Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 196
June 1, 2015
Is Euroscepticism Nearly Dead?
This weblog has a ���deafening silence��� department which goes around, raising to their feet important stories which have mysteriously not been as widely followed as I think they should have been.
This morning it sent out a special team, equipped with defibrillators, mugs of hot sweet tea and syringes full of powerful reviving shots, to try to do something about this absolutely terrific story by my esteemed Mail on Sunday colleague Simon Walters
It says that Rupert Murdoch , believed by ���Eurosceptics��� and Euro-enthusiasts alike, to be a dogged foe of EU integration, has ���mellowed��� towards the EU and now favours Britain staying in it. It provides an interesting history of Mr Murdoch���s known past views on the subject.
Simon is a very astute and careful reporter, hugely experienced and well-informed. Yet this astonishingly important development, so far as I can make out from my usual reasonably careful reading of the morning���s papers, and monitoring of the broadcast news programmes, has attracted almost no interest, beyond a tiny reference in the Daily Mirror. It hasn���t been denied, either.
I���ve long wondered when such a thing would happen. I���ve never fully understood Mr Murdoch���s fundamental objection to the EU, which I would have thought would have been his sort of thing, suited to the open borders, post-sovereignty , free movement world which he seems to espouse.
Neoconservatives, and I think Mr Murdoch can fairly be placed in this category, do tend to waver a bit on the subject of the EU. British neocons can still get hoity-toity about it, but when it came to its conflict with Russia over the neutrality of Ukraine, they sided pretty heavily with Brussels. For a long time I used to think the EU was hostile to the USA and sought to rival it, especially in the Middle East. Now I am far from sure that this is true, and tend to see the EU as what it always really was, a fundamentally American creation.
I wonder whether this development will be the beginning of a more general slippage of neocons into EU acceptance. After all, if I am right about the coming referendum ( and my friend Christopher Booker seems to agree with my assessment, as he said in yesterday���s Sunday Telegraph) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11641374/Six-predictions-for-that-EU-vote.html ) then the issue will soon be closed for good and not worth much effort. Very few people, in my experience care about it for itself. They may object to some of its implications, especially immigration, but see ���sovereignty��� as too abstract an issue to worry about. The needless resubmission of this country to the European Arrest Warrant, an outrage against Habeas Corpus, went by without a whimper.
Quite a few ideological cold warriors originally adopted ���Euroscepticism��� as a replacement for the lost passions and abolished enemies of the Cold War. Now they have found the Islamic threat instead, beside which poor old Mr Juncker looks a bit tame, and anyway we will have to get used to beeing governed, as Auberon Waugh put it, by Belgian Railway ticket collectors. Is ���Euroscepticism��� now doomed? I suspect so.
May 31, 2015
A Discussion About the Recent Election at the Hay Festival
I mentioned a discussion I'd had last Monday at the Hay festival about the General Election (other participants Bronwen Maddox of Prospect magazine, David Aaronovitch of the Times and Johann Hari , my opponent in a separate debate on drugs).
The audio has now been posted and can be listened to here
https://www.hayfestival.com/p-9644-bronwen-maddox-peter-hitchens-david-aaronovitch-johann-hari.aspx
If policemen don't scare you, they are not doing their job
This is Peter Hitchens���s Mail on Sunday column
What is the point of the police if wrongdoers aren���t afraid of them? Yet Durham Constabulary has actually produced a poster chiding parents for using the police as bogeymen.
It pleads: ���Parents, please don���t tell your children that we will take them off to jail if they are bad. We want them to run to us if they are scared, not be scared of us.���
Is that really what the police are for? If anyone runs to them for aid, it is because they imagine they are fearless defenders of right against wrong, who can be trusted even if they are frightening, and who will scare away bad people. But is that what they now are?
The poster features a picture of a gently smiling officer in a short-sleeved shirt. It leaves out his bottom half, so you cannot see if he is carrying the standard non-confrontational police armoury of clubs, handcuffs, pepper spray and electric-shock dispenser, which he may need to deal with the increasingly violent society which liberal ideas have created.
I am not surprised this comes from Durham, whose Chief Constable, Mike Barton, advocates giving free heroin to criminal drug abusers, and once told me he was ���proud to be a social worker���.
Now, as it happens, I would never tell a child or teenager to stop doing something in case the police come and arrest him. I know perfectly well that, if I were ever stupid enough to confront an underage wrongdoer, related to me or not, the police would arrest me, not him. I���ve heard or read of quite enough cases where this has happened, especially to people who have tried to defend themselves or their property against feral children.
But millions of people ��� usually those who have had no recent dealings with this surly and peevish nationalised industry ��� do retain a simple faith in the police, inherited from another age. They would rather their children were scared of getting into trouble than that they did stupid things. They know that the young all think they are immortal.
Most teenagers can���t ��� for instance ��� believe that they could become irreversibly mentally ill after using cannabis. And they come under huge peer pressure to take such drugs at their schools, where cannabis is often sold nearby or on the premises. How useful it would be for their mothers and fathers if they could credibly warn that they risk being caught, given a criminal record and banned for life from travelling to the USA.
But, as the Durham poster makes horribly clear, there is no such risk. The modern police are weird paramilitary social workers, jingling with weapons and armoured with astonishing powers, but not interested in enforcing the laws that matter to us most.
Perhaps one day the few remaining police stations will become heroin dispensaries, serving the people they failed to deter from drug-taking when they were younger.
And so bad people are not afraid of the police, though good people are increasingly afraid of being run in by them for saying the wrong thing.
It���s a pity. Fear is good and useful, when it���s deployed on the side of common sense. But these days what we mainly fear is chaos, and a callous, incompetent state that views us as a nuisance.
How interesting that the new head of the Downing Street Policy Unit, Camilla Cavendish, is an openly declared supporter of the legalisation of drugs. Such a view, publicly expressed on the record, would once have disqualified anyone from this job.
Ms Cavendish was an Oxford contemporary of David Cameron, and even went to the same college. He once signed a Commons report calling for weaker drug policies. Does she say openly what he thinks privately?
A royal luvvies affair
Until recently you could reliably assume that the acting profession and the media were stuffed with fashionable republicans, snobbishly looking down on monarchy. Yet a series of films and plays about our present Queen and her stuttering father seem to have softened the thespians��� radicalism.
