Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 189

The Giant Fraud of Britain's Education System

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

 

The giant fraud that is Britain���s education system strides ever onwards, messing up many more lives than it improves.

 

But so many of us ���parents, children and teachers ��� are so deeply implicated in it that we dare not admit the depth, length breadth and height of the folly.

 

Like ���National Offer Day��� each March, when our viciously selective state secondary schools deny so many children a good education (usually because their parents are poor) , the second half of August is a time of bad news for many.

 

Not everyone is jumping about and simpering when ���A��� level or GCSE results arrive. A lot of those who do, don���t yet know that they have been cheated or are about to be.

 

I���ll be chided for being ���churlish��� for saying this. I don���t care. I think illusions, which will later shrivel up into so much crumpled paper, are far crueller than an unwelcome truth told in time.

 

Perhaps the greatest deception of all is the wild scheme to persuade nearly half of all our young people to go to university. Like that daft advertising slogan ���exclusively for everyone���, the problem is obvious if you think about it. If it���s for everyone it���s not exclusive. Elites are small. If they���re big, they���re not elites.

 

All serious elite institutions, from the great London clubs to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, have always made sure that most people can���t get into them. That���s the point. 

 

Last week we learned that the alleged universities which so many children strive to enter give them no benefits.  Even the few genuinely elitist colleges cannot any longer guarantee a future for their products. Years later, many thousands of  graduates are toiling away at jobs they could have got ��� and done - without spending three years getting into lifelong debt which will, in many cases never be repaid.

 

Why do we do this? Why have we, in effect, raised the school-leaving age to 21 for a large chunk of the population? Why, come to that, do we annually import large numbers of qualified nurses and other professionals from poor countries which can���t afford to lose them?

 

Why is almost every unskilled or semi-skilled job in this country now done by Eastern Europeans, when (at the most recent count) the UK has 922,000 young people aged between 16 and 24 who are not in employment, education or training (NEETs)?

 

As always, there are two possible explanations. One is that our governments know what they are doing and consciously seek to turn this country into a third-world low-wage economy. In which case this stage is simply a transition towards that, designed to soften the blow of youth unemployment and manoeuvre its victims into paying for it by getting into debt. 

 

In that case many of the new ���universities��� will be bulldozed for affordable housing within 20 years, and their degrees will be quaint souvenirs like Russian Tsarist bonds.

 

The other explanation is that the people who run this country are so stupid that they believe their own propaganda. I wish I could work out which of these was worse, and which was true.

 

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Big Dope is on the verge of success

Open legal sale in this country of one of the most dangerous drugs in human history is now probably only a matter of time,

 

Big Dope, the billionaire-backed global campaign for this outcome, has captured the minds of much of the media and of the political elite, many of them unrepentant drug abusers during their 1960s days (and often since).

 

This group is even more cynical than Big Tobacco, which pretended for years that there was no link between cigarettes and lung cancer. At least Big Tobacco had the excuse that they had a business to lose.

 

But Big Dope wish to create a new multi-billion-pound business ��� even though the evidence is piling up that their chosen product is linked with lifelong irreversible mental illness.

 

I find this willingness to profit from human misery breathtaking. And I invite you to remember it each time you see one of these reports, decorated with grandiose names, the latest drivelling that destroying your mind with drugs is a ���human right���.

 

What about the human rights of those, often parents, wives, siblings and children of drug abusers, who must take up the dismal task of looking after the pitiful husks which so many drug abusers become?

 

And, I might add, what about the rights of those who are murdered or injured by the unhinged ultra-violence of cannabis abusers. Yet we will not even investigate this persuasive link.

 

The latest example is the hideous death of E���Dena Hines, the step-granddaughter of Morgan Freeman. Her alleged killer, who is accused of stabbing her 16 times in a screaming frenzy, is (as I expected he would be as soon as I heard of the crime) a heavy user of the supposedly peaceful drug, cannabis.

 

Our descendants will wonder if we were ourselves drugged as well as unhinged when, in future times, they mourn and regret our irreversible folly in legalising this dreadful poison.  Haven���t alcohol and tobacco done enough damage, and made enough profit for cruel and greedy people?

 

********

Looking the Wrong Way

Personally I think we have heard pretty much all we need to know about the Labour Party leadership election, Far more interesting, but (as usual) far less covered is the revelation that David Cameron���s EU ���renegotiation��� really is a blatant fix.

 

The former Cabinet Minister Andrew Lansley has told select audiences that the whole thing is planned, right down to a fake table-thumping row with the French to make the Prime Minister look like John Bull.

 

If this got the prominence it deserved, the referendum result might be in some doubt. But most voters will still be unaware of it by the time they come to vote in September.  News isn���t just what happens. It���s what a fairly small group of people decide is news.

 

******

The Chatterley Delusion

Is there no escape from dramatisations of ���Lady Chatterley���s Lover���, quite possibly D.H. Lawrence���s worst and most embarrassing book? The BBC are trying to whip up interest by claiming that their new version will be less explicit than the one before.

 

When will people grasp that the famous prosecution of this indifferent work was an elaborate panto, designed to destroy what was left of our obscenity laws?

 

Everyone knows the silly quote about letting your wife or servants read it. Nobody knows that there were no prosecution witnesses at all, except a solitary constable confirming that the book had been published. There were 35 defence witnesses. Almost all of them had read the book in uncensored versions, which really wasn���t very difficult even in those days. The publishers had printed 200,000 copies of the book before the trial. Most of those who bought it probably never finished it. The fuss is and always was a fake.

How about trying to discuss the actual issue?

How I try, on these threads, to move away from the futile contest over whether there is or is not a God,  which all intelligent and honest people know will remain undecided everywhere on this side of the tomb.

But I can't do it, even when I call in aid one of the most distinguished atheists who ever lived.

I quoted him thus in my support:

'���Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don���t know *because we don���t want to know*(my emphasis). It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence. Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless������

Yet I do not think one of the atheist responses to this post has actually dealt with this simple. well-expressed point by one of their own, a point I have likewise striven to make myself repeatedly. If one has, I have missed it and would be grateful to have it pointed out to me.

Yes, East Germany was terrible. But Was it a Joke or a Warning?

Normal respectable people have almost no idea of the parallel world in which much of the British Left actually live, or certainly used to live.  It came as something of a surprise to me after I joined the International Socialists in the late 1960s and was slowly drawn into this strange zone.

 

Much of this came back to me at the weekend when I read the (to me) hilarious accounts of Jeremy Corbyn���s dinners of cold baked beans, and his austere, serious-minded holidays, spent chugging about on Warsaw Pact motorbikes. The man���s an obvious Roundhead, left over from the New Model Army, with all the unenviable virtues - and even more unenviable disadvantages - of those ferocious and magnificent old soldiers for righteousness. 

 

I know nothing more about the Corbyns than has been published, and have never been invited round for cold beans or hot ones. But the glimpse of his life summoned from my memory a whole world . Its boundaries were marked by great mounds of unsold left-wing papers under the bed, posters for forgotten demonstrations flopping off the walls, reefs and mountain-ranges of undistributed leaflets, surmounted with unfinished, rather horrible meals; more often than not,  a neglected lawn and a feeling of perpetual hurry, to a meeting, to a demonstration, to one of the hundreds of gatherings and episodes which the Left-wing faith demands of its scrawny, ill-dressed devotees. You might meet people who had lived in East Berlin or still had friends there,  or who had couriered gold and messages for the Comintern.  Sometimes in the midst of this there might also be quite a bit of unconventional sex going on  (by the standards of the 1960s, though rather restrained now) . In some cases there might also be quite a bit of drink taken, though abstention wouldn���t be frowned on, and in the more exotic, studenty outfits, drugs as well.

