Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 194

What Are You Afraid Of?

Let's have an Inquiry NOW into the Correlation Between Drugs and Rampage Killings.

Who wouldn't want such an inquiry, and why?

 

One of the worst things about conventional wisdom is the thick carapace of self-satisfied certainty which protects it from attack.  To dissent from the belief that America���s gun crimes are mainly caused by lax gun laws is to risk the most extraordinary level of semi-deliberate misunderstanding.

 

I say ���semi-deliberate��� because I can���t think of any other way of describing a refusal to listen or absorb which appears to be a conscious and wilful act, and feels like one. In fact, those who are behaving in this way, often very vigorously and self-righteously, do not know that they are doing it. They know, as do all victims of conventional wisdom, that what they believe is the unmixed truth.  Since the abolition of effective death penalties in Anglosphere countries, the liberal response to murderous violence ���supposedly a humane alternative to the swift exemplary execution of heinous killers, actually no such thing -  has always been ���tough��� gun law. So, support for ���gun law��� is not just about policy, but a declaration of allegiance to a particular version of moral rectitude. Thus, anyone who challenges them is wrong, ignorant,  stupid etc.

 

And thus they interpret what they hear to suit this. It is of course quite obvious ��� so obvious and repeatedly argued that it seems to me not be worth stating - that the mass-ownership of guns, unrestricted by law, has *some* influence on crime , suicide, domestic accidents etc. in the USA. This is beyond dispute.  Yet supporters of ���gun control��� almost invariably respond to what I say by assuming that I believe that such gun ownership has *no* influence on these things. I have no such view. I have not said any such thing.  It is a factor.  But is it, in the cases with which we increasingly have to deal, the *decisive* or even the most significant factor?

 

 

 

Many also assume that I���m some sort of gun nut, when I neither own nor seek to own any firearm.

 

They think this because they can then dismiss me as absurd and unhinged. But it���s not what I think, or what I say, or what I do. What I think is that we all need to think, and that to do so we need to escape from this mental clich��. My main opinion is that correlations between drugtaking (legal and illegal) and irrational violence  increasingly demand a proper inquiry into whether there is another more powerful and significant common factor in these massacres. And that to obtain such an inquiry, we need to stop going into a thought-free gun law frenzy each time one of these horrors takes place.  Doing so prevents serious consideration of the problem.

 

I might add that the current furore about the flying of the Confederate Battle Flag near official buildings in South Carolina (while undoubtedly an interesting issue) is almost wholly irrelevant to the case, whereas Roof���s drug use is hugely relevant. Yet which of the two attracts more political and media attention? You guessed it.

 

The question before us is why we are seeing massacres of innocent people by unhinged assailants. None of these massacres is remotely rational. They serve no political purpose, gain nothing material or otherwise for the perpetrator , who in most cases does away with himself at the end.   This is a worldwide phenomenon, not restricted to the USA. Nor does it always involve guns. We learn here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China_(2010%E212) that in China (where gun massacres, such as that in Tiananmen Square, Peking,  in 1989, are a state monopoly, and private citizens are genuinely unable to obtain guns) there are comparable massacres involving knives and hammers. We don���t of course know how common this sort of thing is because China lacks a free press, and incidents of this kind could happen without being reported.

 

People may say that these events are different, and so they are. An unhinged person with a machete , a knife or a hammer is more easily subdued than one with a gun. Even so, he can do a lot of harm beforehand, and the point being made here is that the weapon itself is not the decisive feature of this sort of crime.  No state, not even the Chinese police state, could mount an effective ban on ownership of knives, machetes and hammers. 

 

A gun ban in the USA, even if constitutionally permissible, would not be enforceable without the introduction of a repressive state so powerful as to transform the country. Even then it would be difficult because of the existing levels of illegal gun ownership. Legally registered guns might quite easily be confiscated from their owners. But the millions of illegal ones? Various local gun bans in the USA (notably that in the District of Columbia, whose summer nights echoed with gunfire in its eastern segments, after a gun ban was imposed there) have proved ineffectual, to put it mildly, affecting only the law-abiding.  So if we are interested in stopping or seriously reducing these events, then we need to look elsewhere.

 

People tell me that Britain has had far fewer such events. This is perfectly true, and it would be interesting to wonder why. But, having lived in both countries, I can never warn strongly enough against assuming that the USA is just a big Britain. It is different in almost every conceivable way, and for more than a century (mostly the 19th century , a period during which Britain was not famed for gun crime) Britain���s gun laws were more relaxed than those of Texas.

 

One reason for the difference (out of many) could be that the chemicalising of psychiatry, the replacement of therapy and mental hospitals with bottles of pills, got under way earlier in the USA than it did in Britain, and we are simply behind.

 

There���s also been a huge lack of interest in the drug issue.   I���ve never heard of any serious investigation into the mental state of Michael Ryan, culprit of the 1986 Hungerford massacre, any interest expressed in whether he was taking prescribed psychiatric medication or whether he was a user of illegal mind-altering drugs (by 1986 cannabis had been in common use in Britain for at least 20 years) . Nor have I ever seen any examination of the mental state of  Thomas Hamilton, the culprit of the 1996 Dunblane murders, though Hamilton was clearly in the grip of persecution mania. In both cases, media and official responses were entirely directed towards the issue of guns.

 

The culprit of the 1989 Monkseaton shootings (in which most of the victims survived , and only one died), Robert Sartin,  pleaded insanity at his trial, but again I have seen no detail of this insanity, or of what ���treatment��� he may have had before he dressed in black and went out on a bloody rampage with his father���s shotgun.

 

The 2010 Cumbria shootings by the taxi-driver, Derrick Bird, remain equally inexplicable if the shooter is assumed to be rational. Only if he was unhinged can the actions be explained consistently. But individual madness is rare in humans who have not undergone severe personal shock and tragedy, or some sort of external physical trauma, physical or chemical. But there was only one hint that he may have sought help for his mental health, oddly in a report in an Australian newspaper, otherwise nothing. At the time I suspected he might have been taking prescription ���antidepressants���, and asked if this was so. I was told that it wasn���t so, though I am not sure how this was established beyond question. Had I been looking into it now, I would be equally interested to know if he had been using cannabis. In a report that sent a shudder down my spine, it did emerge that he had been prevented from boarding a Thailand-bound flight at Doha because of a bizarre outburst of rage. One report (Daily Mail, 5th June 2010) said :

 

���DERRICK Bird was deported back to Britain last year - following a drunken rage at an airport.

