Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 195

A Interview with a Polish Website

I recently gave an interview to the Polish website Prosto Z Mostu

 

My Polish-speaking readers may see it here

 

http://prostozmostu.net/swiat/hitchens-cameron-chce-unii-do-gor-ural

 

But those of you without Polish may see the English version below:

 

 

 

Let���s start with current affairs. Are you surprised after the last elections?

***Very much so. I had believed the Conservative Party was so decrepit that it could never win another election. I���ve also found that opinion polls are usually broadly right, if you read them carefully.  I was wrong.  I���ve tried to explain, in various blogs, why I think I might have been wrong, but I think the very careful targeting of certain seats, and unscrupulous propaganda uncritically swallowed by most of the media achieved this unlikely victory.  The first of these was made possible by very successful fundraising among the super-rich, as big money can keep alive parties which are otherwise dead. Since 1997, there has been a tendency on the part of the great bulk of the British media to approve of one party, which is awarded the title of ���the centre���. This title was granted to the Conervat9ves after they adopted a broadly left-liberal, pro-EU, politically correct programme under Mr Cameron. Labour *might* have won it back had they chosen the establishment candidate, David Miliband, as leader. But by choosing Ed Miliband, who actually dared to have some opinions, they lost all chance of media backing.

 

 

British electoral system - First Past The Post ��� was widely criticized, mostly by the UKIP. In the same time in Poland, Kukiz���s Movement, which is quite similar in rhetoric to UKIP, seems to become soon the third or even second power in our politics. Their most important pledge is imposing FPTP instead of existing now proportional system. Which one is better?

****FPTP is good in two ways. It allows strong decisive government and tough discipline opposition from a second party which knows it could be the government tomorrow and so is forced to be realistic about its opposition. And it allows the electorate to throw out an unpopular government. Neither of these things is possible in PR systems. I think they suit our country, with its strong adversarial tradition in law, debate and politics, and its potent class system. I wouldn���t necessarily recommend it to anyone else. I think UKIP���s support for PR is baffling  and opportunist. To get a British exit from the EU, they need an overall majority in the Commons. With PR, they will never get this. With FPTP, they might, or a future party might. Perhaps they have been diverted from their political aim by the joys of official recognition

 

 

Is the Conservative Party���s intention to go out from the European Union?

***Of course not. The Conservative Party has from the start been in favour of British integration into the European project.  All its major leaders since Macmillan have been keen supporters (including Margaret Thatcher for most of her political life) David Cameron wants an EU extending to the Urals, and has said so. Some Tory MPs feel the need, from time to time, to pretend to be patriotic. But it���s just posing, and not to be taken seriously.

 

Are they not Eurosceptics?

***Indeed they are, but so what?. A ���Eurosceptic��� is a person who criticises the EU when he is out of office, or at elections, but supports it when he is in office. It is a silly expression anyway. What is there to be ���sceptical��� about? The thing exists. You can be in it or out of it, and that���s the choice.  You might as well be ���sceptical��� about breakfast, or the Moon.

 

You are personally against the idea of referendum in/out. Why?

***Because plebiscites (except in Switzerland where voters rather than the state decide the question, the timing and the conduct) are devices by which governments legitimise with votes what they want to do anyway. They are never fair, or fairly conducted. If by any chance they go wrong, they are soon afterwards re-run and reversed. This referendum is a baited trap. Once it has happened, and the pro-EU side has won, opponents of the EU in Britain will be told that the issue is now settled for good.

 

 We all have firmly in our heads some labels concerning British politics. Right-wing, conservative values and strong opposition to the European Union ��� that���s kind of Tories��� image. Would you say something instead?

***I cannot imagine how the Tories, in practice one of the most socially, morally, educationally and left-wing parties in Europe, manage to sustain this image. It���s much as if people still expected London to be full of people in bowler hats, groping around in smog.  One visit to Britain should be enough to dispel this outdated rubbish. The Tory Party has always been a cynical organisation for gaining office at all costs. At times this may have given it a conservative appearance, but surely not in living memory? The Thatcher era was one of economic and social liberalism, not conservatism.

 

 

What about Labour Party? Left-wing, welfare state, help for poor?

***Labour���s original welfare agenda was long ago accepted by all major parties, and it is left with very little to say about this, apart from making false claims that the Tories are dismantling the Heath Service and the welfare state, which fewer and fewer people believe. It has become the party of the metropolitan bohemians, but again, their sexual, social and educational politics have now been adopted by the Tories.

 

 

The same evil?

*** More or less .Increasing state funding of political parties, supported by broadcasting rules which favour existing parties and discriminate against new ones, plus the huge donations of the super-rich, have enabled both these parties to survive long after they had lost any reason to exist. They are now just career-ladders for professional politicians. If either of them tried to raise money by collecting it on the street a)they would not have enough people to do the collecting and b) nobody would give them anything. Each British election is a sort of street theatre in which the electorate are persuaded to legitimise one or other of these unrepresentative, internally dead organisations. The ballot box is one of the few sacred things left in our culture. Truly sacred things are scorned.

 

 

Is the political collapse of Britain connected to the moral one?

***In a dialectical way, they fuel each other. And don���t forget the economic collapse as well.

 

I���m asking, because you wrote ���The Abolition of Britain���, which describe moral bankruptcy of the UK. How did it come?

***You���ll have to read the book. I can���t summarise more than 300 pages here. But our lunatic entry into the First World War is probably the single greatest cause.

 

Church of England is interesting part of this story. Your church is going more and more liberal: they established priestly and episcopal ordination of women, majority of the clergy is in favour of blessing same-sex relationships or even introducing same-sex marriages. How you can connect it with your conservative views on that matters?

***I���ve no objection to female clergy, some of whom are conservative and much-valued. Same-sex marriage is a tiny non-issue, set beside the general acceptance of divorce and  of remarriage after divorce, and the almost total collapse of lifelong marriage. The church���s failure to defend marriage (described in detail in ���Abolition of Britain���) was the thing that utterly destroyed it. Penitence-free new liturgies and baby-talk Bibles, plus modern music, are awful, but they are symptoms of a deeper loss.

 

 

20 years ago, English criminal in America Nicholas Ingram was waiting for execution. Many people campaigned for clemency ��� the Bishop of Canterbury among them. You were on the other side.

***So should the Archbishop of Canterbury have been. The 39 Articles of the Church (Article 37 specifically) support the execution of heinous murderers ( as does the Roman Catholic catechism, the last time I looked) , and Ingram was a heinous and unrepentant murder, whose guilt was in no doubt at all.

 

 

 Actually, why aren���t you Catholic?

***Because I am English, and of my generation, and Roman Catholicism seems to me to be wholly foreign, also because, while I regard Roman Catholics as friends and allies in the struggle against the modern world, I personally find aspects of Roman Catholic worship and doctrine difficult to accept or support. I think the Anglican compromise between the Catholic and the Reformed versions of our faith is actually a very sensible and thoughtful one.

 

If we are talking about religion: great British writer ��� Gilbert Chesterton once said that the coming era would be a time of religious wars. Don���t we see beginnings of serious religious conflict in the Europe?

***Try as I may, I cannot become a Chesterton enthusiast. On this, as on many things, he seems to me to have been wrong. But he wrote some good poems.

 

 

Although, we hear almost every day about some incidents connected to the Muslim community, political elites seem to be not very critical of them?

***That would depend on where you were. The USA, where Muslim immigration is small, tends to have many neoconservatives who are very militant on the subject, and their allies in Europe are the same. The trouble is that neo-conservatives are also supporters of open borders and unrestricted immigration, so, in Europe but not the US, they are ensuring the growing power of Islam in formerly Christian societies. I think this may be why they are so obsessed with terrorism and the Islamic State. They can give themselves the illusion of being ���tough���, while actually supporting the very process that will (in my view) eventually make Islam supreme in much of Europe, quite peacefully and legitimately ��� the growth of the Muslim population.