The latest surprise is the sight of Kate Winslet (who insists her origins are working-class) in A Little Chaos, helping Alan Rickman to soften the image of that tricky old despot, Louis XIV of France. If tough old Lefty Helen Mirren can warm towards the Crown, after impersonating Her Majesty, who���s next? Since reigning and acting have so much in common, it���s surprising all actors aren���t fervent royalists.
George Osborne���s non-existent economic miracle continues. Not only are house prices now galloping upwards in a mad and ruinous frenzy. The official growth figures (about whose first draft the media fell silent in the days before the Election) now confirm that economic growth has slowed violently, dropping to a miserable 0.3 per cent in the first quarter of this year. The main cause is a combination of falling exports and rising imports, invariable symptoms of deep trouble.
Fight IS ��� and get something even worse
Even though we no longer have an Army worth the name, since David Cameron slashed the defence budget to pay for the scandal known as ���Foreign Aid���, voices are being raised to suggest that we intervene again in Iraq.
This is clueless in the extreme. If we send soldiers there, RAF Brize Norton will soon be welcoming planes loaded with flag-wrapped coffins ��� and in the end we will leave, beaten, yet again. The rise of Islamic State is the direct result of two disastrous foreign policy mistakes, both so obviously doomed that even I could see it at the time.
The 2003 overthrow of Saddam and the 2011 Western-backed undermining of the Assad government in Syria were both based on the idea that if you get rid of a tyrant, something better will automatically follow.
This isn���t true. In fact both these adventures released forces we barely understand and cannot control. There is no sign that anyone in London or Washington has learned anything as a result.
Our pious horror at the intolerant and repressive behaviour of Islamic State is bitterly funny, given that it is really not that different from the policies of our close ally, Saudi Arabia.
You may remember that flags flew at half-mast in London recently to mark the death of the Saudi king, and that British Royalty and politicians are frequent honoured guests in the Saudi capital. I am not against our having good relations with Riyadh. It is a sound principle of wise foreign policy to deal with whatever government is firmly in control of the territory.
We recognise many horrible governments all over the world, and have learned to live happily with grisly Sinn Fein right next door. In which case we may soon have to consider dealing with Islamic State too. Don���t rule it out. It may be better than the alternative.
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May 28, 2015
My Debate on drugs with Johann Hari at Hay-on-Wye
Some of you may like to listen to this audio recording of my debate on drugs with Johann Hari at Hay-on-Wye last Sunday evening.
https://www.hayfestival.com/p-9632-peter-hitchens-and-johann-hari.aspx
Some of you may not. Those who do may like to know that the story about Mr Hari going by mistake to Aberystwyth is absolutely true, and that my first contribution begins seven minutes into the recording.
Some Thoughts on the BBC's latest Churchill programme
A reader urged me to comment on the BBC2 TV programme (originally broadcast on Monday 25th May) called ���Churchill: When Britain Said No��� . I���m grateful for the suggestion.
It can still be seen on BBC iplayer , but only until Monday evening. It is very odd indeed, as I shall show later.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/search?q=Churchill%3A%20When%20Britain%20Said%20No
It���s true that there���s always been a bit of a mystery about the scale of the Tory defeat in 1945. It���s actually quite reasonable that they should have been beaten ��� they���d been in office, under the ���National��� label since the collapse of Ramsay Macdonald���s Labour government 14 long years before. They would have faced a difficult election in 1940 had the war not broken out
During the war, an electoral truce had suppressed opposition and political debate. What���s more, several leading Labour politicians had successfully occupied major offices of state in the wartime coalition. The wartime government had pursued the sort of regulation and control that Labour then advocated. The undeniable contribution of the USSR to victory was seen by many as another vindication of socialism. It also helped the growth of the Communist Party (see below).
Victory in war does not necessarily bring joy. By July, the war in Europe was over but huge numbers of men were still stuck in the services and waiting to go home, some dreading a long war against Japan (Hiroshima was still a month in the future, the Atom Bomb a secret). Rationing and shortage were still pervasive. Those who did return often came back to bombed cities , wrecked homes and to wives they had lost touch with and children they had hardly seen. People might have associated Churchill and his wartime colleagues with war and victory. But as they re-emerged as Tory politicians they remembered Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain and their fumbling, erratic conduct of foreign policy.
Set against them was the achievement of victory under Churchill���s leadership, and his enormous personal prestige. Contrary to myth, pre-1939 Britain was not a desert of starvation, soup-kitchens and misery, but had an elaborate welfare state, generous by world standards (as the far from right-wing historian Paul Addison has pointed out in his book ���The Road to 1945���) plus a great deal of public housing and state schooling. Chamberlain hated the war largely because it got in the way of his social programmes.
But it was logical to believe that the Labour Party, strengthened by proven experience in wartime government, would be keener on implementing social programmes (and less keen on another war) than the Tories.
Even so, a reasonably close result would have been perfectly possible. The overwhelming victory of Labour has never been fully explained, with some attributing it to political indoctrination of soldiers by the Army Bureau of Current Affairs. Opinion polling was barely done in those days, and I am myself a bit sceptical of the reports of ���Mass-Observation���, wrongly described as a government agency in the programme) with its self-selecting sources and its far-from-conservative (or Conservative) origins.
It���s not that the opinions it records aren���t genuine. It is just that one has absolutely no way of knowing how representative they are, and a constant suspicion that it was drawn to complainers, and they were drawn to it.
My own suspicion is that Churchill himself had little to do with it. Actual archive film shown by the programme shows him being greeted on tour by large crowds, who even then must have felt some admiration for this extraordinary figure. But it probably didn���t influence their votes at all.
As Clement Attlee pointed out in a clever and drily witty broadcast reproduced by an actor in the programme, the voters distinguished between Winston Churchill the great war leader, and Mr Churchill, the Tory politician. This broadcast was a riposte to a daft broadcast claim by Churchill (also reproduced by an actor) that a Labour government would impose its opinions on dissenters by a ���Gestapo���.
