament any other way,  the abolition of Aldermen in local government, whose experience and wisdom is in my view still much missed,  and the destruction of the House of Lords as it was (though there is yet to be a satisfactory or even half-way useful replacement). This rejection of the hereditary title to office, whose supporters feel no need to argue a case they think is self-evident,  implicitly menaces the monarchy. Everyone is too polite to mention it while the present Queen is still among us, but what will happen when she is not?

 

This unanimity means that universal suffrage (or the abolition of unelected chambers such as the Lords and the US Senate used to be) cannot possibly be reconsidered or withdrawn. Those who doubt the absolute wisdom of the people have to concede the universal suffrage principle. Only then can they come up with ideas I���ve discussed before,  giving extra votes to some citizens (such as Nevil Shute���s scheme for additional votes, granted for achievement, life experience, skill at work, successful raising of children, or other distinction, explained in his novel ���In the Wet���).

 

I just think that if you ponder the sheer wrongness of denying Votes for Women, because they are women (a wrongness which is self-evident, because it is irrational) you have in all honesty to think about whether Equal Votes for Everybody is a particularly sensible idea, and if so why. It doesn���t seem especially rational to me.  Do we apply the same principle to anything else?  I can���t offhand think of any other example, but perhaps I am not trying hard enough.

 

 

 

Owen Jones Interviews Me - Uncut!

Some weeks ago I posted an interview of me by Owen Jones of 'The Guardian'. I said at the time it was a pity that the whole thing couldn't have been shown. To my amazement, lots of other people then started asking for the uncut version. Owen (and I know this has caused him and his colleagues some effort, for which they deserve thanks ) generously agreed to do so. Here is the full version.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrwuk6NoMv8

 

 

A Real Expert Speaks about Syria

Experts seem to have vanished from British foreign policy. They gave unwanted advice before the Iraq war (they were against it) and so were sidelined in favour of political commissars, spin doctors and politicised ���intelligence services���, whose huge unquestioned budgets are a reward for their loyalty to the government of the day and their willingness to sustain its claims and feed its fantasies.  This is easy for them since they don���t ever have to give public accounts of what they allegedly know, and can fend off all inquiries by claiming to have prevented all kinds of horrible attacks which would otherwise have taken place, claims that can never be tested. My own instinct is to mistrust them because they are both self-serving and secretive.

 

On Saturday, in a brief flash of knowledge and understanding, the BBC allowed an actual expert on Syria on to a major programme . I am not sure they bargained for what they got, a few brief minutes on concreted, well-informed scorn for the policy the BBC has itself been actively promoting through the nature of its coverage since the Syrian crisis began, thoughtless, emotive, utopian and one-sided from the start. Some of you may recall my appalled response to this coverage at the time, which seemed to me to be playing with fire. I didn���t know the half of it.  

 

This expert is Peter Ford, once Her Britannic Majesty���s Ambassador to Syria ( a job not handed out to just anybody), genuinely knowledgeable about that country and the Middle East, and so utterly opposed to the British government���s current ridiculous policy.

 

 

He argued that the choice is quite simple, between Assad or the deluge. He said Russia���s policy was quite reasonable, wondered out loud  (as I do)  why the Labour Party does not make more of this very considerable British foreign policy failure . He described the Western powers as having ���impaled themselves���  on their policy of calling for the downfall of President Assad.  He argued ( and this I had not heard before) that Western sanctions on Syria, by creating more misery there, were also causing people to flee destitution and become refugees.

 

.

Peter Ford���s interview can be found in full  1 hours 35 minutes into Saturday���s Radio 4 Today programme, here:

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06gtbj1

 

Justin Webb does actually ask him a question beginning ���Are you seriously expecting���?��� Questions couched in this form , especially directed by generalists against experienced veteran diplomats who know more about the subject than the questioner, really are a breach of impartiality.

 

By the way, the phrase ���barrel bomb���, a phrase always  enunciated in tones of horror, as if there is something intrinsically macabre about barrels, creeps into this exchange, as it crept into a recent statement on the subject by President Obama. Readers here will know that I am not an enthusiast for dropping explosives or incendiaries on populated areas.  Indeed, I am loathed and despised by many for my condemnation of the deliberate bombing of German civilians in their homes by this country���s political and military leaders in World War Two (not just Dresden , the whole lot).

 

So I am not in any way a defender of ���barrel bombs���, any more than I am a defender of the NATO bombing of Belgrade, in which civilians inevitably died, or the Anglo-French bombing of Libya, in which civilians inevitably died, or of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, in which civilians inevitably died. If you don���t like atrocities, don���t start wars. It���s a simple rule, and one I hope to make popular in time.

 

But, while all such bombs are axiomatically horrible,  I cannot see what is so *exceptionally* horrible about ���barrel bombs��� , which are simply crude improvised unguided bombs. In what way are they more barbaric than supposedly guided bombs, whose alleged accuracy is greatly over-rated. Is it nicer to die or be maimed by more sophisticated, more accurate bombing? To ask the question is to demonstrate the absurdity of such distinctions. High explosive, splinters, incendiary chemicals tear and burn the human body just as terribly whether they are 'sophisticated' or crude. Accuracy in aerial bombing is a pernicious self-serving myth. Anyone who catches himself using the mendacious term 'surgical strike' should afterwards be ashamed. 

By the way, I also note the absence of outrage over the current Saudi air attacks on Yemen. In what way are these attacks morally superior to Assad���s barrel bombing of rebel areas in Syria?