 

Maybe I���m not objective, but I feel that even when someone criticize mass immigration it���s about Poles or Romanians, not Muslims. UKIP rhetoric is pretty like that. Are the European immigrants bigger problem or that���s simply kind of political correctness?

***I think British people are worried about all mass immigration. The problem is that they have understood the nature of the problem far too late. It has happened. I suspect it is easier for UKIP to talk about migrants from Europe because they can then not be accused of racial bigotry.

 

 

Thank you very much, the last word is up to you.

*** I think I���ve said quite enough, thanks.

 

 

...And Battles Long Ago . A few responses to readers about 'Meet on the Ledge'

I���ve had many responses , most of them constructive and thoughtful , to the post I wrote a couple of days ago about ���Meet on the Ledge���. I can���t respond to all of them, but this is an extended version of a reply I���ve inserted in a comment made by Olav from Oslo���. It begins with his comment:  

��� Mr. Hitchens,

Let me add that Meet On The Ledge (a song I hadn't heard before) is a beautiful song, and I don't think it's cheap.

 

You seem to argue (correct me if I'm wrong) that modern music automatically is cheap, even if the song moves you.

 

But can a cheap song really move you in this way? If so, by what criteria do you call it cheap? That they happened to deliver the song with different instruments than the classical composers?

 

Do you think it's the case, that modern songs (even those who moves you deeply) automatically can be labelled as cheap, and classical pieces (even the forgettable ones) automatically can be labelled as a higher form of art? If so, why?

 

The lack of answers to these questions brings me to the conclusion that you're judging modern music on political, cultural and social grounds.

 

Sorry again about my notorious bad English.

 

********

My reply begins here:

It's a reference to a remark usually attributed to the playwright Noel Coward but actually one he put into the mouth of the character Amanda in 'Private Lives'  "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is" . I've looked it up and she says the line in a quarrel with her husband Elyot, from whom she has just been divorced. They are bickering about Coward's own song 'Someday I'll find you', the words and music of which can easily be found. Elyot says it is a 'nasty insistent little tune'. Amanda retorts by pointing out its power to move. Both are of course right in a way.  But Amanda is more right. When  'Private Lives' was first performed, Elyot was played by Coward, who thus had the pleasure of publicly sneering at his own song.

 

I owe this information to an interesting Guardian article about Coward  by Ian Bostridge, who also quotes a knowing passage from another Coward play 'Blithe Spirit' . He writes: 'Music in Coward's work has an access to the unconscious. "Are you susceptible to music?" asks Judith of Richard in Hay Fever, Coward's first comic hit. "I'm afraid I don't know very much about it," he says, to which she replies: "You probably are, then." '

 

The reactions of several contributors to 'Meet on the Ledge' (a very different song from 'Some Day I'll find You') have been similar to Elyot's . They say it's a dirge, or dismal, or they point out that there is better and more moving music to be had. Tell me about it. I cannot listen to the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony without being completely overcome with awe and wonder, and I was recently given some Paul Tortelier performances of Bach that defeat my powers of description. Any fool knows these are great. But I still like 'Meet on the Ledge' , probably for the same reason I liked it when I first heard it, redoubled by nearly half a century of life and regrets.  There���s something true and sad about it, and I like sadness almost as much as I like truth (not least because they are often close companions) . I think I knew when I heard it , and I think Richard Thompson knew when he wrote it, more than we realised we knew.

 

I'm with Judith. People like me, ignorant of music and of how it works, can be beguiled against our will and without understanding what has happened to us. I'm old enough not to be ashamed to admit it.

 

When I was 17, by contrast, I kept many of my tastes in books and music to myself . One reader seems to think that liking this song makes me some sort of follower of Fairport Convention. I'm not. I wasn't then, and am not now. I didn't know who they were when I first heard it, presumably on Radio London (the seaborne pirate version)  on the small cream plastic Ferranti transistor radio which for some reason picked up the best signal on 266, though it couldn't often pick up the rival Radio Caroline. I didn't tell anyone else I liked it, or know anyone else who liked it. I haven���t made any special point of listening to them since.  I think I may well have been embarrassed that I liked it. It wasn't, as another reader points out, typical of Top 20 songs of the time. I was surprised (and not altogether pleased) , years later, to find out that it had won a sort of cult following. But I knew why, just as I know why Richard Thompson���s mother asked him to sing it at her funeral.  It contains an unstated hope that in the end, after all the car crashes and suicides and divorces and abortions and young, untimely deaths,   *everything will be all right* . We will meet on the ledge.

 

 

Or ,as Julian of Norwich put it more lastingly 'And all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well'

 

As to what its author thought it meant, I'd add one other thing that I do know for sure. Writers seldom know what will please people. I never do. I���m not even sure how conscious writers are of what they are about to say, or how strong the barriers are between thought and word, and how little of what we really mean to say ever gets through the stubborn filters of vocabulary and grammar (not to mention keyboards which sometimes mock the clumsy efforts of our fat fingers) . Most have the experience of things that have come unbidden to their pens, or their fingertips,  not in some obviously mystical way but because thought does not always form and harden into words as you expect it to.

 

I am sure this is even more so with poets and the writers of songs. How many of them know which of their words will bring sudden tears to the eyes of readers long after they are dead? I hate to think how much superlative stuff has been thrown into the fire by great writers who didn't appreciate their own work.

 

But in the case of 'Meet on the Ledge', I think there was a growing sense of danger in our minds as the Sixties went wildly and rather unstoppably on (they ended for me, in a series of self-inflicted personal melodramas in August 1969, but for everyone else, I think, in the sudden slamming on of the economic brakes by the Yom Kippur war in 1973).  But in 1967 and 1968, there seemed no limit to it. Everything we had been told we couldn't or shouldn't do, we were now doing. If you were in your teens, it was a very insecure time, full of combined longing and apprehension.   The comprehensive revolution was beginning to change the schools out of all recognition. Forbidden words were being broadcast on TV. Forbidden and previously unnamed actions were being openly discussed.  And our parents' marriages were in many cases foundering, as the new Divorce Laws took rapid effect, one of the most underestimated and under-recorded factors in the Sixties revolution.

 

Another reader asked if musicians only had drink problems in the 1960s. Well, no, obviously this has always happened, though I think it quite rare among classical musicians. Kathleen Ferrier, he owner of an even lovelier voice (listen to her singing ���Blow the Wind Southerly��� and see what you think. The song had a special resonance in the years after the war, for all of those who knew that no ship and no wind would ever bring back their husbands, sons , brothers and fathers)  also died young, but of breast cancer, which she would probably have survived in these times.  But young women raised in the London suburbs didn't tend to have drink (or drug)  problems before the 1960s, not much, and I can't think of any other combination of circumstances that might have led poor Sandy Denny to such an early end in any other recent time. The cheerful amorality of the age actually went further, in my recollection, than most people would go now.  So did its politics. But those of my generation remember what they did and thought then, even if they don't like to talk about it much now,  and are still influenced by it. It still seems to me to have been a very sad time, and a regrettable one. We could have shaken off the postwar grimness of our country in a different and kinder way. 