The good thing about the programme is that it shows that Churchill was a more or less useless politician, a follower of lost causes from King Edward VIII (oddly not mentioned) to the Gold Standard and intransigence over India. He had severely cut the armed services when in office in the 1920s, and his calls for rearmament are now over-emphasised in historical accounts influenced by his own writings and by our desire for a national myth. Under Chamberlain, as it happened, Britain re-armed quite effectively for a war in defence of the empire and the home islands (Spitfires, radar, a reasonably strong navy, the Singapore base ). What it did not prepare for was the war it got - an alliance with France against Germany for a land-campaign in defence of Poland. Duff Cooper had argued for a continental-sized army when he was a defence minister in 1936, but was told (truthfully) that the country could not do this and defend its empire.
Nobody apart from Cooper ever made this case, as far as I know. And, just as in 1914 the supporters of entering the war believed that Britain���s role in continental fighting would be marginal, supporters of ���standing up to Hitler��� tended to imagine that most of the standing-up would be done either by the French or by the Russian, or perhaps both. When Russia chose an alliance with Hitler, and when France collapsed, we found ourselves in a war we were totally unequipped to fight, and to whose main battlefields we had no access except from the air.
From 1940 to 1944, we fought the war we had prepared for, successfully defending our islands and (less effectively) defending the empire, in Iran, Iraq, North Africa and then the far east, only occasionally coming up against the main body of the German enemy, as in North Africa and the absurd Greek and Crete campaigns, but mainly not doing so. Our great imperial campaigns of reconquest, especially that in Burma, were major military achievements, but led nowhere. The territory we recaptured or defended was all lost to us within 20 years.
It���s quite an odd story when you look at it. One of our largest and most concentrated single naval engagements of the war (obviously not to be compared with the (defensive) battle of the Atlantic or the (politically driven) Russian convoys, but nonetheless of huge politico-military importance) was our attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, designed to prevent that fleet falling into enemy hands and to win support in the USA.
Our air force was (rightly) deployed mainly in defence of the home islands, the task for which it had been designed from the start. The Graf Spee, Bismarck and Scharnhorst episodes were not classic battles for sea power, but the destruction of convoy raiders. I suspect that the most important single naval engagement was at Narvik, where our destruction of German surface ships crippled Hitler���s navy, making an invasion of Britain even less likely than it had been in the first place. The next was at Dunkirk, where once more our superb and well-trained modern destroyer force did its job defending our shores and neighbouring seas, while also saving the British Army from being turned into hostages.
So Churchill���s supposed prescience and warnings were perhaps not as significant as is often believed, a point the programme legitimately makes. It also mentions the little-known fact (nowadays) that Churchill���s famous speeches were by no means all heard at the time, apart from by MPs, and were not universally enjoyed when they were broadcast.
It rehashes the well-known diary revelations about Churchill���s often insufferable behaviour to his generals and other colleagues, and the severe doubts frequently expressed in private about his conduct of the war. This is well-known, but does not in my view detract from his supreme achievement, the decision not to seek peace with Hitler in 1940. Readers here will know that I am still puzzled as to why we and the French had entered the war in 1939, at the worst possible moment for ourselves rather than waiting, with Rooseveltian cunning, till we were ready. But that wasn���t Churchill���s fault either.
This is all very well. What I find slightly less convincing are the contributions which stress reports from ���Mass-Observation���, and the ones from a self-styled ���activist��� with a Geordie accent (I am still trying to contact this person to make sure I have got the right man) whose political perspective seems to me to so far to the left that it tells us only what very left-wing people think about Churchill. I do not think this necessarily tells us what mainstream Labour voters and trade unionists thought about him.
In similar vein is an account of an election meeting at Walthamstow. There is actual film of this, but it is interspersed with dramatised reconstructions (which feature greatly in the programme) . It was quite clear to me which was which, but I am not completely sure that all viewers will have realised that fiction was being mixed with actuality.
Anyway, what was certain from the archive film of the rally, and from an eyewitness account of it which described the presence of pictures of Stalin and hammer-and-sickle symbols, was this. Communists had organised the interruption. One absolute giveaway of this is the use of the clenched-fist Red Front salute by several of the hecklers and protestors. This is as Communist as the ���Internationale��� and would not have been used at that time by ordinary Labour supporters.
I think the programme makes a mistake by suggesting that this organised Communist intervention tells us much about general public opinion at the time. British Communism, although more popular than ever before at this stage, never ceased to be a small minority.
So why *did* the Tories lose so badly? The programme makes this harder to understand by using modern terminology, and talking about Churchill seeking to be elected as Prime Minister, just as they tend to say that david Camron was re-elected as Prime Minister.
But in those days people understood much better that they were voting for a party candidate, not for a national President . they were used to Cabinets full of big men who had authority of their own, and weren���t ciphers appointed by an al-powerful boss. It was far easier for them to separate a liking and respect for Churchill from a dislike of his party (which, as they well knew, had not much liked him for most of his career, and which he had himself deserted and rejoined) .
And I think they felt Labour had earned the right to govern for the first time with a majority. Labour supporters, who had borne the heat of the day and the burden of a war they had not chosen, had earned the right to choose a government of people like them. It was a bit like the way in which people felt women had earned the right to vote during the 1914- 1918 war. All the old arguments looked a bit silly.
I���d also guess (though I was unborn at the time) that Clement Attlee���s very English modesty appealed far more strongly to a war-exhausted nation than Churchill���s bombast. In many ways, Attlee is the most English Prime Minister this country has had ��� terse, dry, withdrawn, understated, unshowy, modest (yet with real experience of combat) but determined and unquestionably patriotic, as Labour was in those days. I fancy I would have voted Labour in 1945, had I been old enough to do so. And I���m still not sure I���d have been wrong to do so.
A Kiss is Just a Kiss. Reflections on an unexpected victory and on Bills of Rights
My favourite story of the week is the revelation that the Chancellor of the Exchequer promised (or threatened) to ���French-kiss��� the Tory PR man, Lynton Crosby, if the Conservative Party won an outright majority .
See here
and here
to discover how the pledge was redeemed.
But the really interesting thing is that Mr Osborne made his promise *on election day* , clearly confident that he would not have to do as he promised. Can there now be any doubt that the Tories themselves were not expecting to win, or even seriously intending to do so?
