Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 190

We Need a Much Tougher Charity Commission

I must stress here that I am drawing no conclusions about the charity Kids Company.  I have no direct or indirect personal knowledge of what went on at this organisation (full name ���Keeping Kids Company���) headed by Camila Batmanghelidjh . I did hear, some years ago, suggestions that  there might be problems there, but was not in a position to check whether these suggestions had solid foundations.  I have only once encountered Ms Batmanghelidjh, on a Sunday Morning TV programme broadcast from Manchester, more years ago than I care to recall.  

I formed the opinion that she was in demand, by the media and by politicians,  because she held reliably indulgent views of the best way to cope with troubled young people.

 

The admiring attitude of much of the establishment to her is well summed up in this preface (by Sandra Jovchelovitch)  to a London School of Economics report on Kids Company published in September 2013

 

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/52856/1/Jovchelovitch_Kids_Company_Diagnosis_2013.pdf

 

���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, but all the more for those who have never experienced a stable and loving home. This is something that every field psychologist knows well. Positive attachment and supportive human communication are at the basis of healthy development for individuals and communities. Find a way of offering neglected children the experience of love and they will respond because love remains foundational for what we humans are. I am delighted that we have been able to study the language of love that Kids Company makes available to some of the most vulnerable children and young people in the UK.���

 

In recent weeks I have watched with great interest as various allegations have been made about the charity, and as the government (clearly with some reluctance at the top) has withdrawn support which turns out to be crucial.

 

I watched with total fascination this morning���s interview of Ms Batmanghelidjh by John Humphrys, on the Radio 4 ���Today��� programme, on this occasion available with video as well as sound.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02yxdg0

 

 

I understand from media reports in reputable outlets and by experienced reporters that there have been quarrels at a high level in Whitehall about state support for Kids Company, and that at least one civil servant was sent to work in Kids Company for some months.  What did he or she report back? Did it have any bearing on what subsequently happened? I think all of us, critics, doubters and supporters, now deserve a full and thorough investigation into this episode. Large amounts of public and private money are involved. The charity���s many generous backers, and those whom it has helped, and now can no longer help, need to know what transpired.

 

It���s been my view for many years that Charities are far too lightly regulated in this country, because we all melt into a sympathetic goo at the sound of the word ���Charity��� . I know nothing of their internal arrangements of Kids Company, but I have looked at the annual reports of other major charities and found large salaries for senior employees, and a very strong reliance on state aid from our own government and from bodies such as the EU. In some cases I have found that charities have used quite a lot of money for what I would call propaganda. Maybe their donors desire this, but I think those who make out direct debits or put money in tins intend their cash to be used to help suffering people (or animals), not for politics.  

 

In all cases I have wished to know more than the annual report tells me. And I have wished there were clearer rules on what is a charitable purpose and what is not, and that Charities had to give a clearer and more detailed accounting of how they spend their cash. These bodies are too big and too influential, and carry too many hopes (hopes which tend to make people uncritical), to be as unsupervised as they are. This episode should surely provide an unanswerable argument for a much tougher Charity Commission.

Put That Light Out!

Living in the USSR and Russia vastly expanded my understanding of the deep and merciless wars between state and family, love and power, and between freedom of thought and the tyranny of the mind.  It reawakened a straightforward love for history, for its own sake, that I had as a child and had lost thanks to the dry and narrow demands of formal school, and it also brought the Atlas to life. When you have actually *been* to Sevastopol, Samarkand, Tashkent and Tibilisi, those great spaces seem to come to actual life on the page. 

 

Living in America was much more of an education about alternative ways of doing things, quite distinct from those in Europe and the old British Empire.  

 

My minor fascination with the differences between electrical voltage in the USA and Britain is a family joke (Well, they didn���t have to find the 110-volt bayonet light-bulbs, generally sold in Britain only for fairground use, and in very specialised shops)  which were the only way of getting our collection of lamps to work in the USA, or fathom the curious effect of different cycles on devices such as record-players. I never fathomed it either, but for years after we got home from the US, we had wonderful American Christmas-tree lights which could only be made to work through huge steel transformers (which converted 230 volts to 110 volts) that weighed about five pounds each and grew alarmingly hot after an hour or two of use. It was worth it at the time.

 

But this curious difference symbolised for me the different ways at which the two rival English-speaking civilisations had arrived at roughly the same place. But it wasn���t the same place.

 

This was so in melodramatic ways. The neat little silver, red and blue diesel trains which rattled southwards past the Jefferson memorial and across the placid Potomac river could take me to places where they had chain gangs, and where they occasionally put people to death in the electric chair.

 

Huge-sounding snuffling wild animals could and did come rooting round the house at night, and butterflies the size of passports blundered about in the warm winds of late summer.

 

My suburb in Bethesda, Maryland was utterly different from its equivalent in Oxford ��� the main architectural theme a diluted mass-produced 18th-century New England rather than our own mass-produced diluted 16th-century Tudor. There were no fences, either fronting on to the road or between front gardens, though , mysteriously, they appeared round the back, where of course we had yards rather than gardens.  

 

The local hardware store ( I love these) in Bethesda was full of huge axes, storm lanterns, stout lengths of rope and other pioneering equipment (I realised why when the tail ends of hurricanes came roaring into Maryland in late September, casually uprooting huge trees and almost flooding the basement. This emphasised John Keegan���s brilliant point that England is a garden, whereas North America is a wilderness. And what a wilderness. Travel far enough South-West and you are in the most astonishing, uplifting and exalting landscape I have ever seen, blue lakes amid red rocks,  colossal faults in the earth full of disturbingly beautiful and gigantic rock formations which look like the work of an artist ��� and by night stars so numerous and so bright that, until you have seen them,  you have never really seen stars at all - you just think you have.

 

Even in the settled North-East  the nights were different. They arrived earlier and more quickly than in Britain because we were so much closer to the tropics. I also began to notice that in this supposedly ultra-modern country the streetlights were pretty small and dim, and nobody thought it strange that it was so.   The nights had an Edwardian feel, as the various bugs fireflies and other winged things, of which Dixieland has so many, smacked themselves into the sides of the screen porch or brained themselves on the windowpanes, in a dim semi-twilight. It didn���t seem to encourage burglars. Most people left their doors unlocked and their houses, by comparison with English suburban equivalents, were lightly protected.

 

It made me wonder why we thought it necessary to spend so much electricity and effort to banish darkness from our streets at home. Nobody seemed to want all this light. Round about the time of the first Moon landing Oxford City Council came to remove the beautiful old cast iron Narnia-style gas lamps from the small North Oxford side-road where I then lived. Protests against this folly were, as usual, futile.  My father managed to buy one. We dug a small trench for an electricity cable, and a deep hole for the base,  and, using his old naval skills and a rudimentary pulley, we hoisted  and fitted it with a small electric bulb (which was not as good as the old gas but a lot better than the glaring modern thing that replaced it on the street). It still stands to this day, slightly out of true (I think this was my fault) , breathing the last enchantments of the Victorian ages.  I won���t say exactly where it is as I���m nopt sure it will do it any good to be associated with me.  I visit it from time to time to see if claims that the old light was worn out, too rusty to survive etc were true. But it seems not.  As long as someone slaps a bit of paint on it from time to time, I expect it will still be there, happily unchanged,  for another hundred years.

 

As so often in those days, I worried that my resistance to the modern age was a  fault in me, some form of eccentricity, especially my fury at the wilful wrecking of the railways. In almost all cases I have found that I was dead right.  Now I learn that the claims made for hideous, dazzling  modern streetlighting, that it makes us all safer, are, to say the least, in doubt.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jul/29/turning-off-street-lights-does-not-lead-to-more-or-accidents-study

 

 

People think it reduces crime and accidents. And so if people such as coroners say so, everyone thinks they speak from knowledge. But do they? Research ( with all its faults) suggests not. I was especially interested in this because of the recent arrival in my home town of LED streetlamps,  installed largely on the Warmist grounds that, if we don���t have them, various archipelagos in the Pacific will be overwhelmed by salty billows because the ice-caps will melt.

 

Forgive (or don���t) my flippancy on this, but I think it is merited, even if you belong to the Warmist faith, as I do not.  On its own terms, the argument is fairly thin.  The amounts of wattage saved are actually quite small. The electricity used in making the new lamps, and the fossil fuels used in carting them about and digging the holes for them  must be quite considerable too. The wattage and petrol, not to mention midnight oil,  used by taxpayers working to pay for the lamps will also be quite large.

 

Many people don���t like them, as shown here

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2609957/Coming-street-near-lights-awake-make-people-ill.html

 

From what I���ve seen, they produce a strong, cold clear light which shows colours accurately and is pretty much good enough to read by.  It is mainly directed downwards so should reduce light pollution in general. But I have spoken to people who greatly dislike them, and you may be among those. How is it that this rather costly project for change has got under way with so little discussion (for it is, for certain,  quite a major change from what you are used to)? And is it necessary at a time when we are supposedly so short of money for such things as public libraries?  Perhaps the general frenzy for banishing the night has got out of hand. Have we just got into the  habit of doing this because we have not thought about it?  I think this is so much more often than we think it is.