 

If you or I were being bombed from the air in our homes how much would we care about the shape of the bomb? Also, if we are so exercised about barrel bombs, when did you last hear through any British or US medium that ���our��� ���democratic��� Iraqi President, Nouri al Maliki,  had used these weapons in populated areas against Sunni militants in Fallujah in 2014?

 

My own guess is that this stuff about barrel bombs is a result of the failure to establish that Assad had used chemical weapons, and his subsequent decision to dismantle and abandon his chemical munitions.  Supporters of continuing efforts to overthrow Assad at all costs speak and write as if the case had been proved, but in fact it never was, and alternative theories have been put forward (also unproven) by the American journalist Seymour Hersh. So I advise care, and intelligent curiosity,  when you hear or read the phrase.

 

Snake oil and billionaires... Now I KNOW Blair's taken over the Tories

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

The really big political changes in this country take place inside the major parties, not at general elections. Think of the Heseltine putsch against Mrs Thatcher, or the cruel overthrow of Iain Duncan Smith, or the recent desperate recapture of the Labour Party (whatever next?) by socialists.

And last week the Tory Party finally transformed itself into New Labour.

There are a few finishing touches to be added between now and 2020. But after much writhing and struggling, the chrysalis finally burst open to reveal the Heir to Blairism, glistening with snake oil and hair oil and surrounded by trilling choirs of happy billionaires, just as in the old days of Lord Cashpoint and bombing Iraq.

The process will only be complete when Lord Mandelson himself accepts that his life���s work is now being done by David Cameron and George Osborne, who is even starting to look like the Blair era���s Sinister Minister. Perhaps it���s time for a moustache.

The Tories also yearn for the open endorsement of Alan Milburn, whom they already employ as Commissar for Equality.

For the moment, they will have to content themselves with the embrace of Lord Adonis, more Blairite than Blair, who is in charge of concreting over what remains of the English countryside, a long-term New Labour obsession.

Privately, they are on good terms with the Blair creature himself, whose advice is always welcome in Downing Street. He is known there as ���The Master��� and, with a few very minor changes (mainly the replacement of the word ���Conservative��� with ���New Labour���), he could have delivered the Prime Minister���s Manchester speech on Wednesday.

Who said (I have removed any mention of the party name): ���It wasn���t just me who put social justice, equality for gay people, tackling climate change, and helping the world���s poorest at the centre of our mission ��� we all did���?

Honestly, could you tell? Where now are all those who thought David Cameron would unleash his inner Tory when freed from the embrace of Nick Clegg? Mr Cameron doesn���t have an inner Tory, and Wednesday���s performance suggests that Mr Clegg is actually the more conservative of the two.

Even the slightly embarrassing off-colour joke about sex, astonishing in the mouth of a serious politician, was the sort of thing that Mr Blair likes to do, along with the mention of ���the kids���, the tinny business-school English, and the use of terrorism as an excuse for dubious actions.

Though I doubt whether Mr Blair would have had the nerve to make the deeply dishonest misrepresentation of Jeremy Corbyn���s perfectly reasonable and civilised objections to the extrajudicial killing of Osama Bin Laden.

The false and cheap suggestion that Mr Corbyn does not regard the events of September 11, 2001 as a tragedy ��� when he specifically said that he did ��� was a disgrace for which Mr Cameron should quickly make amends.

This is the thing that is most wrong with Blairism ��� its instinct is to lie. It is at bottom a nasty mix of greed, Leninist party discipline, advertising slickness and ruthless, intolerant political correctness. It attracts and promotes power-worshippers.

To survive and prosper, it must always pretend to be something else.

And as long as it succeeds in doing so, we are stuck with it.

Finally, a movie that's right to use the awful F-word

I don't generally approve of the F-word, but I must admit that the opening scene of the new film The Martian, about a US astronaut stranded on the red planet, provides a rare example of the wholly justified use of this powerful expletive.

Even I might be tempted to mutter it, under the circumstances.
There are many interesting things about this drama, one of them being that we never see the marooned spaceman���s family, whose powerless pain would normally feature largely in such a story.

But perhaps the most fascinating of all is its oozy, flattering attitude towards China, shown as a noble ally and as a highly advanced country, with no attention paid to its repressive, nasty features.

It���s all rather different to the way the equally despotic Soviet Union used to be dealt with in the movies, when it was America���s chief rival.

Still, at least there isn���t a Russian villain. I suspect they���ll start featuring in Hollywood productions soon.

The face of a REAL politician 

For those who think that Jeremy Corbyn is a threat to national security, how about this fellow, who appeared before the Labour conference in military uniform, denouncing the upper classes of every nation as ���selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent���, and promising they would be dealt with shortly by the coming ���socialist revolution��� (by which he meant the arrival of Russian tanks).

It was the 1945 Labour conference. And it was Denis Healey, who died last weekend, full of years and honour, having been one of the best Defence Secretaries in modern times, and a reasonably competent Chancellor. Healey was in fact a terrible old Stalinist, an actual member of the Communist Party in the worst gulag days, who may just possibly have stayed sympathetic to Moscow for rather longer than he later admitted.

Yet when it came to it, he showed undoubted courage on the field of battle in his country���s service, and later proved a wise and competent Minister, ending his life fiercely opposed to the succession of stupid wars into which lesser men dragged us.

Proper countries are full of awkward, discontented people who may in fact turn out to be better patriots than the more obvious and noisy flag-wavers. Bear it in mind.