Welcome to Britain...you really didn't need to try so hard to get in

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday Column 

Another contributor to George Osborne���s dubious low-wage boom leaps nimbly from a Romanian lorry into the labour market.
The mystery is why this lithe person in a leather jacket, and his mates, have gone to so much trouble to evade the authorities ��� or why police in the Cotswolds bothered to round them up. I think it a very good bet that they will all still be here five years hence.
The world���s poor have discovered that the EU (that���s the country we live in, no point pretending there���s anywhere called Britain any more) has absolutely no clue how to stop determined immigrants.
In almost all cases, we allow them to stay, often because it is just too complicated and time-consuming to make them go away.
The astonishing abolition of internal borders, from Greece to Sweden, and from Spain to the Russian frontier, means that anyone who can get into the EU���s space can now get to Calais without any major risk of being stopped. And we know how hard it has proved to keep that gate closed.
Once they���re in, our own treasured freedoms work against us. Thanks to centuries of island freedom, when we were able to decide who came in and who didn���t, it is far easier to disappear in Britain than in almost any other country in the world. We���ll abolish those freedoms in the end, alas, but it won���t do any good.
And now the expensive navies of the EU are ferrying thousands more across the Mediterranean each week. The people-smugglers are saving a fortune on fuel, for they know their victims will be picked up before they are halfway across, in what are misleadingly described as ���rescues���.
The only thing that will stop the flow is when the EU countries, including ours, become so like the places these people are fleeing from that there is no point in coming any more.

*****

Sir Tim Hunt, a biochemist of such brilliance that he has won the Nobel Prize, has been forced out of a professorship. Is this because there is anything wrong with his science? Has he committed a crime, or told a lie, or done a cruel thing? No. I do not know Sir Tim, but I know people who do and by all accounts he is a man of great personal integrity, kindness and generosity, reluctant to refuse any request for help.
What he did was say something unfashionable about women. And for this, one of our greatest minds must make a public apology, and ���resign��� from a post of honour. Unreason is in charge.

*****

Why we will never escape from the EU

In the unlikely event of the ���No��� side winning the EU referendum, what do you think will happen?
My advice is not to be too sure. On Thursday morning I called the Foreign Office, which is piloting the Referendum Bill through Parliament. I asked if there was anything in the Bill, or its schedules, about what specific actions would follow such a vote. I also asked if any Minister was on the record, in a speech or in the answer to a Parliamentary Question, on this matter.
There was nothing.
So there you are. I think we can take that as confirmation that they don���t think it���s a realistic prospect, and that there���s no pledge on the record. The Tory manifesto says they ���will respect the outcome���. What does that actually mean? Knowing how slippery these people are, I don���t think that necessarily means a guaranteed exit.
Apart from anything else, would there be a majority for a British exit in either House? I can���t see how, given that so many Tories, including the PM and most of his ministerial colleagues, are keen EU enthusiasts in practice.
My own guess is that a ���No��� majority would not lead to a British departure from the EU, unless the majority was so huge that it was embarrassing. Anything else, and we���ll be in for a new round of ���negotiations���, another lot of ���reforms��� and another vote in which you���d jolly well better vote ���Yes���.
Eventually it will sink in. We���re not leaving.

*****

Suspicious death of crime figures

No matter how often I and others point out that the police crime figures are fiddled, and how they are fiddled, and that this has now been officially admitted, people still quote these discredited numbers as if they mattered. Or they tell me that the rival Crime Survey gives a true picture, even if the police statistics are confected rubbish.
Well, now they won���t even be able to say that any more. In news relegated to the bottom of obscure pages, it was revealed last week that the Crime Survey, too, is deeply suspect. Professor Sylvia Walby, of Lancaster University, found that the survey caps the number of times anyone can be listed as a victim of crime at just five. She calculated that without this cap, the number of violent and sexual crimes would rise by 61 per cent. At the same gathering, Adrian Leppard, Commissioner of the City of London Police, declared that ���the notion of police recorded crime is history. It���s dead in the water���.
Remember these things next time any politician boasts that crime is falling. As in all crooked and ill-run countries, the truth can no longer be told. The figures are falling because crime isn���t. And they���re not going to do anything about it.

*****

No appetite for facts in our 'skinny' world

Skimmed milk was what they used to give to prisoners and workhouse inmates, to go with their porridge and gruel. It���s a punishment, not a drink.
Now there are coffee chains which do not even provide proper milk. And people ask for and seek out this disgusting, skimmed substance, or its close cousin, semi-skimmed milk, turning up their health-snob noses at proper milk. And they are all mad. There are no health benefits from drinking it, unless the shudder you experience as it goes down your throat is in some way good for you. Fat does not make you fat.
Nor is it bad for your heart. Owning a car (because you will stop taking normal exercise) is far worse for your heart than drinking full-fat normal whole milk. So is the sugar-crammed ���low-fat��� cake you will have to buy to take away the foul bitter taste of your ���skinny��� coffee. I have to exercise huge self-restraint each time the person in front of me in the station coffee queue asks for a ���skinny��� drink. How can one begin to explain to these deluded people that their behaviour is irrational and unscientific, as well as nasty-tasting? It would only lead to unfortunate scenes, red mists and shouting.
They all believe, absolutely, that they are being sensible. It is much the same as the widespread belief that global warming is known for certain to result from human activity, and that it is already causing the sea to overwhelm the land.
In both cases, those who actually possess the facts are dismissed as eccentric dimwits, while those who are totally wrong glory in the warmth of majority righteousness. The insane popularity of skimmed milk is a good metaphor for our deluded civilisation.

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Old Forgotten Far-Off Things

The power of cheap music is (famously) extraordinary. But it withers and dies. Most of the songs I can remember from my teens evoke little more than a brief surge of small memories, stimulated by the half-forgotten sounds. Some I can���t stand. To some I am indifferent. Some I can���t imagine why I liked. One or two lodge, worryingly, in a different part of the thorny and misleading undergrowth of memory. One in particular struck me as very disturbing and rather extraordinary at the time, which was that very unsettling (and in retrospect desperately sad) period, the late 1960s. But in the way of things I never expected to hear it again.

 

Records in those days were everywhere for a few weeks, then gone for good. I can���t even remember throwing away the old 45 rpm discs I used to buy from Taphouse���s music shop in Oxford ��� one of those places where you could listen to the song in a booth, or through headphones, before buying it for seven shillings and fourpence, a price which (like most prices in those times) stayed unchanged, year in and year out.

 

But ���Meet on the Ledge���, Fairport Convention���s second single (as I now learn, since it was the first time I���d heard of them), wormed its way into my consciousness.  It wasn���t like anything else I���d heard. You should be able to find the 1968 version on the web, without too much difficulty. It was ��� or appeared to be - about death, in which I had always been interested, and possibly the afterlife, that zone of searing justice and recompense in which I very much did not then want to believe. This was not common in the popular music of that or any other time.  But I was unwillingly fascinated.  I���d sung a lot of hymns about death, but I���d given up the church at that stage partly because I had come to dislike the idea of death very strongly, and to dislike, at the same time, dark places, old buildings and art or architecture which contained religious references or reminded me of tombs and tombstones. 

 

I say ���appeared to be��� about death, because the author, Richard Thompson, now apparently says he doesn���t know what it means. His mother, on the other hand asked in her will that he should sing it at her funeral, which he understandably found very hard to do. And the rather unsatisfactory explanation of ���the ledge��� is that this was Richard Thompson���s childhood name for a low-hanging tree branch on which he and his friends used to sit.

 

Well, if he says so. For me, it conjured up a very clear mental picture of a ledge high on a chilly and windswept mountainside (the rest of the words very much point this way) on which were gathered the last survivors of some perilous quest, who had agreed to meet there when they began.

 

What the quest was I���m not sure, and wasn���t then. Now I think it was a kind of longing we all had, adolescence to the power of ten, a belief that just beyond the horizon a world of colour, pleasure and fulfilled ambition waited for us all.  It didn���t, of course.

