Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 186

The People's PMQs, the National Anthem and the Continuing Corbasm

I am deliberately writing this without listening to or reading anyone else���s opinions on Prime Minister���s Questions today (Wednesday 16th September).

 

This weekly performance has for many years been a nonsense, a pretend substitute for the adversarial parliament we have lost.  It���s not actually a moment which the Prime Minister is seriously questioned. Many principled MPs have long despised it. The fake roaring and howling of backbenchers, and the attempts to manipulate the appearance of the event to suit TV, are just part of a general phoniness. Americans like it because their Senate and the House of Representatives  lack anything of the kind (and are extraordinarily dull to watch) and their own President rarely faces any disrespect at all. Also they know so little about our politics that they don���t notice the cardboard controversies and mistake the whipped-up bellowing for real emotion.  

 

I���m genuinely unsure whether the public care. For years, William Hague regularly trounced Anthony Blair week after week, but the media classes at the time favoured Blair and despised Hague, so it made no difference to anything at all. Margaret Thatcher, an uninspiring performer, never did especially well at it during her long years in office.

 

It was when she faced Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock that I first experienced the real thing, in a pre-televised House.

 

The racket (which then contained some genuine hostility)  was so great that you couldn���t hear much of what was going on. I and many others used to leave a tape recorder running next to the radio (which broadcast the 15-minute exchanges each Tuesday and Thursday at 3.15) so that we could find out what had actually been said. The radio microphones ( as the TV ones do today) picked up far more than we could hear from the gallery directly above the Speaker���s chair .During all my years in the Lobby, somebody���s dropped Bic biro, its blue cap still in place, lay amid the dust on the canopy above the Speaker���s head. I���ve often wondered who dropped it. These days , if anyone did such a thing, gun-draped robocops would probably abseil immediately down from concealed pods in the ceiling and drag him off to Belmarsh, while alarms shrilled and the Cabinet were ushered away to a bunker. And the next day they���d put up yet another armoured glass screen, shielding our lawmakers from the dangerous press.

 

When the Blair creature merged two post-lunch Question sessions into one pre-lunch half-hour, he knew what he was doing.

 

Unless a genuinely clever backbencher asks a really good question (rare ��� Blair was caught once when one of his own MPs, Tony McWalter,  cruelly asked him to outline his political philosophy ), the whole thing becomes a bore.  Backbenchers cannot follow up their questions with a  supplementary, so their attacks are never pressed home. The only drama, such as it is,  now comes during the Opposition Leader���s questions, which will generally have been foreseen and rehearsed for by the Prime Minister, whose answer will generally amount to ���Your lot did it too��� or an irrelevant snowstorm of statistics about alleged government achievements (and you may be sure that the government has achieved some great statistics every week. It is one thing we do well in this country) . The rest is filled by outbursts of nauseating sycophancy, orchestrated by the government whips who plant questions on the weak, the pathetically ambitious and the pliable.

 

The Opposition leader won���t win many of these exchanges. And if he does, nobody will remember it. So how did Jeremy Corbyn do? No doubt the phalanx of disgruntled lobby journalists, furious with Mr Corbyn for messing up their tidy lives, will dismiss his performance yesterday because they would have done so whatever happened.

 

For those who didn���t see it, Mr Corbyn ��� rather in the manner of a phone-in host ��� read out questions he had received on various subjects form members of the public (pointing out that these were just representative samples of thousands sent to him). He preceded this with a slightly-too-long preamble about how a different sort of question time was needed (he never knows when to stop).

 

I think it was quite effective, except at the point where Labour MPs very foolishly began barracking the Prime Minister, who rightly and swiftly noted that he thought ���this was the new Prime Minister���s Questions���.  That shut them up.

 

But Labour MPs, like the Lobby, have no stake in helping Mr Corbyn to succeed and it is said there are big problems in the Labour whips��� office, which means one can never be entirely sure who is working for whom.

 

Mr Corbyn (as he did on the stump)  flew low and slow, not attempting any aerobatics . As a result, he took off and landed safely, droning steadily in between times, but neither frightened his opponents nor impressed his own side.  Had he tried any tricks,  he would have ended up on his face in the mud, with his machine smouldering and sputtering beside him.

 

With his ill-fitting jacket, beard and untailored appearance, I suspect Mr Corbyn had in his mind an old engraving (which I recall from my school history books) of Keir Hardie, the first Labour leader ���bringing the plight of the unemployed before Parliament���. I can���t find it or I���d link to it. Keir Hardie, too, was criticised for his non-adherence to the dress code.  Jeremy Corbyn has been an MP far too long to care about that (though more of this later). But he was certainly making a point. Marks and Spencers suits, which are a lot more conformist,  are well within his means.

 

Rightly concluding that he was not going to kebab the prepped and confident premier, Mr Corbyn chose instead to strike at Mr Cameron���s soft underbelly. All his questions would have meant quite a lot to Labour voters in the rougher, bleaker parts of Britain. They were theoretical bafflements to Mr Cameron who knows little of housing associations or high rents. Mr Corbyn���s questions were based on specific problems sent to him by actual individuals. Mr Cameron���s replies were banal generalities.

 

Now, if Labour���s case, that normal people are suffering from and under government policy, is basically true, this will resonate beyond Mr Corbyn���s narrow base. If the Osborne case, that we are in the midst of great national recovery, is true, then it won���t.  As I incline to the view that Mr Osborne���s boom is like Billy Bunter���s postal order (endlessly promised, never to arrive) I tend to think it might, if cleverly sustained, be quite dangerous.  This will especially be so if Frank Field is right about the tax credit cuts voted in yesterday. Mr Field, who understands the welfare system better than most men living, reckons it will hit quite a lot of people very hard.

 

I was fascinated by the behaviour of David Davis, who actually voted against his own party���s government on this (and who the day before had ��� quite rightly ��� attacked some of the more onerous and heavy-handed provisions of the new Trade Union legislation) . Hard to believe now that Mr Davis nearly beat David Cameron for the leadership of his party, and would have done so had Michael Howard not stretched out the campaign to suit David Cameron.  I am surprised more isn���t being made of the Haltemprice MP���s behaviour.

 

But back to Mr Corbyn. He spent much of yesterday being attacked for being honest about his opinions, and for not resorting to spin. Much of the media, as well as people in pubs etc, say all the time how much they yearn for politicians who speak their minds, stick to their principles, don���t try to be too smooth.

 

Yet when they get such a person, they attack him for it. Take the ���not singing the national anthem��� affair.   I���m all for constitutional monarchy myself, and these days lustily sing the anthem, including (when possible) its Satanic verses about ���knavish tricks���. I support it because I think constitutional monarchy tends to sustain free countries.  Constitutional monarchies rarely have torture chambers, for instance. Republics often have them. Which is why I���ve reached the stage where I���m very happy to share my country with people who don���t agree with me. I���ve always hated being forced to say (or sing) things I don���t agree with. I suspect that plenty of other Labour leaders have been secret republicans. Mr Corbyn���s an open one. If he doesn���t want to sing ���God save the Queen���, then isn���t his freedom to do so one of the many small but significant things so many people fought and died for back in 1940? He was perfectly polite about it. He didn���t glare at his neighbours for singing, or lounge in his seat while they stood.  He just didn���t sing a song he didn���t agree with.  Indeed, I also suspect that some of the soldiers, sailors and airmen in combat posts in His Majesty���s armed forces between 1939 and 1945 might well have held the same views as Mr Corbyn. It didn���t stop them fighting, dying or being wounded.