Is there a worse thing than having your child wrongfully snatched away from you by the State, which cannot be bothered to wait to see if charges against you are proven? Are we truly free if such a thing can be done, irrevocably?

The case of Karrissa Cox and Richard Carter is a grotesque injustice. No court should have been able to hand over their child for adoption until the charges of abuse against them had been heard and proved beyond reasonable doubt. In fact, the charges collapsed.

The presumption of innocence is all that stands between us and tyranny, and I hope that some wise judge acts swiftly to restore the lost child to its parents. This isn���t a free country if this doesn���t happen.

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A Brush with the Hijab Police

My ���supporters��� and my enemies have one thing in common. Both want to believe I think things that I don���t think.

 

I am amazed at how many readers want me to endorse the absurd UKIP Dad���s Army, despite a dozen articles explaining why I can���t and won���t do this.

A few still believe I am a Tory. More long for me to rush into the futile Stalingrad of the ���same-sex-marriage��� debate. Some wrongly expect me to be an enthusiast for Enoch Powell, or get angry with me when I object to the display of golliwogs or to the broadcast of the n-word as a dog���s name in the film of 'The Dambusters���. Thousands cannot cope with my repudiation of Sir Arthur Harris���s (and Winston Churchill���s) policy of deliberately bombing German civilians in their homes. Etc.

 

Likewise my enemies believe I am a nostalgist who believes the 1950s were a ���golden age���, a view I very firmly do not hold, having experienced the 1950s. They think I support wars which I in fact oppose, and above all, they hope that I am a racial bigot, because that would allow them to dismiss everything else that I say. Many hope this so strongly that they believe it to be true.

 

My 4th October Mail on Sunday column, published here, included a short item to accompany an interesting picture, which had grabbed my attention during the week.

 

It read: 

���A hijab-wearing model, Mariah Idrissi, has been chosen for a new advertisement by the fashion chain H&M. 

I think we will be amazed at how quickly this becomes normal. It won���t be long before we have veiled Muslim Cabinet Ministers, TV newsreaders and judges. It is all part of a slow but unstoppable adaptation of this country to Islam. 

In my view it will eventually mean that non-Muslim women will come under pressure to conform. 

If you doubt the power of this huge change, consider this. There are archive films available showing women in Afghanistan and the Arab Middle East dressed in Western styles. It has taken only 40 years for them to disappear beneath scarves and shrouds. The process may be quicker for us.���

 

While interesting, it was not in any way the major piece on the page, which was mostly taken up with a discussion of the alarming contradictions in our public policy in Syria, and our absurd attitude towards Russia���s intervention there.

 

There was also an all-too-brief review of an important new novel on the drugging of children to alter their behaviour, and a protest against the media���s failure to examine the Marxist pasts of Blairites, compared with their frenzied interest in the left-wing background of Jeremy Corbyn.

 

There was a little (far too little) response to my thoughts on the Syrian crisis. I am one of a very small number of British journalists who does not swallow the official line on this. I am painfully anxious that my dissent reaches beyond those who already know my views. I genuinely fear that we may be on the path to war, and for all the wrong reasons, and like to think that wider understanding of the problem might avoid this. Likewise, I long for a wider understanding of the dangers of drugging healthy children; and I have for years believed that the Marxist background and origins of Blairism, if understood, would change attitudes towards them. If I was hoping to influence anybody into action (or inaction), then my hopes were concentrated in these three pieces. My remarks on the hijab were just that, a commentary on an observable change in our society.

 

I have been saying for years now that this will eventually become an Islamic country, not to raise some kind of alarm, but because it seems to me to be the inevitable result of the policies we have been following for many decades. As one who prefers Christianity to Islam I regret this, but do not think it can be reversed. In particular, I mention this because I think those who have campaigned against the Christian religion are partly responsible for this direction in our national life, and this is a curious paradox.  I have also repeatedly said that mass migration into this country has already reached such levels that all we can realistically hope to do is to find some way of living peacefully alongside our new neighbours.

 

Readers here will know that I abandoned the last scrap of active political engagement last May, when the Tory Party had the election bought for it by the hedge funds. This killed my last hope, that this ghastly, fraudulent party might be defeated so severely and so repeatedly that it would collapse and make way for a properly conservative party. I increasingly recognize this desire as having been a fantasy, far behind its rightful time. Anything of the kind would have had to have been achieved 30 years ago to have had any chance of success.

 

I still have one or two ameliorative projects whose achievement I think might be possible  ��� the return of academic selection in state schools, inquiries into ���ADHD���, ���Dyslexia���, ���antidepressants��� and the correlation between cannabis and mental illness. I would dearly love to see the railways back in public ownership and restored to their pre-Marples extent before I die. I oppose foolish wars as and when others propose them. But that���s it.

 

I certainly have no policy on the hijab, and oppose all schemes to prevent Muslim women (or anyone else) wearing what they like. These are in my view totalitarian and wrong. The law can reasonably say whether we wear anything at all to cover our nakedness, because many, if not most,  people are genuinely shocked and upset by public nudity.

 

The sight of the naked human body is, for reasons we can never fully fathom, a hugely powerful thing (all painters and sculptors know this) and forms a crucial part of the Garden of Eden myth for that reason.  So the law can say that the body shall have a covering. It cannot prescribe what this covering is, a wholly different question. We can ask a woman to lift her veil where we have good reason to do so, just as we can ask motorcyclists to remove their helmets for the same reason. But that���s it.