 

I���d read ���The Lord of the Rings��� when I was 12 and 13, long before it was fashionable or even widely-known, and was probably influenced by that, and also by Alan Garner���s work of genius ���The Weirdstone of Brisingamen���  but also by dozens of other boyish adventure stories of the sort we still used to read , in attics or in a corner of the staircase,  or in a remote part of my boarding school���s spacious buildings where nobody would find me, on winter afternoons. Quests, caves,  tunnels, escapes, tottering bridges and precipices filled our minds.

 

I���ve often thought that this was the children���s literature of a profoundly safe and civilised country, where a snake was an event and the largest wild beast in the woods was a fox, and where most horizons ended in gentle downland (or if you were lucky, moorland) rather than in the jagged peaks of Tibet or Mordor.

 

And we were so safe as the sixties got under way, brought up in warm homes with plenty to eat, attending orderly schools, venturing out onto crime-free streets with very little traffic, cocooned in lives of predictable mild prosperity and full employment.  Fools that we were, we sometimes chafed at all this safety and predictability, and longed for real excitement, not just the sort you got from a book. I did, for certain. I remember, in 1968, being unpleasantly thrilled by the chaos in the boulevards of Paris, by the Warsaw Pact tanks trundling through Prague and in 1969, even more unpleasantly satisfied to see serious violence on the apparently British streets of Belfast and Londonderry. What I didn���t know then was that these things were exciting, as it is exciting to shelter from a storm , precisely because we were so safe. The word ���selfishness��� simply isn���t rude enough to describe my state of mind in those years.

 

Anyway, here is this song. Again, you can easily find pictures of those who sang it, among them (in a very English study full of autumn leaves in which they are all wrapped up against the chill and obviously nowhere near California)  the sweetly-smiling face of Sandy Denny, whose extraordinary, melancholy voice (that, I might say, of a very British, educated young woman) runs through the original recording like a lament.

 

You can look up the lyrics. They are not especially good as verse, though the opening words ���We used to say������have a plangent sadness all their own, because obviously we don���t say it any more, for some reason.  I like the frank admission that the writer���s hopes of ���finding better words��� were vain. ���These ideas never lasted long���. As such ideas did not, in our world of youth and novelty.

 

Then we get ���The way is up along the road, the air is growing thin,

Too many friends who tried, Blown off this mountain with the wind���.

 

The author (who I find is almost exactly the  same age as my late brother would be if he were still alive) had gone to what was then one of the best grammar schools in London.  I doubt if many reasonably educated children of that age wouldn���t have known or at least met the short poem ���Uphill��� by Christian Rossetti, which begins ���Does the road wind uphill all the way? Yes, to the very end���.  Look it up. It, too, is plainly about death. In my case, it comes to mind as soon as I hear the words ���the way is up along the road���. The bit about the air growing thin seems to refer to something else half-recalled, half-heard, as well, but I can���t work out what. Some episode from a Rider Haggard novel, I expect, or some ���Boy���s Own Paper��� (yes, it still existed in my childhood and we really had it in the house) account of Mallory and Irvine���s doomed and mysterious 1920s attempt to conquer Everest.

 

Who knows? It seems possible to me. Even in the 1960s our minds were crammed with references of this sort. Mine was, anyway. I���m also struck by the line ���too many friends who tried���, in which the word  ���died��� would have fitted just as well as ���tried���, if not better. 

 

Well, I���m generally unmoved by attempts to pick through texts, but this one seems pretty direct. When you match it with the tune, which is oddly thrilling but very sad, the direction seems very clear. Then there���s the refrain, which contains the words ���When my time is up I���m gonna see all my friends��� and��� still more mysterious��� If you really mean it, it all comes round again���.

 

I can recall playing it, over and over again, alone in the house on my parents��� monstrous 1940s radiogram with its heavily-engineered turntable. And then I lost interest, as 17-year-olds do. And I never thought to hear it again. I found out later that it had become a kind of signature song for Fairport Convention and that it is sung ritually to end the Cropredy festival each summer.

 

But I put away teenage things and went off out into the world on my own quests and adventures, sometimes among jagged mountains and in places where the air is thin and the wind strong, literally and metaphorically.

 

Then my brother died, so concentrating my mind on my own childhood in a way that I hadn���t done for years. And then, as I wrote here last year, Linda Grant write her novel ���Upstairs at the Party���(out in paperback any day now),   which touches directly on my years as a student revolutionary. At a stroke, Linda turned this period of my life from a  series of random memories into the buried past,  so long ago that I���m amazed to have lived through it and still be alive. Since then, my memories of these things have become a bit insistent. I���m more curious about who I then was than I used to be.  Sometimes, heading homewards through certain parts of Oxford,  where I have lived on and off for more than 50 years, I half-expect to meet the young men and women who peopled the late 1960s in that city.  I���d recognise them instantly as they were, if they did. What became of them? Mostly I have no idea. What���s become of all that optimism? I did, by chance, meet one of them a few years ago, who I remembered as astonishingly funny and kind - and all the joy had gone out of her.  I couldn���t get away quickly enough, much preferring the memory to the present. 

 

A few weeks ago, taking an unexpected holiday, I travelled up to York, where I was at university, and for the first time in years took a proper look at that odd plateglass campus where I had experienced so many important things, most (but not all) of them mistakes. My own student years have become archaeology. I could see roughly where everything had been, but so much had been built on top that my memory had to work hard to find the places where things used to be. Some I remember from then are dead. Others , I suspect, would never speak to me now.

 

I thought a lot about what we used to say.  And into my head came that old song. And now, of course, I can listen to it again at the click of a mouse. And I can find, through easy searches,  that cruel tragedy followed soon after the sad song.  Fairport Convention (to my amazement) still survive, like George Orwell���s metaphorical carving knife which has had three different blades and two different handles.

 

Lacking any deep interest, I had not known that the group (as I���m sure we still then called them ��� in those days ���bands��� were brass and played on bandstands) was involved in a terrible road accident in May 1969, in which the drummer, Martin Lamble died aged only 19, as did Jeannie Franklyn, Richard Thompson���s girlfriend.  Everyone was hurt in some way. No wonder they nearly disbanded. The story of Sandy Denny is even sadder. You can look it up if you like, but it is a grim, merciless parable of the sixties and where they so often led happy, hopeful young men and women ��� the Prodigal Son without the happy ending. Yes , there were drugs and drink, and other miseries, and there was a very early grave.

 

What if we had all not gone on our adventures? Would we have lost more than we gained? Too late, now, anyway. But I think we���ll all have to be dead before anyone can write a proper, fair account of my generation. From here it looks nearly as bad as the Children���s Crusade. I hate to think what it must have been like for our parents to watch it depart, unable to stop it.

Why I've stopped Caring about British Politics, and Only Laugh at It

This is an extended version of a couple of replies I have to contributors on an earlier thread. I think quite a few of my readers have failed to grasp just what a significant moment the election result was for me. For some time I had listened to appeals from readers to ���get involved��� in politics.

 

I had explained laboriously to people who think you can just ���stand as an MP��� and expect to be chosen on your merits, that MPs are in fact selected by parties and then ritually approved by voters at elections where reason and thought are minor influences. Even at by-elections, where tribal voting is less marked, it is almost unknown for a genuine independent to be elected.  Yet I still get almost weekly enquiries asking why I do not ���stand for Parliament���.

 

I had explained equally laboriously that an individual MP has as much influence on affairs as the lady who hoovers the House of Commons carpets when MPs have gone home. Without a party in which he or she is broadly at home, is listened to and has some hope of ministerial office, an individual MP can do no more than  make unreported speeches to an empty chamber late in the evening, ask questions which will almost certainly remain unanswered, and vanish into the obscurity of committee work.