Helping the Police with their Enquiries

Anyone who dares to criticise the British police pays a price. It���s one I am prepared to pay because sometimes one just has to speak out. But, apart from the NHS, which has succeeded in obtaining Sacred Status, and whose fundamental principles cannot be criticised by anyone in public life,  I know of no body which is so incapable of listening to reasonable criticism.  The NHS, however, does have many redeeming features. It does cure some illnesses and patch up the injured. But the police, however pleasant individuals may be, spend their time doing  the wrong thing. And however busily or diligently they do it, it doesn���t work.

 

Each time I criticise this vast, unresponsive nationalised industry, the Police, a strange thing happens. There is almost total silence from police chiefs themselves, who are well aware of what they are doing and don���t care what I say about it. There is silence from the politicians whose actions have created this very considerable national failure.

 

But there is a frenzy of (often rather spiteful and personal) abuse from individual officers. When I beg them to read my book ���The Abolition of Liberty��� , they suggest that I am doing the whole thing to make money. It is quite amusing if you write serious books on serious subjects, to find that people think these are generally a major source of income, much as they also think that TV appearances are in general hugely rewarded. Ho ho. I���m not complaining,. I���ve been very fortunate in life, but it isn���t usually so. I want people to read them. They can do so through libraries. It���s nice if they buy them,  

 

These police critics will often complain that the change in methods is not their fault and they aren���t free to oppose it. In that case, surely they should view me as their ally. Yet they take the side of their oppressors against me. In which case, how can I believe their claims that they don���t in fact support the reshaping of the police which began in the 1960s?

 

Others urge me to ���go out on patrol��� with them, or assume that I have never done so and that if UI had I would agree with them. Wrong on both counts.  Were they to ask, I would tell them that I have done so, in London, Johannesburg and Dallas, Texas (all surprisingly similar). And that it is these experiences of futile response to things that have already happened, which led me to the views I now hold. They can be summed up in this question. What, exactly, is the sue of a police officer after a crime has been committed? He or she cannot unburgle, unmurder or unmug the victim. He or she was hired to prevent this taking place at all, not to arrive afterwards with a screech of brakes and a notebook.

 

Others point out that they work very hard (which I don���t in any way doubt) and suggest I lighten their load by joining up as a special constable ( a genuinely hilarious thought) .

 

Well, here���s a metaphor for them. If this country was full of factories producing aeroplanes made out of lead, what would it matter how hard their workforces toiled at their task, or how nice their staff were?

 

What would it matter if they were short of workers?

 

Even Saudi Arabia isn���t going to buy lead jets from us.

 

Because they won���t fly.

 

And the point about modern policing is that it doesn���t fly, either. It never has, and it never will, because it is based on a wrong principle.  But the sort of policing which it replaced *did* fly and did work, and nobody has ever shown that it did not (the 1962 Royal Commission explicitly endorsed it as sound), or shown why the new form is better. On the contrary, James Q. Wilson���s ���broken windows theory��� https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory which says that a failure to act against small breaches of the law leads to general disorder

Is both obvious common sense and has been found to be sound, especially in New York City, thought it attracts the usual ���correlation is not causation��� attacks which serve critics when they have no other ammunition.

 

 

This was what I thought on those ���ride-alongs��� with police in various places, as we turned up in dingy apartments to question men and women who had been beating each other up, or in streets where people had been stabbed, or at the scenes of burglaries or muggings.

 

We couldn���t actually do anything except take notes.

 

All that charging about at high speed with the  sirens and lights going was simply not as important as it looked or felt. The paramedics, by contrast were needed.  So were locksmiths, glaziers, the local vicar, all kinds of people. But not the police. The best they could do would be to take the first steps towards a prosecution which, if it ever happened, would be so delayed and so feeble that it would do little to deter any such action happening again.

 

It seemed to me that the police themselves had been beguiled by a TV image of themselves as knights errant, armed and armoured,  hurtling to rescue amidst howling sirens and multicoloured strobe lights or (better still) clattering through the sky in their most favourite toy, the helicopter.

The doubt nagged away at me. Time, the chance to read and research, the growing problem of police seeming to take sides against people who defended themselves (I saw a lot of these cases in my correspondence. They were real. They do happen),  made me think more deeply.

 

I was also increasingly puzzled. Where had the police gone, who once used to be visibly walking the streets of the city where I had lived, on and off, for decades? They sued to be there. Now they weren���t. But I didn���t recall any announcement that, like the railways slashed by Dr Beeching and Ernest Marples, they had been abolished. It had just happened.

 

 Why was it that the local city force, whose coppers knew most of us by name,  had vanished, to be replaced by a vast territorial ���service��� covering a huge and varied stretch of Southern England, whose officers didn���t even know where my street was when I called them up ? When and how had it happened?  Was that better? Small, we had learned by then, was beautiful. Why was big supposed to be best when it came to policing? I had noticed, in two years living in the USA, that policing there was still almost totally local, and largely (if not universally)  popular, responsive and efficient too. There were other problems, the racial one being the greatest, but Solomon himself, in all his glory,  could not solve that, I fear. And we had a form of it too.

 

Unlike most people, I had the time and the facilities to find out what had happened. First I trawled through the wonderful newspaper cuttings libraries, going back more than a century,  to which I have privileged access.  Eventually I plunged into the British Library, led from one book to another by footnotes, and from there to forgotten official documents  that nobody now ever bothered to read. I spent all my days off, and many evenings, pursuing this.

 

And a picture emerged.

 

A huge and lasting change, so profound that it had more or less reversed the polarity of policing in this country, had taken place.

 

It had never been fully debated. It might well have been an accident, though it took place largely under the direction of Roy Jenkins, a pestilential reformer who seems never to have liked any English institution or custom, and who more or less wrecked that most precious inheritance of all, the Jury system.  

 

At that time, as I well remembered, there was a certain belief that newness was goodness and that all change was for the better.

 

The American influence (not real, but misunderstood, through car-borne TV police series such as ���Highway patrol���) was there, making actual British officers jealous of their fictional American counterparts with their huge flashy cruisers and militarised uniforms.  (This doesn���t just affect police officers. Thousands of British journalists were influenced forever by the film of ���All the President���s Men���, in which heroic reporters were played by Robert  Redford and Dustin Hoffman, and a brave, tough editor by Jason Robards).

 

 

Also influential was Eric St Johnston, Chief Constable of Lancashire and another pestilential innovator, responsible for much of what happened and on good terms with the Labour government of the middle 1960s.

 

But you can sense, as the ���experiments��� in car-borne reactive policing, foredoomed to be successful as so many official experiments are,  were repeatedly lauded in the ���Times��� newspaper, that there was someone somewhere in the Home Office who wanted this.

Perhaps they hoped to save money, which is quite funny given what happened later, as police manpower hugely increased and police budgets rose and rose. In those days the police had some problems with both recruitment and retention, and there were genuine shortages of manpower. Though the numbers of officers, both in raw numbers and per head of population, were much , much smaller

 

E.g.:

 

In 1961, there were 75,161 police officers in England and Wales

 

There are now 126,818  

 

Bear this in mind the next time you hear the parrot cry of ���we don���t have the manpower to do it the way we used to���. It���s not true.

 

It���s also worth noting that in the intervening period police have been relieved of their statutory duty to secure commercial premises (now done by private security firms) , of their role in enforcing parking laws (taken on by local authorities) , and of their role as prosecutors (taken over by the CPS) ; and they now have many tens of thousands of non-uniformed staff, few of whom existed in 1961,  to help them with bureaucracy. So, while there is no doubt that the police now face the tedious demands of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and its codes of practice, manpower isn���t the central difficulty. It���s policy and leadership.

 

 

 

Whatever the motive, what was not in doubt was that, without any good technical or practical reason, a successful and established system of policing ��� preventive foot patrolling ��� was extinguished between about 1966 and about 1970, the final blow being delivered by the police force mergers imposed by Roy Jenkins after 1966 and mostly implemented in 1968 and 1969.  

 

It was bipartisan. He did this under powers given to him by a Tory Act of Parliament of 1964, itself based on the Royal Commission report of 1962, the era of ���big is beautiful���. In some ways the thoughtless ���progressive��� consensus on this mirrors the simultaneous one which destroyed the grammar schools in the same era, and which would massacre English local government in 1974.

 

Crime, disorder, vandalism and drug abuse have continued on their upward spiral ,along with the prison population, ever since.  I���d be the last person to say that these deteriorations have no other causes (dare I mention another of my books ���the Abolition of Britain���?) . But it seems reasonable to say that the disappearance of uniformed authority as a presence on our streets and in our countryside has played its part.

 

It was in late 1966 that the Home Office Police Advisory Board urged the abolition of preventive foot patrolling, and its replacement by car-based surveillance.  The Home Office could be reasonably confident that the new heads of the new forces, which would be increasingly under the eye of central government,  would be sympathetic to this instruction.  I recently had an exchange on this era in the correspondence columns of ���the Times��� with an officer who said I was wrong because there were still some foot patrols after 1966 (no doubt there were. I never said they all stopped on the stroke of midnight at the end of that year. They just weren���t typical or normal, that���s all, and they didn���t last) . Alas for his argument he noted that he himself had started to patrol in  a ���Panda��� car (this strange name is explained in my book ���The Abolition of Liberty���) in 1968.���The Times��� has yet to publish my rebuttal, which pointed this out.