 

And if we���re all so keen on the national anthem, why don���t we bring it back at the end of every evening in cinemas and theatres (when it used to be played as a matter of course, right up until the late 1960s, and you were expected to stand)  and see what happens? Most modern British people are sadly indifferent, don���t know the words, don���t understand why it matters. Just as I prefer thoughtful atheism to indifference to religion,  I prefer a serious republican to someone who just doesn���t care, or to someone who is republican in secret and obsequious in public.  

 

Nor should it be a special surprise that a left-wing Labour leader makes a friendly speech to the TUC. It certainly could have been a better speech,  and better delivered. But those of us who endured the ghastly bladders of vanity which were Antony Blair���s speeches (and remember the way they were praised at the time) can see why this isn���t necessarily a disaster.  I myself am also not surprised or distressed when people in political parties disagree with each other  in public. For most of my life, they did this all the time. It became a sort of crime about 20 years ago. It should be legalised again.  I���m also thrilled to see that Labour and the unions are rediscovering its long mistrust of the European project, dating back to Ernest Bevin and long overdue for revival.

 

Those on the right who are joining in with the general mockery and dismissal of Mr Corbyn might trouble to wonder how the media powers of the Left, including the BBC, might treat (indeed have treated, in the case of Nigel Farage) a person who stepped outside the very narrow bounds of liberal approval. It seems to me that in both cases the same establishment ,  which has largely failed in office over the past 20 years, is seeking to defend itself against debate or criticism from any direction. If in, some fantasy world, I unexpectedly found myself at the head of some morally and socially conservative liberation movement, I can just imagine the BBC , the Guardian and The Times (always the servant of the establishment, wherever it is) going through my books, which they had until then ignored,  obscure radio appearances and blogs looking for supposed ���gaffes���. If I have time, I might one day write down and place in a sealed envelope my guesses about what they would come up with and how they would portray it.

Labour has a real lefty...so can we have proper conservatives?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

Do not underestimate Jeremy Corbyn. Labour���s Blairites lie dead and dying all over the place because they made that mistake. Tory Blairites such as David Cameron might be wise to learn from this, especially given last week���s dismal, shrinking manufacturing and export figures, which were pushed far away from front pages by other stories, but which cast doubt on the vaunted recovery.

If (like me) you have attended any of Mr Corbyn���s overflowing campaign meetings, you will have seen the hunger ��� among the under-30s and the over-50s especially ��� for principled, grown-up politics instead of public relations pap.

Do not underestimate Jeremy Corbyn. Labour���s Blairites lie dead and dying all over the place because they made that mistake

 

Mr Corbyn reminds mature people of the days when the big parties really differed. He impresses the young because he doesn���t patronise them, and obviously believes what he says. This desire for real politics isn���t just confined to the Left. Ken Livingstone is right to call Mr Corbyn Labour���s Nigel Farage. Ukip appeals to a similar impulse.

Millions are weary of being smarmed and lied to by people who actually are not that competent or impressive, and who have been picked because they look good on TV rather than because they have ideas or character.

Indeed, ideas or character are a disadvantage. Anything resembling a clear opinion is seized upon by the media���s inquisitors, and turned in to a ���gaffe��� or an outrage.

Actually, I dislike many of Mr Corbyn���s opinions ��� his belief in egalitarianism and high taxation, his enthusiasm for comprehensive schools, his readiness to talk to terrorists and his support for the EU. Oddly enough, these are all policies he shares with the Tory Party.

But I like the honest way he states them, compared with the Tories��� slippery pretence of being what they���re not.

My hope, most unlikely to be realised, is that a patriotic, conservative and Christian equivalent of Mr Corbyn will emerge to take him on, and will demonstrate, by his or her strength of conviction, that there is an even greater demand for that cause than there is for old-fashioned leftism. In any case, I think any thoughtful British person should be at least a little pleased to see the PR men and the special advisers and the backstairs-crawlers of British politics so wonderfully wrong-footed by a bearded old bicyclist.

 
 

On Wednesday the BBC marked the moment when the Queen became our longest-reigning Monarch by broadcasting (on Radio 4���s The World Tonight) a weird, portentous three-minute republican diatribe by the idiosyncratic feminist Beatrix Campbell, who in 2009 accepted an OBE from what she called a ���horrible imperial regime���.
The attack was personal as well as political, criticising the Queen as a parent and accusing her of ���deceiving and disrespecting��� her daughters-in-law. No doubt Ms Campbell has a legitimate point of view which ought to be heard. But an uninterrupted harangue during a flagship news programme? How can the BBC claim to be impartial when it does this sort of thing?

 

Death by drone is not justice

I would cheerfully bring back the death penalty tomorrow, as long as it came with unanimous grown-up juries and a restored right to silence.

But I���d never seen David Cameron as an ally in this. When it comes to defending us against actual heinous murderers in Britain, Mr Cameron (like most politicians) is an excuse-making anti-gallows liberal softie.

How does he square this with his enthusiasm for executing people without trial in the middle of someone else���s desert, using a remote-controlled chunk of high-explosive?

No doubt the victims of this are not very nice, though nothing resembling evidence has been produced against them. But that shouldn���t blind us to the principle involved. If we think killing people we don���t like with drones in other countries is legal and OK, we have licensed everyone else to do the same, even to us, here.

It is all part of a confused and delusional policy towards Syria and ISIS. George Osborne, the Chancellor, still seems to want to attack Syria���s President Assad, whose army is now one of the main barriers against an ISIS victory.

Last week he said Parliament���s vote not to bomb Assad in 2013 was ���one of the worst decisions the House of Commons has ever made���.

On the contrary, if we had bombed Assad then, we would have helped the people who soon afterwards became ISIS. Given this confusion at the highest level, Parliament should be very careful not to allow Mr Osborne and Mr Cameron to make the same mistake again.

**

The people who want to make life coarser never, ever stop. A bookmaker has just got away with using a partly-asterisked F-word in a newspaper advertisement. The gutless, useless ���Advertising Standards Authority��� rejected a complaint, saying it was ���light-hearted���. It won���t be long now before the whole word is allowed, everywhere. Those of us who think that is a pity will be derided for caring. And so the cultural revolution goes on.

**

 
At long last, feminism has found a wise voice
 

Feminism has many faces. Compare and contrast Charlotte Proudman, the censorious Thought Policewoman who publicly denounced an internet bore when she could have slapped him down in private, and the singer Chrissie Hynde.

Ms Hynde lived the entire dream and nightmare of 1960s liberation, and is impressively honest about the bitter depths to which this took her, and the sadness this caused her parents.