 

And I had explained what was necessary and possible (within the law and without violence) to open the existing system to people such as me.

 

These careful, reasoned explanations mainly produced anger and frustration from readers who either had an unswerving loyalty to the Tory party or who insisted on seeing UKIP as a viable party of government.

 

But I continued to hope that, just possibly, they were having an undetected effect elsewhere.

 

The result of the 2010 election showed that even a fourth Tory defeat in a row (which I had desired and predicted) could not by itself destroy the attachment of tribal loyalists to that ghastly party. The formation of the Coalition was so swift that many Tory loyalists thenceforward forgot that their party *had* been defeated and were often shocked to be reminded that they were governing in a coalition. They were not, on the other hand, shocked by how easily the Tory Party meshed with the Liberal Democrats, by how little real dissension there was, by how readily, even anxiously, the Tory Party pressed concessions on the Liberal Democrats to obtain agreement. This process, of course completely confirmed my view that the Tory Party is not in its nature conservative at all, and is in many respects the most left-wing of all our major parties in practice. Witness especially the enactment of same-sex marriage when it had not even been in the Tory manifesto, and the devastation of the armed forces, reducing them to levels that might have worried George Lansbury.

 

The 2015 election underlined the failure of my plea. It showed that left-wing voters care much more about betrayal than conservative ones.  The Liberal Democrats were unjustly punished for having gone into coalition with the Tories, even though they had by doing so achieved many of the desires of their supporters.  The Tories were not punished at all by their voters for joining a coalition of anti-British leftists and pursuing their aims.

 

It was plainly impossible to take this seriously any more. The whole thing is an irrational farce in which millions vote merrily against their best interests. Were I to carry on caring about it, I should only make myself very unhappy for no good purpose. I had pretty much resolved on this position after 2010, but the success of UKIP during 2014 caused me to harbour foolish hopes. These might have been fulfilled had the Labour Party not collapsed in Scotland, but it did, and so we are where we are.

 

And that along with a deep loathing of plebiscites as manipulative and biased in favour of power, is why I decline to get involved in the doomed ���No��� campaign . (This, by the way is not ���hesitancy��� as one contributor describes it, but hard undiluted determination to take no part in a wicked deception). It is doomed not just because it will lose, but also because it would not succeed in its aim even if it won.  In the absence of  a political party committed to British independence, with a Commons majority won on that policy, the United Kingdom will not leave the EU.

 

Mr Brooks Davis thinks there is ���still a chance���. He is welcome to his belief. But I do not think any rational person in possession of the facts can actually believe that. And I believe that in temporal matters, facts and logic are indispensable.

 

Mr Belcher writes : ������you admit you were wrong about The Conservatives winning a majority this last General Election - so don't you want to be wrong again in your prediction about the E.U vote in 2016 ? ���

The very reasons why I was wrong about the election are the reasons I am right about the referendum. In the election I underestimated the power of money, which will be crucial in the referendum, and which, as I wrote last Sunday, will be heavily weighted towards the ���Yes��� side. I also underestimated the credulity of voters repeatedly told a blatant falsehood. If the British public and media can be persuaded to believe that George Osborne has achieved an economic miracle (and they can be) , they can be persuaded that David Cameron has returned in triumph from Brussels with a package of reforms he can ���wholeheartedly��� recommend to the voters.

 

 

 

Is my turning aside, in amused disgust, a moral failing or a dereliction of duty?  It might be if I had never tried, but, having tried, I do not think so. I have tried quite hard (as I note below) to put across a coherent and civilised case against the modern consensus.  I have pretty much completely failed. Why pretend otherwise?  My arguments are unwelcome both to my opponents and to my theoretical allies. I think it safe to assume that this is because, whatever they may say, my theoretical allies prefer the apparent (if illusory) comfort and stability of the status quo to the uncertain shadowy paths of resistance. Their unwillingness to risk what I most urgently sought ��� a Britain without the Tory Party ��� seems to me to show that,  above all things. Their inability to accept that it might (horrors!) be *up to them* to build its replacement was always one of the most striking things about those who rejected my case for boycotting the Tories.

 

By the way, w ell-meant advice about alternative methods of publishing, websites etc is obviously kindly meant, but such things have a tiny impact, and are trivial compared with access to the public mind granted by mainstream book publishing and terrestrial TV and radio, both increasingly closed to me.

 

I don���t think the moral law obliges us to thump our heads against stone walls. We should mainly be concerned with reforming ourselves anyway, and there���s never any shortage of work to do there.

 

This brings me to those two replies.

In reply to Mr 'Of' (who rightly complains that I misattributed his words to Edward O��� Hara, possibly because it was a more credible name)who wrote ���I assume that PH does not want to legitimise this transparent stitch-up by contributing to a high turnout.��� , I wrote ���That is a pretty good summary of my position. I never wanted a referendum, I cannot see why any secessionist viewed it as an object worth pursuing and I don't greatly care what the result is (not that I think it is in doubt) as no conceivable British government will take us out of the EU. If other people wish to be played with and mocked in this fashion, that is up to them. I prefer to remain undeceived.

 

In reply to Mr���Topper���, who wrote: ��� Despair is a strong word, which few people will genuinely understand, and many will disparage and scoff at. That you find this situation funny I find amazing, since I can only see despair as producing sadness. But perhaps this is because I still have not experienced it in its fullness. However, like you, I am glad that I voted no in 1975, and I even worked hard for the "Get Britain Out" campaign before the referendum.���

I wrote : ���My despair is purely temporal. I still hope for the eternal triumph of truth and justice. It is also rational. I felt, during the last two elections, that I had a moral duty to advise my readers on the best course of action. I did so, in the simplest and clearest terms, explaining my reasons repeatedly and in detail, meeting all objections with careful rebuttal. Most of them, despite constantly saying how much they valued my views, quibbled, pretended not to understand, asked daft questions about what would happen *after* a Tory collapse, as if I could possibly know, or made silly requests to be told exactly how not to vote Tory, as if it mattered which dustbin they tossed their votes into. I might as well have said nothing at all, and saved my breath and my fingertips. The opportunity which existed in 2010, for real political change, has now gone forever. I am relieved of any responsibility for what happens next, and untroubled by any hope of improvement in that or in any of the other major issues on which I have campaigned. The invariable reaction to my careful research and reasoned arguments has been that I have been ignored or abused. I now face growing limits on what I can even get published ( my broadcasting appearances dwindle daily, I can no longer publish three-dimensional books). What to do? Rational despair, and laughter, while recording the absurdities of the age, seems the best arrangement.���

 

The more I think about it, the more sure I am that this is right.

The Mystery of the Vanishing 'Eurosceptics'

How much longer can the media maintain the fiction that there is a position known as ���Euroscepticism���? How much longer will it matter? The carefully-planned utterly ruthless nature of David Cameron���s EU Referendum trap grows clearer every day. It is so brutal to these useless two-faced people (the Tory ���Eurosceptics���)  that I almost admire it for its sheer honesty. They richly deserve it.  The trouble is that the Cameron policy, as in all modern political actions, is so hedged about with lies, and serves such a nasty purpose, that I cannot possibly pay it any compliments. There is also the problem that Mr Cameron is upset about his ruthless words being correctly reported, and is now moaning that , when he proclaimed the same thing months ago, he was *not* said to be threatening to sack ministers who dissented from his EU line. Oh yes he was. This amusing article demonstrates that he is wrong about this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/11658640/David-Cameron-at-the-G7-summit-live.html

Actually I can���t see how he could have been much clearer, when he spoke to reporters at the G7 boondoggle on Sunday: ���At the G7 conference in Germany, Mr Cameron was asked whether he had ���absolutely closed��� his mind to allowing ministers a free vote. He replied: ���I���ve been very clear. If you want to be part of the Government, you have to take the view that we are engaged in an exercise of renegotiation, to have a referendum, and that will lead to a successful outcome.������

As he was making this plain, a pitiful rump of Tory MPs were forming the awfully nice and genteel ���Conservatives for Britain��� group of ���Eurosceptics��� , who are so sweet and loyal that they will ���wait and see��� what Mr Cameron brings back from Brussels before deciding whether to campaign for ���Yes��� or ���No���.