 

Anyway, we switched from making planes that fly to making planes that don���t fly, and those who cruelly point out that this is so , in our rather mad country, are attacked for being anti-police��� and ���lost in the past���, whereas those in charge of turning out the non-flying lead aircraft which stand in their vast unsold, immoveable rows, continue to think they are terrific, and to attract vast slabs of public money.

How long before the police stop investigating murder?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

At least our state-school system maintains schools, terrible as many of them are. The NHS, creaky as it is, still treats actual patients.

And in the dear dead days of big nationalised industries, British Coal dug actual coal, British Steel made actual steel, and the same was true of the gas and electricity boards.

But the police force now can���t even be bothered to turn up and investigate burglaries, and its chief spokesperson openly says so.

For the first time we now have a huge and expensive nationalised industry that does not do what it says on the label. The police do not police, as we understand the word. They are busy doing something else, as you will find if you ever try to speak to them. I am not sure what it is.

I discovered this nasty fact many years ago, the night some vandals put a stone through my front window, and I chased after and caught them.

I had to let them go. The sheer hilarious uselessness of the police on that occasion, their general absence, their pitiful excuses for not coming to my aid when urgently asked (���we couldn���t find you, the officers didn���t know the area���) alerted me to a problem I���d until then been only dimly aware of.

I ended up writing a book about it, gasping with growing amazement as I found out from the archives what had happened to a body I used to trust and admire. I have to say here that many of the police officers I meet or talk to are perfectly decent men and women (though a minority are not, as recent figures of criminal convictions show). It���s just that the police force itself is now trading falsely on a name and reputation it earned in another time.

You���ll find this out if ever you actually need them. In the meantime, how many warnings do you want? I have to say that the statement by Sara Thornton, head of the National Police Chiefs��� Council, that ���if you���ve had a burglary, for example, and the burglar has fled, we won���t get there as quickly as we have in the past��� is a pretty clear indication of how things really stand.

I���m not sure how quickly that actually was, as it happens. Car break-ins long ago went on the police���s ���ignore if you possibly can��� list, along with drug possession, littering, shoplifting, vandalism, disorderly drunkenness, public swearing, driving while texting or phoning, and a hundred other things they no longer think are their affair. And, as if by some miracle, once the police stop bothering with these offences, fiddled figures claim that they are not happening any more, and the magistrates��� courts are being closed for lack of business. Well I never.

Don���t be surprised if, in 20 years��� time, homicide goes the same way. To save time and trouble, it���ll be recorded as something else (murder is already often downgraded to manslaughter to save time and trouble), and people watching old episodes of Inspector Morse will wonder why anyone is making such a fuss over a dead body.

Once upon a time, I would have minded. Now I just laugh. But, be warned: like other nationalised industries, the police will act swiftly and decisively if you dare to challenge their monopoly. If you are foolish enough to defend your own home against burglary, expect to be arrested, fingerprinted, DNA-swabbed and probably charged. They wouldn���t want the idea catching on that we could manage without them.

The perfect 50s face - and NO cigarette!

Jessica Raine���s captivating features might have been designed for the fashions of the 1950s, or whenever the BBC���s new series Partners In Crime is supposed to be set.

I���m not quite sure when it is meant to be happening. We���re told it���s post-war, yet Jessica is shown reading a fresh new edition of Dorothy L. Sayers���s (very good) 1930 whodunit Strong Poison. And some of the sexual innuendos sound very up-to-date to me. But for once, the director hasn���t forced everyone to smoke all the time to make sure we realise it���s the past. Instead a lengthy scene is set in an actual grammar school, which for most British people is as historic and distant as a dinosaur.

Forget Chilcot - let's probe our Libya folly

Let's forget the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War. We all know who���s guilty, and the main actors are finished and disgraced in the public mind. Instead, let���s have a new and urgent inquiry (report within a year please) into David Cameron���s equally stupid and irresponsible Libyan war, which is the direct cause of the scenes at Calais and Dover, and may, in the long run, mean the end of European civilisation as we have known it all our lives. It is also thanks to people like him that we have, as a country and a culture, given up all the weapons and defences we might once have used to keep our island secure.

You think this can be stopped, or will be stopped? No. All that will happen is that we will get used to it.

Please continue to pray, if you can, for my friend Jason Rezaian, now wrongly held in an Iranian prison for more than a year. Jason, son of a Persian father and an American mother, went to live in Tehran so that he could report truthfully on that fascinating, misrepresented place.

He took me there a few years ago and opened my eyes to much I had misunderstood or never known. His chief concern was to improve understanding between his father���s people and his mother���s people. He was mysteriously arrested and is still being held, despite the outbreak of peace between the USA and the Iranian government. There is no justification for this.

Let him go.

The ignorance of modern politicians ��� even about the recent past ��� is astonishing. The Chancellor, George Osborne, said last week that ���the central attraction of European Union membership was the economic one���.

Yet in 1972 his own department, the Treasury, argued strongly that joining the Common Market would be bad for Britain���s economy. They were dead right.

Their advice was buried and ignored by Ted Heath, whose reasons for joining were clearly political.

I'll return to this another time, but the Tories should not be too pleased if the Labour Party collapses. Deprived of a bogeyman, what will then hold them together?

Last week the number of visits to the Peter Hitchens blog (address at the top of this page), where I have debated with readers on many subjects since February 2006, passed the 20 million mark. If you haven���t visited, may I urge you to do so?

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Au Revoir les Enfants

Like a lot of English people of my class and generation, I went through a stage of believing that France was a sort of paradise. They did things differently there, but in general they did them better.  I followed French politics, struggled with French newspapers, and hurried across the Channel as often as I could afford to.  I never quite got over that thrill of anticipation and adventure as the steamer docked (usually in Dieppe, for the Newhaven-Dieppe route was the best way of plunging directly into France, and avoided the long and rather dreary train ride from Calais to Paris, providing instead a far lovelier and briefer run through the Normandy bocage , and the glories of Rouen, on down to the Gare St Lazare, as painted by Monet). The ships were often French and sold drinkable coffee or ��� if I was flush ��� an enjoyable lunch.  You knew you were there when mysterious portals opened on the main deck and burly Frenchmen appeared in those horizon-blue overalls, which you see nowhere else, growling ���Porteur!��� Not that we ever had anything for them to carry. Just a minimal suitcase, a railway timetable,  a couple of guidebooks and a few paperback novels. The grey-green train, higher off the ground and generally bigger and less picturesque than ours, waited among the cranes for the last passengers to shuffle through customs. 

 

I viewed every part of it as a pleasure, including the marginally squalid hotels near the stations, with bolsters instead of pillows, brown lino floors, iron bedsteads and appalling wallpaper, the Moroccan sandwiches bought from dubious stalls in the Latin Quarter of Paris, the atrocious headache-inducing beer,  the ultra-cheap restaurants where they scribbled your bill on the paper tablecloth, the thuggish CRS men who hung around the Boulevard St Michel, fingering their billy-clubs,  in case of another 1968-style eruption,  the screeching short-distance trains that still, in those days, rambled into the depths of the countryside (the tracks have been torn up now, by a French Docteur Beeching just as bad as ours) . I don���t really miss much of that now, though I���m very glad I experienced it, and we couldn���t have afforded anything else anyway, which is never a bad thing to remember when you have got older but a bit richer.  

 

I do miss the far more distinctly French look and feel of everything, peculiar regional aperitifs, incredibly old-fashioned advertisements for weird French foodstuffs, medicines and soft drinks, the whiff of hot olive oil wafting from the high, blue Wagons Lits Dining Car, standing on the sunny platform with its crisp white tablecloths and its tempting bottle of wine on every table,  in which we would spend our very last Francs (no Euros then) on the journey to the ferry, the workman���s caf�� next to the country railway junction near Autun, in my memory and probably in fact better than any temple of gastronomy,  which insisted on giving the Rosbif interlopers their ( excellent) wine in stemmed glasses, while everyone else was drinking it out of tumblers, the ancient, slightly-brown-tinged appearance of auberges and cafes, not really all that much altered since, oh, well, now you come to think of it, 1940.

 

Yes. Hmm. What did we think about that? Having visited Jersey and Guernsey, and seen the heavy traces of the German occupation of British territory where we were too weak to defend it, I was not inclined to look down on them from a great and British height. I knew that it was the Channel, not our valour, which had saved us from what had happened to them. I���d also rather liked H.E. Bates���s kind-hearted and touching novel,  ���Fair Stood the Wind for France���, in which a young French girl turns out to be very much the same sort of person as the downed RAF pilots she helps to rescue.  They were ���that sweet enemy��� . They were like us and yet they were thrillingly not like us.  America might easily have been theirs, not ours, if things had turned out differently on the Plains of Abraham in 1759. We liked visiting their country more than they liked visiting ours. They were more interested in us than we in them, readier to learn our language than we were to learn theirs. And they had no Channel, though I���ve always thought the (wrongly maligned) Maginot line was a half-hearted attempt to make France an island too. The world might be very different if they had finished it.