Security at Doha in Qatar would not allow him to join his connecting flight to Thailand because they feared he was a 'flight risk'.

Bird was heading for Pattaya on a pre-Christmas holiday with taxi-driving colleagues when he began drinking on the plane before a short stop-over at Doha.

An argument started when another member of the group began teasing Bird about money. Friends say Bird lashed out at the departure gate and had to be restrained.

Police deemed that he was too drunk and worried about letting him get on the plane to Bangkok after his violent behaviour. He was held in a secure location to sober up and then put on a flight back to London.

One friend said: 'I heard that there was quite a lot of banter, like you would expect there to be, and they'd had a few drinks on the plane. When they arrived in Doha, they all seemed to be getting on all right. Then when Birdy mentioned that he loved Thailand because it was cheap someone made a joke about being cheap.

'Birdy saw red and went for him and officials had to step in. The friends had never seen him flip before and it shocked them.'

 

The outburst is attributed to drink. Perhaps this is correct, though it seems unlikely to me.  I wonder whether its real cause was in fact something else.  But I doubt if we���ll ever know now.

 

In the case of Raoul Moat ��� see http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/07/where-was-the-robocop-army-when-mister-moat-was-busy-selling-drugs.html

 

we do know that he was taking ���antidepressants��� and steroids. Likewise, though nobody in authority has ever cared about in the slightest, we know that the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik was taking steroids too���.

 

In the 2002 Erfurt school massacre, in which 16 innocent people died in a  country (Germany) with pretty strict gun laws, the culprit (expelled student Robert Steinhaueser) is said in some internet reports to have taken antidepressants and LSD, though the information never featured in English-language reports of his crime. As with so many of those cases, because neither police nor media were interested, this aspect of the matter was not investigated.

 

This interesting essay contains a fascinating summary of the evidence in the case:

 

http://correctmaple.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/school-shootings-drug-theory.html

 

Note the very striking point made about the second Columbine shooter, Dylan Klebold, whose medical history has never been revealed. His accomplice, Eric Harris, had undoubtedly been taking ���antidepressants���.  One interesting point made by this author is that the sort of school shooting we now see as common only really began in 1979.

 

There had been other such incidents before then, but the random shootings of schoolfellows only really begin about 35 years ago.  Did guns become easier to obtain in 1979? No, but by then the now-universal policy of ���treating��� mental illness with powerful mind-altering drugs, instead of admitting the mentally ill to hospitals, was well-established. The widespread prescription of ���antidepressants��� was also common, and of course, cannabis was circulating freely in schools and colleges.

 

In Finland, regarded by some readers of this blog as a sort of leftist paradise, whose gun laws might be viewed by liberals as a model for the USA, there was in 2007 a school massacre at Jokela.  Pekka-Eric Auvinen murdered eight people before killing himself. Auvinen is said in some accounts to have taken ���antidepressants���. A Finnish government report also states ( according to this site http://www.drugawareness.org/ssri-antidepressant-2008-finnish-school-shooting-10-dead/

that Matti Saari, perpetrator of another more recent school massacre in Finland (Kauhajoki, ten dead) was taking SSRI ���antidepressants��� and benzodiazepine at the time of his crimes.  I would be interested if any reader can confirm or indeed deny the veracity of this.

 

According to the Lew Rockwell blog here (without doubt a partisan witness, but judge for yourselves)

 

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/06/no_author/the-big-list-of-drug-induced-killers/

 

���According to a data set of U.S. mass shootings from 1982-2012 prepared by Mother Jones magazine, of 62 mass shootings carried out by 64 shooters, the majority of the shooters (41) were noted to have signs of possible mental illness ��� the precise kinds of mental illnesses that psychotropic medications are prescribed for.

It is a well-documented fact that in the 1980s, a shift occurred in the direction of treating the mentally ill. Rather than institutionalize them, the preferred method was to ���mainstream��� them, encouraging them to function in society while being treated with a mind-numbing array of new anti-depressants being developed by the pharmaceutical industry.���

 

The site then lists a number of relevant cases.

 

Interestingly, the case of James Holmes, culprit of the July 2012 cinema murders in Aurora , Colorado, turns out to have a drug aspect not widely noted at the time. This, I think, is a characteristic of many of these events. Some time after the event, the drug details are unearthed and given limited media play. But most people remain unaware of this and so do not see the correlation. It is only because I am interested already that I know.  This sort of knowledge rarely influences policy.

 

Police found medications in Homes���s apartment, including sedatives and the anti-anxiety drug clonazepam. They also found the antidepressant sertraline, the generic version of the antidepressant Zoloft. See http://www.denverpost.com/ci_22955988/judge-unseals-warrants-affidavit-aurora-theater-shooting-case

 

This wasn���t known at the time. Yet I speculated as follows in my blog of 28th July 2012: ���Another mass killer, another link to drugs

An intelligent person would surely wonder why rampage massacres are becoming increasingly common.

America has always been full of easily obtained guns. But Finland isn���t, and nor is Norway, and nor is Germany ��� yet these horrible events happen there too. 
What���s more, even in the USA mass killings  of this type have become common only in modern times.

The other obvious line of enquiry is legal and illegal drugs, from steroids and antidepressants to cannabis. The culprits in these events are often found to have been taking one or more such drugs. The suspect in the Aurora shooting, pictured in court, where he looked physically ill, has been reliably reported to have been taking the prescription medicine Vicodin, which is often abused.

The New York Post quoted one of his neighbours as saying he had seen him smoking cannabis, a drug whose carefully created ���peaceful��� image is contradicted in many trials of violent or homicidal people.���

 

I might add to this the strong circumstantial evidence that Kiaran Stapleton, the terrifying young man convicted of the random murder of Indian student Anuj Bidve, is a cannabis-user.  This report from the Manchester Evening News contains one of the most astonishing and under-played quotations (about guns and cannabis farms) I have ever seen, and portrays a person who is far from mentally normal and (by his own account) has ready access to cannabis.

http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/im-not-bothered-gunman-kiaran-690858

 

 

And I should mention the appalling and distressing case of David Leeman, who shot his wife Jennie dead at close range with an (illegal) gun.