 

In contrast to their refined, consensual and modest approach,  Kenneth Clarke let fly at opponents of the EU as ���hard core right wing nationalists��� This is no doubt what David Cameron thinks too, but he leaves it to Mr Clarke to say out loud. Mr Clarke (for all his cuddly appearance and genuine love for jazz) fights like a tiger for two things ��� one, British integration in the EU superstate and the other, a weaker criminal justice system.

 

Mr Clarke told Sky News : ���It was obvious from the moment we said we were going to have a referendum that there would be party groups from all sides. There���s a hard core, right-wing nationalist end of the party that is determined to try to leave the European Union at any cost. These particular demands that they���re putting forward are of course completely incompatible with membership of the European Union and the European Economic Area.���

He added: ���These are rather isolationist foreign policy people." If only it were true.

I am myself wondering whether many of those who have long given the impression of wanting this country to leave the EU will, in the coming months, be revealing that Mr Cameron���s clever negotiations  (or just his general genius, so great that he is  bound to succeed anyway) have persuaded them to support a ���yes��� vote.

 

Watch out for lots and lost of people , previously thought of as ���leading eurosceptics���, being ���deeply impressed��� by the ���concessions��� ���won��� by our Great Leader, and stumbling, weeping, into the camp of the converted. Think this is unlikely. See the following:

I was chided by a correspondent over the weekend for referring to the Tory ���Eurosceptics��� as ���pointless blowhards���. But I do not think this was unjust. Another contributor had contacted me a few days earlier with news of an astonishing gathering of the Bruges Group. I have spoken to this tendency twice myself, once in the Autumn of 2009 when my warning that Mr Cameron was in fact a Blairite liberal was greeted with frigid hostility, more recently to a friendlier reception for the same message.

My informant told me that this meeting ( which I had known of but had been unable to attend, in London on Monday 1st June) had been acrimonious but also very interesting. An account of it is to be found here

 

https://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2015/06/04/bruges-group-meeting-1-april-2015-john-redwood-says-he-could-vote-to-stay-in-the-eu/

 

This is the key passage : John Redwood ���was so out of touch with the feeling of the audience that  he came close to being booed. As it was there were frequent cries of ���no���, ���rubbish��� and general murmurings of dissent as he asked the audience to trust Cameron���s honesty in his attempt to renegotiate Britain���s relationship with the EU and put forward a plan for the OUT campaign which side-lined Nigel Farage . (The traffic of  audience disapproval   was countered by support for Redwood , but judged by the noise made  those against him were  considerably more  numerous than his supporters).

 

���Redwood said that he  believed  in Cameron���s honest intent  in  his negotiations  with EU. Consequently, he would not make up his mind whether to vote to leave until Cameron had completed his negotiations. Also said explicitly  that he would vote to stay in if the renegotiations were successful.    I think most people who have followed Redwood���s voluminous pronouncements  on  the EU over the years will be more than a little surprised by his adoption of  such an equivocal position as the referendum approaches.   His position was all the more unexpected because he began his talk by  denouncing  the fact that  membership of the EU  meant elected governments  ���  most notably Greece at present ��� could not  do  what their electors wanted even if they wished to.  An important question arises,   if  Redwood  is  undecided about which way he will vote  how can he be part of the planning of the OUT campaign?   Indeed, if Cameron gets concessions which Redwood deems enough to persuade him to vote to stay in,  presumably he will be campaigning with the  stay in camp.���

 

The author points out that Mr Redwood, whose ambitions of office under David Cameron must be minimal, still took a position sympathetic to the Prime Minister.  Yet this is a man who, when his chances of high office were real and immediate,  was once a fierce opponent of EU integration.  What has become of him?

 

For he is also blazingly intelligent and must know that the EU simply does not give major powers back to its member states after it has given them up. Oddly enough there is one anomalous exception to this. It is the recent opportunity given to member states to opt out of various Home Affairs measures. The background to this oddity is obscure and hard to explain. Please believe me that it is wholly exceptional and unlikely to be repeated. The thing is, it showed beyond doubt that Mr Cameron in practice favours tighter British integration with the EU, even when he is free to reject it. This surely tells us all we need to know about the coming negotiations.

 

David Cameron chose (without serious challenge from his ���Eurosceptic��� backbenchers or anyone else), to re-enter the European Arrest Warrant, which destroys Habeas Corpus, and gravely undermines the presumption of innocence and the Bill of Rights, I mean, the one we actually have. This document analyses the implications of the EU���s accelerating and very serious expansion into Home Affairs and law, probably the single most important conflict between English liberty and the continental belief in a strong state, because we are more likely to lose it than any of the previous ones.   http://www.gerardbattenmep.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/FJS-PDF-Copy-28th-Feb-2012.pdf

 It is quite funny, a few months later to see him demanding (with no realistic hope of success) the return of other unstated powers.

 

But then the whole thing is quite funny if you have, like me, chosen despair as the only realistic option. If there ever was a chance for this country to reassert its independence, it passed long ago. I am just grateful that I can remember Britain when it was still a sovereign country, and glad that, in 1975, I was lucky enough to vote ���No���.

Something for the Weekend

Back in 2008, when Sky News still talked to me, they asked me to go over to Brussels on a sunny Spring morning, to make this agreeably short film about what I would do if I were Prime Minister. I thought some of you might enjoy it.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SXEjtC7RyE&feature=youtu.be

 

Let FIFA run our schools - they couldn't be more dishonest than the Tories

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Why is a Tory Government nationalising all the schools in England? The simple answer is that the Tories have swallowed New Labour and turned into Blairites, which is true.

But there���s a deeper mystery. Why does anyone think that shiny new buildings, new names and lots of money will solve the problem of our horrible state-school system, a costly, organised insult to the children of the poor?

It is interesting that while they claim to have been liberated from Left-wing pressure by getting rid of the Liberal Democrats, Mr Cameron���s Cabinet have no plans to restore the selective grammar schools that once opened the road of success to the poor.

That would be a real conservative policy, and they won���t be having any of those. Comprehensive schools were imposed on the country by Labour in the 1960s as a giant piece of social engineering, designed to make the country more equal, even if it meant education standards declined.

The Tories, as usual, spinelessly gave in to this, because most of them sent their children to private schools and didn���t know or care about the state system.

Whatever you think of the comprehensive idea (I think it is stupid and wrong), it failed from the outset. What happened was that a minority of comprehensive schools, usually in expensive catchment areas, maintained reasonable standards, though not as good as those of the abolished grammars.

The rest sank, often well below the standards of the secondary moderns they replaced, not least because they were so huge and hard to control. There was no equality, and education got worse.

National educational policy ever since then has been a sort of grand cover-up, one that makes Fifa look clean and honest. Rather than admit they were wrong, Tory and Labour governments have tried to mask the disaster with diluted examinations, plus a parade of expensive stunts and gimmicks.