 

I realise that most normal people would be genuinely amazed by this way of life, this milieu in which people don't believe what everyone believes or behave as everyone behaves. 

 

I cannot tell from how deep into this world Mr Corbyn comes. Some sort of clue has been given by various profiles, which have mentioned Mr Corbyn's even more nonconformist brother, the weather forecaster and defiantly anti-warmist Piers, who is sensibly unconvinced by the view that climate change is man-made, an unusual position on the Left. ( I had always assumed they were related, but had never known whom to ask. They definitely are).

 

Simon Hattenstone, in the Guardian, was one of several reporters who showed that he wasn���t very versed in the language of the Left  when he recounted that ���Corbyn grew up in a politicised family in Shropshire. "Mum and Dad met campaigning on the Spanish civil war. Both were active peace campaigners."'

 

Um. This is mildly puzzling on the face of it. Though the Corbyn parents are (and what a shame this is) no longer with us and cannot be asked, I don���t think anybody much campaigned for ���peace��� in the Spanish Civil War. In fact a lot of previously left-wing pacifists (George Orwell among them) abandoned their pacifism about that time. The English left, to a man and woman, were for the Republic and against Franco, and wanted the Republic to win. This couldn't be done through peace.  Many went there and proved it with their lives. Others returned wounded and in some cases crippled for life. Such people could still be found in Left-wing London in the 1960s and 1970s, still vigorous and clear-minded.  

 

What about ���peace campaigning���? Well, sometimes the term is misleading. In the post-1945 world, it generally meant campaigning against *Western* nuclear weapons, not Eastern ones.

 

This was not least because those who campaigned against Soviet nuclear weapons, in the only places where it mattered, did not usually stay at liberty for very long. Their ideas were greeted with scorn as well as hostility, especially by those Communist governments who were delighted by 'peace' campaigns in NATO countries.  Indeed, some of the  best pro-deterrence propaganda I have ever seen was posted up in East Berlin department stores in the winter of, I think, 1983 ��� a cartoon hedgehog wisely refusing a Fox���s smiling suggestion that he abandon his prickles, until the Fox has agreed to have his teeth removed.  The same message,  less elegantly expressed, was to be found as late as 1991 on banners on the main street of the secret city of Kurchatovsk in Kazakhstan, built by Beria as the headquarters of the USSR���s H-Bomb project.

 

This ���peace campaigning��� in Britain took place mainly in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, founded in 1957.  I note that what I used to know as ���the CND symbol��� (brilliantly invented by the English artist Gerald Holtom from the combined semaphore signs for ���N��� and ���D��� ) is now known as the ���peace symbol���. This is a rather broader claim, which might be made for a number of other organisations and movements. If CND had succeeded in its aims,  I am not by any means sure that peace would have been the outcome.  

 

Anyway, in this world, life looked very different from most people���s. Irish nationalism was a sort of ally, with varying degrees of reservations. Israel was wrong and the 'Palestinians' were right. Any strike was good. The armed forces were suspect rather than a source of pride. There was, even among Trotskyists supposedly disenchanted with the USSR, an openness to the Socialist world, especially Fidel Castro���s Cuba. Eastern Europe, ruled by men in suits all too like our own governments and plainly unromantic,  tended to be only for the Communists.

 

Which brings me to a rather good first novel which I have just finished, Jo McMillan���s ���Motherland��� http://www.amazon.com/Motherland-A-Novel-Jo-McMillan/dp/1473611997, the background to which is explained here http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/aug/01/lenin-mum-and-me-my-communist-childhood

 

From her girlhood, she lived in this odd backwards-facing world in which every loyalty was a disloyalty, and the other way round.  

 

The book (sometimes very funny, sometimes desperately embarrassing and sad, always absorbing and moving)  is full of her ineradicable love for her batty, determined Stalinist mother. That mother is a descendant of other Communists,  who counted it a betrayal to abandon her earthly faith just because everyone else was leaving and because the USSR kept invading other people���s countries with tanks. I do have a sort of admiration for this indomitable wrongness, never forgetting my own seduction, a conscious rejection and betrayal of everything I had ever been brought up to believe, and so in some ways worse than a false belief I had been born into and nurtured with.

 

East Germany, of all places, became the refuge of this intense and loopy two-person family, who spent most of the year failing to sell the Communist ���Morning Star��� to the hostile and baffled people of Tamworth. In Potsdam and East Berlin they were suddenly normal and welcome for a few sunny weeks. Then they had to slog back to Staffordshire and be jeered at and suspected, outcasts for the rest of the year.

 

Of course, it was not an exact reflection, one world the mirror-image of the other. There was one vital difference.  During my many wanderings round the Communist world from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, I would occasionally fall into a feeling of normality. Look, there was food, there was beer, there were normal-looking people going about normal-looking tasks. And then there would be an idol of Lenin, that merciless murderer, or the urgent need to hush one���s voice while speaking, or a banner proclaiming a naked lie, or a parade of tanks with their barrels pointing West, restrained ultimately by the nuclear weapons that CND and the ���peace��� movement wanted to abolish.

Or one might glimpse , as one walked round East Berlin, granite-faced detachments of the Feliks Dzerzhinski (I won���t attempt the German spelling) Regiment, named after the bloodthirsty founder of the KGB. They had a marching chant whose chorus went ���Feliks! Dzerzhinski!...You have taught us how to hate!!!���  The final word in German was ���Hass!!!��� which was enunciated with a prolonged and menacing hiss. These were the palace guard of the ���Socialist Unity Party���, loyal Marxist-Leninists ready to defend Communism to the end if required . They never were  required, though I suspect that if the East German leadership had decided to try the Tiananmen Square route out of trouble in 1989, it would have been the Feliks Dzerzhinski boys who would have machine-gunned the crowds in Leipzig. But those leaders ��� who lived in Western comfort in a compound at Wandlitz, north of Berlin, which was fenced off from their own country much as their own country was fenced off from the West ��� correctly decided it was wiser just to give in.  

 

Jo McMillan, not unreasonably,  did not observe this sort of thing, or the Stasi secret police ( at least as a named organisation, for those who lived under its gaze were wiser not to name it) ,  in her childhood and teenage visits. But lurking in her story are brief flashes of the true,  horrible and sinister characteristics of the ���German Democratic Republic���,  like some deadly alligator glimpsed for the occasional moment among waterweeds, then invisible again, then a little closer.  You will find these for yourself if and when you read it, and I urge you to.  I think it is enough to say that her teenage East German friend, an elusive but very credible character in the book,  who jeers at the appalling dress sense of Western communists, whose clothes, she says, look as if they have already been worn by at least two other people of entirely different shapes,  has a better idea of what is going on this poisoned paradise than the narrator does, let alone her deluded but devoted mother.  

 

Even so, it would be wise not to forget that such a place existed, that real and well-intentioned human beings admired it, that (as I keep pointing out) many of its policies and characteristics (especially concerning secondary education and the family) have since been introduced here. A country, such as ours, which has a Ministry of Justice and a Ministry of Culture, which is increasingly being deserted by its educated professionals, which makes divorce easier than breaking a car-leasing agreement and which is dedicated to separating children from their mothers at the earliest possible opportunity, such a country should be careful about laughing at people who admired such things 40 years ago, but at least knew they were eccentric.  

Why Some People Want God Not to Exist - Aldous Huxley Speaks

On most Sunday mornings I swim up to consciousness while listening to BBC Radio 4. The thing that forces me into full wakefulness is an almost comically correct programme called, with great wit and originality,  ���The Sunday Programme��� . This hour is supposed to be about religion. But whenever I concentrate it always seems to be mainly about sex ��� sexual abuse by priests and leaders of religions of almost all denominations, or the travails of overt homosexuals who insist on adhering to, or seeking to be ministers in, churches which disapprove of overt homosexuality. Yesterday was no exception to this rule, so reliable that is actually comical.