 

It never quite went away, this business of imagining how our lives would have been changed if this dreadful thing, invasion and occupation, had happened to us.  

 

All this came rolling back, like a long-dammed stream when on Sunday I went to one of Oxford���s wonderful arthouse cinemas to see ��� for the first time ��� Louis Malle���s superb, heart-piercing film ���Au Revoir les Enfants���. Somehow I managed to miss it when it came out in 1987 ��� it was a busy, even frantic time in my life when I couldn���t get to the cinema that often. And . having missed it, in a sour grapes sort of way I persuaded myself that it didn���t matter, that it cannot have been that good anyway. But of course it was and is, and  you should see it, on DVD if you can���t find it at a cinema. The one where I went to see it, this being Oxford on a grey , wet Sunday afternoon, was almost full. I doubt if any of those present got to the end without weeping in the dark, quietly and privately.

 

It opens, all too fleetingly, with a dedication to (I think) four named people, three schoolboys and a man, a Roman Catholic priest and monk.  It ends with a scene which Malle himself said while he still lived that he would remember till the day he died, and I have no doubt he did.

 

I shall not reveal the plot in detail, not that its shape and ending will, in general, come as a shock to any educated person. It is of course quite beautiful to look it, the freezing winter of early 1944 evoked so strongly that on a July afternoon I actually wished I had brought a coat with me. A French middle-class boy going away by train to boarding school in the 1940s cannot have felt very different from an English middle-class boy such as I was, going away by train to boarding school in the 1950s.  Nor were the schools that different, the casual cruelty and spite of the boys to each other, the lack of privacy, the often superb teachers struggling with unformed lumps of intellectual lard in cramped and chilly classrooms, the silly playground fads and sudden fights, the pre-television reliance on books for entertainment and pastime,  the fumbling, fragile friendships  the awkwardness of parental visits, the subdued colours. We were Protestant, these are Roman Catholic, but both versions of Christianity, before they were modernised, had the same austere power and otherworldiness (now neither do)  .

 

And then, the difference that comes from having been beaten and occupied -  from not having a Channel,  finding that the great armies and weapons, in which they had trusted, were gone or in the hands of the enemy, and what an enemy he was. He looked like them, often behaved like them, could appear civilised and decent and act with kindness.  But he wasn���t really kind. Here, in civilised, light-hearted lovely France, thanks to the abolition of a border a couple of hundred miles away, see what creatures burst into what would otherwise be a normal life of lessons, meals and chapel services. See what they can do and how they do it. Find out what treachery, misery and fear are actually like, in this small, intimate and seemingly normal piece of the world. Find out what it is like when ���Gestapo��� is not a word or a jibe, but a presence among you. And remember, as you watch, that this is all true, actually happened and will, in some form or other, happen again. You might be there when it does. You will probably just stand and watch, astonished that such things can happen and that nobody can stop them.

Let's Groan Again. An Atheist Writes Back

As I feared, my attempt to argue reasonably with the Atheist contributor ���James��� was not a meeting of minds. I don���t expect these encounters to be, normally, for the reasons I���ve discussed. The modern militant atheists have closed their minds, contemptuously, to the possibility that they may be mistaken a,d erected a caricature of religious believers as stupid, uneducated, anti-scientific morons which  leads to a certain ���de haut en bas��� style in their approach, which they have done nothing to earn.

 

 

But the exercise wasn���t entirely useless. The response of ���James��� and some other militant unbelievers makes their simple but unyielding misunderstanding of my position so plain that I can quite easily show it to any unprejudiced observer, and do so below with my inserted and marked comments. The difference between us is that they are trying to prove me wrong, which they can���t do, and I am trying to offer them some common ground, on to which they fear to advance.  It���s like trying to give a free gift to someone who is convinced it is a trick.

 

The argument also produced some cogent counters to the arguments of ���James��� from contributors, so good that I have included them below in this post.

 

 

Let me begin with the second epistle of ���James���:

 

 

'James' writes: 'At the risk of boring Peter Hitchens further, here is my reply. In any other sphere of discussion when presented with unconvincing arguments and bad or no evidence, you reject the position until new or better evidence is presented. All I argue is that our normal standards of evidence and rigour should be applied to arguments about God.

 

*** PH. Once again, there is a very simple reason why this cannot be so. We are here arguing about belief and faith, not testable knowledge. Both my religious opinion and the religious opinion of ���James��� are just that ��� religious opinions about the unknowable.  They cannot be tested like the ca=various claims of scientists historians, etc.  Does ���James��� accept this? I am not sure he does. I think he is convinced as any Ayatollah in the courtyards of Qom or as any hillbilly preacher,  of the absolute truth of his claims.

 

���James���:  I would be happy to discuss the arguments further but Peter Hitchens is completely closed to the idea that an atheist could be motivated out of anything other than selfish hedonism

 

****PH writes: No, I am not. I have never said that *all* atheists are so motivated, and do not think so. I specifically said in my first reply to him ���I do not believe I have ever used the word 'all' in this case '.  I also said : ���I am not making any individual or even universal claim, and any of my opponents are free to show that it is not their motive.��� He neither acknowledges nor attempts to rebut these points. Like all bad debaters, when he finds a difficult bit, he avoids it completely and pretends it doesn���t exist.

 

Indeed, he has the nerve to repeat the same false charge as if I had never rebutted it. ���James' shouldn't make these things up. Let me give some more examples. Many atheists in our secular society , like many cradle Christians, believe in their faith out of conformism and fashion, and have never considered it deeply enough to have a motivation. ���James���, by all appearances, may be one such. The recurrence in their arguments of the same tricks and stylistic habits, ���gods��� in the plural without an initial capital, for instance, is often a sign of a faith casually and self-protectively picked up from a peer-group.

 

���James���: (PH might do well to remember that he, along with everyone else, doesn���t actually know much about human nature, and that semi-autobiographical novels and his own former atheism are not evidence that atheists are generally selfish and hedonistic).

 

***PH replies: I am pretty confident that I know a good deal more about human nature than does ���James���, my knowledge having been quite dearly bought in more than 60 years of far-from-saintly life.  It is very interesting that he completely ignores the congruence, evident to any campus visitor, between the angry atheist surge and the ���libertarian��� cry of ���nobody tells me what I can do with my own body��� which is the slogan of the drugtaker and the sexual libertine. That���s why all my brother���s fans hate me so. They liked having an educated plummy voice telling them their hedonism was fine and their small-town pastors were stupid morons.  They are doubly infuriated to hear my very similar educated plummy voice saying that actually it isn���t that simple.  How dare I profane the sacred memory?

 

He also ignores totally my point that : ���Because this (hedonism) is the demonstrable default position of humanity anyway, because it is equally true of many nominal religious believers, whose faith can quite rightly be judged by how well they keep to the precepts they claim to espouse.���  The truth of the first is so blazingly obvious that he couldn���t possibly rebut it, and the second is probably something he would say himself under other circumstances, but it doesn���t suit him to do so now. So he ignores it completely. Again. Duck and cover.

 

He concentrates instead on Maugham���s eloquent autobiographical passage, which I doubt very much he has read ( I wonder if he even knows who Maugham was or how he lived) , but dismisses anyway, on  my own undoubted personal experience, which he dismisses of being of no worth at all. ***

 

 

���Paul���: So, as he so rightly says in other contexts, when arguing with someone who won���t treat their opponent seriously and treat them with due respect, the only winning move is not to play. ������ I will make a few brief points, as I don���t want to be thought to be ducking them, but I won���t bore PH with any further replies unless he is prepared to argue with me as though I were a moral and decent human being. ���

 

***PH : I have never said otherwise. I know nothing about him and have said nothing about him. For the third time, my speculation on the motives of atheists  has never been all-inclusive and he cannot claim that it is directed at him personally. He is making things up, to suit him - an interesting characteristic in one so resolutely rejecting the idea that we choose our beliefs to suit us. He has chosen this one to suit him - it sort of gets him out of a corner from which there is no escape by actual argument. Alas for him, it is demonstrably untrue.

 

 

���James���: On the point about the complex universe being evidence for a theistic God. This is, at best, an argument for pantheism or deism, not for theism, and certainly not for the Abrahamic God. No claims in the Bible are supported by the complexity of our universe.���

 

*** PH: We are not here arguing about the Abrahamic God or any particular religion. Poorly-equipped anti-God people always make this silly mistake. The argument about the existence of God is entirely separate from arguments about individual faiths.  Deism is a subdivision of Theism, not the other way round.

 

 

���James��� : 'Einstein was a believer in Spinoza���s god, which has nothing to do with theism. He specifically rejected the idea of a personal God.

 

***PH writes: Quite so, which is why I specifically referred to : ���the existence of something which might be called 'God'' rather than to a personal God.  

 

���James���  All this is easily verifiable. His beliefs on God and its existence are far closer to mine, than to yours, not that it matters much.

 

***PH writes: I do not agree, either that it doesn���t matter or that Einstein���s position is closer to his position, of absolute rejection of anything resembling a deity than to mine, a belief that He may exist, accompanied by a strong desire for Him to do so. 