Last week she was questioned on this by the high priestess of po-faced British feminism, Jenni Murray. The exchange didn���t go quite as Ms Murray expected. Chrissie Hynde���s thoughts about feminism and knicker-displaying rock stars have been much publicised. But this was the bit that really impressed me: ���I don���t think it���s liberating at all to think that you can behave like a man��� When this false commodity of sexual liberation came along which made us think that we could act like them ��� actually women don���t act like men and they also respond emotionally very differently to men. It took me a long time to find out, and I don���t think it was any kind of liberation. I think it was more enslavement.���

Jenni Murray immediately changed the subject.

Labour has a real lefty...so can we have proper conservatives?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

Do not underestimate Jeremy Corbyn. Labour���s Blairites lie dead and dying all over the place because they made that mistake. Tory Blairites such as David Cameron might be wise to learn from this, especially given last week���s dismal, shrinking manufacturing and export figures, which were pushed far away from front pages by other stories, but which cast doubt on the vaunted recovery.

If (like me) you have attended any of Mr Corbyn���s overflowing campaign meetings, you will have seen the hunger ��� among the under-30s and the over-50s especially ��� for principled, grown-up politics instead of public relations pap.

Do not underestimate Jeremy Corbyn. Labour���s Blairites lie dead and dying all over the place because they made that mistake

 

Mr Corbyn reminds mature people of the days when the big parties really differed. He impresses the young because he doesn���t patronise them, and obviously believes what he says. This desire for real politics isn���t just confined to the Left. Ken Livingstone is right to call Mr Corbyn Labour���s Nigel Farage. Ukip appeals to a similar impulse.

Millions are weary of being smarmed and lied to by people who actually are not that competent or impressive, and who have been picked because they look good on TV rather than because they have ideas or character.

Indeed, ideas or character are a disadvantage. Anything resembling a clear opinion is seized upon by the media���s inquisitors, and turned in to a ���gaffe��� or an outrage.

Actually, I dislike many of Mr Corbyn���s opinions ��� his belief in egalitarianism and high taxation, his enthusiasm for comprehensive schools, his readiness to talk to terrorists and his support for the EU. Oddly enough, these are all policies he shares with the Tory Party.

But I like the honest way he states them, compared with the Tories��� slippery pretence of being what they���re not.

My hope, most unlikely to be realised, is that a patriotic, conservative and Christian equivalent of Mr Corbyn will emerge to take him on, and will demonstrate, by his or her strength of conviction, that there is an even greater demand for that cause than there is for old-fashioned leftism. In any case, I think any thoughtful British person should be at least a little pleased to see the PR men and the special advisers and the backstairs-crawlers of British politics so wonderfully wrong-footed by a bearded old bicyclist.

 
 

On Wednesday the BBC marked the moment when the Queen became our longest-reigning Monarch by broadcasting (on Radio 4���s The World Tonight) a weird, portentous three-minute republican diatribe by the idiosyncratic feminist Beatrix Campbell, who in 2009 accepted an OBE from what she called a ���horrible imperial regime���.
The attack was personal as well as political, criticising the Queen as a parent and accusing her of ���deceiving and disrespecting��� her daughters-in-law. No doubt Ms Campbell has a legitimate point of view which ought to be heard. But an uninterrupted harangue during a flagship news programme? How can the BBC claim to be impartial when it does this sort of thing?

 

Death by drone is not justice

I would cheerfully bring back the death penalty tomorrow, as long as it came with unanimous grown-up juries and a restored right to silence.

But I���d never seen David Cameron as an ally in this. When it comes to defending us against actual heinous murderers in Britain, Mr Cameron (like most politicians) is an excuse-making anti-gallows liberal softie.

How does he square this with his enthusiasm for executing people without trial in the middle of someone else���s desert, using a remote-controlled chunk of high-explosive?

No doubt the victims of this are not very nice, though nothing resembling evidence has been produced against them. But that shouldn���t blind us to the principle involved. If we think killing people we don���t like with drones in other countries is legal and OK, we have licensed everyone else to do the same, even to us, here.

It is all part of a confused and delusional policy towards Syria and ISIS. George Osborne, the Chancellor, still seems to want to attack Syria���s President Assad, whose army is now one of the main barriers against an ISIS victory.

Last week he said Parliament���s vote not to bomb Assad in 2013 was ���one of the worst decisions the House of Commons has ever made���.

On the contrary, if we had bombed Assad then, we would have helped the people who soon afterwards became ISIS. Given this confusion at the highest level, Parliament should be very careful not to allow Mr Osborne and Mr Cameron to make the same mistake again.

**

The people who want to make life coarser never, ever stop. A bookmaker has just got away with using a partly-asterisked F-word in a newspaper advertisement. The gutless, useless ���Advertising Standards Authority��� rejected a complaint, saying it was ���light-hearted���. It won���t be long now before the whole word is allowed, everywhere. Those of us who think that is a pity will be derided for caring. And so the cultural revolution goes on.

**

 
At long last, feminism has found a wise voice
 

Feminism has many faces. Compare and contrast Charlotte Proudman, the censorious Thought Policewoman who publicly denounced an internet bore when she could have slapped him down in private, and the singer Chrissie Hynde.

Ms Hynde lived the entire dream and nightmare of 1960s liberation, and is impressively honest about the bitter depths to which this took her, and the sadness this caused her parents.

Last week she was questioned on this by the high priestess of po-faced British feminism, Jenni Murray. The exchange didn���t go quite as Ms Murray expected. Chrissie Hynde���s thoughts about feminism and knicker-displaying rock stars have been much publicised. But this was the bit that really impressed me: ���I don���t think it���s liberating at all to think that you can behave like a man��� When this false commodity of sexual liberation came along which made us think that we could act like them ��� actually women don���t act like men and they also respond emotionally very differently to men. It took me a long time to find out, and I don���t think it was any kind of liberation. I think it was more enslavement.���

Jenni Murray immediately changed the subject.

Some Further Thoughts on Jeremy Corbyn and the Borders Crisis

I thought I���d post a few further thoughts on the great Corbasm, and the events in Germany over the weekend.

 

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the obvious rage and discontent among political journalists (who have spent the last five years and lots of money taking Blairites to lunch, all now wasted) who are appalled at the cheek of the Labour Party in picking a candidate they don���t know and don���t like. This isn���t much to do with politics. In my experience few political journalists have any interest in politics or any interesting views on the subject. They���re all ���modernisers��� or ���centrists���, meaningless expressions which (being interpreted) mean that they unthinkingly accept whatever conventional wisdom is until it changes, whereupon they accept the new conventional wisdom. 

First Corbyn wouldn���t win. Then he did. Then there would be a putsch against him. Then his majority made that rather difficult. Then he wouldn���t be able to form a Shadow Cabinet. Then he did.  Then there weren���t enough women in the new Shadow Cabinet (fat lot I care, not believing that someone���s sex is, by itself, either a qualification or a disqualification for political office). Then there were more women in it than men. Then none of them was Shadow Chancellor. Well, there aren���t that many women in great offices of state (so-called) in the real Cabinet, and I don���t recall Mr Cameron being quizzed very hard on this, or anything else much.