 

Even so, late on Sunday I began to hear the low, menacing whine of a gathering Twitter Storm, growing slowly into a growl of intolerant rage. There is a curious alliance between Islam and the liberal left in this country which makes no sense at all, given Islam���s pretty stern strictures on many of the things the liberal left holds dear. But in left-liberal-world things don���t need to make sense.

 

And it was mobilizing against me. I was accused of bigotry, racism etc etc, though when I asked for quotations to back these claims, none came. 

 

One of my critics was a person named Nesrine Malik, who wrote on Twitter as follows on Sunday evening (I have cleaned up the Tweet by asterisking a lavatory-wall word):

 

���Nesrine Malik ��� Oct 4

Look at how acceptable it is so say clearly rabidly anti-Muslim s*** like you just don't want to see hijabs anywhere���

 

I rebutted this, but as is so often the case with such attackers, could not get her either to substantiate or clarify her charge.

 

She then began to question me on what appeared to be the assumption that I was in fact concealing some sort of hidden message in what I had written. I pointed out that I had written exactly what I meant, and meant exactly what I had written.

 

For example, she wrote:

���ok - so please - spell it out for me as I clearly cannot read - what is your objection to the hijab advert?���

 

I replied, noting the inquisitorial, sarcastic tone: ���Who says I have any objection to it? I simply observe that this has taken place, and is significant.���

 

She responded :���so you're saying that 'a slow but unstoppable adaptation to Islam' is a statement completely shorn of any opinion or judgement?���

 

I responded: ���It is my judgement that it is significant an[d] interesting. What opinion does it express?���

 

And so it went on. I can now recognise a People���s Court when I see one, and also an obvious attempt to put words in my mouth. Later on we got on to the point about women eventually being compelled to take the veil against their will. 

 

I was urged by her to condemn this. This seemed odd to me. Does anyone defend it? I had begun to wonder.  I thought the matter had gone far enough and so asked Ms Malik what her opinion was on people being told how to dress.  Well, she was against that, though she quickly said it was rare. Well, so it may well be, thoigh that doesn't seem to have any bearing on whether one is against it or not.  I can���t see how we could easily find out how rare or common it is in the rather unfree countries where it is most widespread. I have made no claims about how often compulsion happens now or how often it will happen in the future. I just think that it will do so here, if things continue as they are now.

 

The matter dragged on, eventually involving the Great British Bake-Off, an event which I have managed to ignore completely, and a film-maker called David Baddiel, one of whose films I once slighted. It turns out that he still resents this, though as he is so modish I should have thought he would have regarded my disapproval as an endorsement. 

 

While this was going on, I ranged the country from Oxford to London, where I took part in the ���Daily Politics��� which discussed the Tory conference, a sample here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gg_VksiEd4

(I expect the whole thing can still be found on iplayer), 

 

...and then to York, where I had a pleasant evening haranguing a group of Politics and Philosophy students, studying very roughly the same course I (sort of) pursued at that University more than 40 years ago, though really I studied Marxism-Leninism, in its strictly practical form.

 

The subject was the incompatibility of multiculturalism with Britain, and once again I had to explain that I am an obituarist of Britain, not a resurrection man trying to dig up a dead country and revive it. Then I took a complicated train journey to Beverley and its glorious undiscovered Minster, one of the loveliest great churches in Europe in a largely unspoilt East Riding town. During this railway Odyssey I was asked by Channel Four news to appear on their programme to discuss the hijab issue.

 

Oh, all right, I said, suspecting that it might not work out well.  I did the usual thing of explaining my opinions to an intelligent and receptive researcher, all too aware that when it reached the studio, the debate would be less satisfying(this is almost always so) . I think the researcher was a bit surprised when I said clearly and emphatically that I opposed any legal restrictions on the wearing of the veil. But I may be mistaken about that.

 

As you may see here:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnlyL5yMTnk

 

 

���the actual exchange wasn���t very enlightening.

 

A few hours beforehand I had learned that my opponent would be Nesrine Malik.

 

Who is she, by the way?

 

Well, here���s an interesting and relevant article about her.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/7896536/Burka-ban-Why-must-I-cast-off-the-veil.html

 

Now, a few things about the Channel Four occasion struck me rather strongly.

 

Matt Frei introduced the item by rhapsodising about the victory of a hijab-wearing woman in a baking contest, saying approvingly this was an ���extraordinary celebration of multicuturalism��� . No doubt he was being a devil���s advocate at the time, but at the BBC and C4 news, they do always seem to be advocating the same devil. Many people, even in the Liberal Elite, nowadays disapprove of multiculturalism and say it was a mistake which they now oppose. David Cameron is, or says he is, one of them. See this 2011 speech

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12371994

 

 

Ms Malik began her contribution by asserting: ���It shouldn���t even be something to comment on in any way other than ���This is really cool. It is representing a significant swing of Muslim British people and it���s something we should celebrate.��� ���

 

I thought and still think this was an astonishing attitude to take. She appeared to me to be saying (���It shouldn���t even be something to comment on in any way other than���.���) that only one opinion on the matter was permissible.  So I responded by saying that other views were permissible. She took this an expression of opinion about the wearing of hijabs, on my part, which it wasn���t. It was an expression of opinion on free thought and speech. I was now quite sure that this, not a discussion about headwear, was my main aim

 

 

Later on she began her inquisitorial, nay prosecutorial attempt to establish what I was ���really saying���. The clear implication *here* is that I had some hidden message that I was concealing,  presumably for reasons of shame.

 

Seizing on the words ���gradual and unstoppable adaptation��� she described this wording as ���alarmist���. I have to say that in my dictionary the word ���gradual��� doesn���t really go together with alarm, but that���s just an opinion.