 

 

���James���: ���When Dawkins talks about aliens, he specifically describes them as ���Godlike���, and different from the usual beliefs in God in one important way: Their complexity would only come about through a process similar to that of evolution. What this has to do with theism, I have no idea.

 

****PH writes: Then he is not thinking. Others have had no difficulty in seeing its relevance.

 

���James���: ������On the topic of addiction. Fair enough, I concede that those who argue for addiction claim it is a fact, while you do not claim the same about God. This was a mistake.

 

 

***PH writes: I am glad to see him admit it. A rare glint of gold amid the mud.

 

���James���:  I would like to say though, that a lot of my taxes go in support of the state belief in Anglicanism,

 

***PH writes : They do? Perhaps he would like to tell me how much taxation is spent on the Church of England? Figures, please, and references. 

 which leads to absurdities such as the Windsor Family and the Lords Spiritual, with which I profoundly disagree.

 

***PH writes: I hope all readers will note the change of subject here, and the comic-strip republicanism which is also revealed. 

 

'Paul': We both agree that a belief in addiction should not lead to state support, perhaps you would extend the logic to other beliefs like Anglicanism. ������ On the general topic of hedonism and selfishness. It is entirely possible for these things to be criticised without needing to appeal to Christian Morality.

 

 

***PH writes: Yes, I know. But there is a great difference between disliking these things in a specific instance or because they affect you badly personally, or they damage the national budget or reduce industrial production, or whatever it is - and having an absolute prohibition on them because they are wrong at all times and in all places . This difference is important because so many wrong acts are done in secret, their culprits unknown to their victims and undiscovered by the authorities. There is also the human tendency, most obvious in dismembering, crushing, burning and suffocating foreign civilians and permitting abortions, to claim that various forms of wickedness aren���t, in this case, wickedness at all.

 

 

 

Finally, I have one question. As you believe that belief in God is a choice, how is it that objective morality can come from it?

 

**** PH replies: I don���t see that this is an inconsistency. I believe in the existence of objective morality and absolute truth.  I do not state that they definitely exist because I cannot (any more than he can state that they don���t) .  It is, of course, a claim but its point is that it requires absolute standards of goodness from those who make it. That is why I choose to believe in it.  . Large objective consequences can be shown to flow from the general belief in its non-existence, and likewise from the general belief in its existence.  I can offer no other test this side of the grave.

 

 

Mr ���Bunker��� then joined the argument, perhaps feeling left out, as ���James��� has pretty much completely restated the case  which Mr ���Bunker��� first made here about 2,000 years ago. ****

 

 

Mr ���;Bunker��� wrote: ���If (as I assume) Mr Hitchens is telling the truth when he says he is a believer, then let him prove that he is able to choose to believe the opposite - just for, say, one week as from tomorrow, in which we could argue with him about it. Then he could return to the belief 'of his choice'!���

 

Of course he could 'pretend' to believe God doesn't exist, if only for one week, but that's not the test. The test is whether he could 'truly' believe (just for one week) that God does not exist. And argue, genuinely and credibly, with believers on this blog that there is no God, that God is a figment  of human imagination and that only deluded people can believe such rubbish.

 

I don't think Mr Hitchens can do that. I don't think that choice is open to him. He cannot choose arbitrarily to believe the opposite of what he does in fact believe - and neither can I!!! (There is some mysterious force preventing him!!!!!)���

 

****PH writes ���There is nothing mysterious about it. The 'force' that is preventing me from choosing the atheist creed again just now  is my strong desire, which I have developed rationally over many decades, to live in a designed, created and purposeful universe, to which justice, love and liberty are essential. I cannot unlearn the experiences or forget the knowledge which brought me to this desire, though I can, alas,  imagine appalling circumstances which might make we wish once more for another kind of universe. As I say, the key is the desire.  That is why the desire of the atheists is so interesting, and why they are so reluctant to admit this or discuss it. When you desire, you can and will choose what suits your desire. What does Mr Bunker desire, which enables him to choose the cruel,  meaningless and purposeless chaos in which he seeks to live? He won't even accept that his choice is motivated by a desire, so he won���t talk about it. Note that, one again,  I can easily answer his question. He won't even consider mine.

 

���Paul Small��� also joined in to say:

PH's attempts to rationalise his beliefs just cause him further problems as his logical inconsistencies are exposed. He concludes this piece saying: "Knowledge of God's existence or non-existence is not available to us. Fact, reason and logic cannot take anyone any further than agnosticism, as he well knows." Yet earlier in the same post, PH wrote: "Belief in God, once it is accepted, requires the individual to reform and govern himself according to eternal laws which he cannot change - often to his own severe disadvantage." This is self-contradictory. If knowledge of God and His existence is unavailable to us, then so is any knowledge of His supposed eternal laws. Instead, PH's principle that we choose our beliefs must apply equally to our beliefs about these 'eternal laws': Does God exist? You can choose Yes or No. If you choose Yes, then is (for example) homosexuality a sin? Is it wrong, acceptable or a duty to kill non-believers? You must choose yourself because fact, reason and logic cannot tell us. The same is true for every belief about God, if it is true for the belief that He exists in the first place. How can you reform and govern yourself according to laws if you do not know what those laws are? On the other hand, if you do know what these eternal laws are, you must necessarily also know that God exists. In which case, it is not a choice.

 

****PH replies : Mr ���Small��� is (this is so common) confusing two different processes. One, the choice of belief in a God or a comparable force(see discussions elsewhere about Einstein, Spinoza, etc) and two, the actual religion which the believer then adopts, or perhaps doesn���t. They are distinct. Once one has decided to believe that there *is*an absolute, one then has to try to discover what it is and what this fact means to us. This is the cause of philosophy and of theology, and of the huge energy devoted by so many very clever people over so many centuries to trying to establish this from the various instructions we appear to be have been given. You have to accept first of all that there are rules. You must then spend the rest of your life trying to discover what they are, and how to obey them. But Christ���s summary of the law, combined with the Sermon on the Mount and the parables, all in His own words, seem to me to me to offer a fairly straightforward guide to anyone seriously interested. But of course you have to approach them in that way, not as a teenage scoffer.

 

 

My thanks to

���John Baker���, who wrote:

 

���This concept of 'choosing' to believe something is really causing people problems. It shouldn't. It should be uncontroversial. Choosing to believe something is not restricted to the philosophical or the spiritual. People choose to believe all kinds of things, including and particularly of a temporal nature, every day of their lives. Most of the 'facts' people think they 'know', they have chosen to believe. It is impossible, for an individual to 'know' that a particular event or discovery occurred, if they were not themselves present, and it wasn't recorded on some reliable medium. They have to take the word of others. Or not take the word of others. Most of the 'facts' about events in the world are derived by individuals from media of some kind, or from word of mouth, not from personal experience. An individual may sit down to watch a BBC news report about some event that the BBC claims happened. Most individuals do not start phoning around to check if the news report is true. They believe the report is true, they believe the report is untrue, or they don't form an opinion. If they believe the report is true, they are choosing to do so. They base their choice on something they already believe. Such as, the BBC is a source of authority, and is trustworthy. If they believe the report is untrue, they are choosing to do. They base their choice on something they already believe. Such as the BBC is purveyor of propaganda, and is untrustworthy. It will often not be possible for an individual to verify the report, even if they wanted to, and had the time, and money to do so. A event could be between two other individuals who attest that something specific was said, but that was not recorded on any medium. Whether the first individual believes the other two individuals is a matter of choice. They can't 'know' what happened, if they weren't there. This extends to any event at which an individual wasn't present, or experiment they did not carry out themselves. People do not start carrying out an investigation, an experiment, or calculate probabilities, for every potential 'fact' that comes to their attention. It is as impossible for individuals to 'know' about most of the things they think know about, as it is for them to peer beyond the universe and 'know' if there is a God or no God. Everyone chooses to believe things, every day.���

 

Likewise to Peter Charnley, who wrote:

 

 