The reporters have seldom been so out of the loop. Perhaps that���s why, on the BBC at lunchtime, Mr Corbyn was interviewed with the camera practically shoved up his right nostril,  an angle that could reasonably be described as unflattering. Gosh, how one wishes that all this suspicion and hostility had been unleashed on the Blair creature when *he* was first elected, amid much adulation and almost no questioning, back in 1994. 

 

I still think those who dismiss Corbynism as a purely leftist upsurge need to explain the very large public meetings which took place wherever he spoke. My own solitary experience of one of these did not suggest that those attending were solely battle-hardened old Bennites yearning for their lost youth. Many were simply curious, and indeed enthused by a feeling that they were being asked their opinion, and doing something that they had been told not to do. 

 

What is so great about the other politicians, exactly? Can someone tell me? What are they good at? What do they stand for? What do they know?  What are their great qualifications? I agree that Mr Corbyn is undistinguished, academically or in life. But that would be a more powerful argument if he weren't up against the veterans of various Bullingdon club offensives in the restaurants of Oxfordshire, heading a Cabinet of forgettable nonentities whose names and deeds few can recall.  It's not as if the Cameron Cabinet is full of decorated warriors, brilliant businessmen, academic giants or anything else much. 

 

There is a malaise abroad in this country and it is not confined to left-wingers. Anyone with any memory knows that this is a worrying and uncertain time, full of signs and portents.  The glass is falling, hour by hour, if you care to look.

 

Where will the young find proper jobs? How will they pay the enormous debts they are contracting? How will the British government pay the enormous debts it is contracting? Historically, the only way out of indebtedness on this scale has been the debauched horror of hyper-inflation, which destroys the middle class, and so destroys stability and responsibility.

 

How will they find places to live that they can afford? Where and how will they educate their children? Are these claims of brilliance in non-selective academies true? If they are, why don���t Michael Gove, who created and talked up so many of them, and the Prime Minister, who is always saying how wonderful they are, send their own children to them?

 

 

For the middle-aged, there is a different set of worries.  In many former industrial areas, jobs have vanished,  shops are boarded up and houses unlet and unsaleable. How long can society endure in such surroundings? Can nobody stop my neighbourhood being devoured by cars and traffic?  Or, in the countryside, is there now to be no limit on the expansion of what were once compact, pleasant villages into ugly sprawl, composed of cardboard hutches too small for civilised life, whose occupants can hear their neighbours breathing? Who will replace the doctors who have served me all my adult life and who are now retiring in increasing numbers, or going abroad for better conditions?(this is an even greater problem in country practices, where in many cases they will simply come to an end when the current generation retire).

 

Why must we submit to the growing retreat of supposed services ��� so that we cannot contact our town halls, our banks, the police,  our utility companies or anyone else, especially when problems arise and when we need them most? I think it also fair to say the welfare system has a habit of making life hardest for those who need it most, while turning a blind eye to many who are abusing it.

 

Must we endure the replacement of so many unskilled workers, especially in shops,  by robots? Whom does this benefit?

 

There may not be much official  inflation, but there is a form of inflation targeted on the thrifty - the prices of valuable assets, especially housing, are soaring out of reach, while savings accumulated over decades are quietly but relentlessly shrinking because of near-zero interest rates. And none of us can guarantee that the only assets most of us own - our houses ��� will not have to be sold for ���care��� at our lives��� ends.  It is not much comfort that few of us could now afford to buy the houses we own, when much of this fairy gold will be snatched away before we can hand it on.

 

And for all, of course, there is the great uncertainty of mass immigration, which I discuss below. Much has already taken place. How much more will there be? How will it affect our lives? 

 

***

Look at the amazing reversal in Germany. Just days after declaring that migrants were welcome, Germany has slammed shut its borders and halted trains from Austria and Hungary.

Germany, whose hoity-toity adoption of the Schengen no-borders agreement was always very pointed, now wishes to suspend that very agreement, having found that open borders work in several different ways. The last time I flew to a certain German airport from London, I noticed the ill-tempered way in which, as non-Schengen passengers, we were treated.   The immigration desk was set up so close to the bridge which led off the plane that the passport queue stretched back into the aircraft itself. The German passport officials scowled at us with a sort of Iron Curtain ferocity.  I had the strong impression, though of course I cannot prove it, that we were being punished for our irritating nonconformism. The distant facility-free corrals in other continental airports, used for non-Schengen passengers waiting to depart, do tend to give the same impression.

 

Germany wanted a free flow of cheap labour into its territory, and a free flow of goods outwards. I���ve for years been astonished at how little attention has been paid to Schengen and its political implications. Perhaps that���s because I travel quite a lot on the continent, in my xenophobic, Europhobic way, and still can���t get over the way things have changed since the borders were enforced.   How can the countries involved still claim to *be* countries when they���ve renounced any real power to decide who enters and leaves their territory (this question should also be asked of the UK which has gone most of the way to borderlessness by accepting the EU passport and abolishing its own). Yet the external border of the EU is still vigorously enforced. And they say it isn���t an empire. Like, hello? Amusingly, it is Germany which on this occasion has closed *its* frontiers against its subject nations, which makes it easier for them to do the same.  

 

But the multitudes who arrived over the weekend at Munich railway station (many of them, judging by films I���ve seen, not from Syria or anywhere near it)  have put a stop to that. Has Germany���s regularly over-rated Chancellor, Angela Merkel, now grasped the simple point that an unquestioning open door to economic migrants will increase the numbers of such migrants? News of this kind travels very fast in the modern world. I gather there is a growing market for real and faked Syrian passports.

 

While reasonable weather lasts, all who can will try to cross from Turkey to Greece, and from Libya to Italy, to get to Germany and Sweden. Some will fail, horribly.  Many will succeed.

 

But that���s only a small part of the reality.  This will not end when the weather turns bad at the equinox. It will return next year and the year after, and for decades to come. Migrants become citizens. And most of the migrants now arriving here come from societies where the clan is strong, where every man has an obligation to his many cousins. Once they are citizens, they will become a potent and irresistible lobby for ���family reunification���,  an unending process by which they will bring family members into EU territory, much as Hispanic migrants have done in the USA, transforming the culture of that country in 25 years, and continuing to do so even now. It is a fact, whether you approve of it or not, that we are talking about transformation, not a minor adjustment.

 

I stress that this is, on the migrants��� part, a perfectly reasonable response to EU governments which have resolved to welcome them.  I don���t blame them, or criticise them. As I have said before, I admire their enterprise and courage. Moving to another country, even in good circumstances, is a hard thing to do.

 

I criticise the many European governments which have acted to encourage migrants to act (perfectly rationally) in this way. This is what they decided to support, when they resolved on the policy of welcome. That is what the campaigners support, who urge a policy of welcome. 

Some Further Thoughts on Jeremy Corbyn and the Borders Crisis

I thought I���d post a few further thoughts on the great Corbasm, and the events in Germany over the weekend.