 

But for a few brief moments it actually did discuss religion. An atheist (I forget his name) was pitted against the author of a new book on the 'New Atheism��� from which we suffer so much here on this blog, whether I write about it or not.

 

This was Andy Bannister, of whom I had not heard before. Nor have I read his book ���The Atheist Who Didn���t Exist��� .

 

I was astonished (because these discussions are usually hopelessly narrow)  to hear him referring to Thomas Nagel, the courteous and thoughtful philosopher who gives Atheism a good name and who openly discusses the fact that he and his fellow believers in Nogod *want* God not to exist. This is a point I tirelessly seek to make about the whole argument. It is indeed the only interesting part of it, which Mr Bunker and others decline to discuss.

 

Anyway, he mentioned that Aldous Huxley had also written on this point.  I have always admired Huxley���s bleak clarity and honesty, and made a brief Internet search to see what he might have been referring to.

 

I found a book called ���Ends and Means��� , subtitled ���An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods employed for their Realization���, published in London in 1937 by Chatto and Windus. There���s a 1941 edition online here

 

http://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/religion.occult.new_age/occult.conspiracy.and.related/Huxley,%20Aldous%20-%20Ends%20And%20Means.pdf

 

The  interesting bit , for this part of the argument, begins at the bottom of page 269, where Huxley is discussing the reality of the ���meaning��� which we like to give to the world and our actions within it.

 

���This is a question���, says Huxley, ���which, a few years ago, I should not even have posed. For, like so many of my contemporaries, I took it for granted that there was no meaning������

 

������I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption...

 

���Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don���t know *because we don���t want to know*(my emphasis). It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence. Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless������

 

 

There then follows an interesting reflection the Marquis de Sade (one of whose disciples was Ian Brady, the Moors Murderer), perhaps the ultimate example of the man who wanted to live free of restraint (and ended up being restrained by authority as a result) .

 

���De Sade���s philosophy��� Huxley writes ���was the philosophy of meaninglessness carried to its logical conclusion. Values were illusory and ideals merely the inventions of cunning priests and kings. Sensations and animal pleasures alone possessed reality and were alone worth living for. There was no reason why anyone should have the slightest consideration for anyone else.���

 

Of course almost all of us recoil from such a view of the world, and , even if we wished God and hell out of existence, can construct systems of mutual solidarity, or at least apparent mutual solidarity,  which keep us and our fellow-creatures from raging down De Sade���s path, or Brady���s.

 

Yet like all pure, unashamed and unrestrained versions of any idea,  he is valuable in assessing its essence, just as one must know about Robespierre and Lenin when dealing with any Utopian, however mild and restrained. What if the restraints come off?  As Huxley says ��� Sade is not afraid to be a revolutionary to the bitter end. Not content with denying the particular system of values embodied in the ���ancien regime���,  he proceeds to deny the existence of any values, any idealism, any binding moral imperatives whatever��� De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.���

 

A little further on comes this ���No philosophy is completely disinterested. The pure love of truth is always mingled to some extent with the need, consciously or unconsciously felt by even the noblest and the most intelligent philosophers, to justify a given form of personal or social behaviour, to rationalize the traditional prejudices of a given class or community.���

 

And then ���The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves.���

 

And (remember this is 1937) ���The voluntary, as opposed to the intellectual, reasons for holding the doctrines of materialism, for example, may be predominantly erotic���.  As is usual in Huxley this is followed by an example, drawn from his immensely wide reading, typical of a pre-1914 educated person (such as Huxley was ��� his poor eyesight saved him from a muddy grave in Flanders) but rather shaming for those who pose as intellectuals in today���s world.

 

Huxley (after a justified swipe at Christianity���s frequent willingness to endorse things it shouldn���t)  continues ���For myself, as no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a  certain political and economic system and liberation from a  certain system of morality. *We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom* (my emphasis); we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust.'

 

Then ���The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever���.

 

The next section, dealing with man���s later attempt to rediscover meaning in class or nation, should send a shudder down any spine. For once again, it is 1937.  I think I had better read the whole thing when I get the chance, but this passage shone with such startling and honest brilliance (compared with most of the dreary repetitious stuff which passes for debate on the subject) that I thought it worth reproducing here. Thank you, Radio 4.

Why Do People Get So Worked Up About the Death Penalty?

A glancing reference to the death penalty received more responses than almost anything else I wrote in my MoS column on Sunday. Here and on Twitter people were astonishingly anxious to disagree with me, to trundle out ancient arguments on the subject that have many times been exploded here for anyone who was really interested. Most especially I have disposed of the deeply tedious evasion about unintentionally killing an innocent person, which (as any thoughtful person knows) is not in reality considered an obstacle to any other policy whose general effects are considered good.

 

Why is it that one���s opinion on the execution of a few heinous murderers has become (more or less) the supreme test in our society for who is and who is not a civilised person? There is not the faintest possibility of the death penalty being reintroduced in this country unless and until it becomes a left-wing despotism (it is in such polities that execution is most widely used as a penalty in the modern world ��� Cuba until recently, the Chinese People���s Republic and Vietnam for example, and of course the USSR ).

 

It is simply not a live issue in our politics and is most unlikely to become one. As I freely admit the conditions under which I would find it acceptable no longer exist in this country, especially proper independent juries whose verdicts must be unanimous.  

I only state my support for it because I refuse to pretend that I accept the feeble, unreasoning, ill-informed and emotive arguments deployed against it, and because (as a former abolitionist) I changed my mind through the study of facts and the exercise of logic. It would be an act of self-betrayal and cowardice to keep my position secret just because it was generally despised. The only parallel is abortion, but the fury on that subject has subsided since the most fanatical  pro-abortionists (young men terrified they might actually have to take responsibility for getting a girl pregnant)  realised that the chances of this happening are now virtually nil. The ritual choruses of women claiming that killing unborn babies is a human right don���t ever have quite the same urgency as the adolescent male���s fear of the nappy, the mother-in-law and the shotgun wedding, now vanished.

 

Asked a little while ago why I described myself as ���The Hated Peter Hitchens��� on Twitter I explained that this was because it is in fact the case that quite a lot of left-wing persons (who often have the sketchiest idea of who I am or what I think) do regard me as a hate-figure. Asked to explain why this might be, I concluded that it was because I do not act or speak as if I were ashamed of being a moral or social conservative.

 

I am not apologetic about holding these views, nor am I embarrassed. I regard myself as having a coherent, defensible moral position. I am also quite familiar with the techniques of mockery and raillery used by the left against their opponents, and am happy to use them (rather more fairly and in a more measured fashion) against the Left. Why shouldn���t I?   If I did nothing else but act, speak and think as if I believed what I do believe, and wasn���t ashamed of it, my very existence would still be ���offensive��� to my critics. I suspect some of them (who say this on Twitter from time to time) genuinely wish I was dead. 

 

For the modern Left is not just about holding left-wing opinions and propagating them in the hope of achieving a socialist society. It is a sort of secular state of grace, in which the person who adopts the full set of ���correct��� opinions regards himself or herself as morally good, simply by the act of embracing those opinions. It is, I think, a caricature of the Evangelical Protestant belief in Salvation Through Grace Alone, about which I have always had some doubts (well expressed in the General Epistle of St James, especially the Second Chapter, which I once heard read at a memorial service, and which struck me, that day,  so hard in the heart that I could barely think about anything else for some time afterwards). In fact, it is the Left-Wing attitude of ���Salvation by Correctness Alone��� which has made me wonder all the more about it. But I digress.