 

This was somehow a ���warning shot��� (shot?) and the words ���gradual and unstoppable��� were by clear implication a condemnation. Actually this isn���t so. People often describe their own movements and causes, or those of which they approve,  as unstoppable. The left-liberal anthem ���We Shall Overcome���, with its uncompromising use of the verb ���shall���, is a declaration of unstoppabilty, in my view, and has turned out to be much more right about that than it sounded when I first heard it in about 1966.

 

She again suggested that I had said this was something to be ���alarmed��� or ���worried��� about it. I had not done so. And under this repeated pressure to be confess to having opinions different from those I had actually expressed, I found it necessary to harden my heart. I wasn���t going to give such inquisitorial behaviour, redolent of people���s courts and Stasi interrogations, any victories.

 

I was then told I should forgive people for readng things that were not there into what I had written. I declined to do so. First, they hadn���t asked for my forgiveness or admitted to doing anything wrong,  the absolute requirements for forgiveness; secondly, these attempts to make windows into people���s souls are plain wrong and must be resisted in  a free society or it won���t stay free for long.

 

Channel Four News���s Matt Frei, a civilised and travelled man, was even so seemingly under the bizarre impression that I am a Tory. Apparently believing that this might wring my withers, he brought David Cameron (���railing against racism��� ��� but who until then had mentioned race or ���racism���? Not I for certain) into the argument, and made the usual liberal error of assuming that opposition to multicuturalism had racial implications. Culture and race are not merely not the same, but the opposite of each other (See Thomas Sowell���s fine book ���Race and Culture���). Indeed, I would say that the best way to achieve a harmonious multiracial society is to ensure that it is monocultural.

 

Ms Malik could not understand or really register my use of the past tense to describe the long-ago death of British culture (Good heavens, I described this back in 1999 in my book ���The Abolition of Britain��� which as it happens makes no mention of race or immigration as contributors that abolition, though it briefly notes the existence of the change) . She seized on it as my longed-for confession of Crimethink.  

She then said : ���The motif of the hijab makes people like Peter uncomfortable because it implies that the sort of rosy white homogenous culture of British society is now on the wane. That���s what it���s what its all about���

 

'���It���s a figleaf for a dying gasp of monoculturalism in the UK��� .

 

 

Now, there were two key words in this passage.

 

That word, smuggled quickly in at the last moment, is ���white���. Without it, the statement is quite harmless, apart form the word 'figleaf, which suggests concealment, which indeed has no other purpose outside botany than to suggest concealment. 

 

Note that both Mr Frei and Ms Malik both introduced the question of skin-colour or 'race' into the matter. Yet it was not there until they put it there.

 

In fact the spread of the hijab, niqab and burqa throughout the Islamic world is a matter of controversy among Muslims, some of whom resist it and some of whom welcome it.   And it is a religious, not an ethnic matter. And, as I so often find I need to say, religions (including my own) are matters of opinion, with which people may legitimately disagree.  Islam is a religion, not an ethnicity. A woman with a pinko-grey skin (what Ms Malik describes as ���white���) can wear the hijab, indeed there are some such whom I occasionally see in Kensington High Street in London, where I work. Pinko-grey British men can and do embrace Islam.

Women with other skin colours can, even if Muslim, decide not to wear hijab or niqab. The matter, in short, has nothing to do with skin colour or ���race���.  So why did Mr Frei mention 'race' and why did she introduce the word ���white���.

Your guess is as good as mine.

 

Which side are we really on in this war of the awful against the evil?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I don���t think the British or American governments really want to fight the Islamic State. They just want to look as if they are doing so.

I judge these people by what they do, not by what they say. And in recent months I have noticed them doing ��� and not doing ��� some very interesting things.

The White House and Downing Street both seethe with genuine outrage about Russia���s bombing raids on Syria.

Yet the people Vladimir Putin bombed have views and aims that would get them rounded up as dangerous Islamist extremists if they turned up in Manchester. So why do British politicians call them ���moderates��� when Russia bombs them?

It���s not as if London or Washington can claim to be squeamish about bombing as a method of war. We have done our fair share of it in Belgrade, Baghdad and Tripoli, where our bombs certainly (if unintentionally) killed innocent civilians, including small children.

Then there���s the curious case of Turkey. Rather like Russia, Turkey suddenly announced last summer that it was sending its bombers in to fight against the Islamic State.

But in fact Turkey barely bothered to attack IS at all. It has spent most of the past few months blasting the daylights out of the Kurdish militias, a policy that Turkey���s President Erdogan has selfish reasons for following.

Yet the Kurds, alongside the Syrian army, have been by far the most effective resistance to IS on the ground. Why then does a key member of the alleged anti-IS coalition go to war against them?

Turkey, a Nato member, is not criticised for this behaviour by Western politicians or by the feeble, slavish Western media. These geniuses never attack our foreign policy mistakes while we are making them. They wait until they have actually ended in disaster. Then they pretend to have been against them all along.

I���ve grown tired of people impersonating world-weary cynics by intoning the old saying ���My enemy���s enemy is my friend��� as if it were a new-minted witticism.

But in this case, this sensible old rule seems to have been dropped. Instead, our enemy���s enemies ��� in the case of the Kurds, Syria���s government and the Russians ��� are mysteriously our enemies too.

Meanwhile the Turkish enemies of our Kurdish friends are somehow or other still our noble allies.

Compare our weird attitude towards Syria���s horrible but anti-IS president, Bashar Assad, to Winston Churchill���s wiser view of Stalin.