 

An Exeter jury convicted him of manslaughter rather than murder after hearing evidence that he might have lost control of himself due to antidepressants he had been taking.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-18771406

 

Yet when I call for an inquiry into this increasingly worrying correlation, I am invariably attacked angrily. Why? Because cannabis, antidepressants and steroids are now so widely taken, in some cases by quite influential people, that each drug has a powerful lobby fearful of what such an inquiry might conclude. That is all the more reason to hold that inquiry.

 

Then there was the Adam Lanza case, at Sandy Hook school in Connecticut. At the time of this unspeakable crime there was no information available on what Lanza might have been taking. There is still some coming and going about Lanza���s drug use, on which I have yet to see a final determination.  This (again partisan)  site http://ssristories.org/the-antipsychotic-prescribed-to-adam-lanza-has-a-troubled-history-all-its-own-business-insider/

suggests that Lanza was prescribed an antidepressant, which he rejected. Then it refers to a report in New York magazine (based on  statements by Lanza���s uncle reported in the New York Daily News) that Lanza had later been prescribed the drug Fanapt

 

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/12/aspergers-is-a-red-herring-to-explain-newtown.html

 

If you follow the link you then find this very curious note

 

Editor's Note: This post originally cited a report in the Daily News that quoted Adam Lanza's uncle as saying he was taking an anti-psychotic drug called Fanapt. The Daily News subsequently deleted the quote. It is now unclear whether Lanza was taking Fanapt.

 

Then we find this : http://www.infowars.com/state-of-connecticut-refuses-to-release-adam-lanzas-medical-records/

Another highly partisan site whose report ( based on a recording which makes pretty astonishing viewing) I have been unable to find in any mainstream publication. You may judge for yourself what value to give it.

 

As I was writing this article, the trial of Nicholas Salvador concluded with the Jury deciding he was insane at the time he murdered and beheaded 82-year-old Palmira Silva. Mrs Silva���s family are understandably distressed by this verdict, but there is a good chance that Salvador can now be kept locked up until he dies, which might not have been the case had he been convicted of murder. I also tend to think the Jury were right to attribute his actions to insanity. Consider this. Had the killing had a ���terrorist��� connection, they might have found it harder to do so, even though the circumstances were identical. They might have been accused of ���condoning��� or ���trying to excuse��� Islamic extremism, as I have ludicrously been for my comments on the mental state of the killers of Lee Rigby.

 

Most but not all of the reports of Salvador���s very distressing trial have mentioned his heavy use of cannabis, but as a sort of side-issue or afterthought. In fact, his appalling and unhinged behaviour reminds me very strongly of the conduct of Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo, on the day when they murdered Lee Rigby. See

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/11/theresas-right-we-do-face-a-dire-new-threat-from-people-like-her-.html

 

It is also reminiscent of the murder and beheading of Jennifer Mills-Westley, in Tenerife in May 2011. Once again, the killer, Deyan Deyanov, was a known user of marijuana. Cannabis also connects both the recent ���lone-wolf��� attacks on soldiers in Canada (treated as primarily terrorist by politicans and media), and all the killers in the ���Charlie Hebdo��� affair and its accompanying crimes.

 

But these cases are not connected in the public mind or the official mind or the media mind. Nor does anyone attempt to make sense of them, because the various conventional templates of modern concern ��� Islamic terror, race hate, gun law ��� actually prevent people from seeing any link. As they do now.

 

I really don���t know what purpose people think they serve when they oppose my calls for a proper inquiry into this correlation. If I am right, then they are postponing vital action. If I am wrong then what harm will have been done by looking into it?  

The Go-Between: Doing Things Differently

���The past is a foreign country:  they do things differently there��� . These words must be one of the best opening lines in any novel since Dickens���s introductions to ���Bleak House��� (���LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln���s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill');  or ���A Tale of Two Cities��� (���It was the best of times. It was the worst of times������).

 

The book involved, which I think everyone should read, is ���The Go-Between��� by L.P. Hartley. Some of Hartley���s other books are interesting (The ���Eustace and Hilda��� trilogy especially) but ���The Go-Between��� is his masterpiece, and I have often had the feeling that I was somehow meant to read it. Shortly before I left my Cambridge boarding school, my eye was caught by a glimpse of the original Hamish Hamilton hardback, with its evocative picture of a boy (not much younger than my then age, 14 or perhaps 15) stealing away from a serene, porticoed English country house (you can see a picture of this cover at the book���s Wikipedia entry) . I immediately knew that I wished to read it, though I had never heard of it. When I went back later that day to try to borrow it, it was already out, and, in the hurly burly of the complex months which followed, I forgot all about it. This was probably a good thing. I would have been too young to see its point.

 

Five turbulent years later, I was at a loose end on a sunny early summer afternoon at the University of York. I had no work to do, no essay to write, no leaflets to distribute. So I rambled over to the pleasant, now-vanished little bookshop , Godfrey���s , which was then part of the University Library building. And the book which caught my eye was ���The Go-Between���, this time bearing a picture of the ravishing Julie Christie dressed as an Edwardian young lady,  in a still from a film of the book (not then released in Britain). I had to have it. It cost six shillings, perhaps the last time I ever paid for a book in shillings, which dates it to 1971, when old and new currencies still ran alongside each other.  This was a big chunk of the two pounds I used to take out every week for living expenses, the price of two dining hall meals. I was never truly short of money in those days, but my needs were modest and any extra could throw out the budget dramatically, which was good discipline.

 

Why is it so good? A lot of people seem to have seen the film but not read the book, thus in my missing about three-quarters of the point. The film is perfectly all right, and very faithful to the book in most ways. The music is particularly good, with a strong hint of menace mixed with a lush, seductive prettiness. The setting, at a real Norfolk mansion. Melton Constable Hall, whose own sad story is a separate drama of its own, is pretty much perfect, and the shots of Norwich and the Norfolk countryside make me yearn to return to that remote, motorway-free  and under-appreciated county (how I miss the superb dining cars on the Liverpool-Street to Norwich railway line, which disappeared a few years ago. They were among the last of their kind and almost worth going to Norwich for). As well as Miss Christie and Alan Bates , at that time permanently doomed to pay D.H. Lawrence-type peasant sex-bombs, it is crammed with actors of the kind who helped create the idea of mid-20th century Englishness, especially the endlessly watchable Michael Gough and the majestically beautiful Margaret Leighton, and of course Edward Fox, the master of aristocratic cockney, and born to play King Edward VIII, as he eventually did.   