The increasing embarrassment of their manifesto, underlined by the curious nature of the Queen���s Speech today, and the retreat over the ���British Bill of Rights���, plainly results from the same thing. This document was never intended as a programme for government. It was just an attention-seeking trailer, whose crowd-pleasing items would be swiftly got rid of in coalition negotiations.
What about that ���British Bill of Rights���, alas for the government hard to abandon outright, because it is rather popular with some of the newspapers which so keenly backed Mr Cameron? First of all, the ambition to create such a thing is deeply painful to the dwindling number of people who know that there is already an English Bill of Rights, and a Scottish equivalent, the Claim of Right. Is it possible, we wonder, that the advocates of this document really don���t know about this central pillar of our constitution? Regrettably, it is perfectly possible.
What they almost certainly don���t know is that this document, and its American equivalent ( based upon the English original) bear no relation to the stream of documenst proclaiming abstract ���Rights��� that have been foisted on the world since 1945.
The 1689 Bill of Rights is more or less a list of things the Crown and the state cannot do.
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/england.asp
It begins by denouncing King James II for various breaches of the limits on his power. Then it explicitly restates that such powers are pretended, that is to say, falsely asserted, and are illegal. ,
The ���rights��� it asserts are liberties - the liberty to petition the King, to elect MPs, to bear arms. Otherwise almost everything in it is an assertion of what the state is not permitted to do ��� no standing army , no limits on freedom of speech in Parliament, no fines before conviction, no excessive bail or fines, or torture.
To understand the document���s abhorrence for the Roman Catholic religion it is necessary to read Macaulay���s superb History of the period. Put very simply, it was at the time seen as the agent of tyranny and foreign rule.
Its American descendant, the 1789 U.S> Bill of Rights, here
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights_transcript.html
���is strikingly similar, including the right to bear arms.
But it is different, because the US Constitution does not assume Parliamentary sovereignty but instead makes the Constitution supreme, and can thus say that ���Congress shall make no law������on a number of matters. That is why the USA has a constitutional protection for press freedom, and we have none.
The wording also makes explicit a number of old English Common Law freedoms, speedy and public trial by jury, the right to be secure in one���s home, protection from double jeopardy, etc.
Any state will at all times seek to circumvent such provisions (Jury trial is pretty hard to get, in reality, though for different reasons, in both modern England and the modern USA, and by no means as much of a safeguard in England as it was before majority verdicts came in. This country has abolished the right to silence and the protection against being tried twice) .Whether Americans are in fact safer than Englishmen from such dangers is open to argument. Such documents are only as good as the generation charged with defending them, and both here and there , there are far too many people willing to sacrifice liberty for supposed ���security���.
But that���s another question.
What would Mr Cameron���s planned ���British Bill of Rights��� be about?
I suspect it would in fact be no more than a UK equivalent of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms here
http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-15.html
a more or less wholesale Importation of the European Convention of Human Rights into North America, with local adaptations. I think I can guarantee that, once enacted it would lead to just as much daft litigation, if not more, than has ever gone before the Strasbourg Court. Be careful what you wish for.
Why? Because such documents are by their nature an unlimited meal-ticket for smart activist lawyers.
This is because they are crammed with vague and imprecise sentiment which can be made to mean almost anything with a bit of effort.
Here, for example, is the ECHR
http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Convention_ENG.pdf
The difference is huge. The English and American Bills both address government, with suspicion and experience, saying, by implication, ���We know what you would do if you could. We have recently seen you do it.��� And adding :��� You are expressly forbidden, therefore, to do the following things���.
The ECHR-type documents are wholly different. They do not expressly limit the power of government. They assert, out of some imaginary pillar of fire or whirlwind from which they claim to speak, a number of laudable ���rights��� which government is in some way required to grant. It plainly derives from the slightly earlier UN Universal Declaration, which may be read here
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/eng.pdf
The gap between the aspirations in this document and the actual state of affairs in most UN member states during the subsequent 70 years is illustration enough of the total worthlessness of this kind of idealistic bloviation. Those countries which don���t do the awful things listed in the UN Declaration refrain from them because they have other historical, legal and constitutional reasons for refraining. As we have seen since the ���security��� panic following September 11th 2001, even the most law-governed nations can abandon civilisation in an afternoon, if they get worked up enough.
It is also true that, if the UN Declaration had never been made, they would still refrain from them. Those countries which torture ( a growing number, though they prefer to contract it out where possible) or imprison without trial or trample on minorities, are, always have been and always will be unrestrained by their signatures on such documents.
And look at the vagueness of section 1 of Article 11 of the UN Declaration :��� 1. Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence. ���
What does it mean in practice? An innocent person could be flung into jail on untested evidence by a corrupt or servile judge, in a courtroom in which those words were carved on the walls. Without practical limits on arrest, bail, pre-trial detention, a right to silence, an effective legal prohibition on torture, a rule against double jeopardy, habeas corpus, without a free press, and above all without independent juries, such formulae are written on water.
These things, without the means of enforcement, are just high-minded statements of intent.
Worse, they are so vague that they become the basis of judicial activism, the interference by political judges in the constitution.
In fact, the grander the wording, the more dangerous they are. It is a pity , for instance, that the drafters of the 1689 and 1789 documents used the expression ���cruel and unusual punishment��� . They should simply have specified torture, and drawing and quartering, which was what they meant.
Political judges will, alas, take any opportunity to invent ���rights��� that they wish to invite anyway. The legal profession has become infested with would-be politicians who are even so unwilling ( and who can blame them) to submit themselves and their opinions to the hurly burly of open politics. . The US Supreme Court���s decision to allow abortion on the grounds that to prevent it would infringe a woman���s privacy is so logically and linguistically absurd that one gasps at the nerve of the judges involved. Yet it was so.
I am honestly not sure how to curb judicial activism, or even if it can be curbed. But dull, cynical narrow laws, which say to government��� you can���t do this��� like those our ancestors inscribed upon vellum, seem to be better at doing this than modern charters of this and that. The British Bill of Rights is an electoral diversion, crowd-pleasing piffle which may turn out to be worse than what it replaces. If it ever happens.
May 26, 2015
What did the election really show?
I thought I would try some amateur election analysis here, (This post was previously posted here last week.I have reposted it to overcome a technical problem). This is partly for my own amusement and instruction, and probably not at all for yours.. I have (apologies for any errors, and gratitude for any corrections) assembled below what I think is a chart of the major and significant parties��� performances at general elections going back to 1979.