 

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the obvious rage and discontent among political journalists (who have spent the last five years and lots of money taking Blairites to lunch, all now wasted) who are appalled at the cheek of the Labour Party in picking a candidate they don���t know and don���t like. This isn���t much to do with politics. In my experience few political journalists have any interest in politics or any interesting views on the subject. They���re all ���modernisers��� or ���centrists���, meaningless expressions which (being interpreted) mean that they unthinkingly accept whatever conventional wisdom is until it changes, whereupon they accept the new conventional wisdom. 

First Corbyn wouldn���t win. Then he did. Then there would be a putsch against him. Then his majority made that rather difficult. Then he wouldn���t be able to form a Shadow Cabinet. Then he did.  Then there weren���t enough women in the new Shadow Cabinet (fat lot I care, not believing that someone���s sex is, by itself, either a qualification or a disqualification for political office). Then there were more women in it than men. Then none of them was Shadow Chancellor. Well, there aren���t that many women in great offices of state (so-called) in the real Cabinet, and I don���t recall Mr Cameron being quizzed very hard on this, or anything else much.

The reporters have seldom been so out of the loop. Perhaps that���s why, on the BBC at lunchtime, Mr Corbyn was interviewed with the camera practically shoved up his right nostril,  an angle that could reasonably be described as unflattering. Gosh, how one wishes that all this suspicion and hostility had been unleashed on the Blair creature when *he* was first elected, amid much adulation and almost no questioning, back in 1994. 

 

I still think those who dismiss Corbynism as a purely leftist upsurge need to explain the very large public meetings which took place wherever he spoke. My own solitary experience of one of these did not suggest that those attending were solely battle-hardened old Bennites yearning for their lost youth. Many were simply curious, and indeed enthused by a feeling that they were being asked their opinion, and doing something that they had been told not to do. 

 

What is so great about the other politicians, exactly? Can someone tell me? What are they good at? What do they stand for? What do they know?  What are their great qualifications? I agree that Mr Corbyn is undistinguished, academically or in life. But that would be a more powerful argument if he weren't up against the veterans of various Bullingdon club offensives in the restaurants of Oxfordshire, heading a Cabinet of forgettable nonentities whose names and deeds few can recall.  It's not as if the Cameron Cabinet is full of decorated warriors, brilliant businessmen, academic giants or anything else much. 

 

There is a malaise abroad in this country and it is not confined to left-wingers. Anyone with any memory knows that this is a worrying and uncertain time, full of signs and portents.  The glass is falling, hour by hour, if you care to look.

 

Where will the young find proper jobs? How will they pay the enormous debts they are contracting? How will the British government pay the enormous debts it is contracting? Historically, the only way out of indebtedness on this scale has been the debauched horror of hyper-inflation, which destroys the middle class, and so destroys stability and responsibility.

 

How will they find places to live that they can afford? Where and how will they educate their children? Are these claims of brilliance in non-selective academies true? If they are, why don���t Michael Gove, who created and talked up so many of them, and the Prime Minister, who is always saying how wonderful they are, send their own children to them?

 

 

For the middle-aged, there is a different set of worries.  In many former industrial areas, jobs have vanished,  shops are boarded up and houses unlet and unsaleable. How long can society endure in such surroundings? Can nobody stop my neighbourhood being devoured by cars and traffic?  Or, in the countryside, is there now to be no limit on the expansion of what were once compact, pleasant villages into ugly sprawl, composed of cardboard hutches too small for civilised life, whose occupants can hear their neighbours breathing? Who will replace the doctors who have served me all my adult life and who are now retiring in increasing numbers, or going abroad for better conditions?(this is an even greater problem in country practices, where in many cases they will simply come to an end when the current generation retire).

 

Why must we submit to the growing retreat of supposed services ��� so that we cannot contact our town halls, our banks, the police,  our utility companies or anyone else, especially when problems arise and when we need them most? I think it also fair to say the welfare system has a habit of making life hardest for those who need it most, while turning a blind eye to many who are abusing it.

 

Must we endure the replacement of so many unskilled workers, especially in shops,  by robots? Whom does this benefit?

 

There may not be much official  inflation, but there is a form of inflation targeted on the thrifty - the prices of valuable assets, especially housing, are soaring out of reach, while savings accumulated over decades are quietly but relentlessly shrinking because of near-zero interest rates. And none of us can guarantee that the only assets most of us own - our houses ��� will not have to be sold for ���care��� at our lives��� ends.  It is not much comfort that few of us could now afford to buy the houses we own, when much of this fairy gold will be snatched away before we can hand it on.

 

And for all, of course, there is the great uncertainty of mass immigration, which I discuss below. Much has already taken place. How much more will there be? How will it affect our lives? 

 

***

Look at the amazing reversal in Germany. Just days after declaring that migrants were welcome, Germany has slammed shut its borders and halted trains from Austria and Hungary.

Germany, whose hoity-toity adoption of the Schengen no-borders agreement was always very pointed, now wishes to suspend that very agreement, having found that open borders work in several different ways. The last time I flew to a certain German airport from London, I noticed the ill-tempered way in which, as non-Schengen passengers, we were treated.   The immigration desk was set up so close to the bridge which led off the plane that the passport queue stretched back into the aircraft itself. The German passport officials scowled at us with a sort of Iron Curtain ferocity.  I had the strong impression, though of course I cannot prove it, that we were being punished for our irritating nonconformism. The distant facility-free corrals in other continental airports, used for non-Schengen passengers waiting to depart, do tend to give the same impression.

 

Germany wanted a free flow of cheap labour into its territory, and a free flow of goods outwards. I���ve for years been astonished at how little attention has been paid to Schengen and its political implications. Perhaps that���s because I travel quite a lot on the continent, in my xenophobic, Europhobic way, and still can���t get over the way things have changed since the borders were enforced.   How can the countries involved still claim to *be* countries when they���ve renounced any real power to decide who enters and leaves their territory (this question should also be asked of the UK which has gone most of the way to borderlessness by accepting the EU passport and abolishing its own). Yet the external border of the EU is still vigorously enforced. And they say it isn���t an empire. Like, hello? Amusingly, it is Germany which on this occasion has closed *its* frontiers against its subject nations, which makes it easier for them to do the same.  

 

But the multitudes who arrived over the weekend at Munich railway station (many of them, judging by films I���ve seen, not from Syria or anywhere near it)  have put a stop to that. Has Germany���s regularly over-rated Chancellor, Angela Merkel, now grasped the simple point that an unquestioning open door to economic migrants will increase the numbers of such migrants? News of this kind travels very fast in the modern world. I gather there is a growing market for real and faked Syrian passports.

 

While reasonable weather lasts, all who can will try to cross from Turkey to Greece, and from Libya to Italy, to get to Germany and Sweden. Some will fail, horribly.  Many will succeed.