 

But ��� like many films of books ��� it struggles to convey the writer���s actual voice. And, by intercutting the central character���s return to the scene 50 years later with the events of 1900, it probably confuses those who haven���t read the book.   

 

I will try to tell you why you should read it, without spoiling it for you. It is good about so many things : about the cruelty and strange tribal customs of small boys in private boarding schools, about the two most sensitive borders in the English class system , the first between the modest middle classes and the truly rich, and the second between the merely wealthy and the genuinely well-born; about the wild optimism of those who were young in 1900 and imagined that the new century would be the bringer of nothing but progress and loveliness ( as daft as those who harboured similar illusions about the turn of the calendar from 1999 to 2000, but more observably mistaken, given how much we knew about the 20th century).

 

It also has the wonderful theme of oppressive ever-increasing heat (expressed in proper Fahrenheit temperatures, which actually seem hot)  , only to be brought to an end by a great storm, which duly comes.  And, for me, the fascination felt by melancholics such as I am for the slightly scruffy back parts of noble buildings, where their true nature is revealed and where you can usually be left in peace by grown-ups or people anxious to make conversation when you prefer none - the servants��� stairs , the kitchen gardens and the half-abandoned outhouses . I once lived in a half an Edwardian house on the far outskirts of Chichester which had its own miniature gasworks and electricity plant, both by then derelict,  but enjoyably terrifying and fascinating, especially the gas apparatus with its deep pit and mysterious weights.  And one of my boarding schools occupied a modest but majestic gentleman���s house on a  Devon hilltop, whose stable blocks and estate workshops still partly survived, and where you could find all kinds of devices which would now be in a museum of rural life, still lying about as if the men who used them had gone to lunch and would soon be back.

 

All this appeals greatly, as does the cricket match in which otherwise- hidden conflicts of class , sex and money are played out in the open  (one of the best literary cricket matches, comparable with that in Dorothy Sayers���s ���Murder Must Advertise���, in which the murderer suddenly understands beyond all doubt that he is caught and doomed, and why).  And all of it begins with a sad middle-aged man in a bleak uncurtained attic, remembering the combination which unlocks an ancient diary, and wishing, as he finally recalls it, that he had not���

 

As one does with all the best novels, it is written so persuasively that one wonders all the time if it is in fact true, if these things actually happened. I still do.

Stop it!

A growing number of contributors here, many of them longstanding ones, have taken to posting their comments several times. Please stop doing this. It is needless extra work for the moderator. These comments are not posted immediately, but generally updated twice a day. The fact that they do not appear immediately does not mean you have not successfully posted them. By posting them over and over again you give yourself no advantage. On the contrary, you slow down the whole process. If posts are too long, or are incoherent, or contain links, they will not be posted however many times you send them in. 

Interview with Music

I think I posted a words-only version of this Australian Radio National interview some time ago. This version contains the actual musical selections which I think were missing from the original.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QineglE-jXQ&feature=youtu.be

 

'Posh tests' won't rob your child of a job - socialist snobs did that years ago

This is Peter Hitchens��� Mail on Sunday column

Why is the Tory high command in love with Alan Milburn, a chip-on-the-shoulder Blairite class warrior, who shows little sign of having grown out of the Marxism he once embraced?

George Osborne and Michael Gove have publicly praised this former Labour Minister, and he has been put in charge of a nasty little quango, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.

Under his leadership, this body ceaselessly complains that Britain is unfair (which, of course, it is) while flatly refusing to mention the main reason ��� the disastrous comprehensive school system.

Last week, launching a particularly silly report, Mr Milburn claimed: ���This research shows young people with working-class backgrounds are being systematically locked out of top jobs.

���Elite firms seem to require applicants to pass a ���poshness test��� to gain entry. Inevitably that ends up excluding youngsters who have the right sort of grades and abilities but whose parents do not have the right sort of bank balances.���

The claims of a ���poshness test��� were duly taken up by many in the media, who swallowed them whole. I actually read the report. It is remarkably free of specific evidence from named companies or about named individuals. Much of it is a simple statement of the obvious. Big City firms hire the sort of people who are likely to succeed in the work they do.

And since they can choose from huge numbers of applicants for every job, it is no surprise that they pick men and women from the best universities, who are confident, fluent and literate.

The sad truth is that such people come overwhelmingly from private schools and the tiny few remaining state grammar schools. Some others will come from the sort of schools favoured by our Left-wing elite, which pretend to be ���comprehensive��� but in fact select on the basis of postcode, wealth or religion.

Something similar happens at the opposite end of the labour market. In such unposh sectors as the building trade, employers understandably prefer rigorously schooled Poles to the young victims of British bog-standard comprehensives. That is not the employers��� fault.

People���s fates in life are decided largely by their schools. And many must wish it were not so (as we shall see).

But Mr Milburn (who refuses to tell me where his own children went to school) is, like the whole British political class, a dogged supporter of comprehensive state education.

He can���t admit it���s been a disaster for the poor he claims to speak for. Instead, he blames the employers for picking the recruits they need, not the school system, for destroying the hopes of poor boys and girls early in their lives.

This is deeply unfair, as Mr Milburn���s own press release actually acknowledged in a less-noticed passage: ���Some of our country���s leading firms are making a big commitment to recruit the brightest and best, regardless of background. They should be applauded.���

In fact, much of the report describes the considerable efforts made by such firms to encourage applicants from poorer backgrounds. And it flatly dismisses claims of old-fashioned snobbery.

There is a fascinating passage on judging people by their accents, in which one interviewee says such things used to happen but have now virtually died out.

The real dead hand of snobbery in this country is to be found among Left-wing elitists, dwelling in their warm pockets of state-funded privilege, refusing, after 50 years of failure, to admit that they are wrong about anything.

The REAL reason for gun massacres?

Another mass killing is followed by the usual thoughtless political and media responses. The last time I looked, the southern states of the USA contained plenty of people with stupid white supremacist views, most of them armed.

Indeed, this has been so for more than a century. At the same time, the past few years have seen gun massacres in this country (Hungerford and Dunblane), Finland, Norway, Germany and Switzerland, and knife massacres in China, a police state where guns are genuinely difficult to obtain.

So it would seem that blaming these events on widespread gun ownership and white racialism doesn���t quite work. If all these events were properly investigated (and few are, because conventional wisdom closes the minds of investigators), my guess is that almost all of the killers would be found to have been taking legal or illegal mind-altering drugs.

