Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 187
September 9, 2015
Plagiarise! Plagiarise!
I am amused to see that an Australian politician has , er, borrowed, a large chunk of my Sunday column , incorporating it in a speech he delivered in the New South Wales upper house, the Legislative Council.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, etc (this has in fact happened to me before, when a Tory MP, whose name escapes me, somehow included a large chunk of my book ���The Abolition of Britain��� in a speech, without mentioning its origin ��� he later told me he didn���t write it or know where it came from and blamed an underling).
Am I perhaps entitled to a fee? Probably not, as I wouldn���t willingly have helped any politician from a pseudo-conservative party (as the Australian Liberal Party is). I think I shall just have to extract payment in the form of laughter.
The real question is 'Why Don't Most Youthful Leftists Turn Right When They Get Old?'
Owen Jones has now written about our encounter in today���s Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/09/peter-hitchens-tory-trotskyite-left-right
It���s strange how often this question comes up. But my transition from revolutionary youth to crusty, conservative, religious old age is one of the clich��s of humanity, or was until our current age. It���s not really very startling and is easily explained.
Far more interesting is the fact that most of my revolutionary comrades are *still* on the left, that they did not undergo the normal transformation but continue, well into their sixties and seventies, to espouse the moral, social and cultural views they held in their twenties.
It is this evidence of real and deep cultural revolution, unlike anything human civilisation has ever experienced before, that ought to be attracting interest
September 7, 2015
An evening wasted with Peter Hitchens
I genuinely can't recall if I have posted this before. It's an audio recording of a long interview I gave to the journalist Matthew Stadlen in a hall in the Notting Hill area, more than a year ago, which has recently turned up on Twitter.
I am interviewed by Owen Jones
Here is an interview I gave a couple of weeks ago to the left-wing commentator Owen Jones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTu3gVvm_K8&list=PLTYmWuFco1_089houzfDL0CzYdmlP1Wq9&index=1
It is of course an edited version of a much longer encounter. I hope the whole thing will one day come to light.
A TV discussion of the Syria crisis and its origins
Some of you may like to watch this discussion on the Syrian crisis, in which I make my first major contribution about five minutes in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzegRfKImUw&feature=youtu.be
My evening with Jeremy Corbyn
About this time each year I try to ride the 90 or so miles between Oxford and Cambridge on my unspectacular bicycle (no drop handlebars, no space-age alloy frame, but a large and sonorous bell, a basket and a big, soft saddle).
I first did it some years ago to see if I could, then to check on the state of the madly abandoned railway line I used to use between the two cities in the 1960s (it���s enough to make you weep, actually. Overgrown or ripped-up tracks, stations obliterated, and in one key stretch, built over so that restoring it is all but impossible). Even Dr Beeching didn���t want to shut it ��� but Harold Wilson did, an act which seals his reputation in my mind). Now I just do it because it's a beautiful way of spending a September Sunday, and for the triumph of struggling up and over the hill near the village of Orwell (yes, there really is such a place) and seeing the glories of my destination in sight at last, lit up by the late afternoon sun
Anyway, as I wheezed and creaked into the centre of town (nobody can persuade me that Cambridge is a city. Not least because it lacks a cathedral) I was asked by a passer-by if I was going to 'the Jeremy Corbyn meeting'.
Not merely was I not going to it. I���d never heard of it. I was planning a long soak in a bathtub, an enormous meal, and hours of profound slumber. But now that I knew, I obviously had to try. Putting all else out of mind, I walked on creaky knees to Great St Mary���s church, to find it ringed by a shuffling queue of Soviet length. These were the people who���d signed up online to attend. Presumably because the thing was being organised by the unions, they were all being subjected to a minute bureaucratic examination, and the line was barely moving. Tangled up with it was another queue, for people like me who hadn���t signed up in advance. Having sorted out which was which with some difficulty, I joined this (the Biblically learned will understand why I referred to it as ���the Foolish Virgins���) on the basis that you never know.
And so I spent a pleasant hour or so in the lovely, elegiac Cambridge dusk (gosh, September can be the loveliest of all months when it tries) , with the sky fading from gold to blue behind the pinnacles of King���s College chapel, chatting with the interesting variety of people who���d come along.
I think I spotted a social trend. There were plenty of young people, in their early twenties, many in couples. And there were plenty of people of my age-group ��� late 50s upwards. But I rather think those in between were more thinly represented.