I thought this would be useful first because memories of such details (mine certainly) cloud with time; secondly because the result in terms of seats in parliament can obscure other significant facts and trends.
1979 is really the start of the modern political era, being the last election fought when both major parties (major in the post-1945 era in which we then lived) were still more or less capable of forming an absolute majority and entered the battle on more or less equal terms. Labour *could* have won in 1979. It was also the last election in which the parties were still decentralised mass organisations, rather than centralised command structures where all the money and power were under the control of the centre. It was also the last in which the old Liberal Party occupied the curious space gouged laboriously out for it in the post-war world by Jo Grimond and Jeremy Thorpe, and before the Labour split which led to the formation of the SDP, then the Alliance, and then the Liberal Democrats.
One thing strikes me immediately, which is the *astonishing* recovery (a full 25% gain) of the national Tory vote in 2010 , which didn���t and couldn���t win an election, and the *much* smaller recovery in 2015 (a footling extra half million, less than 5%), which did. I have always put down the 2010 recovery to the readmission of the Tories to polite (i.e. metropolitan liberal) company, following their embrace of political correctness, Green dogma, high social spending and their acceptance of new Labour���s general goodness and legitimacy ( as in Mr Cameron���s open admiration of Anthony Blair, and his description of himself as ���heir to Blair��� .This, crucially ended the BBC���s period of active hostility to the Tories (all this is analysed and described in my book ���the Cameron Delusion, never more relevant). It was this recovery which I had hoped and striven above all things to avoid, for it ended any realistic hope that the Tory Party would go down the plughole, as it still so richly serves to do.
The figures also show that the Tories are still miles short of the figures they used to get in the Thatcher-Major era. I am still unsure how or why John Major came to do so well in 1992, and I was there at the time and may even have played some part in it I think it may have been at the national equivalent of the man with the toothache abandoning his appointment with the dentist at the last minute. Fat lot of good it did us all, anyway.
The Labour figures are even more dispiriting, as they reach their peak during the dominance of the most repulsive and unqualified mountebank to occupy Downing Street for many decades. If people word why I express doubts about the virtues of democracy, the repeated electoral success of Blairish projects from whatever direction is my main explanation. But it also shows that the Miliband era, now widely dismissed as a cataclysm for Labour, was not wholly disastrous, and would quite possibly have produced a Labour minority government had it not been for the unforeseeable and wholly unstoppable explosion in SNP support.
I do think the Tory Party is extremely devious, but even I do not believe that Mr Cameron can have expected his pettifogging about ���English Votes for English Laws��� after the close referendum vote in September to have had quite such an effect. He would have had to understand Scotland a lot better than he seems to do, to have calculated such a thing. The law of unintended consequences is everywhere irresistible, and Mr Cameron, by this national blunder, achieved a partisan triumph.
Most striking of all is the great missed opportunity of the SDP-Liberal Alliance, which might have supplanted Labour had certain things not happened which need not have happened, as I think I have mentioned here before. I blame Margaret Thatcher for having acted to save the Labour Party , or partisan rather than national reasons. If the Alliance had displaced Labour, we would now have a much clearer and more intelligent political divide in this country, and the Tory Party might actually have come out of the Cold War as a proper conservative formation rather than as the Blairite rabble it now is. It���s one of the most interesting might-have-beens in politics.
Then of course there is the terrific achievement, in a very short time, of UKIP. I suppose this may continue, though current events are not heartening. The problem with UKIP us that it really doesn���t have any real idea of what it wants to achieve. Its attempt to become a significant Parliamentary party, and the absurd talk of it forming some sort of coalition with the Tories, were both delusional. It mistook success in the PR-governed Euro-elections and low-poll local votes as a guide to Parliamentary success. It misunderstood the meaning of its by-election victories (though Rochester and Strood was uncomfortably narrow and should have served as a warning). Its main task was always to rip into the underbelly of the Tories and destroy them. Having failed to do so, I now suspect it will use its voting base and organisation to attack Labour. This may well be moderately successful, but the continuing success of the Tory party in getting conservative people to vote for a radical-liberal party out of fear that , if they do not, there will be a radical liberal government - *and not mind when they find that their votes have brought about the very thing they voted to prevent* - dooms all efforts at supplanting the Tories in the foreseeable future. All that is left is to watch and laugh.
Tories
2015: 11,334,930 (36.9%) 331 seats
2010: 10,806,015 (36.4%) 306 seats
2005: 8,784,915 (32.4%) 198 seats
2001: 8,357,615 (31.7%) 166 seats
1997: 9,600,943 (30.7%) 165 seats
1992: 14,093,007 (41.9%) 336 seats
1987 13,760,935 (42.2%) 376 seats
1983 13,012,316 (42.4%) 397 seats
1979 13,697,923 (43.9%) 339 seats
Labour
2015:9,344,328 (30.4%) 232 seats
2010: 8,609,527 (29%) 258 seats
2005: 9,552,436 (35.2%) 355 seats
2001:10,724,953 (40.7%) 413 seats
1997: 13,518,167 (43.2%) 418 seats
1992: 11,560,484 (34.4%) 271 seats
1987: 10,029,270 (30.8%) 229 seats
1983: 8,456,934 (27.6%) 209 seats
1979: 11,532,218 (36.9%) 269 seats
UKIP
2015: 3,881,129 (12.6%); 1 seat
2010: 919,471; (3.1%) ;No seats
2005: 605,973(2.2%) ;No seats
2001: 390,563 (1.2%) No seats
1997: 105,722 (0.3%) No seats
1992: Not standing
Liberal Democrats
2015: 2,415,888(7.9%) 8 seats
2010: 6,836,824 (23%) 57 seats
2005: 5,985,454 (22%) 62 seats
2001: 4,814,321 (18.3%) 52 seats
1997: 5,242,947 (16.8%) 46 seats
1992: 5,999,606 (17.8%) 20 seats
1987 (SDP-Liberal Alliance) 7,341,651 (22.6%) 22 seats
1983 (Liberals 4,273,146, SDP 3,521,624) Total 7,794,770 (25.4%) 23 seats
1979 Liberals : 4,313,804 (13.8%) 11 seats
SNP
2015: 1,454,436(4.7%) 56 seats
2010: 491,386(1.7%) 6 seats
2005: 412,267(1.5%) 6 seats
2001: 464,314 (1.8%) 5 seats
1997: 621,550 (2.0%) 6 seats
1992: 629,564 (1.9%) 3 seats
1987 416,473 (1.3%) 3 seats
1983 331,975 (1.1%) 2 seats
1979 504,259 (1.6%) 2 seats
A few notes on the actual details of the election (this artuicle was first osted last week and is now re-postedm, to oercome a technical problem:
In 2015, in untargeted English seats, Tories often flagged badly and Labour did quite well, suggesting that the national trend may well have been closer to the polls than the result might suggest.