 

There���s another religious parallel to this, which is the status known as ���Dhimmitude��� under which Christians and Jews were in the past permitted to live in Islamic countries.  Though much relieved by the Ottomans, under pressure from Western Christian empires, the rules of the ���Pact of Umar��� persisted in the Muslim world for many centuries  

I won���t go into the full details of its past enforcement, of dress codes, doorway height, permitted mounts, inferior legal status, the carrying of weapons or the exaction of special and punitive taxes, sometimes accompanied by a ritual public slap in the face. Apart from anything else it varied a great deal from place to place, and many of its victims have left scanty records.

 

Perhaps the most striking restrictions enjoined by this form of tolerance were bans on the repair of existing churches or the building of new ones, or on making noise during funerals. I believe that bells were also removed from churches, and church towers pulled down,  to avoid any kind of challenge, either to the call to prayer from the muezzin or to the height and magnificence of the mosque.

 

Under these conditions, forbidden to convert or to appeal for help from co-religionists abroad,  the Christians of the region were permitted to remain in humble existence, quietly and apologetically practising their rites and ceremonies in crumbling buildings. This was, as anyone with an imagination can work out, a very effective way of seeing to it that the non-Muslim monotheisms shrank and shrivelled under Islamic rule. No wonder few people now realise that Christianity predated Islam in the Middle East , and was once dominant there.

 

The parallel is of course not at all complete or exact, and I would rather by far be a moral and social conservative in modern Britain than be a Christian living in the mediaeval Levant or Maghreb under the Pact of Umar.

 

But there���s still an interesting similarity. Both systems claim to be tolerant, and (to the extent that they do not actually employ violent persecution) they are tolerant.   But both in practice require an acceptance by the dethroned belief system that it acts at all times as a defeated and humbled thing, not worthy of respect.

 

Thus it becomes harder and harder simply to express certain opinions, once universal, such as favouring lifelong marriage over divorce, serial marriage or cohabitation, or (come to that) Christianity over any other religion, or academic selection, or the freedom of parents to exercise authority over children, or national independence, or secure borders, or the blazingly obvious wrongness of abortion on demand.  

 

But the death penalty is by far the greatest of these. And I think the reason for this is simple. It is the keystone of the arch of an former legal and moral system, which regarded people as wholly responsible for their own actions.

 

The stated purpose of the pre-1914 Prisons Commission, for instance, was ���the due punishment of responsible persons��� . Nobody would dare say that now. Prisons hesitate to punish at all, and the punishment is said to consist solely in the deprivation of liberty, which is why the prisons, being chaotic much of the time, are in many cases far more terrifying than they were when they believed in punishment.  Responsibility has been abolished. And a lot of people are very glad, and hope it will stay that way. Even the faintest hint that it might return disturbs and unsettles them.  

Did Jesus really say 'blessed are the queue-jumping knifemen?'

 

THIS IS PETER HITCHENS'S MAIL ON SUNDAY COLUMN

I���m always a bit suspicious of the sort of person who argues by saying ���What would Jesus have said?��� They usually mean that they are quite sure Jesus would have agreed with them.
My favourite example of this was always the Blair creature, reproved by Cardinal Basil Hume for taking Catholic communion when he wasn���t a Catholic. The then Labour leader peevishly responded: ���I wonder what Jesus would have made of it.���
My guess is that Jesus would have told Mr Blair (who converted to Rome once he���d left Downing Street) to decide whether his faith or his political career came first. But it���s only a guess, based on Our Lord���s known retorts to one or two other uppity lawyers. And, of course, it���s what I think.
Now we���re being asked, by the Dean of Durham, what Jesus would do about the migrant camp at Calais. This is because of the BBC���s plan to broadcast in today���s Songs Of Praise sections filmed at a makeshift church in that camp.
This is not by any means the only such lecture from that direction I���ve heard recently.
I���m not bothered much by the broadcast. BBC bias is a fact of life and that���s that. And I can���t say that screening film from such a place on Songs Of Praise is a bad idea in itself. Christians ought to be thinking about such things.
But thinking is what these prelates and preachers are not doing. Is it as simple as they claim? I am far from sure. The founder of the Christian church was not actually a guerrilla fighter or a Russell Brand-type demagogue. He had nothing against people obeying laws or fulfilling their obligations. I���d say, rather the opposite.
He was himself a genuine refugee, hiding in Egypt from the real, murderous wrath of Herod. But when the danger was past, his family didn���t settle in Egypt but returned home.
Nowhere in the Beatitudes did Jesus say ���Blessed are the queue-jumpers���, trying to gain an advantage at the expense of others. This is what the people at Calais are.
They are not prepared to apply for asylum or seek visas and work permits in the normal way. Their actions make people in this country less willing to grant any asylum, or to welcome any migration.
They force their way into lorries and trains, or break down a lawfully constructed fence, sometimes clutching drawn knives as they do so. Many destroy their passports so that the truth about their origins and claims can never be proved. Why precisely is it Christian to endorse this behaviour?
As the Left-wing media have rightly been pointing out, only quite a small share of the migrants arriving in Europe from Africa and elsewhere actually end up at Calais. They are already out of danger (if they were ever in it) and have chosen to be there.
As for the parable of the Good Samaritan, the hero of the story didn���t tell other people to be compassionate and generous. He did it himself. I am full of admiration for any individual who offers to take such migrants into his own home indefinitely, and to bear the charges (as the Good Samaritan did) of their housing, food and medical treatment.
But I have none at all for the pulpit Samaritan who tells others in our overcrowded country that they must suffer for the sake of his own peace of mind.

Amnesty's now a lost cause 

After what must be at least 30 years, I���m finally going to stop being a member of Amnesty. I joined because I thought it was a good deed in a wicked world, working to free prisoners of conscience from the dungeons of Right-wing and Left-wing despots.
Prompted by Amnesty, I wrote polite letters to such despots, urging the release of people I often disagreed with, because I thought then and think now that nobody should be imprisoned for expressing an opinion.
I must admit it has been a while since I did that (or was asked to do so), but the end of the Cold War did not end the need for such a campaign. China, Asia and the Muslim world still have plenty of political prisoners. But Amnesty seems to have developed other ideas.
A few years ago, it began to campaign on behalf of convicts on death row in the USA.
It���s a perfectly reasonable cause ��� though I don���t happen to agree with it, being a convinced supporter of the death penalty in free countries. But it has absolutely nothing to do with prisoners of conscience. The USA, for all its faults, does not execute people for holding opinions.
What���s more, it���s politically partisan. Left-wing people tend to oppose capital punishment, Conservative people such as me tend to support it. The whole point of Amnesty was that it was a place where we could forget our divisions in the cause of liberty.
I protested, uselessly, and carried on paying my dues. But now Amnesty has decided to support decriminalisation (they mean legalisation) of prostitution. Once again, it���s a political, partisan position. Even if I agreed with it (which I don���t) I really cannot see what it has to do with prisoners of conscience. I suspect it will make it harder for Amnesty to campaign for such people, its real concern.
Like so many other once-noble charities, Amnesty has lost its way. I���m sure it���s not remotely interested in what I think of its behaviour and I���m sure it won���t make any difference. But that���s enough. I���m very sorry, but I���m off.

*******

An exasperated Sherlock Holmes would often scold Dr Watson with the words: ���You see, but you do not observe.���
His point was that the clues were all there in front of us, if only we had the sense to see what mattered and what was connected.
Take the horrible stabbing of the teacher Vincent Uzomah by a teenage pupil. Much fuss has been made about the boy���s use of a racial insult.
But far more important is the fact that the knife-wielding child is, at the age of 14, a cannabis user (when arrested for the knife crime, he was also charged with cannabis possession). I more or less knew that he would be as soon as I heard of the crime.
The correlation is incredibly strong. Why is it not investigated?