Just before eight o���clock, as the light thickened into dusk, we were told we wouldn���t get in ��� but that ���Jeremy���, as everyone callas Mr Corbyn would come out and speak to us, the improvident casual turners-up, first. For me, this was a huge stroke of luck. I���d vaguely hoped to get to a Corbyn meeting at some point but there were none near where I lived, as far as I know, had never been organised enough, and now I was going to attend one without all the tedium of the other platform speakers, the introductions, and without being crammed into a stuffy, overcrowded church, no doubt sandwiched between two people who loathed me, on one of the loveliest evenings of the year.
By the way, it���s interesting to note that Great St Mary���s holds 1,400 people, and was totally full, and that there were at least several hundred outside who couldn���t get in. And that the meeting had been postponed because the original venue had been too small to safely hold the audience who signed up. Apparently it wasn���t possible to hold the meeting in the open air on Parker���s Piece, the great green open space, where Jack Hobbs once played cricket, that lies near the centre of Cambridge.
I warmed to Mr Corbyn personally for two things . One was the unaffected, barely conscious way he bent down to scratch the head of a dog belonging to someone in the crowd. The other was when he acknowledged the majesty of the setting, the beautiful heart of one of the loveliest places in England, at sunset.
I suspect that most readers of this blog, if they heard the speech without knowing who was delivering it, would have thought it workmanlike and commonsensical, though obviously of the left. It was not high-flown, it contained a reasonable amount of self-mocking humour, it was proudly free of personal abuse or political invective. It was also (this made it easier for me) free of anything about the wild enthusiasm for comprehensive schools and multiculturalism which Mr Corbyn shares with David Cameron.
It was completely coherent, delivered fluently without notes by a man who obviously still writes his own speech and understands what he is saying. Every statement in it obviously resulted from a long and considered examination of the subject, and he could have defended every assertion if he had had it. This was itself a refreshing change from most modern political speeches, crafted by professional experts in blandness, rehearsed and spoken by the ���leader��� (what a horrible term this is) more for effect than for edification. I simply don���t think any of his rivals could have done this, not because they���re stupid or bad speakers, but because they don���t actually have coherent political positions.
They have to supercharge their words with emotive claptrap, slogans and clich��s to get them of the ground at all, and ,while they might briefly soar they quickly sink to earth again. Mr Corbyn���s speech, by contrast, took off in an orderly, well-piloted fashion, flew at a sensible height for the correct amount of time, droning gently, and then landed smoothly at the intended destination. I think this is the sort of thing people used to do in the 1940s, and perhaps the 1950s, when we still had real-live contentious politics in this country. But they have forgotten how since the PR men took over in the 1960s.
Its economics, under the circumstances, were quite level-headed. At a time when interest rates are absurdly low and the economy needs revival (the EEF report today suggests the Osborne boom isn���t up to much) , borrowing to spend makes perfect sense.
The Private Finance Initiative has been a costly disaster. There���s nothing wrong with public provision either for health or welfare. As he pointed out, much of what he said would be considered more or less mainstream in Germany.
Its politics (I noted a repeated assertion that greater equality is good for its own sake, and a clear belief in immigration as a good thing in itself ) are shared by the Tory Party. The only difference is in the detailed method of application, and the honesty and clarity (or lack of either) with which they admit to this.
Once or twice I was tempted to applaud the style and the sentiments, particularly his opposition to big money in British politics, a problem which increasingly concerns me. But I didn���t because there is a wise convention that journalists don���t . In the end, this is a protection against being *made* to applaud, or being *expected* to do so, which can be much the same thing ��� and which was important on the day when I declined to applaud a (frankly, terrible) speech which Nelson Mandela once delivered at a Labour Party conference. Whatever views we have, we must maintain a distance between us and power, or those who seek it.
Is Mr Corbyn on the way to power? I don���t think so, though a small but significant part of me says ���Don���t rule it out���. It is impossible to imagine any other politician living who could draw such a crowd . Tony Benn could have done, and they���d have paid, but that was because he had become a holy relic and because what someone once called his ���lovely, wuffly Children���s Hour voice��� could create great waves of nostalgia for long ago teatimes in the hearts of a certain generation. Mr Corbyn has no such voice, or presence. He wasn���t even famous until recently.
There is obviously something going on, but is it going on England, or in a small, particular part of English society, the educated, thoughtful old left who have been disenfranchised by the New labour smoothies. They might look impressive all gathered in one place, but do they add up to much in the total of votes, even in a rather exceptional place such as Cambridge? Or are they in fact outnumbered by the great mass of the indifferent, who either never vote or who can be manipulated and bought, to vote for whoever has been given the Mandate of Heaven (or at least the Mandate of Murdoch) that year?