In Cambridge Labour increased its vote from 12,174 to 18,646 to beat the Liberals. It is hard to see tactical voting, or a wave of late Tory supporters, operating here. The Tories dropped from 12,829 (25.6%) to 8,117 (15.6%) UKIP performed poorly, hardly increasing its share from 2010.
In my own Oxford East constituency, where Tory activity was negligible, Labour���s popular Andrew Smith actually increased his vote to 50% of those polled, with the Tory trailing miles behind, and barely benefiting at all from a Liberal Democrat collapse. The Greens must have taken quite a bit of that, and UKIP perhaps took from the Tories what they gained from the Liberal Democrats. One can only guess at these ebbs and flows.
Oxford West, another constituency about which I know a little, is a peculiar seat. It was taken by the Tories from the Liberals in 2010 against the trend, (most think this had something to do with Christian objections to the Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris, largely thanks to his militant secularist position on many issues). Given that the Tory Party is a defeated relic in the whole city of Oxford, no longer represented at all on the council, it is interesting that it even so has a Tory MP for one of its divisions. This MP, Nicola Blackwood, survived and prospered in 2015, hugely increasing her tiny 2010 majority over the Liberal Democrat. But this also looks like astute targeting. The Labour vote (though a poor third place) actually rose.
Also interesting is Bath, a similarly prosperous city with many middle-class professionals, university etc, famously lost by the Wet Tory Chris (later Lord) Patten ( ���Tory gain!���, whooped some Tories, who regarded Patten as hopelessly left-wing) in 1992:
In 2010 the Lib Dems held Bath with an enormous majority 26,651 to the Tory 14,768. No other party did at all well. In 2015 (on an almost identical turnout) , the Greens polled a creditable 5,634 (compared with 1,120 in 2010) and Labour increased its share from 3,251 to 6,216. This must have cut into the Lib Dem vote, but was surely not enough to reduce it to 14,000. UKIP also increased its vote from 890 to 2,922
Let���s try another seat that changed hands, Morley and Outwood, where Leeds and Wakefield meet, held by Ed Balls in 2010. Mr Balls had previously held the Morley and Rothwell division, re-engineered into Morley and Outwood (a far more marginal constituency than before) by the Boundary Commission in 2010.
But his majority in 2010 had been very small - 18,365 to the Tory challenger���s 17,264.
This was plainly a target seat, where whatever necromantic methods were deployed by both main parties would have been used to the utmost, quite possibly for some years before 2015.
Ed Balls actually scored (on a very slightly lower turnout) 18,354 votes, eleven (yes, eleven) fewer than the 18,365 he had won in 2010. The Tory candidate, Andrea Jenkyns, won 18,776 , 1,512 more than her forerunner had garnered in 2010. This isn���t much, but it was enough. The Liberal Democrats collapsed from 8,186 to 1,426. Where did they all go? The Greens, on a first foray, may have helped cost Mr Balls the seat by collecting a respectable 1,264. The really big gainers in votes were UKIP, who increased their vote from 1,505 in 2010 to 7,951 this year. Some of these must have come from the BNP, which scored 3,535 in 2010 and didn���t stand in 2015. Some must have come from Labour. I���d guess that while quite a few Liberal Democrats switched *to* Labour, quite a few Labour voters switched to UKIP and the Greens. But a crucial 1,500 or so Lib Dems switched to the Tories.
A very similar process took place in Derby North, an even more marginal constituency and one of remarkably few seats to change hands between Labour and the Tories. If you look at the rather short list of seats that did change hands, the great majority were lost to the SNP by Labour in one of those total, overpowering changes of opinion which happen less than once in a generation and which no amount of canvassing or targeting could have altered, though I���ve no doubt that such waves can be and were amplified by the media and political adulation bestowed on Nicola Sturgeon. The next biggest category are Tory gains from Liberal Democrats. Labour also made some gains from the Liberal Democrats, in London and the North. And they made a few notable gains from the Tories, events which also belie the rapidly solidifying myth of a total Tory triumph.
I mentioned Bath above, a Tory gain from the Liberal Democrats. But one reason for this *might* have been that the incumbent Liberal Democrat MP had stood down. Almost everyone who has ever covered a by-election, including me, would have said before 2015 that the Liberal Democrats had an extraordinarily effective machine for getting and holding seats through dogged, detailed hard work and identification with local issues. I would have said that this would have resisted most national swings, especially when backed by the big personal votes which incumbent MPs can pile up by assiduous attention to such detail.
So let���s look at North Devon, an English Liberal Democrat seat with a longstanding incumbent, yet captured by the Tories.
The changeover is astonishing. This is not, I think, an area in which Liberal Democrat voters have ever been especially left-wing or likely to rush to Labour over the tuition-fee betrayal. In fact, I should have thought it an area where the Coalition was probably quite well-received. Nick Harvey is a prominent and articulate politician, who got quite a lot of broadcasting time, and could easily be mistaken for a Tory if you hadn���t been told. What is more, he had held the seat since 1992, and I don���t doubt that his local organisation was pretty good.
In 2010, Mr Harvey polled 24,305 to his Tory rival���s 18,484. UKIP was undistinguished but solid at 3,720 and Labour a romantic survival with 2,671. The Greens were on 697.