Stalin became our ally when the Nazis invaded Russia. Churchill, a lifelong foe of Soviet communism, immediately grasped that times had changed. ���If Hitler invaded Hell,��� he said ���I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.���

That is because, in body, heart and soul, sleeping and waking, with all the force and spirit he possessed, he was committed to the fight against Hitler above all things. So he would have accepted any ally against him.

Is this true of our leaders, who constantly portray Assad (and Putin) as Hitler, who imagine themselves as modern Churchills and condemn their critics as ���appeasers���?

No. They play both ends against the middle. Their anti-extremist rhetoric, turned up full when confronting Birmingham schoolteachers or bearded preachers, drops to a whisper when they want to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia, the home of Islamist fanaticism.

Things are not what they seem to be here. Russia���s action may be rash and dangerous. It may fail, especially as we are obviously trying so hard to undermine it. But at least it is honest and straightforward.

A new look set to sweep the nation

A hijab-wearing model, Mariah Idrissi, has been chosen for a new advertisement by the fashion chain H&M. 

I think we will be amazed at how quickly this becomes normal. It won���t be long before we have veiled Muslim Cabinet Ministers, TV newsreaders and judges. It is all part of a slow but unstoppable adaptation of this country to Islam. 

In my view it will eventually mean that non-Muslim women will come under pressure to conform. 

If you doubt the power of this huge change, consider this. There are archive films available showing women in Afghanistan and the Arab Middle East dressed in Western styles. It has taken only 40 years for them to disappear beneath scarves and shrouds. The process may be quicker for us. 

The hard-Left menace we ignored

The continued rage about Jeremy Corbyn���s rather dated Leftism baffles me. Most British journalists weren���t (as I was) members of the Labour Party in the 1980s. In the months before I quit, I used to be angrily called to order by the chairwoman of my local party. She was cross with me for (as she put it) provoking too much heckling from noisily pro-IRA, ban-the-bomb types.

Meanwhile, the real Left worked by stealth. That is why our political media never understood that the Blairites were in fact far more Left wing than Jeremy Corbyn. The Blair faction���s ideas came from a communist magazine called Marxism Today. The magazine, in turn, got the ideas from a clever Italian revolutionary called Antonio Gramsci. He wanted a cultural revolution, a Leftist takeover of schools, universities, media, police and courts (and of conservative political parties too). That is exactly what New Labour did.

An astonishing number of senior New Labour people, from Peter Mandelson to Alan Milburn, are former Marxist comrades who have never been subjected to the sort of in-depth digging into their pasts that Jeremy Corbyn faces. Why is this? Is one kind of Marxism OK, and the other sort not? Or is it just that most political writers are clueless about politics?

Well I never. Schools that introduce the Daily Mile ��� encouraging children to walk or run a mile during school time ��� report more attentive, happier pupils who look as children used to look before we locked them in cars and houses and abandoned them to TVs and computer screens.

This news will be unwelcome to the potent lobby which urges the drugging of children to make them behave in boring classrooms and exercise-free schools, a disgusting barbarity that will one day be looked on with horror. 

I���ve tried many times to set out the case against the wicked fantasy of ���ADHD���, which usually earns me nothing but ignorant rage in return. But perhaps a rather clever new novel will succeed where I have failed. 

I do urge you to read Concentr8 by William Sutcliffe (Bloomsbury ��12.99), set in the very near future in a London convulsed by riots, ruled by a fameseeking mayor with eccentric hair.

Many of the most shocking passages in it ��� concerning the cynicism of the drug industry and of doctors about the use of mind-altering drugs to control the young ��� are not fiction but researched fact. Also, you���ll be interested to find out what happens to the mayor���s hair in the end.

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

Some Immediate Thoughts on the New Crisis in Syria

Just who is fighting whom in Syria? I should have thought this was the thing we most need to know before getting involved. Some years ago, before this war was a cause, I began receiving private letters from a worried British woman married to a Syrian Sunni Muslim, then living in Latakia.  Her main motivation was fear about the danger to the quiet, contented life which she and her family were then living and now are not. They are now, like so many others, refugees. I think she hoped that some discussion of this in the media might avoid such an outcome. I only wish it had been so.

 

After some checks, I believe them to have been authentic. She described the worrying appearance in that country of armed, heavily-bearded militiamen speaking Arabic in a way quite different from that in Syria.

 

I was an unlikely choice for Syrian state propaganda. I had for some years been writing rude and disobliging articles, when the opportunity arose, about Syria���s habit of massacring rebels, its discrimination against Jews, its harbouring of the Nazi refugee Alois Brunner, a  mass-murder of children,  its undoubted involvement in the attempt to smuggle a bomb aboard an El Al jet at Heathrow and its probable (in my view ) involvement in the Lockerbie bomb, strangely attributed to Libya. I thought the cosying up to Syria which followed its support for the anti-Saddam coalition in 1991 was absurd. I thought the West���s use of Syrian torturers to interrogate suspects, taken there on rendition flights after September 11th 2001, was disgraceful. My main motive for these articles had been Zionist. I am a strong supporter of Israel���s continued existence, and had long regarded Syria as one of the main threats to that.

 

So when a certain Tory MP (whose career has since exploded amid farcical revelations about his private life) accused me of being some sort of Syrian patsy, I was actually astonished, and sought (but did not get) a retraction.