We will rapidly discover which it is, if Mr Corbyn is elected on Saturday. Either a wider audience will say ���Actually, we are impressed by this style of politics, regardless of the views expressed, and wish to see more of it. Indeed, it would be good to see all parties adopting it���. Or they won���t. Knowing what we know of modern Britain, from instant mashed potato to comprehensive schools, I fear the answer won���t necessarily be the one that the audience in Cambridge would like to hear.
September 6, 2015
We won't save refugees by destroying our own country
THIS IS PETER HITCHENS'S MAIL ON SUNDAY COLUMN
Actually we can���t do what we like with this country. We inherited it from our parents and grandparents and we have a duty to hand it on to our children and grandchildren, preferably improved and certainly undamaged.
It is one of the heaviest responsibilities we will ever have. We cannot just give it away to complete strangers on an impulse because it makes us feel good about ourselves.
Every one of the posturing notables simpering ���refugees welcome��� should be asked if he or she will take a refugee family into his or her home for an indefinite period, and pay for their food, medical treatment and education.
If so, they mean it. If not, they are merely demanding that others pay and make room so that they can experience a self-righteous glow. No doubt the same people are also sentimental enthusiasts for the ���living wage���, and ���social housing���, when in fact open borders are steadily pushing wages down and housing costs up.
As William Blake rightly said: ���He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.���
Britain is a desirable place to live mainly because it is an island, which most people can���t get to. Most of the really successful civilisations survived because they were protected from invasion by mountains, sea, deserts or a combination of these things. Ask the Russians or the Poles what it���s like to live without the shield of the sea. There is no positive word for ���safety��� in Russian. Their word for security is ���bezopasnost��� ��� ���without danger���.
Thanks to a thousand years of uninvaded peace, we have developed astonishing levels of trust, safety and freedom. I have visited nearly 60 countries and lived in the USSR, Russia and the USA, and I have never experienced anything as good as what we have. Only in the Anglosphere countries ��� the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand ��� is there anything comparable. I am amazed at how relaxed we are about giving this away.
Our advantages depend very much on our shared past, our inherited traditions, habits and memories. Newcomers can learn them, but only if they come in small enough numbers. Mass immigration means we adapt to them, when they should be adapting to us.
So now, on the basis of an emotional spasm, dressed up as civilisation and generosity, are we going to say that we abandon this legacy and decline our obligation to pass it on, like the enfeebled, wastrel heirs of an ancient inheritance letting the great house and the estate go to ruin?
Having seen more than my share of real corpses, and watched children starving to death in a Somali famine, I am not unmoved by pictures of a dead child on a Turkish beach. But I am not going to pretend to be more upset than anyone else. Nor am I going to suddenly stop thinking, as so many people in the media and politics appear to have done.
The child is not dead because advanced countries have immigration laws. The child is dead because criminal traffickers cynically risked the lives of their victims in pursuit of money.
I���ll go further. The use of words such as ���desperate��� is quite wrong in this case. The child���s family were safe in Turkey. Turkey (for all its many faults) is a member of Nato, officially classified as free and democratic. Many British people actually pay good money to go on holiday to the very beach where the child���s body was washed up.
It may not be ideal, but the definition of a refugee is that he is fleeing from danger, not fleeing towards a higher standard of living.
Goodness knows I have done what I could on this page to oppose the stupid interventions by this country in Iraq, Libya and Syria, which have turned so many innocent people into refugees or corpses.
But I can see neither sense nor justice in allowing these things to become a pretext for an unstoppable demographic revolution in which Europe (including, alas, our islands) merges its culture and its economy with North Africa and the Middle East. If we let this happen, Europe would lose almost all the things that make others want to live there. You really think these crowds of tough young men chanting ���Germany!��� in the heart of Budapest are ���asylum-seekers��� or ���refugees���?
Refugees don���t confront the police of the countries in which they seek sanctuary. They don���t chant orchestrated slogans or lie across the train tracks.
And why, by the way, do they use the English name for Germany when they chant? In Arabic and Turkish, that country is called ���Almanya���, in Kurdish something similar. The Germans themselves call it ���Deutschland���. In Hungarian, it���s ���Nemetorszag���.
Did someone hope that British and American TV would be there? I���ve said it before, and I���ll say it again: spontaneous demonstrations take a lot of organising.
Refugees don���t demand or choose their refuge. They ask and they hope. When we become refugees one day (as we may well do), we will discover this.
As to what those angry, confident and forceful young men actually are, I���ll leave you to work it out, as I am too afraid of the Thought Police to use what I think is the correct word.
But it is interesting that this week sees the publication in English of a rather dangerous book, which came out in France just before the Charlie Hebdo murders.
Submission, by Michel Houellebecq, prophesies a Muslim-dominated government in France about seven years from now, ushered into power by the French Tory and Labour parties.