In 2015, the Tory candidate won 22,341. Mr Harvey���s total shrank melodramatically to 15,405. UKIP, meanwhile, won a respectable 7,719, which couldn���t have come from Labour because Labour���s vote went *up* to 3,699, as did the Green tally, which rose nearly five-fold to 3,018. My guess is that the extra UKIP voters were disenchanted Tories, but that it simply didn���t matter because the Tory campaign had achieved such an avalanche of Liberal Democrat defectors that there was no stopping them. I would list this as one of the seats the Tories never really expected or (nationally ) much wanted to win. But modern electoral weapons , once launched, cannot easily be controlled. If they could be, we would have a coalition, and the Tory manifesto would be in the bin where they always intended to throw it, rather than being taken seriously. Laughter, once again, must be the main response.
A Very Interesting Appointment
Is this the most soft-on-drugs government Britain has ever had? I mean in terms of the penetration of its higher levels by people who have already decided that surrender to the drugs lobby is wise and right, so ensuring that arguments for serious prevention are sidelined and ignored, and a 45-year campaign for tacit non-enforcement of existing laws continues and expands. A very important appointment at the very top, which I discuss below, seems to give us a clue.
I don���t mean in terms of actual, open legislative action. All the major political parties still hang back from direct legalisation, not least because this country is still bound by international treaties to maintain laws against certain named drugs. This is also because a lot of the older voters upon whom the Tory Party and the labour Party rely for their survival would not support it
The wealthy international Big Dope campaign is working hard to get these treaties rescinded or revised, and will (I suspect) begin to achieve this aim within ten years, after which the collapse will be swift.
But in the meantime, the creation of an atmosphere in which all expect (and many want) the drug laws to be weakly enforced, and in which the idea that such laws have any good purpose is systematically rejected and mocked, is continuing.
This is done largely by the media, but also by the ���sending of signals���, by brilliantly uncoordinated actions by drug lobbyists, who don���t know each other, who never meet for lunch or dinner, never have private conversations in which they discuss influencing public opinion to their advantage. To suggest that they did such things would be a ���conspiracy theory��� and therefore laughable .
So, for instance, while the Independent on Sunday was alone in calling for the actual legalisation of cannabis, a call it later withdrew, much more conservative organs, including the Times, The Economist and the Daily Telegraph, long ago allied themselves with the respectable campaign for decriminalisation. The difference between these positions is one of tactics, rather than of principle.
Of course ( and the BBC is also party to this) if you treat an opinion as if it is uncontentious, and avoid giving time or space to its opponents, you eventually *make* it uncontentious. That���s why in so-called ���debates��� on drugs you now very rarely hear any voice speaking for legal control on them. All the debates are about *how* we should relax the law, on the assumption that the need to do so is agreed and established. This is how the alleged ���centre��� is created - by first marginalising, then ignoring and finally silencing those with whom you do not agree. That���s why my book ���The War We Never Fought��� was killed mainly by being ignored. Most people will never even know what kind of book it is, let alone discover the facts it contains. Widespread knowledge of those facts would be a serious obstacle to the universally-chanted claim, which people actually think they have invented themselves as they mouth it, that ���The war on drugs has failed���.
The political class has played its part in this process. For instance, the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee has twice this century (in 2002 and 2013) sided with the campaign for the evisceration of the British drug laws, entirely adopting the language, attitudes and conclusions of the decriminalisation lobby ��� as if these opinions were not even contentious any more.
On one of those occasions (in 2002), the present Prime Minister, David Cameron, was a member of that committee. In fact, his participation in its report was the only significant political commitment he had made as an obscure MP, before he was suddenly ���discovered��� and rushed by a skilfully uncoordinated media campaign, into the leadership of the Tory Party, over the heads of dozens of more experienced and better-qualified men and women.
You may say that he was just an MP and had no choice. But you would be wrong. One of his Tory colleagues on the same committee, Angela Watkinson, argued fiercely against its conclusions and refused to sign the resulting report ��� a very rare event, and quite possibly the last ever example of a Conservative MP actually doing a conservative thing (it���s all described in my book). Mr Cameron cannot have been unaware of her dissent. He chose not to side with her.
Now he has appointed the Murdoch journalist (and his Oxford contemporary at Brasenose), Camilla Cavendish, to head his Downing Street policy unit. Ms Cavendish is a talented and distinguished journalist who has done some good and interesting work, notably on the injustices of the child protection laws, for which she has rightly been praised.
But she is also a longstanding advocate of drug legalisation (using the usual dud excuses, many times exploded here, that there is a 'war on drugs' that has failed, that illegality means gangsters will control the trade, the alleged evils of alleged ���Prohibition���, the dubious wonders of Portugal etc. etc.).
In an article she wrote in ���The Times��� of London on 24th February 2004, she said :���The logical conclusion of the drugs war might be to raid such clubs and jail half the top earners in the media and the City for recreational drug use. But, apart from being grossly unfair, this might have an unhealthy effect on Britain's GDP.
The better answer is one that many policemen -and politicians -already privately concede. It is to make drugs legal and tax them.���
Once, such an opinion would have disqualified anyone from heading a Downing Street policy unit. Now, I suspect it is more or less compulsory if you want to work for one. You see here the true spirit of this government and that generation, revealed. Moral surrender bolstered by ill-informed drivel, drivel accepted by otherwise intelligent people because it is what they want to believe.
May 24, 2015
Why Charles shakes Gerry Adams' hand - but avoids a loyal patriot
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
The picture of Prince Charles meeting 
Gerry Adams is inexpressibly sad. There is no point in protesting against it. Worse things will be happening soon, against which we will be equally powerless.
It is like living in a defeated and occupied country, only lonelier because most people don���t even realise that a lasting and profound disaster has overtaken them. The horrid handshake is just one of those things that now has to happen, and will go on happening as long as I live.
Like you, I have no power to stop them, no effective way to object to them. I know many people who will (quite wrongly) believe that such things are good signs and praiseworthy.
For we now live in a Kingdom of Lies in which almost everything is upside down or twisted, and in which most people are unhappily fooled into thinking, acting and voting against their own best interests.
I���d like to add a small personal note, because it seems to me to sum up the wretched state we are in, quite neatly.
I have more than once refused to shake Mr Adams���s hand.
That was more than 20 years ago, when I asked him some awkward questions during his visits to the USA, so much so that, on the one occasion we were alone together, he made his strong displeasure very clear (in public he always feigned friendliness). Not long afterwards he called for me to be ���decommissioned���. I suspect he���s not the only person who has hoped for this.