 

But that���s only a small part of the reality.  This will not end when the weather turns bad at the equinox. It will return next year and the year after, and for decades to come. Migrants become citizens. And most of the migrants now arriving here come from societies where the clan is strong, where every man has an obligation to his many cousins. Once they are citizens, they will become a potent and irresistible lobby for ���family reunification���,  an unending process by which they will bring family members into EU territory, much as Hispanic migrants have done in the USA, transforming the culture of that country in 25 years, and continuing to do so even now. It is a fact, whether you approve of it or not, that we are talking about transformation, not a minor adjustment.

 

I stress that this is, on the migrants��� part, a perfectly reasonable response to EU governments which have resolved to welcome them.  I don���t blame them, or criticise them. As I have said before, I admire their enterprise and courage. Moving to another country, even in good circumstances, is a hard thing to do.

 

I criticise the many European governments which have acted to encourage migrants to act (perfectly rationally) in this way. This is what they decided to support, when they resolved on the policy of welcome. That is what the campaigners support, who urge a policy of welcome. 

Jeremy Corbyn's Victory

I shall have more to say about Jeremy Corbyn's victory in my Mail on Sunday column tomorrow, and have recently written at length about him here :

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/09/my-evening-with-jeremy-corbyn.html

..but, very briefly on a busy day, I would say here that I see this moment as a victory of adversarial, adult politics over bland, public relations pseudo-politics and the ghastly, meaningless and closed-minded concept of the 'centre', a claim by a narrow political viewpoint to be somehow blessed with moderation, modernity and common sense, when its only real strength is to be in fashion with conventional wisdom.

 

This is not because I agree with Mr Corbyn about much (though I do agree with him about some things, notably railway nationalisation and several foreign policy issues) . One of the things that is wrong with him is that he shares far too many polices with David Cameron, and isn't anything like radical enough for me on the European Union, where he is disappointingly conventional, unlike his one-time ally, Tony Benn .

It often puzzles me that the Labour Left have mysteriously abandoned Tony Benn's consistent and indispensable opposition to the EU, while continuing to revere him. 

The right people have been discomfited. That does not, alas, mean that we are on the road to any real change in national politics. 

Why Owen Jones Has Got it all Backwards

For 15 years now, I���ve been trying to explain to left-wingers what ���left-wing��� means. It is strange that, while many of these people have a clear grasp of modern technology, can ���get��� references to TV programmes, films and rock bands of which I have never heard, and are, how shall I say, more fashionable dressed than I, they still approach politics as if it hadn���t altered since 1945.

 

They still seem to think that nationalisation of industry is a major aim of the left. They still approach Marxism, if they approach it at all, as if Soviet Communism was the end point of Marxist thought, and nothing has happened since.  Many imagine that Marxism was defeated utterly in 1989-91, when the Soviet empire fell. Likewise they still view the USA as the arsenal of reaction, a highly-conservative country at home and abroad.

 

No wonder that, stuck in these categories, they are clueless about the real nature of New Labour and of the Tory Party which has embraced New Labour���s policies (without understanding their aims and origins).

 

To me, dealing with people so utterly out of touch with modern political developments is much like meeting a male person who still wears detachable cellulose collars, sock-suspenders and vests, plasters his hair to his head with brilliantine, uses a typewriter,  and still listens, via some electronic time-warp, to the Home Service and the National Programme on his wireless.

 

Nationalisation, for instance, was always rather marginally connected with socialism. It existed before socialism . Leaving aside the armed forces (the earliest state enterprises) King Charles II nationalised the mails, Stanley Baldwin nationalised the BBC, Neville Chamberlain nationalised electricity distribution, Dwight Eisenhower nationalised America���s highway system.

 

The question of whether, say, the railways, are state-owned or not is a practical one, not an ideological one. Long before Harold Wilson came to lead the Labour Party, nationalisation was dead as a real left-right issue in this country.

 

Roy Jenkins���s 1959 book ���The Labour Case��� and Anthony Crosland���s ���Future of Socialism��� correctly identified the left with moral and cultural revolution, and with dogmatic social egalitarianism. The lasting achievements (like them or not) of the 1964-70 Labour government were not economic or in the field of state ownership. They were : comprehensive schooling, an egalitarian political project of huge power, adopted (despite its utter educational failure)  by the Tory Party as well. This issue is the true litmus test of modern politics, and is not merely Labour���s real Clause Four, but has become David Cameron���s Clause Four as well; the array of legal changes summed up (by a resentful Jim Callaghan) as ��� the permissive society���  - simple, swift unilateral divorce, the de facto decriminalisation of cannabis (actually enacted, using a Labour template, by the Tories in 1971), the removal of the principle of punishment from the criminal justice system, the keystone of this being the abolition of capital punishment for heinous murder; the introduction of what rapidly became abortion on demand.  This last would be followed by the prescription of contraceptive pills first to the unmarried and then to those under the legal age of sexual consent without the knowledge of their parents.

 

These vast changes, described and explained in my books ���The Abolition of Britain��� (1999), ���A Brief History of Crime��� (2003) and ���The War We Never Fought��� (2014) utterly transformed private life and the nature of British society, and have been continued and reinforced, never reversed or moderated, by subsequent governments of all parties. One major result has been the transformation of the police force from a locally run, conservative consensual enforcer of the public will into a highly-politicised (and nationalised) exercise in social engineering, with a  hilariously slight interest in actual crime or disorder.

 

They were  accompanied by an increasing willingness to permit large-scale immigration, and a decreasing willingness to insist on the integration of the new arrivals. This aided the process of diluting and replacing the former conservative, Christian culture of the country, which came to be seen as ill-mannered towards the new citizens. Thence came multiculturalism, and the insistence on���Diversity; and ���Equality��� eventually enshrined in the Equality Act put through Parliament by Harriet Harman with the qualified but definite assistance of Theresa May.

 

The surrender of law-making powers to the European Union (whose original directive the Equality Act, among many similar, transforms into British law) made all this much easier, and assisted in the general denaturing of what had formerly been a very particular and unchanging society.

 

The name ���Equality Act��� concealed the fact that its aim wasn���t so much equality, but the de-privileging of various institutions and ideas which had previously been considered supreme. The married state became one of many equally respected positions, thus losing its privileges. Protestant Christianity, likewise, became one among many competing beliefs, none to be regarded as more favoured than any other. Whether you like this or don���t like it, it is impossible to pretend that it is not a profound change.

 

Abroad, the USA (especially after the Clinton Presidency) became the arsenal of political correctness ��� both in its own domestic affairs and its policies overseas -  and liberal globalism. Meanwhile Russia, having thrown off Communism  became the most socially conservative major country on the planet.  Eurocommunism, the original basis of Blairism, grasped that political and social radicalism could readily exist alongside economic liberalism. It also saw that regulation was easier to achieve - and in many ways easier to exercise - than nationalisation, and that the old models of Moscow socialism were utterly outmoded. It is beyond comical that anyone  imagines that Vladimir Putin���s Russia has anything in common with the USSR.  On the contrary, it���s a violent reaction against it. You just need to look, to see. But people don���t look.

 

It���s hardly surprising that children of the Cold War have found all this hard to grasp. Right is left and left is right.  It is full of paradoxes and of things and people trading under aliases.