What they want, says one of the cleverer characters in the book, ���is for France to disappear ��� to be integrated into a European federation���. This means they���d much rather do a deal with a Muslim party than with the National Front, France���s Ukip equivalent.
If any of this sounds familiar to you, I wouldn���t be surprised. It���s amazing how likely and simple the author makes this Islamic revolution sound.
Can we stop this transformation of all we have and are? I doubt it. To do so would involve the grim-faced determination of Australia, making it plain in every way that our doors are open only to limited numbers of people, chosen by us, enduring the righteous scorn of the supposedly enlightened.
As we lack the survival instinct and the determination necessary, and as so many of our most influential people are set on committing a sentimental national suicide, I suspect we won���t.
To those who condemn reasonable calls for national self-defence as bigotry, hatred and intolerance (which they are not), I make only this request: just don���t pretend you���re doing a good and generous thing, when you���re really cowardly and weak.
September 3, 2015
An article in the Spectator about the Chilcot Inquiry
Some of you might like to see this article in this week's London 'Spectator', in which I suggest that Sir John Chilcot's inquiry will solve nothing because it is looking in the wrong place.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9622092/forget-chilcot-heres-the-inquiry-we-really-need/
Spectator podcast -including PH on Chilcot
Some of you might also be interested in this Spectator podcast in which I discuss the Chilcot problem with Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator. There are other items before this segment, on Jeremy Corbyn and on what Christianity says (or doesn't) about the migration crisis. My bit starts at about 31 minutes in.
http://www.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremycorbynsbritain?autoplay
Far From the Madding Crowd
I can remember 1967 all too well, at least I can remember various intense portions of it. It was confusing because so much novelty was surrounded by so many apparently unchanging and unyielding things.
The film accompanying this recording of Bob Dylan singing ���Don���t Think Twice, It���s All Right��� gives an excellent and (to me) rather moving idea of the slow birth of the modern world in the midst of what was still more or less the 1930s. I can remember this chilly London, the smell and feel of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-Y3KfJs6T0
Brown tea, made from leaves, was still being drunk in the sadly-furnished parlours of old-fashioned houses in stolid brick towns. Smoke still drifted from factory chimneys over murky canals and tank engines still shunted long lines of clanking coal trucks in urban sidings. Drizzle was the normal state of affairs. There was something on the radio called ���The Light Programme���. Factory hooters and church bells still marked the passing of the hours, and people rode bicycles not because it was cool but because that was what they could afford. Right on the edge of this unchanging if exhausted landscape (supposedly that of a great power recently victorious in world war) , the yelling of Mick Jagger could just be heard, and in parts of London the sexual revolution and the drugs culture were, briefly, more open and radical about what they really wanted than they have ever dared to be since. They had not learned the Blairite lesson that a man in a suit, who minds his manners, can be far more revolutionary than a shouting youth in a donkey jacket.
The cultural revolution was gestating in the still-living body it was going to destroy. It wasn���t like a natural birth, more like the dreadful scene in ���Alien��� where the creature bursts out of the chest of its unwitting host, killing him in the process.
I was looking through some old Youtube films of 1960s pop songs a few months ago, and found film of (I think) Manfred Mann, singing a curious, furtive little ditty in 1965 called ���If you got to go, go now������. The next line ran ���Or else you got to to stay all night���. (Paul Jones, by the way, definitely did not sing ���gotta��� , but ���got to���. American still didn���t come naturally. ).
It���s perfectly clear what he���s talking about and on the record the words are clear too. I think, but can���t now be sure, that it was broadcast uninterrupted on the radio - though in those days there was no BBC Radio 1, and Radios London and Caroline wouldn���t have banned any record for sexual innuendo. But in the filmed version (presumably shown on TV) the bit about staying all night, and another clear reference to sexual intent is drowned by the screams of girls in the audience, presumably dubbed to obscure the suggestion of fornication, since it repeatedly happens at the same point. I���ve wonder if this is why Fairport Convention recorded the same song in French in 1969.
This last gasp of public puritanism reminds me of the response of America���s Ed Sullivan show to the Rolling Stones��� 1967 song ���Let���s Spend the Night Together��� , which had to be bowdlerised to ���Let���s spend some time together��� before Sullivan would allow them to sing it on air.
Talking so directly about sex in public, especially where the older generation might be present, was still taboo in most places, though far more so in North America. No doubt there was plenty of sex going on, though I think we were still well short of the relaxation of morals so well symbolised by the activity known as ���the Line-up���, described by Allison Pearson in her Daily Telegraph column yesterday, 2nd September 2015. Inhibition was still strong. Nice girls were quite easily shocked by things that would nowadays pass unnoticed. And contraception for the unmarried was not straightforward at all, or reliable.