The latest and most persistent is the ���academy���. Our privately schooled Education Secretary declared last week that she is taking powers to turn hundreds more schools into ���academies���, on the grounds that they are failing. Does she think a change of name will stop them failing?
I defy you to tell me what the term actually means for the education of those who go to them. It embraces trendy ���free schools��� and establishments that were bog-standard comps a week ago.

Experts on the subject will tell you that they were notorious for gaming the exam system to make their results look better than they are. For years they were not even subject to the Freedom of Information Act. They are now, but hard evidence of their success is still difficult to find.

Oodles of cash and barnstorming charismatic heads can and do (for a while) raise standards in rescued schools.
But the cash can���t go on for ever, and there are many more schools than there are charismatic heads, so solid long-term improvement is hard to detect.

Experts do not agree that academies are necessarily beneficial. Former Tory Education Secretary Michael Gove is certainly not convinced.

Rather than send his own daughter to Burlington Danes Academy, which he had loudly praised and which is a short walk from his home, he dispatched her instead to a highly traditional and selective all-girls Church secondary miles away, as near to a grammar school as you can get in London. Actions speak louder than words.

But if you want words, try the House of Commons Select Committee on Education, which said in January: ���The Government should stop exaggerating the success of academies and be cautious about firm conclusions except where the evidence merits it. Academisation is not always successful, nor is it the only proven alternative for a struggling school.���

And then there���s the issue of central control. Aren���t we supposed to think that nationalisation is bad, that small is beautiful, and openness and accountability are virtues?

Then let me introduce you to the Education Funding Agency, with a budget of ��54 billion a year, the mysterious body that is ultimately in charge of all the ���academies��� in Britain, and will soon be in charge of a lot more.

Like so many of these arm���s-length ���agencies��� (public and private) that run much of modern Britain, it doesn���t even seem to have its own postal address or phone number, but is buried in bits and pieces of the Education Department.

What it really means is that a strong centralised state is rapidly taking control of education in this country.

If the private schools think they can escape its tentacles, they are very much mistaken. All my instincts rebel against so much power in so few hands.

But what is even worse is that this power-grab is being dressed up as an improvement in education, when it is not, and that the proven way to make schools better and fairer ��� academic selection ��� is being ignored.

The great EU stitch-up gathers steam

Be careful what you wish for. Is it just me, or do I see a growing dawning of doubt about the referendum among anti-EU types?

Mr Cameron���s new friend Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the European Commission, was absolutely right when he pointed out that the Government is not seeking an exit from the EU, and ���Cameron wants to dock his country permanently in Europe���. 

A defeat for the anti-EU side in a referendum will, of course, achieve this, diminishing all the ���Eurosceptic��� poseurs in the Tory Party to the pointless blowhards they really are. What will they do then, to pretend they are patriots?

Oh, and talking of defeat, spending rules for the referendum have already been cleverly devised so that the ���Yes��� side can spend up to ��17million, while the ���No��� side will be limited to ��8million. It���s done by giving each political party an allocation, on top of the equal limits for the actual campaigns.

And a law which would have banned pro-EU promotions by public bodies in the last 28 days of the campaign has been quietly dropped. All this goes on undiscussed, while we obsess about Sepp Blatter.

Another slice of my life rides into history 

You know you are old when what you still think of as recent films are remade. 

The 1967 version of Far From The Madding Crowd, with Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Peter Finch and Terence Stamp, is scorched into my memory. 

I can���t see how it could possibly be improved, and Christie and Stamp also perfectly embodied the rather wild and beautiful aspect of the 1960s that now seems so sad and wasted, lost in disappointment and failure. 

Yet I know that for millions of people, Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts will become Thomas Hardy���s characters from now on, and what I still think of as fresh and new will become a flickering archive.

*****

What will still be Royal about the Royal Mail, after it has all been sold off?
*******
 

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

 

How the Tories Became New Labour

Some of you may have noticed, in a recent debate on the election at Hay-on-Wye, a reference I made to John le Carre���s first-class novel ���Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy���. I spoke of the ���very clever knot��� described by le Carre and untangled by George Smiley, by which everything was made to appear the opposite of what it was.

 

It worked like this. The KGB agent who was actually debriefing the mole inside British intelligence was believed by MI6 to be a Soviet Traitor, the exact opposite of the case. Those who went regularly to meet this KGB man in a secret safe house in North London (surrounded by elaborate precautions)  believed they were running a deep-penetration agent inside Soviet intelligence.  One of this team of debriefers (you���ll have to read the book to find out which)  was in fact an MI6 traitor, who thus managed to hold meetings with his KGB controller, on MI6 premises, at the British taxpayer���s expense and under the protection of MI6. His senior colleagues helped to provide cover for this traitor.  The very boldness of the deception made it all the more effective. When it was exposed, the disbelief and fury of the duped was enormous. Had it not been for the detective genius of George Smiley, it might never have been exposed at all. Nothing is, but what is not. Everything is the opposite of what it seems to be. In that way, those who might act against it become its active and committed defenders.

 

Some remarks on Monday by James Harding, the head of BBC news, brought this to mind again.

 

The Daily Mail reported on Tuesday : ���THE boss of BBC News has denied any trace of Left-wing bias despite a series of rows over its coverage in the run-up to the election.

James Harding insisted that the Corporation is always 'scrupulously impartial' and rejected as 'fable' claims that it is prejudiced against Right-wing parties.

However, he did admit to some failings, saying that the BBC had allowed political polls - which predicted some form of coalition - to 'infect [its] thinking'.

As a result, he said, they spent too much time examining which parties might do deals with each other instead of analysing their policies.

Addressing the accusation of bias, Mr Harding told a conference in London: 'I find this increasingly hard to take seriously.

'In the light of the Conservative victory, what's the argument? That the BBC's subtle, sophisticated Left-wing message was so subtle, so very sophisticated that it simply passed the British people by.'

 

Gosh, how witty.

 

But it depends entirely for its force on the idea that the Conservative Party is in some way ���right-wing���. What if it���s not, and the BBC���s behaviour helped that party into office? Perhaps it was quite subtle. Then everything���s upside-down, and everyone���s doing the opposite of what they seem to be doing, aren���t they?

 

Now, as we have discussed here, the modern Tory Party is not conservative, and has not been for many decades, if it ever was. It is all but impossible to believe that it once contained, at its heart, such people as Janet Young, a committed and determined foe of the sexual revolution.

 

It is certainly *liberal* in economics, in culture and morality. Many politically unlettered people think of this position, associated with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, as ���right-wing���.  It certainly conflicts with the pre-1989 ideas of the political left, which until the end of the Cold War was still devoted to state ownership of large chunks of the economy.

 

This devotion, while essential to Soviet Communism,  doesn���t actually have any particularly strong connection with Social Democracy. States which are largely Social Democratic, Germany, France, Scandinavia and the Low Countries spring to mind, seem to me to be quite pragmatic about state ownership of the economy, certainly more pragmatic than the 1945 Labour government were.  For the Labour Party under Alastair Campbell to pretend to abandon (which they didn���t really) Clause Four of the old Labour rules, wasn���t a great step. In effect, Harold Wilson had abandoned nationalisation as a policy in the 1960s. I still meet people who think New Labour was ���right-wing���, when in fact the ideas of New Labour came out of  Eurocommunism, social and cultural radicalism stripped of Soviet impediments, and was crammed with former Marxists who weren���t all that former, which is why they don���t like it mentioned to this day.  