By contrast, Prince Charles (who had read one of my books) once expressed an interest in meeting me, and I was alerted to expect an invitation. But the future King was scared off by his advisers, who said it would do him grave harm if it ever got out. Well now look who he���s meeting, and being praised for it, too.
How strange to live in a country where the heir to the throne would rather publicly clasp the hand of a Republican apologist for political murder than privately meet a loyal patriot and monarchist. But there it is. Nothing is but what is not. We must learn to live our lives backwards, sideways, every way but straightforwardly.
Perhaps the next biggest absurdity is that we have a virulent New Labour government, which has the effrontery to call itself ���Conservative���. It would take a thick book to list all the ways in which this Government follows Blairite policies on everything from marriage and migration to the appeasement of terror (who do you think advised Charles to shake Mr Adams���s hand?). But here is one absurdity that tells those with eyes to see and ears to hear all that they need to know.
ON the day that mass immigration reached levels not seen since the Blair era, the Prime Minister appeared amid a clearly staged ���raid��� by immigration officials, bloviating about a ���crackdown��� that will of course never take place. Why should it? The EU rules that prevent us from controlling our borders will not be lifted. And the dubious and risky boom that has fooled so many is built largely on a wave of cheap unskilled migrant labour. Mr Cameron doesn���t want it to stop ��� and couldn���t stop it if he did.
I can���t help you. This is what we voted for, and the only opposition is a Labour Party that can���t think of anything to say because all its policies, from the NHS and comprehensive schools to wind power, same-sex marriage and foreign aid, have been adopted by David Cameron. The Heir to Blair has at last fully inherited his hero���s estate. And we have to live there.
Spooks let slip MI5's big secret... it really is useless
What exactly is MI5 defending, and from whom? This question kept seething in my mind as I struggled to understand the film Spooks: The Greater Good, whose plot (if there is one) makes relativity look simple.
Who is betraying whom? Who is the enemy? Why did she shoot him? Why didn���t he shoot her? Why doesn���t one character say anything at all for most of the film? Why is he so short? What on earth is a domestic security agency doing in Berlin? I left the cinema even more convinced than before that we would be better off without any MI5 at all.
The EU vote is just a cruel trap
Actually I never wanted an EU referendum, and I think those who called for it will one day wish they hadn���t. It���s a trap. A referendum is almost always a device by which governments get the voters to endorse what they wanted to do all along.
I remember the 1975 referendum, in which I voted ���No���. I changed my vote at the last minute because the evening paper I then worked for refused to print a news story I had written which showed the local ���Yes��� campaign in a bad light.
Until then, like almost everyone else, I had been completely beguiled by a ���Yes��� campaign which was (as it will be this time) hugely richer and smoother than the ���No��� side.
I had been fooled by claims that we would be better off in, fooled by claims that opponents of the Common Market were all swivel-headed extremists.
Then, as now, the BBC and the whole of the important print media were on the side of staying in, and covered the battle in ways that helped the ���Yes��� movement and hurt the ���No��� campaign.
Of course this time it will be cleverer. Mr Cameron will feign toughness in ���negotiations���, which will win a few token concessions much like those ���won��� by Harold Wilson in 1975.
Then his ���triumph��� at late-night Brussels talks will be praised by the same people who praised his non-existent economic miracle. And the vote will be got in by the same costly, clever methods, combined with scare stories, that won a Tory majority on May 7.
And the trap will snap shut, and the issue will be closed, not for 40 years, as it was last time ��� but for ever.
A slice of tyranny
Curious how slow the judiciary are to understand what the Great Gay Cake issue is about. It has nothing to do with who asked for the cake, or even why. It has very little to do with cakes.
It is about whether anyone can be compelled to say something he disagrees with. The bakers who refused to make the cake did so because they did not agree with the wording they were being asked to put on it. If someone can be forced by law to say something he disagrees with, we are not a free country.
The nearest parallel I can think of is the way in which people in communist countries were forced to display red flags from their flats, or to carry placards bearing Marxist slogans they secretly hated.
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May 23, 2015
Do Young People Really Hate Bach?
Some of you will have heard of the ���Mosquito���, a device which emits a whine so high-pitched that is inaudible to almost everyone over the age of 25. It has been used to try to drive teenagers away from places where they gather in unwanted clumps and knots.
It causes all kinds of other problems, and was once denounced by a person holding the title of ���Children���s Commissioner���
Here���s an example of its use :
But I have also read of shopping centres using classical music to drive away the unwelcome young.
See:
and
though some doubt is cast on it here
http://www.wqxr.org/#!/story/281248-does-classical-music-train-stations-really-deter-crime/
But a few days ago I saw it in operation. In a favourite second-hand bookshop (it���s actually much more than that) I was so delighted by the music that was playing that I asked the owners what it was (Arcangelo Corelli���s Church Sonatas, as it happens http://www.amazon.com/Corelli-22Church-Sonatas-22-Avison-Ensemble/dp/B009H75B9M ).
As they told me, they said ���You may like it, but did you see that young man who just left? He said he couldn���t stand it and had to get out!��� .
Now, I am sure that in my teens and twenties I would have liked the music of Corelli nearly as much as I do now. I think it would be very hard to dislike. So what explains this.
I think it is that the ears of the young have been trained to appreciate different sounds from the ones we used to appreciate.
When I was about 11 I began to listen to popular music of various kinds, though it was not till I was 14 or so that Radio London made it easy to hear it practically all the time. Mostly it reached me through tinny radios or scarcely less tinny monaural record players. Headphones were more or less unknown, and festivals rare, and hard to get to.
But a child growing up today is constantly exposed to louder, deeper, more powerful rock music, broadcast and easily downloaded from the web, almost invariably with a deep bass beat and loud guitar chords. The number of people with headphones clamped to their heads or buds in their ears is enormous (by the way, the righteous campaign to get people to wear dubious bicycle helmets would be far better directed at getting cyclists to stop listening to music while riding and so depriving themselves of one of their most valuable safety devices, the only ones that can warn them of what���s behind them, their ears) .
Is it possible that, having become accustomed to this sort of music, the human brain is no longer receptive to, and is actually repelled by the classics?
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