Into this neither-one-thing-nor-the-other world came John Schlesinger���s film version of Thomas Hardy���s ���Far From the Madding Crowd��� which, by the normal standards of the Dorset Merchant of Gloom, has a sort of happy ending, so making it more suitable for filming than (for instance) the relentlessly miserable ���Jude the Obscure��� .
A recent remake, perfectly good in its own right, caused me to want to see this version again ��� partly because I find it hard to believe that 1967 is now farther from me in time than the General Strike was when I first saw it. But also partly because it is more or less perfect, as far as any film can be. Four scenes ��� Sergeant Troy���s swordplay, the harvest storm, Fanny Robin���s death and Bathsheba���s ripping-open of her coffin, and Mr Boldwood���s ghastly, disastrous Christmas ball ��� will stay in my mind for as long as my memory is any good. And because three of its four central actors ��� Julie Christie, Alan Bates and Terence Stamp ��� so well symbolise and sum up the strange atmosphere of that time - wild, temptingly dangerous and exhilarating as well as rash, destructive and scornful. Peter Finch is just as good, but not part of that moment. Finch is no longer with us, and the others are all well on in age, so to see them in their primes is a curious thing. How strange it must be to have such powerful records of your own young years, available to you and to everyone.
Julie Christie is a daughter of empire, whose father was an Assam tea planter. She was also an early victim of a broken marriage. Terence Stamp, a grammar school boy, is the son of a tugboat captain. Alan Bates (later knighted, also gone from s - thanks to those readers who pointed this out to me) was another grammar school boy.
There could and would never be another generation quite like that, brought up in one set of ideas (which were not always upheld by their parents��� generation) and then told to despise them, educated to a standard we would now find startlingly high, and then released into the magic toyshop of 1960s London.
Perhaps this confusing background is one of the reasons why their portrayal of the fierce and illusion-free earthiness of 19th-century rural England (still thought of as not really in good taste in suburban 1960s England) is especially good.
In Hardy���s world, women do get pregnant out of wedlock. But they can also die in misery as a result. Women also talk among themselves about the failings of men with surprising freedom (���they do say he has no passionate parts���). And when the farm labourers sing the old songs, which in this version they do at some length and rather beautifully, there���s a half-expressed bawdy longing to them, even though the same men will be at church on Sunday, singing psalms and hymns. In this version of the film, when there are scenes in church, we don���t just get snatches of hymns, but whole verses.
A greater variety of English faces was available then than now, I think, and many of them are on display in all their toothy, toothless, gnarled or uneven naturalness. The workhouse master and mistress, grim gargoyles of chilly public charity, could have been drawn by Tenniel.
There���s also a lot of honesty about drink. The man driving Jenny���s coffin back to her home village becomes horribly, shamefully drunk in a way that was quite rare in England after the First World War. I���ve seldom seen hangovers so well acted as they are by the men (including a shamefaced parson) inveigled and threatened into debauchery by Sergeant Troy while the wind tears through the hayricks outside. You can almost feel the sore, heavy heads, foul, crusted tongues and nauseous stomachs as they shamble out into the blank, unforgiving morning, in some cases pausing to be quietly sick.
They couldn���t have shown these things, the drink or the misery, ten years before. To this day I���ve seldom seen anything on screen so shocking and distressing as Fanny and her dead baby in the coffin.
This incident has a special grimness for me as l learned a few years ago that my own grandfather, then a boy of about 12, unconvinced by a hospital���s explanation of his beloved sister���s death, crept downstairs at dead of night in their narrow Portsmouth house to the room where her coffin rested, and unscrewed the lid to make sure it was her. It is a scene that Hardy could have written , but which in this case actually happened.
As for Stamp as Sergeant Troy, how easily you can see why he steals their hearts away, and why they won���t believe how bad he really is, and why they never really cease to love him. With that astonishing face and that swaggering carriage, he might have been born to play the part of Temptation in a morality play. And just then, in 1967, Temptation was once again welcome in polite society.
Funnily enough, hanging having just been abolished at the time the film was made, another particularly searing sequence (another coffin is required for this) suggests that Boldwood is to be hanged, whereas in the book he is reprieved.
Oh, it���s full of power and light and memorable things. Films as good as this are seldom made. See it if you can. It dares to be three hours long, and I would say that not a minute of that is wasted. A new restored version is available on DVD, and if you are really lucky ( as I was) , there might be an arthouse cinema showing it on a big screen. If you���re still around in 48 years, I can practically promise you that you won���t have forgotten it.
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