Often, as in the case of James Holmes, the Colorado cinema shooter, the facts don���t emerge for many months. Or the authorities refuse to release the killer���s medical history, as they have done in the Sandy Hook case.

Dylann Roof, the alleged Charleston murderer, was recently arrested for possession of Suboxone, a drug given to opioid abusers, and suspected of causing personality changes and violent outbursts. A student at his high school described him as a ���pill-popper���.

It is the use of legal and illegal mind-altering drugs that has hugely increased in recent years. Gun ownership and racial bigotry haven���t. Please think about this.

By scattering morning-after pills into the outstretched hands of girls as young as 13, the state believes it may at last bring down the numbers of unwanted pregnancies.

The signs are that this ferocious medical intervention, now to be given out to under-age girls by chemists, is working. And it is doing so where sex education has not just failed, but has been followed by an accelerating increase in the things it claims to prevent.

The pregnancy figures are falling at last, though sexually transmitted diseases continue to spread rapidly, suggesting that sexual activity is not declining.

Well, it���s success of a sort. We���re well on the way to the loveless nightmare of Aldous Huxley���s Brave New World, in which sex has been completely separated from the making of babies.

A few questions arise. Is there any remaining justification for sex education now we have turned pregnancy into an easily curable disease? And does anyone know what the long-term effect this potent chemical dose will have on the bodies of those who use it? Or are they unwittingly taking part in the trials that will find that out?

Don���t blame Rachel for our stupidity

I���m surprised that more people don���t emulate Rachel Dolezal and pretend to be black, or members of some other minority.

Our gullible society rushes to reward such status, often with jobs and money. As I am actually partly Cornish, I am frequently tempted to start some sort of Cornish liberation front in the Home Counties, where our language rights are badly neglected.

I fear to do it because it would probably work. Within months I���d have an EU grant and there would be Cornish-language library books in Stow-on-the-Wold. In which case I���d probably have to actually learn Cornish.

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At Last! 'The Rage Against God' audio version available again in the UK

For some time an audio version of my book 'The Rage Against God' has been readily available in the USA but not, for reasons too obscure to explain, in the UK. Now at last it can be found again in the UK here

 

http://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Biographies-Memoirs/The-Rage-Against-God-Audiobook/B00ZYCSMGS/ref=a_search_c4_1_4_srImg?qid=1434720179&sr=1-4

 

I am most grateful to all those at Audible, Zondervan and Bloomsbury who helped make this happen. All of my three-dimensional books are now available in audio versions, except 'A Brief History of Crime' and its revised paperback version 'The Abolition of Liberty'.  I'll see if I can do anything about this gap. 

 

 

  

"This Sceptic Isle" - My 2005 BBC4 programme in Britain and the EU

Ten years ago , thanks to the last-minute withdrawal of another presenter, I was approached by the BBC to make this documentary about Britain and the EU for BBC4. You may now watch it here

 

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

 

 

Proof that I Have No Sense of Humour

And here from 1999, final proof that I have no sense of humour at all  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EiHQlh2TJM

 

Are Posh Employers Really Discriminating Against the Poor?

Horrible Posh people are getting all the good jobs, thanks to snobbery, or so you might think if you read Monday morning���s newspapers and listened to the BBC.

 

 The ���Independent��� noted :

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/poshness-test-is-the-new-glass-ceiling-lack-of-wealthy-background-denies-workingclass-people-top-jobs-says-research-10319541.html

 

��� Thousands of working-class people are being denied jobs at top firms, as they effectively need to pass a "poshness test" to join elite employers, according to the official body set up by the Government to promote social mobility.

���Executives are more likely to judge potential recruits by how they speak than by how well they might do the job, research by Alan Milburn's Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission found. Its review shows that more than two-thirds of the job vacancies in elite legal and City firms are filled by university graduates who have been through private or grammar schools. By comparison, nearly 90 per cent of schoolchildren have a comprehensive education, compared to just 7 per cent attending fee-paying schools and 4 per cent going to selective grammar schools.

���Discrimination comes about because the managers who conduct job interviews do not like working-class accents, the commission reported, but are impressed by young people who have travelled widely, which naturally favours those from well-off families, One employer frankly admitted his firm's recruitment practices were loaded against young working-class applicants. But, he asked: "How much mud do I have to sift through in that population to find that diamond?" Even when a working-class youth is on first rung of the ladder, he or she is likely to be passed over for promotion because of "the tendency of more senior professionals to promote in their own image and thus 'misrecognise' merit," the commission said.���

 

Ah, an independent commission. How nice.  But who���s in charge of this ���independent��� body?  Here���s a clue :

 

���This research shows that young people with working class backgrounds are being systematically locked out of top jobs,' said Mr [Alan] Milburn, the former Labour Cabinet minister, much beloved by the Cameron Tories,  who chairs the commission. 'Elite firms seem to require applicants to pass a 'poshness test' to gain entry. Inevitably that ends up excluding youngsters who have the right sort of grades and abilities but whose parents do not have the right sort of bank balances.'

 

And how independent is it? And of whom is it ���independent���. The Commission���s website is adorned with St Edward���s Crown and clearly part of the government. It describes itself as ���an advisory non-

departmental public body��� (another way of saying ���Quango), sponsored by those well-known independent organs, the Department for Education, the Cabinet office and the Department for Work and Pensions���.  Presumably the government provides it with office space and salaried staff to run it. Its commissioners, apart from Mr Milburn (of whom more later) are Great and Good ���  one is Baroness (Gillian) Shepherd, a wettish former Tory Education Secretary from John Major���s era, another is chairman of an academies trust and mixed up with the ���Centre of Social Justice��� itself very close to the government (another Commissioner is also prominent in this body). One���s a local government veteran and former chief executive of Barnardo���s , these days in the forefront of political correctness . One���s a social policy academic. Two are campaigners against ���Child Poverty��� (aren���t we all? ��� at least I���ve yet to meet anyone in favour of it).

 

And then there���s Mr Milburn, like his sort-of twin Stephen Byers, a Blairite beloved by the Cameroons. Back in 2008 George Osborne praised both of them in the ���Guardian newspaper . He said (of education and health reform) ���Now I think that's a big political challenge for us. And it's a big political challenge - there are people in the Labour party like Alan Milburn and Stephen Byers who would agree with us  http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/sep/09/conservatives.georgeosborne. In the same interview Mr Osborne interestingly described himself (accurately) as a ���social liberal���.