*******

Given our recent record of pouring  petrol on to the flames of war in Iraq,  Syria, Libya and Afghanistan, may I suggest  we are very careful about training Ukrainian soldiers? There are some pretty sinister  people in Ukraine���s chaotic army. We may  not want to be associated with some of the things they are going to do.

******

Do all the attackers of Jeremy Corbyn  not see that his supporters thrive on their assaults? This is a great revolt by those who  are sick of being told what to do by people like Alastair Campbell.

An Interesting Question on Generosity

Mr John Aspinall contributed a fascinating comment to a fairly dormant thread, and I responded to it (see below) .

 

I thought the short exchange was too interesting to be left on its own there. So here it is: 

 

John Aspinall: 'Why do some contributors here whine and complain about their opponent���s lack of ���generosity��� to their position / opinions etc.? I don���t understand this.

What does ���generous��� even mean in this context? Be nice to me? Don���t make me cry?

Someone explain.
I couldn���t care less how ���generous��� or not a person is with me in a discussion or a debate. It���s the ideas which matter, not the ���feelings��� of the persons discussing the ideas.'

***PH explains. It means starting any argument with the assumption that your opponent is honest, has intentions as good as your own and might possibly be right. I would add that (in my opinion) if and when an opponent shows beyond reasonable doubt that these things are not true, it is permissible to have a bit of fun at his or her expense. But not before.. ****

In Response to Mr 'L'Eplattenier'

���Henry L���Eplattenier���  (HL) has provoked a lot of reaction. I just thought I would respond to some his points, briefly, myself, for the sake of clarification. My responses are marked ***

 

 

HL writes:���There is a lot to object to in what is being said and written here. The metaphor that the African migrants trying to cross the channel into the UK from Calais are jumping the queue is in my view inaccurate. What queue are they jumping?���

 

****PH writes: they are jumping two main queues, depending on their real position.

1. If they are refugees from persecution, they are free to present themselves, lawfully, with their passports, at any point of entry in the UK . If their fears are well-founded, they can then justly obtain asylum. It should be stated here that asylum is usually granted in the first free and safe country which the persecuted person reaches. Should their claims be false, or should it be the case that they have crossed several other countries which would have given them asylum and they are in fact migrants with a specific desire to enter this country( see below) then they are not merely jumping the queue, but poisoning the wells of public support for a valuable and important custom.

2. If they are economic migrants, they are free to apply for visas and work permits for this country at any British consulate. Their cases will there be judged on their merits.

 

 

HL  ���Rather it seems to me that they are desperate and risking their lives to join the metaphorical queue, not jump it.���

 

***PH replies: The word ���desperate��� is nearly as inflated as the German Mark in the 1920s. Nobody doubts that they strongly desire to enter this country. Nobody blames them for wishing to do so.  . But they have many other options open to them. Their presence at Calais is voluntary ( as Mr ���L���Eplattenier��� rightly points out below) .  They are not , so far as we know, fleeing genocidal mass murder or famine. If they were, then our response would, rightly, be different.

 

 

HL ���The idea that ���they all want to come to the UK��� is a myth that seems to persist despite numerous articles in the press showing that this is blatantly not true.���

 

***PH responds : I tend to agree with Mr ���L���. This is why I have made no such claim. Why then is Mr ���L��� introducing into the argument a claim that I have not made?

 

 

���HL���  France, German and the Scandinavian countries have all accepted more refugees from Africa and the Middle East per capita than the UK, not to mention countries around the Mediterranean such as Italy, Greece, Turkey or Lebanon.

 

****PH replies. This rather destroys the claim by Mr ���L��� that they are ���desperate���. Given the many possible alternatives, it is clear that their decision to attempt to enter Britain illegally via the Channel Tunnel is a rational, considered choice, made despite the existence of other perfectly civilised alternatives.

 

 

HL The use of the expression ���mass immigration���: a little more than 30,000 refugees applying for asylum in the UK in 2014 cannot reasonably be qualified as ���mass immigration���. Obviously a much larger number of people migrate to Britain from EU countries, but that is a completely separate issue and in no way related to the migrants in Calais. It is doubtlessly true that the reduced border controls between countries within the Schengen area of the EU make it easier for immigrants to travel within the EU. Nonetheless, reinstating tougher controls between EU countries (assuming this was possible and in any way desirable) would not change the fundamental issue here, which is large numbers of African migrants desperately trying to reach the safety of the EU.

 

***PH replies. I have dealt with the absurd abuse of the word ���desperate��� above. I indexed the article under ���mass immigration��� because this event is plainly part of two waves of mass immigration -  one into Britain( largely but not wholly from the EU) and the other from Africa and from the Middle East into Europe in general .Actually 30,000 is quite a large number, the population of a medium-sized town,  and I think it wise and reasonable not to describe these people as ���refugees��� until their cases have been examined and they have been found to be so. It seems to me that refugees from persecution should not be so anxious to conceal, by disposing of their passports, their actual countries of origin.

 

 

 

HL : ���The idea that ���lefty liberals��� owe their views on immigration to the fact that they live in the leafy suburbs and are therefore not personally affected by immigration is a ridiculous generalisation, which is not based on any facts. At the last general election the vast majority of constituencies in central London (where the proportion of immigrants is notoriously high) elected Labour or Lib-Dem MPs.

 

***PH replies: I hope I have never used the clich��d phrases ���lefty liberals��� or leafy suburbs���.  I am not sure what this fact establishes. MPs are not elected by unanimous votes, and those who did not vote for them cannot be assumed to be their supporters. Migrants themselves, once they have passed through the lax processes of citizenship, are inclined to vote (quite reasonably) for those parties which they believe support the immigration of their relatives. Those who dislike the effects of mass immigration on neighbourhoods tend to move out of them if they can.

 

HL��� There is no evidence that a high percentage of immigrants in a particular area is correlated with right-wing voting and vice-versa.���

 

***PH replies: Nor did I say that it was (see above). He is once again attacking the expression of views that have not been  expressed, because he wishes that I, like so many ���right-wing��� writers��� conformed with his stereotype. I don���t, and he ought not to cope with this difficulty by pretending that I do. He should cope with it by addressing what I actually do say, hard as that may be for him, since he appears to rely on a series of wearisome left-wing clich��s rather than any personally-developed position. I would add, anecdotally,  that UKIP votes seem to me to be highest in areas close to zones of high immigration where people fear that their district will be next.

 

���HL��� ��� Those who claim ���I did not agree with Blair���s war in Iraq therefore I should not be made to ���suffer��� due to immigration��� are desolidarising themselves from the rest of society. Of course one can disagree with the decisions made by Blair and his government, but they were democratically elected.

 

***PH replies. I am not sure what this is supposed to mean. Democracy, flawed as it is, is not a tyranny of the majority or Leninist ���democratic centralism��� under which the winner takes all and the defeated minority have no voice.

 

HL: ���It is like saying ���I refuse to pay taxes because I disagree with the government���s stance on education and I want my kids to be privately educated���.���

 

***PH writes: No, it is not. Most of us strongly approve of some taxation, are doubtful or indifferent about much of it and actively opposed to others. But as long as it stays within a general consensus, broadly stated in a party manifesto, we accept our legal obligation to pay it for the general good of the country. Indeed, had Mr Blair or Mr cameron stated in their manifestoes that they planned to spend much of their time in office starting foreign wars,  we would all look a bit silly protesting or complaining about it later. But they didn���t. Rather the reverse, in fact, in the case of Mr Blair. Going to war, killing people and bombing cities, especially in defiance of mass public protest, is not the same as providing terrible schools. We are quite entitled to say we did not ask for this and cannot be made responsible for its consequences. 