���@James | 28 July 2015 at 02:27 PM ���James��� is firing wide of the original mark with many of his replies. James:-���On the point about the complex universe being evidence for a theistic God. This is, at best, an argument for pantheism or deism, not for theism, and certainly not for the Abrahamic God. No claims in the Bible are supported by the complexity of our universe.��� This has got nothing to do with the straightforward question of whether there is or is not a God - which is the original primary question as to whether extraordinary structured complexity arose naturally or as a consequence of a conscious act.��� James:-���Einstein was a believer in Spinoza���s god, which has nothing to do with theism. He specifically rejected the idea of a personal God. All this is easily verifiable. His beliefs on God and its existence are far closer to mine, than to yours, not that it matters much.��� Again this is a dilution of the point under consideration. There are many people who believe in a Spinozistic or Deistic 'God of Nature' who or which leaves Nature and its creatures (including its human creatures) entirely to their own devices. I believe that Anthony Flew, famous for being ���the world���s most notorious atheist who changed his mind���, moved through this stage. And he famously argued against Richard Dawkins that ���natural selection��� does not explain the existence of life, affirming that there is today no satisfactory naturalistic explanation for the first emergence of life from non-living matter, or for the capacity of life to reproduce itself genetically, and observing that there isn't even any sign of such an explanation on the horizon 'if indeed��� as Flew suggested ���there ever could be.' In short, James, the fact that a Spinozistic God has nothing to do with theism is irrelevant to the question of whether the universe came into being as a deliberate act of a conscious mind - i.e. a God. James:-���When Dawkins talks about aliens, he specifically describes them as ���Godlike���, and different from the usual beliefs in God in one important way: Their complexity would only come about through a process similar to that of evolution. What this has to do with theism, I have no idea.��� Again you are functioning wide of the debating mark, James ��� for largely the same reasons as above. James (now entering into the realm of a theistic personal God) :- ���On the general topic of hedonism and selfishness. It is entirely possible for these things to be criticised without needing to appeal to Christian Morality.��� You may very well abhor hedonism and selfishness as a self-proclaimed atheist. However, simply dismissing the origin of absolute morality does not discount that origin ��� whether you believe in it or not. James:-���Finally, I have one question. As you believe that belief in God is a choice, how is it that objective morality can come from it?��� For the same reason as above. You can choose to acknowledge that origin or to deny it. However people who deny a definitive source of absolute objective morality are more likely to stray from it than those who don���t. The history of the human race, particularly the 20th century, makes that self-evident.���

Why I Can't Stand Cyclists who Overtake other Cyclists on the Inside

Wheezing slowly up a not-particularly steep hill on my far-from-lightweight bike, my backpack stuffed with books about the European Union, I heard the sounding rasping rapid breath at my left shoulder and months later was overtaken, on the inside, by another cyclist, one of those scowling depersonalised clones in uniform Lycra and a plastic helmet, i-player buds jammed in his heedless ears,  who have multiplied in their hundreds of thousands in the past ten years. In my view any theoretical gain form wearing the helmet is completely cancelled out by the added danger from not being able to hear what is behind you properly).

 

 Had I turned left just then, as I might well have done, there would have been a bad accident and it would have been entirely his fault.  I have to say I wish I could have caught up with him and told him a few home truths. I greatly fear him and people like him, and their irresponsible and self-righteous stupidity is a growing danger.  I have grown better at anticipating it, but I still haven���t trained myself to expect it as often as it actually happens.

 

The road was reasonably wide and not busy. He could perfectly well have overtaken me on the outside. I actually think he went on the inside deliberately, as some sort of thrill (it happens so often in irrational unjustifiable circumstances that I have been forced to this conclusion).

 

  I was a little way out in the road because, like most sensible cyclists,  I expect danger from any parked car. The most likely is that one of its doors will suddenly be flung open in my path. The other (especially in these days of near-silent electric cars, where the tell-tale plume of exhaust and mutter engine are absent) is that the car will swing out without warning. It���s always been my rule to assume these dangers.

 

I ride, in fact very defensively. While riding, I adopt an attitude of total mistrust of all motor vehicles. I assume (often correctly) that their drivers may technically have seen me, but have not registered me as a significant object. Where the car has (illegal) tinted windows, I assume this twice over. When nice, kind, decent motorists offer to give way to me, I stonily ignore them, because I cannot square their (rare) behaviour with the indifferent or hostile road etiquette of the majority. I have to maintain my defensive hostility at a high pitch all the time. It's often reciprocated, and quite unprovoked. Many believe (I think they got this off a TV ���personality���) that I am not entitled to use the road because I ���don���t pay road tax���. Few remember anything of the Highway Code, especially about showing consideration to other road users.

 

I won���t say my ultra-defensive attitude keeps me safe. There is no safety on the road. I���d just say it has kept me safer than I would have been if I hadn���t adopted it, long ago, when I was one of the very few adult cycle commuters in London or indeed in the country, and was mocked or despised by colleagues for my eccentricity.

 

 

Since then, many aspects of cycling have got much better. Cycle lanes are a lot better than no cycle lanes, though they often turn abruptly into car parks or run out when you need them most. Brakes now work in the rain. They used not to, even the expensive leather ones which were better than nothing. Gears are simple and easy to use, quite unlike the old feeler-gauges on the frame, so placed that you had to let go of the handlebars to use them. The bikes themselves are lighter and stronger,  the tyres tougher, lights a thousand times better and more conspicuous, reflective gear far easier to obtain and inventively designed.

 

But drivers are more heedless and more hostile, and the law against driving while texting or phoning is, to all intents and purposes, dead as it is almost never enforced. And then there are the other cyclists. They havem, in recent years, made riding far, far more dangerous.

 

I am not a purist. Sometimes, at vicious junctions designed by homicidal traffic planners to force cyclists into the paths of speeding juggernauts, I will cautiously ride on the pavement, giving way to pedestrians if they appear. I���ve even been known to ride the wrong way up a  brief stretch of (deserted) one-way street, rather than ride half a mile to stay legal.  At any sign of oncoming traffic, I will dismount. At some very slow-to-change traffic lights I will dismount, wheel my machine past and then remount, to show respect for the law. I might have gone through one or two as they changed from amber to red.  But I regard deliberately riding through a red light ( especially on a pedestrian crossing) as a serious sin, as well as an offence.

 

There���s a simple reason for this. The law is what protects us.  Nothing else does. If you drive around in a  ton of steel and  glass, and drive through a red light, you probably won���t be badly hurt if it goes wrong. The same���s not true if you���re on a bike.  If red lights are just advisory or some sort of leftover Christmas decoration, then it won���t be the people in the cars or the lorries that have most to lose. And if the law protects you,  you should protect the law, all the time and especially when it doesn���t suit you. I simply don���t buy the claim that jumping red lights is safer. Staying ahead, where you can be clearly seen, is clearly safer than being stuck alongside a big lorry. But it���s not the only choice. If you can���t get ahead, then stay behind. There���s not that much hurry, anyway.  

 

The same is true, in a  slightly different way, about overtaking on the inside. When in motion on a two-way road, it���s almost impossible to drive or ride safely if you have to watch both sides in the mirror, or glance repeatedly over both shoulders, and keep an eye on the road ahead for crazies coming towards you in the middle of the road.  You���re not even supposed to do it on Motorways, where the head-on danger is a lot less. Any driver knows that you shouldn���t do this.

 

Cyclists do (I do) ride slowly and cautiously alongside stationary or very slow-moving cars on the inside in some circumstances, though I much prefer to pass them on the offside. This is awkward, and unlovely but there's a good reason for it. It is often essential if you are to make any progress on the jammed roads of modern Britain. It is not ideal. The fear of the suddenly opened door is even greater when you are doing this than when you are riding past parked vehicles.  In many cities there are actually cycle lanes where this is encouraged by the authorities. Urban drivers have, I think, grown accustomed to it and the risk is, in any case,  much more to the cyclist than it is to the driver.  

 

But why do cyclists (who have so much to fear from, a war of all against all on the roads) repeatedly and needlessly do it to other cyclists who have left a sensible distance between themselves and parked cars? Or who are simply riding a reasonable distance out into the road to assert their freedom to be there?  I can't see what they gain. I can see it causing horrible needless accidents. I am growing used to it and am learning to expect this stupidity alongside all the others I see on the road. But it still seems to me to be irrational, verging on the spiteful. Can anyone explain?    

Groan. An Atheist writes....

Some interest has been shown in a posting by someone calling himself 'James'. For any who think that this contains original or interesting challenges to my view that religious belief of any kind is a self-interested choice, I have wearily inserted my responses in his posting below, marked***. It doesn't. As usual, he is free to reply at length if he wishes.

 

'James' writes: You've changed my mind on many things, drugs and addiction, grammar schools, the crisis in Ukraine, the goodness or otherwise of the European Union and better affirmed things I already believed regarding liberty and free speech. You (and your brother) have done a great deal to get met to think independently and to not be concerned with the consensus or with fashion.

So I comment here not as a closed minded, unthinking, dogmatic atheist, but as someone genuinely interested in having my mind changed. But some of the things you say on the topic of God and his existence seem to me to be wrong.

Belief in what is true and what is not true is not a choice, this is the case for every single idea with which we are faced, including God. I do not chose not to believe in God, it is simply that there exists no evidence for such a being, nor any good argument.

****PH writes: This is simply silly. As I said in the podcast, the question is not whether there is evidence, but whether his prejudice will allow him to admit that evidence. The existence of a vast and intricate universe engineered to very fine tolerances is strong evidence, though not proof, of the existence of something which might be called 'God'. History is full of eloquent arguments, logical, philosophical and moral, for the existence of God. There is a persuasive case for saying that Einstein was a theist in this matter, though not a follower of any religion. And Richard Dawkins's speculation on the possible intervention of aliens (whose existence remains unproven) seems to me to be essentially Theist in nature. It is not necessary to accept the many arguments for the existence of God to grasp that they are powerful even if they are not conclusive. Likewise, I accept that there is evidence, but not proof, for the non-existence of God, and arguments against his existence which are powerful but not conclusive. ***

'James ' : And when faced with no evidence and no good argument

(***PH writes: Which he isn't, see above)

what is one to do other than reject the claim? ������You don���t believe in addiction because no objective proof can be presented. I don���t believe in God because no objective proof can be presented.