 

Yet they should have tried harder. More credit should be given to my late brother, Christopher, for correctly identifying the modern USA as the most revolutionary power on the planet, opposed to crabby conservative concepts such as national sovereignty, sweeping away the tedious restraints of migration controls and protective tariffs. It���s this economic liberalism - allied with the personal liberalism of ���Nobody can tell me what to do with my own body��� which has somehow become identified with the British Conservative Party and the American Republicans, even though it���s not in the least bit conservative.

 

This is why Owen Jones���s reference to Alan Milburn���s private enterprise activities in his article http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/09/peter-hitchens-tory-trotskyite-left-right#comment-59164209 misses the point so totally. The left no longer has the slightest difficulty with business or wealth. It���s utterly relaxed. Peter Mandelson and Deng Xiaoping , both educated in Marxism, both concluded that to get rich is glorious. Did they cease to be revolutionaries?

 

I don't think so.

 

Hasn���t New Labour revolutionised Britain? Isn���t China revolutionising the world, far more than it did before Deng let rip with the capitalism? Did Mr Milburn?

 

What Owen Jones should be more interested by is Mr Milburn���s incessant ( and well-publicised and well-received, not least by the Blairite Tories) calls for greater egalitarianism in our society

 

See http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/06/are-posh-employers-really-discriminating-against-the-poor.html and

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/06/posh-tests-wont-rob-your-child-of-a-job-socialist-snobs-did-that-years-ago.html

and 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1202147/PETER-HITCHENS-Comrade-Alan-Milburn-army-Useful-Idiots.html

 

Right wing? I do not think so.

 

Neoconservatism���s Trotskyist origins aren���t accidental. It���s a revolutionary project, cunningly adapted for our times, by people who never ceased to be revolutionaries but learned that the old methods would never work. The teenage leftists of the 1970s have not become conservatives. They have become radical, revolutionary liberals a thousand times more effective than they can ever have hoped to be. If Owen really doesn���t like the ���political consensus that combines free-market economics with social liberalism���, then he has a very tough epiphany ahead of him.

 

Or he can do what almost all my generation did, and sink comfortably into the liberal consensus, where every slogan of their college days is now conventional wisdom, and men in their 60s still struggle into their jeans and attend Rolling Stones concerts, marvelling at how funky they still are. 

Melissa Benn's Nostalgia for the days of Gove

Sticking with the problem of left and right not being what they seem to be, here's an interesting outbreak of sympathy between a supposed Left-wing activist and a supposed Tory reactionary.

 

Just before the election I took part in an Oxford panel discussion about democracy, in which one of the other participants was Melissa Benn, daughter of Tony and Caroline Benn. I thought her wrong,  but thoughtful and intelligent, and possessed of that indispensable attribute, a sense of humour (which, as James Hilton���s great fictional teacher ���Mr Chips��� pointed out,  is really a sense of proportion).

 

One of the things she���s wrong about (as were her parents) is comprehensive education.

 

And I was struck this week by an article she wrote for the Guardian���s education section.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/sep/08/grammar-school-expansion-kent-selective-education

I have discussed here the utter lack of support for selective state schools shown by my former friend Michael Gove .

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/05/more-details-of-michael-goves-attitude-towards-grammar-schools.html

 

 

We haven���t spoken more than a few words(which were, as I recall ���Good Evening���), since he sent his daughter to Grey Coat Hospital school, see

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/03/more-thoughts-on-michael-goves-school-choice.html

 

What���s interesting is that Melissa Benn has also noticed this. She says in her article, about a possible extension of one grammar school in Kent:

 

���It will also mark a significant retreat from the Gove years, when there was a strong commitment to the principle of non-selective education and rejection of old-style Tory claims that grammar schools promote social mobility.���

 

See that? A strong commitment to the *principle* of non-selective education���

 

What principle is that? By ���non-selective��� she of course means ���not selected by ability���, as she and her allies are quite happy with the current system of selection by money, elbows and cunning.

 

What is this principle shared by the heir to Tony Benn and by Michael Gove, blue hope of the new Tories? I shall have to ask Melissa, when next I bump into her.

 

By the way, I���d link to link here to a long moan by the fashionable media person Giles Coren (The headline is ���Thanks for nothing, you middle-class scum') about not being able to get his four-year-old daughter into two good local state primary schools. He���s going private. He blames self-righteous local lefties for manoeuvreing their children into the two schools��� tiny catchment areas.

 

But I can���t link to it. It���s behind a paywall.

 

He tells readers of ���The Times��� not to dare to ���look down on him��� for going private. We have come to something when he feels he must address such an appeal to readers of  ���The Times���. But there you are.

 

Thus do the British middle classes, in their various ways, avoid the problem of selection by ability (which would of course have a huge and beneficial effect on state primary schools, compelling them to restore their lost rigour).

The Case of Mr 'MikeBarnes'

Yesterday the contributor who likes to be known as 'Mikebarnes' (though he objects when people call him 'Mike Barnes') posted a response to my brief item about the Australian politician,  who included in a recent speech a large unattributed quotation from my Sunday column, slightly amended but substantially identical to what I had written.

 

The politician concerned has now owned up to this, and even offered to pay me a fee (I declined this, and asked him instead to ensure that the words were attributed to me in the Hansard for the New South Wales Legislative Council, where they were spoken).

 

Mr 'Mikebarnes' chose to make this the occasion for a remarkable comment.  Newer readers will not know that Mr Barnes claimed many years ago that I had in some way taken some of my ideas and beliefs from the 'policy documents' (if they can be so grandly described) of the 'British National Party (BNP)' a deservedly defunct political grouplet, founded by admirers of Hitler and supported (in some cases) by people who struggle to accept that Hitler engaged in the deliberate mass murder of Europe's Jews. Until quite recently, the 'constitution' of this 'party' was specifically racialist. I put this politely. I have no idea what connections, if any, Mr 'Mikebarnes' has with this body. He appears, from his writings, not to be wholly opposed to it. He is welcome to correct me on this if my impression is mistaken. 

 

I would rather gather my food from the gutter than take ideas from such a source, always assuming there were any ideas to be found there, which I rather doubt. It is not an intellectual powerhouse.

 

I told Mr Barnes either to show that his claim was true or to withdraw it and apologise. If he did neither, I warned him, he would be refused permission to post here in future. He did neither and was duly prevented from posting here. After a period of some months, he begged to be allowed back and offered the necessary withdrawal and apology. I agreed to his return purely because of a sense of justice. I had enjoyed being spared his incessant, rambling, atrociously written contributions, which managed to be simultaneously repellent and dull. His presence here is an illustration of my belief in the rule of law. 

 

Mr 'Mikebarnes', I suspect, chafes under this indulgence. Anyway, on Wednesday he chose to make the Australian MP's borrowing of my words the occasion for the following comment:

'Well it seems he doesn't consider your Sunday column as a 'news paper article ' else he would have acknowledged it . Strange and confusing is that ! But as I once accused you of plagiarising the BNP output ,which you demanded an unreserved apology.  perhaps being consistent is not your forte. Still never mind eh'

 

It is never easy to penetrate the 'logic' of a 'Mikebarnes' post. But it was the accusation of inconsistency *'perhaps being consistent is not your forte. Still never mind eh'* which seemed  to me to be the operative part of this mini-epistle.