 

What of Mr Milburn? After another of his reports, on social mobility, I asked him (via the Commission) where his own children went to school. He declined to tell me, so I don���t know.  I���m not sure that a public figure given to strong pronouncements on the education system should be so coy.

 

 

But, as I have many times pointed out, there are other forms of privilege apart from private schools and selective state schools, and these (often in the form of exceptional ���comprehensives��� in pleasant catchment areas with sizeable Oxbridge entries) are often used by left-wing politicians who wish to give the appearance of egalitarianism without suffering from its less agreeable side.

 

 

Mr Milburn is an interesting person, no doubt.  In the ���Independent��� of 3rd June 2006, Sean O���Grady wrote of him: ���Indeed, so intense did his political motivation become that he dropped out of his doctorate, and his politics soon acquired a very specific bent. Alan Milburn became a Trot.

���For a few years in the early 1980s, Milburn ran the Days of Hope radical bookshop in Newcastle and became involved in the International Marxist Group, the British section of the Fourth International, founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938 and led for a time in Britain by Tariq Ali. The IMG's intellectual guide was a Belgian Marxist theoretician called Ernest Mandel, a friend of Fidel Castro who, it is said, never lost his faith in the eventual triumph of the proletariat. Milburn shared a house with members of the group and, according to Paul Foot, rigorously flogged Marxist literature. Those closest to Milburn acknowledge that he was indeed a Trotskyist at the time. Difficult though it may be to imagine the future champion of the private finance initiative surrounded by skank-heads and back copies of Red Letter and Black Dwarf, an extremist pedigree is in fact not unusual in New Labour. Even Peter Mandelson used to be a Stalinist.

���Milburn says he has now "grown up". "There is nothing to hide. Like many people in the early 1980s I had very left-wing views. The Labour Party and myself have done a lot of growing up since then. The party has changed and I have changed." More to the point is the lingering whiff of cannabis smoke that hangs over that time - not for nothing was Days of Hope also known as "Haze of Dope". Now, those closest to Milburn say that dope was "not his cup of tea" and that he did not use the substance, implying that, whatever the tastes of the clientele, it would have weakened the ideological drive of Newcastle's nascent revolutionary cadre.

���Milburn left the IMG "by 1984", although there is some vagueness as to when he joined the Labour Party: "after the 1983 election" is about as exact as it gets, leaving open the intriguing possibility that Milburn was an entryist. In any case he was heavily involved for the rest of the 1980s in his work as co-ordinator of the Trade Union Studies Information Unit, which was funded by local government and unions, and in leading the Sunderland "Save our shipyards" campaign. He also helped to found trade-union CND. So Milburn had by the mid-1980s moved into the safety of the broadly Kinnockite soft-left mainstream. Indeed so mainstream was Milburn that when the time came for the party to drop its unilateralism in 1988, it was Milburn, as chairman of the Newcastle Labour Party, who oversaw the passing of a motion for the party conference to this effect. At this time, so his allies claim, Milburn's shifting politics were "almost indicative of the thought processes of Labour". Milburn, like Labour itself, was beginning to tire of gesture politics. This was the "life is a bitch" moment. All must be subordinated to gaining power. A Blairite was born.���

 

The process by which revolutionary caterpillars became Blairite butterflies is a fascinating one, needing as much understanding as the biological process on which my metaphor is based.  The Blairite must shuck off constricting layers of stuff about the workers and the unions, about ���capitalism��� and  nationalisation, and then flutter forth as a liberated cultural revolutionary, with the correct set of opinions on immigration, the family, sexuality, education, and of course the EU and national sovereignty.  But in my view he is still fundamentally the same creature as he was at the start.

 

Far too many dim ���right-wing��� persons , and a fair number of dim 'left-wing��� persons, mistake the outer trappings for the inner thing. They should re-read, or even read, the original 1848 Communist manifesto, and see that it is fundamentally a socially and morally *radical* document, recognising the revolutionary power of capitalism. Much of what we now think of as ���left-wing��� is in fact a set of opinions which developed at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, under the influence of Methodism and the trade unions, both much weakened since then. The traditional British left never had much time for real revolutionaries, and vice versa, as Ralph Miliband rightly pointed out in ���Parliamentary Socialism���, the work in which he dismissed the Labour Party as a waste of time.  Perhaps his sons should have listened to him.

 

 

One of my favourite bits of the Marxist-to-Blairite transformation is the way they were all fervent unilateral disarmers when Britain���s nuclear weapons actually mattered in the Cold War balance. But  as soon as the Soviet threat had gone forever, Britain no longer had any conceivable need for a nuclear missiles, and NATO had completely lost its purpose, they became Natopolitan bomb enthusiasts ( and indeed liberal warmongers here, there and everywhere).  Anthony Blair himself was so embarrassed by the amazing contradiction that in 1994 he actually tried to pretend he had never been a member of CND, until Michael Heseltine, in a joyous moment, produced the proof. But what would at one time have been a devastating exposure made no difference at all.  Mr Blair was never required to square the two positions, and by the time he revealed himself as a liberal utopian warmonger of Olympic standard, everyone had forgotten his ban-the-bomb days.   

 

 

A much more interesting indication of Mr Milburn���s real politics is the searing egalitarianism which he pursues through the Commission he heads.

 

The report is in fact fascinating, if ploddingly written. Having learned not to rely wholly on newspapers for my news, I went to the actual report

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/434791/A_qualitative_evaluation_of_non-educational_barriers_to_the_elite_professions.pdf

to see what it said. It isn���t quite as portrayed. For a start it is full of the word ���may��� rather than the more certain expressions ���is��� and ���are���

 

My favourite paragraph is on page 11

 

���Participants in the current research suggested that students from more modest socioeconomic backgrounds *may* self-select out of the application process in relatively high numbers, even when educated at Russell Group universities. This can be explained in part because some of the activities conducted during campus visits *may* reinforce elite firms��� image of exclusivity, so that students from these backgrounds *may* feel that they will not fit in, or that their academic credentials *might* not be acceptable.���(my emphases)

 

I was also struck by the anonymity of all the sources, and by the nuances in the much-quoted passage about finding a  diamond in the mud (page 45). Here it is in full:

 

���We do see the problem and for us it boils down almost to a budgetary one, being frank about it . . . is there a diamond in the rough out there at the University of XXXX? Is there a diamond out there? . . . statistically it���s highly probable but the question is . . . how much mud do I have to sift through in that population to find that diamond? A reasonable amount . . . we���ve got a finite resource in terms of people hours and finite budget in terms of cost to target there ������

 

Which is only common sense, and just a metaphor, not the dismissal of unsuitable applicants as mud. How can I be so confident of this?