 

 

HL:  On a side note, I would like to know what ���suffering��� is caused by living side by side with immigrants  

 

**** PH writes: I suppose we must just ask Mr ���L��� (whose aggressive complacency suggests that he lives a sheltered life and doesn���t know it) to imagine himself old and alone, or infirm, in a small house or flat in which he has lived for years, in a neighbourhood familiar to him,  finding over time that this neighbourhood is transformed and is now inhabited by people with whom he has no common language, customs or tastes; or to imagine being the parent of children who must attend a school, in which the overcrowded classes are full of children whose first language is not English; or finding, in general, that the public services on which he must rely are overcrowded, and overloaded to the point where they are quite difficult to use.

 

HL ���and whether those who say they would suffer have reflected on how the suffering endured by the African migrant in Calais compares to their own.

 

***PH writes: I fail to see what the comparison has to do with it. They are quite different. But both are forms of suffering, and we have the power to prevent only one of them. Is Mr  ���L��� suggesting that the suffering of one group is alleviated by making the other group suffer in a different way? How? The claim is absurd. Surely it just increases the total of suffering in the world. If no limit at all is placed on migration, then the prosperous parts of the world will become so overcrowded and so culturally ���diverse���, that is to say, wholly lacking in cohesion, that they will resemble the very places the Calais migrants seek to leave. Who would that help, except sequestered billionaires who enjoy the effects of cheap wages for others?

 

HL��� I am seeing a lot of heads in the sand here. It is easier to complain and protest against change and having to make an effort, rather than face the horrible reality of North Africa and the Middle East and come up with some actual constructive proposals and solutions that reflect the compassion that characterises West European culture. More barbed wire and higher walls around fortress Britain have no part in such solutions in my opinion.���

 

***I am happy to listen to any constructive proposals. But the voluntary self-destruction of Western societies, built up over centuries with great effort, because of a spasm of public false compassion, seems to me to be a solution to absolutely nothing. 

Christianity and Immigration - Some Tentative Thoughts.

I have never watched ���Songs of Praise��� on television except when I have caught it by accident, looking or waiting for something else, so I may have got the wrong impression. But it always seemed to me to be likely to give the impression that Christianity was something your auntie did (and you didn���t). Rows and rows of neatly-dressed old ladies in an unusually full church, singing away at traditional hymns, wasn���t ever going to put the fear of the Risen Christ into an indifferent nation.

 

I like to sing a traditional hymn myself, when allowed. (I use the word ���sing��� here in its most generous sense).  Those who choose the hymns in our churches and cathedrals often seem to have made quite an effort to prevent me from doing so. Cathedrals, in my experience, search the books for hymns that are actually impossible to sing.  As for Anglican parish churches, There are about three hymns that come up all the time, one of them being the frightful  ���Lord of the Dance���, which seems to me to have nothing to do with Christianity (where in the Gospels does Christ dance, or refer to himself as ���Lord of the Dance���? Isn���t the ���Lord of the Dance��� Shiva, who can found in another establishment altogether?). It���s also an abuse of a rather fine old Shaker hymn tune from the Appalachians, ��� ���Tis a gift to be simple, ���tis a gift to be free���.   I wouldn���t even pretend to sing this, or an appalling dirge called ���Living Lord���, which always sounds to like a pensioners' coach party in the backroom of a Blackpool pub rounding off a wet day with a sing-song after a slow evening on the brown ale.  I read the Psalms while these are going on.

 

Another regular is ���Lord of all Hopefulness��� written by the non-churchgoing agnostic Joyce Anstruther (���Jan Struther���,  as is obvious once you know this, is a pen name) to prove that she could write a hymn if she felt like it. I am increasingly conscious of this mocking origin, each time I sing it and note its lack of solid Christian ingredients, concealed by bland niceness.

 

Oh, all right then, here are some I actually like ��� ���Immortal, Invisible, God only wise���, ���Judge eternal, throned in splendour��� ��� 'O, Worship the King���. St Patrick's Breastplate,  ���Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation��� Bunyan���s original ���To be a Pilgrim���, ���Father, Hear the Prayer we offer���,  ��� Through all the changing scenes of life���,  ���Eternal Father, Strong to save������I could go on. Anyone who knows the hymn book will get the picture.

 

 

About 30 others circulate in an unending loop and that���s about it. Yet when I was at school we sang and knew a much wider variety. These verses linger endlessly in the memory, as they were designed to do,  and men and women of my generation are surprisingly familiar with them.

 

I realised the other day, as I sang  the particularly exalted and exhilarating  ���Who are These like Stars Appearing?��� that I had not sung it for about 50 years, but even so remembered large chunks of it.

 

But I know that in general hymn-singing is something that people don���t do and couldn't conceive of doing. Children, dragged to church, usually do not sing and would only do so if tasered. Modernised  churches don���t have hymns anyway, but ���songs��� - one of which, I can swear on oath if required, goes to the introductory music of ���The Flintstones���. Yabba Dabba Doo. Amen. These are often accompanied by drums.

 

So I am slightly puzzled about plans (which I first thought fanciful) to record this programme in the small makeshift church that has been built in the migrant camp near the Calais entrance to the Channel Tunnel.

 

What will they sing? Something tells me that Christians from the Horn of Africa or the Middle East will be unfamiliar with the tunes of Ralph Vaughan Williams and the words of the Wesleys (and even of the Flintstones).  Will they bus over some nice old ladies from Haslemere to fill the pews? Will they take with them a pedal-driven harmonium of the sort my prep-school used when a piano wouldn���t quite do?

 

Perhaps I���ll watch and see. I���m fairly certain that Eritrean, Ethiopian and Syrian old ladies won���t be present (The Calais encampment is better-suited to the young, tough and slender, and mainly to the male sex, which may be important to the argument which follows).

 

I���ve been on the receiving end of a number of sermons, some actual, some metaphorical, on this subject lately. Philip Hammond���s perfectly sensible remarks (if only they were in any way connected to his government���s policies)  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/11792798/Millions-of-African-migrants-threaten-standard-of-living-Philip-Hammond-says.html

 

about how Western Europe cannot indefinitely absorb all the people who want to live there, have been subjected to contemptuous snorting. I am not sure why. Much is made of the word ���marauding��� but its specific use to refer to migrants making frequent assaults on the fences around the tunnel entrance, seems quite apposite to me.  

 

In what way is this untrue , unjust or unimportant? The logic of it ��� that there are huge numbers of people who would like to come to western Europe if they could, and that we  have no realistic power to send them back one they get here, is the problem. It means that we are entitled to place limits on those who come, and to send away those we do not accept. On what basis can we do that? On the basis of law and rules, of waiting your turn and of not necessarily being accepted, the things which those at Calais openly intend to avoid.  Where in the Beatitudes does it say' Blessed Are the Queue-Jumpers'?

 

Yet there seems to be a sort of assumption among nice liberals that any border restriction is an act of callousness. One such sermon was delivered by a writer in the Independent on Sunday, Ellen Jones, who quoted scripture thus :

 

���The Bible says: "You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself." So it might seem an obvious editorial choice for the BBC's flagship Christian programme to film at a Calais migrant camp.���

 

People of Ms Jones���s generation cannot even sermonise properly, for they were robbed of the real Bible as children. How much more impressive it would have been had she quoted the passage (Leviticus,  Chapter 19,  verses 33-34) from the Authorised Version,  instead of one of those Rocky Horror Bibles they use along with the Flintstones tune.

 

The proper quotation rumbles and thunders thus:  ���And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt���.

 

More potent yet (in my opinion) is this rather different passage from Ruth, beginning at the sixteenth verse of the first chapter of the eponymous book. ���And Ruth said ���Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest will I die, and there will I be buried���.��� I cannot read or hear this passage without tears.

 

And I might just chuck in here, from the 39th Psalm: ���Hear my prayer, O LORD, and give ear unto my cry; hold not thy peace at my tears: for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.���

 

But of course this means something entirely different and unworldly, and is on the same level as the warning to all settled persons in the material world (St Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews, 13th Chapter, 14th verse): 'For here we have no continuing city, but  we seek one to come'.  