 

My interest in this issue was motivated by puzzlement  - and also by a pained sympathy for the lady who wrote to me from Latakia. I have also found it all too easy to imagine myself becoming a refugee, driven from my home by war. It has happened in my lifetime to far too many people who thought themselves quite safe, as we do, and as you probably do. You are not. Some fool may even now be devising the plan that will eventually force you out on to the road with a few belongings, leaving your house in ruins or in the hands of strangers. It makes me angry that people behave in such a way that this sort of thing happens.

 

It seemed clear to me that there was a strong lobby for ���democracy��� in Syria, with powerful supporters in Washington DC. This had been pressing for worsened relations between the USA and Damascus for some time before the protests began. I have learned to be suspicious of such lobbies for two reasons. One, they are generally selective about their desire for democracy (the lovers of democracy in Syria seem pretty unmoved by its total absence from Saudi Arabia, its suppression in Bahrain and its defeat and erasure in Egypt), and therefore must have other real motives. I have since heard that French diplomacy underwent a similar convulsion, with Paris demanding a strong anti-Assad line against the doubts of some of its experienced diplomats. I strongly suspect that something similar has happened in London. It is possible to guess that the reason for this is the strong alliance, based upon oil and arms sales, between some Gulf states and those three countries.  Those states are Sunni Muslim, whereas Iraq was broadly secular and on good terms with Shia Iran.

 

 

Two, their allies are unconvincing.  I have no doubt that the various factions which formed the Free Syrian Army and other Syrian opposition groups have genuine grievances against the Assad state. Almost everyone in Syria does, It is a cruel, and presumably corrupt, despotism with little to be said for it save that it had until recently been internally peaceful, and that it maintained unusual levels of mutual tolerance among its varied peoples.

 

But I have huge doubts as to what sort of state they would create, were they to overthrow Assad. We are repeatedly assured that they are quite distinct from Islamic State, a body to which we attribute almost supernatural powers of horror and intolerance. They need to do this, or people might notice its very strong similarity to the current government of Saudi Arabia, also given to ferocious religious intolerance, beheadings and so forth (and currently engaged in a pretty appalling aggression against Yemen) , though less inclined to publicise them on YouTube.

 

But I am not wholly convinced by these assurances that these people are our friends and allies. I do not think that Christian and Shia people in Syria are convinced by them either. They back Assad not because they love him but because the alternative is a Sunni theocracy in which their lives would be enormously worse. Quite a few Sunni Muslims, the famous moderate Muslims of whom we hear so much, seem to have taken the same view, since they continue to play such a large part in Assad���s Army. He would have fallen long ago, were this not so.

 

To me it seems absurd to imagine that defeat for Assad would not pretty much immediately mean that the Islamic State extended its power to Damascus and Aleppo. The supposedly non-extremist fighters against Assad are certainly not pro-Western, and the divisions between them and ISIS seem to me to be slight.

 

Of course, a compromise peace would be good. Like all conservatives I believe very much in such arrangements. But the main obstacle to such a peace has been the absolute refusal of the rebels to contemplate any deal that left Assad in power. Every conference which has attempted to bring about a deal has foundered on this point. As I have many times pointed out our righteous modern insistence on trying and imprisoning (and sometimes hanging) overthrown tyrants, has made them  understandably reluctant to step down, so losing the sovereign immunity that keeps them safe from being hustled into a cell. The shocking and barbaric murder of Colonel Gadaffi in a Libyan drainpipe (an event which launched new horrors in that country) might also encourage any embattled head of state to battle on rather than show any weakness. Those who genuinely wanted peaceful amelioration of Syria would see this, make a deal and get all the concessions they could pocket while allowing Assad to stay.

 

But his foes, and the supposedly wise and responsible great powers of the West, have pursued a policy of all or nothing. They have got nothing, except unending and terrible war.

 

And now Russia has joined it, attacking Assad���s enemies, not necessarily ISIS. My heart sank when I heard this news, as I cannot see it ending well. I had hoped an agreement was still possible. Now I fear a limitless conflict, with ghastly implications for our peace and prosperity.  Russian exasperation is understandable. But unilateral action of this kind is just wrong, and destroys any prestige Vladimir Putin had gained from his behaviour at the UN.

 

It sank even further when I heard the American response, full of machismo and entirely lacking in caution or subtlety. I immediately contrasted the American reaction to Turkey���s supposed decision, some months ago to join the war against ISIS. This was naively welcomed by western politicians and media. In fact Turkey has barely attacked ISIS at all, but has instead launched repeated attacks on the Kurdish forces who have been inflicting serious reverses on ISIS in Kobane and elsewhere. This is all to do with Turkey���s dismal internal politics, often discussed on this blog, and nothing to do with the safety of the Middle East from murderous fanaticism. Yet the hostility and scepticism which greeted Russia���s attacks on people whose victory would help ISIS were quite absent when Turkey launched attacks on people whose defeat would help ISIS. Why?

 

Here���s a question to ponder. If (and I think this is the actual choice) you had to choose between Syria being run by Assad or by the opposition to Assad; and if the victory of the opposition was highly likely to benefit ISIS; who would you then want to win? And if the answer is ���the opposition���, how can those who seek that end claim in reality to be opposed to ISIS, which will benefit so much if their wish comes true.

 

Russia may have thought this through more carefully than the USA. But the Kremlin has still made a terrible mistake. The USA is no longer run (as Russia still is) by disillusioned cynics seeking the least worst outcome. It is in the hands of Utopian idealists and there is no limit to the horrors they can unleash upon the earth in the names of freedom and democracy. Ask anyone in Baghdad. Meanwhile the British government is in the hands of political teenagers whose combat experience ���if they have any at all ��� was gained at the dinners of the Bullingdon Club.