***This is a rather boring multiple category error, which could only be made by someone who is not thinking as he writes. Belief in God, once it is accepted, requires the individual to reform and govern himself according to eternal laws which he cannot change - often to his own severe disadvantage. 'Addiction' is a concept (not a *belief*, as it happens, but a thing claimed by its adherents to be known and true, without evidence) which releases the individual from obligations and rules, and permits gross self-indulgence by excusing it and denying responsibility for it. Also, equally importantly, religious belief *is* a belief,which those who hold it recognise as a belief, as distinct from knowledge.

Now, if anyone ever said merely that they *believed* that addiction existed, that wouldn't especially trouble me. By doing so, they would be giving me permission to disagree with them, and making it a matter of choice - as is belief in God. But supporters of the idea claim (baselessly) that it is a matter of proven *knowledge*, and invariably respond to my informing them that it is not, by demanding that I disprove it. This reverses the normal process of scientific enquiry and discovery, which requires that the advocate of the proposition collects and rigorously tests the evidence for it. . In the case of 'addiction', we have an official state creed of personal irresponsibility, which demands belief in it, and alters law and medical practice to behave as if it did exist . A lot of my taxes, for instance, taken from me under threat of imprisonment, are used to pay for methadone programmes based on a fantasy, with which I profoundly disagree. They also pay for police forces and courts which absolve proven criminals of repeated crimes, much against my desire. ****

'James' :There isn���t any other motive. And this is where I must pick you up on something, the idea that those of us who don���t believe are all selfish hedonists who want to behave in ghastly and immoral ways without fear of punishment.

***PH writes: I do not believe I have ever used the word 'all' in this case . I have praised Thomas Nagel for his generous and thoughtful approach to the subject. And no doubt there are some atheists who live ascetic, selfless lives, though I have to admit I can't think why they bother. In the lives of the non-ascetic, and the non-selfless, I should have thought that, in this fallen world, unrestrained hedonism must play some part. What else is the loud, petulant (and severely mistaken) whine 'Nobody has the right to tell me what I can with my own body' , which we hear so often nowadays, but a demand for unfettered selfishness? Those who utter this whine invariably turn out to be atheists as well as advocates of unrestricted drug abuse and sexual liberation. They often combine in gnat-like clouds to berate me on Twitter for not being my brother ****

Is the characterisation of atheists in this way treating your opponents with due respect and decency that you always ask (and seldom find) in your opponents?

****PH: Why wouldn't it be? I am not making any individual or even universal claim, and any of my opponents are free to show that it is not their motive. But they never do. They encourage me in my belief by ludicrous verbal manoeuvres aimed at avoiding the idea that their belief is a choice, or that they have made such a choice. I long to find atheists who are prepared, like the great Thomas Nagel, to concede that they have reasons for their belief, and that it is a belief, rather than a passively imposed mental vacuum. Our old friend Mr Bunker cited some mysterious nameless force which somehow prevented him from believing in God. Others equally ludicrously maintain that they 'have no belief' in their NoGod, that they have never felt the need to consider the matter and that the theist concept has never even briefly entered their heads at any time in the lives. I simply don't believe them, and am, encouraged in my incredulity by their frantic desire not to discuss this question. A lump of soap may have no belief, or a puddle or (possibly) a toad. Toads, for all I know, may have perfect knowledge of God. But a reasoning being makes a choice. It would be as ludicrous for me to claim that I had never doubted the truth of the Resurrection. Of course I have. I doubt it many times a day, and even more at night. But I conquer my doubts through my desire to believe in it. . ***

'James':It doesn���t seem to me that it is. If I were to say that your reasons for conservatism were not actually your reasons, but because you secretly hated women and homosexuals and the poor, you would quite rightly criticise me as being hostile and foolish.

***PH writes: No, I'd invite you to provide evidence of it, if you made the individual claim. If you made such a *general* claim against conservatives, then you'd have some evidence to support it, for there are such people on my side of the argument and I'd be a fool to deny it. There are also many who do not fut this description. Social, moral and political conservatism is a far broader and less specific position than absolute atheism. In my case, I rather think you wouldn't be be able to come up with such evidence against me personally, so you'd be wrong to claim it against me personally. Frankly, I'd be glad to argue with any atheist who admitted that he *did* have motives at all. It;s their own ridiculous position, that they didn't choose their beliefs, which prevents them from defending themselves against my accusation. That's a problem for them to solve, not for me to solve.

'James' So why is it acceptable to characterise atheists as hedonists who deny the existence of God because they want to behave anyway they can?������

***PH writes : Because it was certainly one of my motives during my long atheist years, which is how I know in grim detail where this path actually leads . Because this is the demonstrable default position of humanity anyway, because it is equally true of many nominal religious believers, whose faith can quite rightly be judged by how well they keep to the precepts they claim to espouse. Because of Somerset Maugham's eloquent and honest description of his own motives in his autobiographical novel 'Of Human Bondage', which chime with my own experience and seem to me to truthfully and persuasively expressed, And because very few atheists are willing to discuss it, at all, preferring the wearisome and comical pretence that they didn't choose their creed. ****

'James:I would be happy to know what you think is evidence of God,

PH writes :No he wouldn't, and I won't oblige. This is just clever-silly stuff. he knows perfectly well what believers think is evidence for God's existence. By claiming he doesn't, he's making a (chosen) declaration of the closure of his mind to the theist case.***

James: and explain to you why I do not find it persuasive.

***PH writes. I know already why he doesn't find it persuasive. He doesn't want to find it persuasive. Next question : 'Why not?'. But we cannot ask him that, because he refuses to admit that his belief is a choice. Snore.

James : But please do not imagine that my atheism is held for any other reason then one of fact, reason and logic.

***PH writes: No need to imagine. It's a demonstrable fact that it's not held through fact, reason and logic. He cannot hold it on those grounds. Knowledge of God's existence or non-existence is not available to us. Fact, reason and logic cannot take anyone any further than agnosticism, as he well knows. Why doesn't he content himself with that? Because he has a reason to be discontented with it. Even acknowledging the *possibility* of God disturbs him deeply. Until he gives me another explanation, I'll assume this is for the normal reason, as it has been among unbelievers for many thousands of years.

How Long Before We See Troops on Our Streets, Just Like Rangoon?

Yesterday my colleague Martin Beckford had a tremendous scoop in the Mail on Sunday . As usual, we had several such scoops, so his was not on the front but prominently displayed on page 5, a right-hand page (these catch the eye rather more than left-hand pages) .

 

Martin wrote : ���A TOP-SECRET plan for the mass deployment of armed troops on the streets of Britain in the wake of a major terrorist attack can be revealed for the first time today.

More than 5,000 heavily armed soldiers would be sent to inner cities if Islamic State or other fanatics launched multiple attacks on British soil - an unprecedented military response to terrorism.

The plan, codenamed Operation Temperer, would see troops guard key targets alongside armed police officers, providing 'protective security' against further attacks while counter-terror experts and MI5 officers hunted down the plotters.

The shocking plans for 'large-scale military support' to the police are contained in documents uncovered by The Mail on Sunday. They have been drawn up by police chiefs and are being discussed at the highest levels of Government, but have never been revealed in public or mentioned in Parliament.

The mass deployment of Army personnel on the streets of mainland Britain would be hugely controversial, even if it helped keep the population safe, because it could give the impression that the Government had lost control or that martial law was being imposed.

Baroness Jones, who sits on London's Police and Crime Committee, said she was 'shocked' at the plans, saying: 'This would be unprecedented on mainland Britain.' And she expressed concern that the troops would not be sufficiently trained to protect civil liberties.

Some police leaders fear that the soldiers would be needed if there were a wave of attacks by extremists inspired by Islamic State or Al-Qaeda, as police forces no longer have enough manpower to cope.

It can also be disclosed today that, one week after this year's Paris massacres, senior police officers discussed raising the terror threat level in Britain from 'severe' to the highest level of 'critical', meaning a terror attack is 'imminent' rather than 'highly likely'. But in the end the level was kept at 'severe'.

The military contingency plan is revealed in the minutes of a National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) meeting held on April 22 at a hotel in Leicester. Documents accidentally uploaded to the NPCC website give details of what was discussed in a closed session.

Under the heading 'COUNTER TERRORISM POST PARIS LARGE SCALE MILITARY SUPPORT TO THE POLICE', the minutes reveal that deputy chief constable Simon Chesterman, the 'national lead' for armed policing, briefed the other chief officers. The paper says up to 5,100 troops could be deployed 'based upon force assessments of how many military officers could augment armed police officers engaged in protective security duties'.

'Discussions were ongoing with Government', the minutes added, saying: 'Chiefs recognised that the Army played an important part in national resilience and supported the work going forward.'

After being spotted by this newspaper, this section was removed from the NPCC website on Friday.

Sources confirmed the detailed plan had been discussed at the highest level and would only be triggered by the Cobra committee chaired by the Prime Minister if there were two or three terror attacks at the same time in Britain, leaving police struggling to respond. Will Riches, vice-chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, said: 'The bottom line is you can't reduce 17,000 police officers and expect nothing to change.���

 

The story was followed on Monday in some other papers,  but not as widely as it should have been and not as prominently as it should have been.