 

What do all these things really mean? Are they, as the liberals maintain, a sort of suicide note for any rich, settled civilisation where lots of people wish to live? Do they license the abolition of frontiers?

Jesus seems to me to have been silent on the subject of immigration, legal or illegal. He, and Joseph and Mary, fled into Egypt to escape from Herod, with good reason, but they were actual refugees and returned to Nazareth when the danger had passed. Jesus���s attitude towards law, property, debt and obligation seems to have been fairly conventional, judging by the parables of daily life which he told. Debts must be paid to the uttermost farthing, work must be done diligently, talents must not go buried,  idleness is punished, as are unreadiness at the time when promised duty must be done,  and the rude rejection of hospitality.  

 

I cannot see why he should necessarily be interpreted as being against reasonable controls on entry to any place which depends for its stability and prosperity on choosing who shall enter and who shall not. What, in the end, is compassionate, about allowing so many into the lifeboat that it sinks and all drown, including those who sought to board it? Indeed, in such a  shipwreck, who is the Christian? He who prevents such a thing from happening, amid the curses and blows of the self-righteous? Or he who , for the sake of others��� approval, allows the disaster? It���s no good saying that the one who gives up his place to another is the Christian. It���s true up to a point. But unless someone is there to limit the numbers, there will be no place to give up.

 

The most forgiving and beautiful of all parables ���The Prodigal Son���, ultimately sympathises with the brother who has not wasted his substance on riotous living. And it leaves the thoughtful reader wondering what restitution the Prodigal would have needed to have made, once the fatted calf was eaten and the welcome was over.

 

The Good Samaritan is a (rather complicated) story about the absolute obligation to rescue those in danger or injured, which transcends tribal loyalties, rank and religious rituals. An actual Samaritan, venturing into a village on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho on any mission, would have been risking his life, so bitter was the sectarian hatred between Samaritans and Jews in that age. Nobody needed a barbed-wire border or passports to enforce the boundary between the two peoples. Anyone who crossed from one society to the other would have had to have done the profound thing that Ruth did, a complete change of loyalty, hope and tradition. ���Thy people shall be my people and Thy God my God��� is no small thing to say, or do.

 

The parable of the Good Samaritan is not an anti-racist tract or a plea for open borders between Judaea and Samaria. The beautiful story of Ruth is actually about a newcomer in a strange land adopting its faith and customs and soil as her own.  The Sermon on the Mount preaches charity, compassion , gentleness and generosity, and warns us that all our actions, of cruelty or kindness, are done to Christ himself and are not forgotten. But it says nothing about how much migration a society can absorb without damaging itself and its people.

 

Nor does it anywhere say ���Thou shalt make others suffer for the sake of thine own peace of mind���.

 

I am myself filled with admiration for individuals who personally take in newcomers from war-ruined or otherwise disastrous countries. These are genuine Good Samaritans of Our Age. I have in my life known such people.  But I confess that I do not really wish to be one of them.  Indeed, if I���m completely frank, I wish not to be one of them, and would be unwilling to open my home to strangers except in the direst emergency. I count myself inadequate for this failing, but I must honestly acknowledge it. And if I won���t do this, I can���t stand up and urge anyone else to do what I won���t do.

 

But this country seems to be full of people who,  while not Good Samaritans themselves, are very keen to conscript *others* into a brigade of compulsory Good Samaritans. The comfortable left-wing middle classes, with their scorn for borders and their jeering dismissal of 'xenophobia��� don���t (usually) live in the poorer, less favoured parts of town where new migrants invariably settle. They do not see their neighbourhoods transformed, nor do they experience the pressures on space, schools, medical facilities, transport and the rest. If they did, then they���d perhaps be less liberal on the subject. I suggest any public figure who urges that we ���take them all in��� be asked if he would himself do so in his own home. 

 

Now, you may well argue that our society would be better if its population was larger and more diverse. It���s a point of view held, I suspect, by quite a lot of political radicals.  You may well believe that a general lowering of wages, people living in smaller homes in more crowded cities,  the permanent dilution of a shared language and culture, the introduction of a major new religion among us, were good prices to pay for taking in huge numbers of people from abroad and possibly even beneficial in themselves. This is a valid opinion.

 

I suspect many in the government privately believe it (valuing as they must the huge downward pressure on labour costs, and the ability to benefit from the superior education systems and work ethics of other nations)  but would never openly say so. Nor would most of them expect it to affect them personally. Their wages won���t fall, they won't be replaced by a Pole or an Eritrean, they won't have to move to smaller homes to make ends meet, their villages or suburbs won���t become more crowded and densely-built. They barely know what a bus is, let alone what it is like to wait ages for such a bus in the drizzle, and then find it is full, the day after the fares go up. They won���t have to wait days for a doctor���s appointment or find their children���s schools transformed by large new intakes of boys and girls who don���t speak English at home.

 

But let us return for a moment to Leviticus etc. leaving aside the precise nature of the authority and weight of its very Old Testament pronouncements in a formally Protestant Christian country, such as we used to be, and against whose standards Christians (such as I claim to be) are judged by Ellen Jones and various sermonisers I have encountered in the last few weeks.  

 

Note that use of the word ���sojourn��� in old and new versions of the Leviticus passage. As a verb and a noun, ���sojourn��� has one invariable, inescapable meaning. That meaning is ���temporary���. The injunction concerns the ancient and invariable laws of hospitality, found in almost all cultures. The stranger, while he stays with you, must be used kindly, honestly and generously.

 

If he decides his stay is to be permanent, the rules may be slightly different. I understate. Settling permanently in someone else���s country, without first submitting yourself wholly to that country���s King and God, is generally associated in the Bible with conflict and even invasion. As my atheist literalist friends (who regard the Bible as a Christian equivalent of the Koran, as I do not) are fond of quoting to me, the Children of Israel are rather given (under Divine instructions) to arriving in other people���s territory and killing off or driving away the inhabitants. Their relations with Moab (���my washpot���) Edom ( a receptacle for cast-off shoes) and of course the hated Philistines are, let us be frank, appalling. From time to time they are rescued from, or allowed to fall victim to, invasions by Assyrians and Babylonians, which do not end in integration, harmony, equality or diversity, but in enslavement, rape,  pillage, exile etc. The prophets generally reckon such events are punishment rather than reward. 

 

This is not out of tune with the rest of human history. It was pointed out to me once that all the most enduring and successful human civilisations had grown up behind the protection of great natural barriers, sea, desert or mountain. I have yet to find an exception.  Others are subject to the occasional huge mass migrations such as those that finished off the Western Roman Empire, or those that repeatedly menaced what is now Russia.

 

In recent times, natural barriers aren���t enough. Without their own navies and armies, those in possession can be evicted , subjugated, exterminated or turned into serfs in what used to be their own land. The era of European imperialism demonstrated this to a lot of people who though they were permanent masters of their own land. The Spanish conquistadors, and those who colonised North America and Australia were not sojourners, as the Native Americans and the Indigenous Australians have found in some detail. There was nothing temporary about them.

 

What we see now is something almost entirely new. Defended countries with enforced borders are even so being reached by very large numbers of determined, hardworking outsiders, prepared to use pretty radical methods to reach their goals ��� dangerous treks across deserts and seas, climbing over defended fences, living and working illegally for many years. The defended countries cannot - without becoming authoritarian states quite unlike their present conditions - ruthlessly expel these newcomers as their ancestors would have done.  Nor can use their armed forces or advanced weapons against these people, for they are not armed or violent nor do they present themselves as formed bodies or as hostile states. On the contrary, they are often personally admirable, pitiable and ��� as individuals - they often add to the temporary prosperity of the countries in which they arrive. 