I don't Believe the 'Pig's Head' Story - but Anyway Cameron's Libya Mistake is Far More Imporrant

 

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

If you know something damaging about a major political figure, then, in a democracy, it is surely your duty to tell the voters before they go to the polls.

 

So I am puzzled by Lord Ashcroft���s motives for emptying a huge bucket of slurry over David Cameron���s head just after the Prime Minister has safely survived a fiercely-contested general election.

 

I have met Lord Ashcroft briefly a couple of times. He gives off an enjoyably sinister whiff of brimstone. He has a smile like the winter sun glinting on a coffin-plate. You wouldn���t be surprised to find he had steel teeth. 

 

He was known in his years of influence as ���The Man Who Bought the Tory Party���, or alternatively as ���Blofeld���, and I don���t imagine he minded.  I was never sure what he wanted in return for all his money.

 

Was it just a ministerial red box? Well, he didn���t get it and now he���s annoyed, and who can blame him? If they hadn���t planned to give him anything in return, the Tories shouldn���t have taken his cash. The same applies to those who bankrolled their 2015 victory.

 

 

I wrongly thought the Tory Party was impossible to save, a task as hopeless and morally wrong as reviving the popularity of Capstan Full Strength cigarettes. I still think we���d all be better off if it collapsed and died.

 

But money and lies eventually revived the ghastly old monster. Alas for Lord Ashcroft, it was somebody else���s money. He���d been five years too soon.

 

So what good came of his expensively-compiled book in the end? I���ve never doubted that Mr Cameron, like most of his generation, was disastrously soft on drug abusers, but that���s true of all the major parties, the media, the legal profession and the police, and he took this view openly. I don���t believe the story about the pig.

 

One important thing remains. Mr Cameron is not fit to be in charge of our foreign policy. His performance over Libya and Syria, the two biggest reasons for the mass migration crisis now menacing all Europe, was historically, politically and militarily illiterate. In a serious country he should resign and vanish into obscurity.

 

Yet he survives undamaged, which is the true scandal, that is never pursued and will never be punished.

 

********

 

I don���t at all mind George Osborne sucking up to the ghastly old waxworks who run the increasingly aggressive and sensitive Chinese police state.

 

And it is a police state. Peaceable professors, such as Ilham Tohti, are locked up and mistreated after lawless show trials. 

 

Communist activists have recently torn the crosses from 1,200 churches across the People���s Republic, claiming with cynical grins that they are acting to preserve ���safety and beauty���.  People disappear into the night and fog of a vast Gulag. Human rights lawyers are arrested for defending dissidents.  

 

I don���t mind us canoodling with this awful regime because I can���t afford to.  Thanks to the batty self-defeating foreign policy we have followed since 1914, we are a minor debtor nation in danger of turning into a beggar nation.

 

Well, this is the sort of country we are now. It���s a shame, and a warning against joining wars when you don���t need to, the root of our fall from power and wealth to our current status.

 

Talking of which, let us examine anew Mr Osborne���s righteous wrath against the Assad government in Syria. Recently Mr Osborne said Parliament had been wrong to veto the planned attack on Syria two years ago. He seems to want to try again.

 

This can only mean that he still thinks we should have bombed President Assad���s forces in 2013, an action which would have hugely bolstered the factions which soon afterwards became the Islamic State. Given our furious hostility to IS, this seems to me to be very nearly clinically mad.

 

Indeed, the Cameron-Osborne policy towards Assad has from the start been based on a righteous condemnation of that regime. How can these two men spend so much time seeking favour from the cruel, intolerant despots of China, and imagine that they have any moral right of any kind to condemn Syria? It is a nonsense, and they should grow out of it. We certainly aren���t the world���s policeman any more, and we���re not the world���s vicar either.

 

********

 

Do good books die when nobody can understand them any more? Today���s children would never stand for most of the Victorian and Edwardian books I loved (and still love). The world in which they were written has gone forever.

 

But how strange to see this happening to a 20th century classic, ���The Go-Between���. I was amazed by the favourable reviews of a dreadful BBC TV adaptation of this bitter, brilliant little book. I don���t think the makers or the reviewers can properly have understood it at all.

 

Apart from the silly, cheap decision to portray one of the main characters naked (when the book makes it quite clear he wasn���t),the main problem was (as it so often is) the faces.

 

The two lovers looked like models, aching for their smartphones, with nothing going on behind their eyes. It was impossible to see these people as the Victorians they were supposed to be.

 

Instead, they were modernised. A needless bit of class-war resentment (about a handkerchief!) was inserted. And the child at the centre of the drama, son of a bank manager and book-collector from Wiltshire, was given a northern accent and asked ���can I get a cup of tea���, as he would never have done.

 

Look, people, manners, customs, belief and language were all different then. Which bit of ���The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there��� don���t you understand?

 

***********

I don���t normally mention my daily struggles with the railways, as most train commuters have it far worse than I do. But I did laugh when the company which tows me back and forth each day, ���First Great Western���, tired of being called (with much justice)  ���Worst Late Western��� and grandiosely changed its name to ���Great Western Railway���, after Isambard Kingdom Brunel���s matchless enterprise of superb engineering and inventiveness.

 

On the very day of the fanfared change, I was of course held up for ages behind a ���broken down train��� (You never actually see these, but like ���signal failures��� and ���track circuit failures��� you are told about them a lot. Great Western indeed.