 

I have written before about the strange and disturbing response to the terror attacks in London on 7th July 2005, here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/07/scandal-panic-and-anomalies.html

 

���in which I said ���London went into severe state-sponsored panic (later misreported as phlegmatic calm) over the bombings. My mobile phone stopped working (as did most others) . It seemed to me to have nothing to do with the alleged network congestion which was later given as the official reason for this. There were no unobtainable tones or ���network busy��� messages. The phone just did not work at all.

 

But *before* mobiles stopped working,  the BBC crew with which I was spending the morning received a call. (As I remember, we were filming my BBC4 documentary about Britain and the Common Market, ���This Sceptic Isle���, and interviewing the refreshingly intelligent Lord (Nigel) Lawson,  just off Piccadilly). The call ,as far as I could make out from various muttered conversations,  instructed them to cease whatever they were doing and to return to TV centre immediately because of a ���national emergency���.

  

I am sure I read reports in early editions of the London Evening Standard of troops (not ceremonial , but in battledress and with modern weapons)  being deployed in various central London locations. But they were not carried in later editions and I can now find no trace of them. Official accounts do say that important buildings, such as the Houses of Parliament were ���sealed off���, but do not say who did the sealing, or how. I had the odd feeling that I had glimpsed the outlines of a much more severe response, half-unveiled and then withdrawn when the atrocities turned out to be less extensive than at first feared.

 

A few weeks later, all-party support was obtained for what would become the Terrorism Act, a measure which originally was intended to introduce 90-day detention, and which also created the unEnglish offence of ���Glorifying Terrorism��� , which has always sounded to me like something out of the Soviet penal code of 1936. In the hands of a tyrant (and of course we will never have a tyrant here, so no need to worry) , the Act���s vague provisions are a severe blunt instrument. Take a look at them, and also at the terrifying Civil Contingencies Act of 2004, under which Parliamentary government and almost all the ancient constitutional protections in our law could be suspended in seconds.���

 

Now, it���s my view that troops can do little to help after a terror attack, unless in some way the normal emergency services have been disabled and cannot do their jobs, in which case soldiers , thanks to their discipline,  flexibility, familiarity with shocking things  and general competence, might be expected to step in ��� but not as troops.

 

It���s the nature of terror that it avoids direct clashes with trained armed forces, which would overpower terrorists in any such clash.

 

It cleverly manoeuvres us into making these attacks more damaging and significant than they are.

 

Terrorism is like judo. It uses our strength against us. A highly-developed urban civilisation is easily disrupted by relatively small acts of violence. The terrorists are only too happy when we react with emotional hyperbole to these comparatively small attacks, which seldom if ever threaten our political, social or economic stability (the only exception being the IRA���s successful targeting of the City of London, which played a major part in their victory over the British state). I am not here saying that terrorist atrocities are not horrible, evil and worthy of condemnation. I am just saying that our politicians and media make too much of them, and so they do the terrorists��� work. Terror ,as its own proponents say, is 'propaganda of the deed'. They rejoice at the fuss we make. 

 

By comparison with German bombing attacks on London, Portsmouth, Plymouth and Liverpool (for example) terror attacks in modern times have been comparatively small.

Secondly a peaceful civilisation is inclined to panic at any manifestation of the abnormal, especially when such panic is officially encouraged by incessant wailing sirens, often needless,  and grim-faced politicians on the TV acting as if we have been invaded.  

There are obvious cheap reasons for such behaviour. Any examination of post-terrorism rhetoric from politicians will show that it is usually composed of entirely empty promises to apprehend the culprits, bring them to justice etc, which are usually not fulfilled. When they are, the said culprits are often released soon afterwards in political amnesties and even end up drawing taxpayer-funded salaries.

 

The terrorists are also called various names, which may or may not be true, and are described as ���mindless���. This is a curious thing to say, given the high success rate of terror campaigns in achieving their aims, and the large number of former terrorists who have ended up as national leaders or at least as free, prosperous and well-regarded politicians.

 

Well, all this is by way of business, I suppose. But for me it is the use of terrorism as a pretext for surveillance and increased state power which is the worst of all. And that is why I was so struck, and so dispirited,  by this plan for troops to take to the streets.

 

I felt very sure, in 2005, that elements in the government might have found it convenient( I won���t say they ���wanted��� this, because I shrink in horror from the thought and do not think it true. These people simply are not that wicked) had the 2005 attacks in London been larger than they were.

 

Had they been, then some sort of British version of the ���Patriot Act��� and ���Homeland Security���, might have been feasible, with lengthy detention without trial, compulsory identity cards ,  and all the other sick dreams of those who think like this, rushed through an unprotesting and unanimous Parliament, uncriticised by a similarly unprotesting and unanimous press. .

 

Such people have always existed and emerge like Japanese knotweed when the occasion allows. Give a nobody power, and he will use it (I recall , as a teenage steward at a Trotskyist conference, becoming in an an instant monstrously officious as I wielded my tiny piece of authority, officiously demanding credentials from people I���d known for years. I still blush with shame over it.) The not-famous-enough Zimbardo experiment

http://www.simplypsychology.org/zimbardo.html

 

seems to me to establish beyond doubt that the desire to feel superior or others, and push them around, is part of the original sin innate in us, and as a result, innate in all state institutions unless restrained by powerful forces. The British state (being as it is the direct inheritor of Henry VII���s despotic government, Star Chamber, High Commission and all), has hereditary tendencies in that direction. I believe that newly-appointed Home Secretaries have for many decades been presented by smirking, oily officials with plans for identity cards, detention without trial, jury abolition,  and warrantless searches. Until recently, these politicians had the character and historical knowledge to tell the officials what they could do with these ghastly proposals. Not any more.

 

In fact, two world wars have allowed much of the securocrat fantasy to become reality. On the pretext of a much greater national danger than any we face now (though it was still a pretext) the state has gained powers which our pre-1914 forebears would never have allowed it.

 

Read, some time, the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/36/contents, and see what astonishing powers the British state could take if it decided they were justified.  The legal procedures exist to turn this country into a dictatorship, should anyone with sufficient nerve and determination care to use them. The setting up of the National Crime Agency (originally SOCA), essentially the Home Office���s private police force, is particularly worrying in connection with the CCA. For the first time in modern history civil servants under direct orders from Ministers are empowered to make arrests . Before the NCA was created, this power was normally only enjoyed by police officers sworn to uphold the law and empowered, nay, obliged to resist unlawful orders.

 

This means its existence is far more of a departure than that of the three semi-national police forces that have quietly come into operation , the British Transport Police, the Ministry of Defence Police (known in the trade as Modplod) and the (armed) Civil Nuclear Constabulary. All these are composed of sworn officers under a Chief Constable.

 

The deployment of thousands of armed soldiers on the streets of British cities, not in ceremonial parades but on active duty, would be a huge departure from the practice of nearly two centuries and in my view a long step towards the end of liberty as we know it.

 

Once deployed, they might well become permanent, like the gates on Downing Street and the armed police who infest central London and major airports. Who would have the courage to withdraw them? And so, just as the presumption of innocence is dying, the presumption of freedom under the law would fade as well, replaced, as if we were in Rangoon, by open displays of state power.  

 

The 1689 Bill of Rights was designed to prevent a standing army on British soil capable of being used against the populace, and for most of the time since then the British Army has been mainly overseas.  Since the Peterloo massacre in 1819, there has been a  special horror of the use of soldiers to maintain public order, and this was one of the reasons Parliament eventually gave in to calls for a police force.

 

But Parliament, knowing well what continental police were like, insisted that the police would be unarmed, not under direct government control, definitely not a national force. Their uniforms were to be non-military and understated. They were to act as citizens in uniform, and would have few powers beyond those of normal citizens (all this is detailed in my book ���The Abolition of Liberty���). Bit by bit, especially since around 1965, Parliament���s wishes have been quietly but relentlessly circumvented, so we now have the militarised, armed, glowering state militia that still calls itself the police, but is in fact increasingly what the MPs of the 1820s feared.

 

And now, it seems, we are to have actual troops on the streets���not yet, but I fear the time will come. Once they start planning for it, you may be sure it will happen. I suspect it will begin with an ���exercise��� , like the strange performance we saw in London a few weeks ago near the Aldwych. Then another exercise. Then another, until we and they are used to it. And anyone who criticises it will be told he is complacent about, or soft on terror. It is all very sad, and not what my parents��� generation went through the 1939-45 war to bring about.

Eric Metaxas interviews PH

Eric Metaxas is an American broadcaster and author (notably of a biography of the German pastor and anti-Hitler resistance hero Dietrich Bonhoeffer). He is also an organiser of debates and public discussions(usually in New York City) under the ambitious but enjoyable title 'Socrates in the City'. Last week , as part of this programme of public events, he came to Oxford and interviewed me (among others) in the very evangelical church of St Aldate's .Here, in two podcasts, is the result. It covers quite a few subjects but is based on my reent book'The Rage Against God'. Some of you may be interested. Some of you may not.

 

http://www.metaxastalk.com/podcasts/