 

Yet it is reasonable to suggest that their unlimited arrival presents  a danger to the order and long-term prosperity of the countries to which they come. I have always been amused by a certain leftist contradiction on this subject.

 

The modern European Left is pretty invariably pro-Arab and anti-Israeli; it accepts (not unreasonably) the Arab view that Jewish immigration into British Mandate Palestine was unwelcome and damaging to the pre-existing Arab population, its freedoms and stability ��� and so it certainly proved . I say this as a convinced Zionist. Israel���s failure to maintain global acquiescence was partly due to the timing of its creation, much later than Australia or the USA, and partly due to the role that the issue would later play in pan-Arab politics, in which hostility to the Zionists was a useful safety valve in despotic, failed states.

 

Easily able to see the political, cultural and religious problems of immigration in the Holy Land, the Left profess to be quite unable to see any comparable difficulty in Europe. Indeed, had it stayed at a low and manageable level, migration into Europe from Turkey and the Arab and North African regions would not have been all that much to worry about. But all the signs are that the migration begun by our moronic interventions in Iraq, Syria and Libya (it was, in my view, an absolute Christian duty to oppose all of them)  is so much greater than anything that has gone before, that Europe now faces a transformation at least as big as the one which the USA has undergone  (and is still undergoing) through Hispanic migration.

 

In my view, it���s rather bigger. The USA���s migrants come from societies where Spanish, rather than English is spoken, and are in the USA in such numbers that the USA is becoming bilingual, and it is now hard to find English-speakers, even among official persons, in some parts of the USA. Who knows how this battle of the languages will end? Then there���s the wholly different political and religious culture, Roman Catholic and not exactly law-governed , owing nothing to Locke, Jefferson, or to Magna Carta. Which of the two traditions will come out on top? I wouldn���t like to say, having read a bit of history in my time.

 

But these are as nothing to the contrast between the European Christian heritage and the traditions of Islam which our many thousands of energetic, hard-working , determined new citizens are bringing with them, just when Christianity of all kinds is becoming vestigial in the lives and minds of Europeans. Except perhaps as a stick with which to beat politicians who, however feebly, wonder if we are doing the right thing.

If the bearded Lefty wins, it's the Tories who'll be a whisker away from disaster

THIS IS PETER HITCHENS'S MAIL ON SUNDAY COLUMN 

Smug Tories who rejoice at Jeremy Corbyn���s seeming march towards the Labour Party leadership should be careful what they wish for.

There are two ways in which this could go wrong for them. One is the constant risk that George Osborne���s supposed recovery finally runs out of luck, and is revealed as the conjuring trick that it is.

In that case, a bearded radical Left party might do surprisingly well, as they have found in Greece and are finding in Spain. A serious dose of unemployment and a spate of bank failures can make the unelectable electable quite quickly.

The other is the risk that Mr Osborne���s alleged recovery doesn���t run out of luck, and the Tories face and trounce a Corbynised Labour Party at the next Election.

That would probably do for Labour as an organisation once and for all. Destroyed in Scotland and flattened in England, it would no longer be able to raise serious money or act as a proper opposition.

And if Labour collapses and splits, as it then well might do, the Tories will quickly be in deep trouble. They will lack an enemy. And as Nato found out after the break-up of the Soviet Union, that is a cruel fate.

NATO has been frantically searching for a new foe ever since, to justify its existence and to hold the alliance together. Luckily, there is always a sinister bogeyman somewhere on the planet, usually with a beard or moustache, who can be portrayed as a menace.

But it is even worse for the Tories. The party���s leaders hate the members and despise their voters. The members and the voters mistrust the leaders. The party���s MPs are a brawling coalition ranging from the Gay Liberation Front and fanatical feminism to the outer edges of Ukip. The only thing that keeps this unprincipled, nonsensical mechanism from flying apart is universal hatred and fear of Labour.

The only slogan that really worked for them in 2010 was ���We have to get Gordon Brown out!��� The only slogan that really worked in 2015 was ���Stop Red Ed!��� Something similar will certainly work well against Mr Corbyn in 2020, unless we are all queuing for food banks by then (don���t rule it out).

Imagine the dawn breaking, in May 2020, on a Britain in which there were no Gordon Browns and no Red Eds left, and Labour just a bankrupt rump.

I���d give it six months before the cracks in the Tory Party began to spread and deepen. By 2025, there might well be no Tory Party either. I wouldn���t be at all sorry about that.

Today���s Tory Party is indistinguishable from Blairite New Labour, and is probably more Marxist in practice than Jeremy Corbyn is in theory.

But those Tories who think Mr Corbyn���s rise is just a little joke might be very sorry indeed.

What was it about Camila Batmanghelidjh? She is the most unpronounceable famous person since Eduard Shevardnadze. She dresses to resemble one of those lurid tinned fruit salads that helped to make the 1950s so distinctive.
Her ultra-sweet smile becomes a fierce scowl at the first sign of challenge. A phalanx of Left-wing media people has now formed protectively round her, suggesting that wicked journalists and politicians undermined a saintly figure.
But I have never seen any actual hard, testable evidence that her Kids Company charity was effective in solving the undoubted problems it claimed to address.
One report, published by one of our most respected academic institutions, is prefaced by a torrent of gush: ���I met Camila Batmanghelidjh in 2007 and was immediately struck by the beauty and profound truth of her simple message: children recover with unconditional and unrelenting love. Holding and listening, containing and never giving them up are practical solutions for all children.���
No doubt. But what did they actually do? Precisely how many children did they help? How precisely did they help them? What exactly has since happened to them? What was all that money ��� much of it yours and mine, including State grants and a chunky tax rebate ��� spent on?
Were envelopes full of cash handed out to teenagers? Is it true that, as one ���client��� told BBC Radio 4���s The Report: ���It was weed heaven on Friday, it was weed everywhere. You could smell it from down the road, like from London Bridge��� they would come into the building high.���
And what about the former worker who recalled angry ���clients��� ���going ballistic��� demanding more cash, saying they only came for the money. He remembered one waving a baseball bat and saying he wouldn���t go home until he got his money.
According to Ms Batmanghelidjh, if they made a ���poor choice��� with the money they were given, that was ���part of the learning curve���. What did they learn from her?
What do you think would happen to someone who set up a charity in the same part of London, offering abandoned children rules, morals, disciplined education, absolute prohibition of drugs, regular bedtimes, that sort of thing? Do you think millions of corporate and State money would arrive, or that Ministers and media figures would rush to its aid? No, nor do I.
Indulgence is the spirit of our age and as long as you don���t defy it, you���ll be fine. And if it hadn���t been for some determined and courageous reporting, Kids Company might still be carrying on unquestioned, with your money, now.

Is there no way of getting supermarkets to stop their cruel  price squeeze on dairy farmers? The end of it will be that we will destroy such farmers. We will then find ourselves relying on inferior imported milk, and wondering why so much of our once lovely countryside is desolate or concreted over.

Here���s a clue as to why Britain and France have been competing  so hard to please Saudi Arabia, by overthrowing Libya���s Colonel Gaddafi and trying to oust Syria���s President Assad. Saudi contracts for projects and aircraft have been pouring into France ��� and now there���s a feasibility study for nuclear reactors. Where���s the UK���s share? Perhaps we lost it  when Parliament voted to stay out of Syria.

It���s interesting how thrillers reflect the times we live in. In the latest Mission: Impossible, Anglo- American relations are chilly and suspicious. 

Rebecca Ferguson, for instance, plays an MI6 agent gone rogue, with an unusually elegant, even musical, approach to assassinating Western leaders. Her boss is even worse, and is, very curiously, called Attlee. 

Will the villain in the next in the series be called Corbyn?