 

First because of the simple common sense of it, which the report acknowledges on pages 11 and 12

 

���Intelligence is important for a professional career. Academic credentials are generally considered within firms to indicate intelligence and critically, to predict success in professional qualifications. However, though they represent an essential license to practice, success in professional qualifications is not considered by many participants to be indicative of a successful career. Neither is it evident that students with the highest scores in, for example, application forms, initial interviews or psychometric tests will necessarily enjoy the most successful careers

 

���However, for most elite firms, this is not necessarily important since screening techniques, particularly the use of academic credentials and psychometric tests, represent a defensibly meritocratic means of reducing the extremely high volume of potentially suitable applicants to more manageable numbers. (My emphasis)  Mainstream recruitment and selection techniques are therefore considered by current professionals to be cost effective and efficient. Many participants acknowledged that social inclusion could be improved should firms seek different ways to measure potential, which might also deliver new professionals with a wider range of skills and abilities. However, doing so is considered expensive, difficult and high risk.���

 

The report is absolutely determined not to acknowledge the main reason for the decline of social mobility in modern Britain, the abolition of hundreds of selective state grammar schools ( usually known as ���academies��� in Scotland).  On page 21 it says ���Historically, the UK has been a society with relatively low rates of upward social mobility . The stratified educational system of the UK is said to play a major role in reproducing the class background (and rituals) of key institutions. As a result, strong links remain between social status, education and familial background. To an extent, these features of UK society were weakened as a result of the decades of social modernisation and explicit commitment to meritocratic values which followed World War Two.���

 

You might say. But if you did say, you surely ought to acknowledge the part which selective state schools, widely(though not universally) available played in that from 1944 to about 1970.  Though of course Mr Milburn's report now makes great play of the fact that pupils from the few remaining selective schools are now among those it criticises as the privileged posh. This is of course partly because those schools , especially in commuter areas, are now besieged by the middle class and are far more selective than they would be if they were evenly distributed throughout the country. But it is also partly because state selective schools which select on merit rather than money have better outcomes for their pupils than comprehensives. This is a fact, recently confirmed by a Europe-wide study which( I believe) was intended to demonstrate the opposite)

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2581479/Poor-pupils-disadvantaged-backgrounds-children-benefit-grammar-school-system.html

 

 

It is a fact which would suggest that the state should make fairer access to good selective secondary schools, and the restoration of grammar schools to every part of the country,  a principal aim of its policy.

 

But it is this logical conclusion which the report strives mightily to avoid.

 

Fundamentally, it is platitudinous, stating that employers will look for the best-qualified candidates for the job on offer, and will also seek out people who can be expected to understand quickly and readily what is required of them. Of course they will. What, I wonder, does the Commission do when it seeks a new staff member? I am sure that any good school will be able to instil such things in its pupils. By the time people are being chosen for jobs, it is more or less too late. Which brings us back to the fundamental problem of the schools selecting by money, not merit, and thus reinforcing the very thing the report condemns. Yet the report won���t mention this issue. Because it is written for a body run by someone committed to comprehensive education, presumably for ideological reasons, for a government which is also committed to comprehensive education.

 

Well, in that, Mr Milburn is pretty much the same as the much ���mocked  Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing candidate for the leadership of the Labour Party, who actually split from his wife

 

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/who-jeremy-corbyn-everything-you-5818431

when she wanted to send their son to a grammar school rather than to an inner-city comp. There is something gruesomely admirable about Mr Corbyn���s passion for egalitarianism, though one has to feel a deep grief for his family. At least it���s an openly, honestly fanatical view, rather than the mushy, evasive approach of Mr Milburn���s Commission. And it���s also brutally honest about the consequences. Mr Corbyn (unlike Mr Blair and his disciples , Harriet Harman,  Michael Gove and David Cameron) appears not to have sought a loophole in the ���comprehensive��� wall, a school which was officially comprehensive but actually highly selective.

 

Does the report really say that people are being rejected because of their accents?

 

Not quite . See this, from page 40: Interviewees did concede (p.90 et al)  that accent could sometimes affect judgments. But nothing like as much as it would have.

 

���The word ���polish��� was used repeatedly here. This appears to apply less to speech and accent than perhaps it once did, although both remain important, especially at ���extremes���. If you go back six or seven years . . . very occasionally you would get people saying ���we couldn���t possibly have this person in the office because of their accent���. And it tended to be that it was a cockney accent or an Essex accent and on a couple of occasions I heard ���well, they sound a bit like they���re a used car salesman.��� . . . That has changed. I���d be very surprised if you heard that anywhere now in the City. (Acc_V_2) In my first appraisal with my then partner, he made a comment to me that because I was from the north of England I had to be very careful that people didn't think I was a . . . fool . . . And that's gone . . . more so, very much more so now. Well, I think so. But in the traditional law firms the people that are getting churned out, it's all quite samey . . . (Client_9) We are fussed asked about things like grammar, but we���re not that fussed about local accent, or even institution to a large degree. (L_X_1)

 

By the way, the report clearly (on p.13) if grudgingly concedes efforts on the part of elite employers to overcome the problem.  This seems to me to undermine the impression given that posh recruiters are spurning the proletariat. Plainly this does not have a huge effect, because most people���s life-chances are, alas, determined by their mid-teens.  But see what you think.

 

���A range of initiatives are though in place to broaden the backgrounds of the young people elite firms employ, as ���add-ons��� to mainstream recruitment and selection processes.

 

�� Often working with charities and third sector organisations, or as consortia, elite law and accountancy firms have introduced a wide range of initiatives to improve social inclusion. A key focus on the ���supply-side��� is to raise aspirations amongst students and school children from significantly less privileged socioeconomic backgrounds. Initiatives often focus on working with schools in deprived areas, and can also involve identifying students with potential and supporting their development through internships, skills training and mentoring.

 

�� These initiatives are undoubtedly transformative for some students and are therefore valuable on this basis. However, there is little evidence to suggest that significant numbers of students who would not otherwise access the elite professions are currently doing so as a result of these interventions. Participants at most case study firms suggested that though they have sometimes offered intensive support to bright students from substantially less privileged backgrounds, some of whom have subsequently applied to their firm, relatively few have been offered a training contract to date. Interventions are becoming more intensive and sophisticated and are likely to have higher success rates in future. However, our findings suggest two points of caution for schemes that aim to increase participation of disadvantaged groups.