 

The modern Labour equivalent of Clause Four is in fact comprehensive education, something David Blunkett repeatedly pledged never to abandon during the Blair years, and which he legislated to make compulsory in all new schools. This is because it is the absolute key and foundation of Labour���s commitment to ostensible egalitarianism, a position it will not abandon. Of course, its own leaders and rich supporters don���t believe in this, and are very skilled at avoiding it in their own lives. But they do very much want to impose it on the fast-declining independent middle-class, the main opposition to the strong state and the main defender of common sense against dogma.

 

Now we come to the very clever knot in British politics, the one which you must undo to grasp what is actually going on.  For this, readers are strongly recommended to get hold of my book ���The Cameron Delusion���, or its earlier hardback version. The Broken Compass��� (they are broadly the same but ���The Cameron Delusion��� was brought up to date to deal with Cameron Toryism).

 

Read especially the early chapter ���The Power of Lunch��� (the index, itself a work of art, will find the passage if you look up the name ���Goslett, Miles���).

 

It recounts the failure of a Freedom of Information request, pursued doggedly by Miles Goslett, to obtain details of a meeting at the Palace of Westminster on 28th February 2008. The location is important because who went to see whom is also important in working out who was setting the agenda.

 

What we *do* know about this meeting is that it was hosted by David Cameron,  then Leader of the Opposition, and his visitors were Mark Thompson, then Director-General of the Corporation, and Caroline Thomson(no relation ��� though ���Thomson and Thompson��� reminds one of the two hopeless detectives in the Tintin books), at that stage the BBC���s chief political commissar. Caroline, whom I know slightly, is very well-connected in the left liberal establishment, especially its pro-EU wing.  Her father was the former Labour MP, later Social Democrat peer Lord Thomson of Monifieth, her husband Roger Liddle, Eurocrat extraordinaire ( from 1997-2004 special adviser to the Blair creature on EU matters), who in turn became Baron Liddle of Carlisle in 2010 (his supporters were Lord Mandelson and Lord (William) Rodgers).

 

This was not a meeting about Tory policy on the BBC (Licence fee, Charter etc). BBC officials were having other meetings with the relevant Shadow Cabinet members about that.

 

This was, I believe, a meeting about the BBC���s policy towards the Tory Party. And that is why they won���t talk about it.

 

The BBC, as Mr Thompson has frankly accepted, had been institutionally hostile to the Tories in the Thatcher era http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2010/09/lecture-thompson-bbc-interview ,  though he asserted that this was now all in the past.

A more general admission of cultural liberal bias was made by Andrew Marr at a famous ���impartiality summit��� recorded here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-411846/We-biased-admit-stars-BBC-News.html

Round about the same time, some will remember, the conservative media were rather sceptical of Mr Cameron���s re-engineering of the Tories, and concerned that they had been cowed into liberal policies by a fear of the BBC  as we see here in a (BBC) report of a rare speech by the editor of the Daily Mail:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6289751.stm

 

The full text of this speech can be found here

 

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Media/documents/2007/01/23/CudlippDacre.pdf, and contains this passage;

 

���I recently had lunch with the BBC���s Director General and I don���t think it���s breaking a confidence to reveal that he told me that their research showed that the BBC was no longer perceived as being anti-Tory. ���That���s because you���ve broken the buggers���, I said laughing.���

 

He added : ���Cameron���s cuddly blend of eco-politics and work-life balance, his embrace of Polly Toynbee ��� a columnist who loathes everything Conservatism stands for but is a totemic figure to the BBC ��� his sidelining of Thatcherism and his banishing of all talk of lower taxes, lower immigration and Euro scepticism, are all part of the Tories��� blood sacrifice to the BBC God.���

This is very perceptive. The re-engineering of the Tory brand in this period might have been (in my view almost certainly was) aimed at placating the BBC, the arbiter of orthodoxy and the gatekeeper of government.  Suddenly the Tories were Greener than Green, metrosexual, Euro-friendly, comprehensive-friendly, equality-friendly, immigrant friendly. For many of them this was no great effort. The private opinions of the Tory upper deck have for many years been left-liberal, with concessions made at conference-time and during elections, during which these people try to appear to be conservative, by talking tough on crime, immigration, the EU, drugs, human rights, schools etc, in non-specific, non-committal ways which will never translate into real policy.

 

Even odder, in this instance, was that Mr Cameron (whose leftish sexual politics I explored and recorded in my lonely way in 2010, to the interest of nobody,

 

see here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/04/the-lisbon-scandal-and-other-cameron-matters.html

 

went ahead with the legalisation of same-sex marriage without putting it in his manifesto, a very clear sign that his real,  true views are further to the left even than he confessed in his BBC-wooing period before 2010.

There���s also the excellent point made by my old adversary David Aaronovitch, in ���The Times��� of 29th April 2008, that ���Tony Blair's mission, unexplained even to himself perhaps, was to make it not matter whether the Tories came back, as they would be hemmed in by Blairism just as Labour was by Thatcherism���.

 

This may also have helped the BBC come round. But come round it did. In 1997 and afterwards, the BBC did not of course openly shout ���Vote Labour���. It just used a lot of energy reporting on Tory ���splits��� and rows. All parties are split, always,  and generally these splits and rows remain minor unless exploited by active media coverage.

 

It also virtually ignored everything they said that wasn���t to do with a split or a row. Then the ���split��� reporting faded, and indeed the splitometer was directed instead at Gordon Brown���s Labour government. Tory speeches and policy initiatives were reported more fully and more respectfully. The Tories had in short, been presented with the cloak of electability and Gordon Brown had been robbed of it.  Only incredibly expensive, day-to-day, hour-to-hour monitoring across all the channels for years could actually demonstrated this, and who can afford that. It was done on the edge of a remark, or by nuance, timing. It wasn���t organised or directed. It was just permitted, when it previously hadn���t been, and everyone knew it.  Conventional wisdom understood that the Tories were on their way back, and indeed went so far as to believe they could actually win in 2010, which *was* a physical impossibility.  All this was helped by Gordon Brown���s unfashionably conservative manners and style of dress, his rejection of Blairite style, things that made BBC liberals less bothered about whether he won or lost.

 

The election of Ed Miliband, a second Brown, ensured that the Tories would continue to receive the blessings of BBC patronage. I wonder if, had David Miliband been picked instead, things would have been the same. I suspect not, though we shall never know. John Rentoul, of the Independent on Sunday, is a useful Blairite barometer on such things.  I don���t get the impression he is especially grieved by the Labour downfall last month.

 

But that chance to reconnect the BBC with a  Blairite Labour Party has gone. Labour is almost certainly done for now, because the Scottish loss has destroyed it as a national party, probably for good, while  the Tory party has become New Labour. David Cameron truly is the heir to Blair, and UKIP can scrabble for the Noisy Minority which is all that is now left of a supposed ���Silent Majority��� that, by staying silent and indeed endorsing its own destruction by voting Tory, allowed itself to be marginalised and defeated.

A Forthcoming Debate, and a past TV appearance

On the evening of Tuesday June 16th I plan to take part in a debate in central London on the Russia-Ukraine controversy. Among other participants will be my old friend and opponent Ed Lucas, and Professor Richard Sakwa, author of the notable book on the Ukraine crisis recently reviewed at length here.  It is a ticket-only affair, which I regret, and over which I have no say(such events have to paid for somehow, and I do not expect to profit from it in any financial way) but those interested in obtaining tickets should follow this link: 

 

http://groupspaces.com/Wrforum/item/927927

 

Gluttons for punishment may also wish to follow this link, to the BBC iplayer version of yesterday's 'The Big Questions' . This was actually recorded two weeks ago, and is devoted to one subject, that of God, and of belief or disbelief in God. When I watched the programme I was even more frustrated than I was during the recording. I'll leave you to work out why that might have been, but I imagine those interested in this subject will find much to engage them here.   

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05xl4yt