Where is the inconsistency? Who is being inconsistent about what? Be precise. In one case, the Australian MP used my words without attribution, was found out, and admitted what he had done. In the other Mr 'MikeBarnes' made and withdrew a false allegation that I had taken my ideas from an organisation I despise. 

I can only see one circumstance in which there *could* be an inconsistency, and that would be if the accusation against me made by Mr 'MikeBarnes' was true. Otherwise there wouldn't be anything to be inconsistent about, would there?  As it was entirely false, on what precisely does the snide, sarcastic suggestion that 'being consistent is not your forte' (which in general I reject) rest? 

Mr 'Mikebarnes', alas, still has a few hours in which to apologise and withdraw the imputation, so saving himself from the Long Goodbye I wish to bestow on him.  I note that he has (as before) gathered a small tail of anguished supporters who perhaps do not know precisely what company they are keeping. They should not imagine that, because Mr 'MikeBarnes' cannot write good English for toffee and gives banality a bad name, he lacks either cunning or subtlety. 

***

Addendum. I feel I ought to respond to the plea from 'Vikki Boynton', who wrote:

 

'I think he ['Mikebarnes']is saying that since you demanded an apology from him when he once accused you of plagiarism, it is not consistent of you, to not do the same with the Australian who has plagiarised your article now.  I don't think he is making the same accusation at all.'

I am afraid this is nonsense. 1. I had no time to demand an apology from the MP, because I only learned of his action after he had been found out, and admitted the act. He was left looking so silly that I was quite satisfied.  Had I discovered it myself, and had he denied it, then I might have taken a more aggressive view. But it wasn't so, and I decided that the grown-up response was to regard the matter as funny rather than serious. Soon afterwards he even offered me a fee (see above). 2. In this case a proven instance of plagiarism has taken place, in that exact words of mine were used by the MP in his speech, without attribution, and plainly after I had written them, so there was not even the remote possibility of coincidence. 3. Mr Barnes's accusation was baseless, and he was unable even to offer evidence of it, let alone proof. 

4. I am flattered if politicians think my words are worth plagiarising, and not especially outraged; it is almost the opposite circumstance to be accused of having secretly stolen *my* words and ideas from a verbal sewer. As I say above, there is no lack of consistency in my actions or attitudes. To suggest that there is, is to suggest something much larger.  

Should Someone Write an English Version of 'Submission'?

On Sunday I briefly mentioned ���Submission���,  Michel Houellebecq���s new novel (newly published, that is,  in English, in a brilliant translation by Lorin Stein. It was published in France smack in the middle of the ���Charlie Hebdo��� murders, which, as we will see, added to its impact, not least because the current edition of the magazine had a caricature of Houellebcq on its cover) . Think of the author���s apparently unpronounceable name as ���Welbeck��� and you won���t be far out.

 

The book���s hero is agreeably unloveable,  a squalid and cynical academic who drinks far too much, subsists on microwaved curries, uses prostitutes and, er, accesses pornography. Quite how he attracts the unattached and personable young women who occasionally solace him, I do not know. After a while, they all write to him and tell him they have ���met someone ���, and I am not surprised.  

Quite a lot of the book is crammed with references to French literature and academic life which I don���t pretend to get,  except vaguely. There are also a few pretty graphic sex scenes which might make it attractive to film or TV producers but seemed to me out of place,  like custard on steak. 

 

Yet it is a captivating read (perhaps thanks to the translator, who is plainly equally at home in English and French, and who is so good that you hardly ever remember that you are reading something originally written in a language utterly different from English).

 

That is because it is (to me) a highly plausible political thriller. French and British culture and politics are nowadays similar enough for almost all his barbs against fashionable commentators and servile academics to stick. They transfer easily from Sorbonne to LSE and from French TV and newspapers to Fleet Street and the BBC.

 

Even France���s largely bankrupt mainstream parties are pretty much interchangeable with Labour and the Tories.  The only difficulty is that there is no real equivalent here to Marine le Pen���s National Front, which under her leadership has moved out of her horrible father���s shadow and become a lot more comparable to UKIP in politics, and a lot bigger.

 

In a narrative punctuated with sex, gluttony, gossip and drinking, plus a strange interlude in a monastery and some sour experiences with the much-overrated TGV train system, we join the hero in his front seat has a front seat as secular, Fifth republic France commits a sort of suicide.

 

Here���s the problem. Neither the French Tories nor French Labour can win the 2022 Presidential election alone. Rather than combine with Marine Le Pen , they do a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood, led by a subtle and diplomatic political genius. Neither of these parties (like their British equivalents) values France. Both have long sought to dissolve it in the EU, though they prefer not to admit this aim. So, deep down, they have no objection to an Islamic France either. Would our pro-EU politicians rather do a deal with Nigel Farage or with a Muslim alliance, if the choice ever arose? 

 

To begin with the deal doesn't seem all that hard to do. The irreducible price is that they must give control of education to Islam. This turns out to be an even bigger step than they realise, as it hands over the future of France to the Muslim faith. Nobody can teach any more ��� including the hero -  unless he converts.  The new Islamic president also begins to bring into being the ���Eurabia��� warned against in Bat Ye���or���s famous book , pursuing the expansion of the EU into North Africa.

 

2022? Probably not. 2037? Highly plausible. Even then, we may not be able to imagine the speed of events if the EU does decide to open its frontiers to millions of young migrants as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)is urging.

 

The only force with any regard for France���s history and nature turns out to be the party everyone denounces as fascists, and which no doubt contains people whose politics and private views are pretty horrible.  Rather than ally with them, a tortured, decayed political establishment falls on its knees before a soft-spoken, politically astute Muslim saviour (Interestingly, in this book, Islam doesn���t demand any renunciation of alcohol, and its main spokesman seems quite happy with the hero���s disastrous boozing, plying him with fig brandy).

 

Houellebecq shows how this process could be quite personally agreeable for some,  at least to start with. Men suddenly find they can have three wives, even if they���re unattractive, because they are once again the source of wealth and power. Economics and employment are transformed by the new religion.  Secular French women start dressing modestly in public because, actually, it���s less effort than the other thing. Conservatives accept that they have more in common with Islam than they do with the gutless Christianity that has long ceased to mean what it says. There���s even a kind of joy in submission, symbolised by a long scene in the Left Bank house where ���The Story of O���, a pornographic masochistic novel so venerable it���s in danger of becoming a classic, was written.

 

The French setting, pleasing to people like me who know Paris reasonably well and have a vague acquaintance with French history and politics (but baffling to those who don���t and haven���t) will probably stop this novel having as much impact here as it should. Perhaps someone should write an English equivalent. But I warn them, it will not be as easy as Houellebecq makes it look.  I hope someone tries. Fiction can have more effect than any amount of truth.