 

�� First, the focus of such initiatives has historically been on raising aspirations and changing the attitudes, behaviours and skills of potential professionals from non- Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission Non-Educational Barriers to the Elite Professions 13 traditional backgrounds. Though welcome, this emphasis neglects the ���demand side��� causes of limited diversity, including the role played by current definitions of ���talent���. Unless elite firms further interrogate their own notions of talent, it is likely that those who participate in access schemes will continue to face barriers to entry and progression. Even greater progress would be made if firms reflected further on those characteristics which represent ���talent���, and minimised those aspects of their current recruitment and selection strategies which tend to reproduce their existing work forces.

 

�� Second, mainstream recruitment and selection processes advantage many of the most privileged members of our society, whilst social inclusion initiatives have focused on some of the least privileged students. We suggest that marginal but still useful improvements to inclusion could be made if many more elite firms could also encourage suitably qualified students from ���ordinary��� backgrounds to apply in significantly higher numbers and, critically, provide them with the support they need to succeed. At present, this group represents a ���missing cohort��� of potential new professionals, who are arguably over-looked by existing initiatives to open access to the professions. There are signs of progress. In particular, ���best practice��� firms are now focusing on the demand-side, including how to adjust their recruitment and selection techniques to become more socially inclusive.

 

�� Best practice firms have adapted their selection techniques, by, for example, no longer screening on academic credentials. Some firms are also exploring the use of socioeconomic data to contextualise academic performance at school. Generally, best practice firms are seeking ways to identify potential in ways that do not rely solely on past performance. Early evidence suggests that these initiatives are opening access on the basis of educational background, especially university, but it is too soon to calculate the precise impact according to socioeconomic indicators.

 

�� During the past five years, many accountancy firms have also expanded their apprenticeship or school-leaver programmes, partly in order to become more inclusive. Compared to graduate programmes, at most firms these programmes are currently relatively small-scale and their demographic profile suggests that whilst new entrants are more diverse with respect to educational background than graduates, the differences can be fairly minor. As such, we must be cautious about whether these programmes are currently making a significant contribution to social inclusion.���

 

Well, of course we should be cautious. But was the wording of the Commission press release (which can be viewed here https://www.gov.uk/government/news/study-into-non-educational-barriers-to-top-jobs-published

��� all that cautious?

 

It said, in part: Rt. Hon. Alan Milburn, the Chair of the Commission, said:

This research shows that young people with working-class backgrounds are being systematically locked out of top jobs. Elite firms seem to require applicants to pass a ���poshness test��� to gain entry. Inevitably that ends up excluding youngsters who have the right sort of grades and abilities but whose parents do not have the right sort of bank balances.

Thankfully some of our country���s leading firms are making a big commitment to recruit the brightest and best, regardless of background. They should be applauded. But for the rest this is a wake up and smell the coffee moment. In some top law firms, trainees are more than 5 times likely to have attended a fee-paying school than the population as a whole. They are denying themselves talent, stymying young people���s social mobility and fuelling the social divide that bedevils Britain.

It is time for the rest to follow the lead of the best and adopt policies that make access to a top job genuinely meritocratic.���

I urge you to read the actual report, and compare it with this statement.

Friends Reunited - Labour and the Tories Combine against Britain

Those of us who were somehow not chilled to the marrow by empty warnings of a sinister alliance between Labour and the SNP can now laugh heartily at the re-emergence of the real and lasting sinister alliance at the heart of British politics.

 

This is the permanent Labour-Conservative coalition, in being since the 1960s,  of social and moral liberals, and of supporters of European federalism. This pact has operated since the passage of the Obscene Publications Act more or less legalised pornography. That Act was the Jenkinsite coalition���s first dry run, duly confirmed by the farcically one-sided Chatterley trial, in which the ���prosecution��� called only one witness. It then collaborated to enact Mr Jenkins���s raft of ���permissive society��� legislation , dressed up as Private Members��� Bills but actually backed by the whips. Its greatest triumph was the cross-party passage of the European Communities Act in 1972, which ended nine centuries of national independence. My own view is that the capture of the BBC by the same forces at the same time was vital to this success.

 

It is this grouping which has arrogated to itself the title of ���The Centre���, which it bestows on whatever formation is pledged to continue this programme, and withdraws from any party which threatens to stray from it. The real political struggles in this country largely take place in internal party convulsions ��� the Blairite takeover of Labour, the overthrow of Margaret Thatcher in 1990, the putsch againsty iain Duncan Smith, the punishment and ostracism by the forces of the ���Centre���  of Labour for daring t choose Ed rather than david Miliband, etc.  

 

On Tuesday, Labour saved David Cameron from a revolt by the battalion of the walking dead known as ���Tory Eurosceptics. By simply abstaining, Labour MPs ensured that the Tory ���Eurosceptics��� were easily overridden by the simpering, toadying multitude of careerists who are at least honest about what being a Tory MP involves. The abstention is supposed to have been unexpected, and to have been arranged at the last minute, according to reports, though it���s really rather hard to believe that Downing Street didn���t both work hard to secure it and expect it, through what are known at Westminster as the ���usual channels���(I once knew the man who performed this interesting, unsung function).  Would they have risked a vote if they had not been sure of the outcome? Isn���t it perhaps the case that Labour MPs discovered from their whips, at the last minute, what they were supposed to be doing?

 

My own suspicion is that the government is simply unable to give way on the specific issue, that of the ���purdah��� rules which in British elections forbid the government by law to intervene in any way in the final weeks of a contest. It doesn���t care for itself, as it has already fixed so many parts of the contest, from the question and the timing to the funding limits,  that it need not weigh in during the last few weeks.  But those rules would also by their nature forbid any involvement by the European Commission, which may well wish to intervene in the matter in tangible ways, and doesn���t care to be told what to do by the Westminster County Council, or British Parliament, as it likes to style itself. Who whom?

 

By the way, isn���t it funny that the EUfanatic SNP  (which can see the implications of this for a future Scottish independence referendum) actually voted with the ���Eurosceptics��� and UKIP? Has the SNP begun to take on the responsible burden of being Her Majesty���s Opposition, now that it is plain that Labour isn���t up to the job?