Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 197

An exchange on drugs

A contributor, a Mr Falconer,  has posted a comment on a rather old thread ('Fighting the Fake War on Drugs'). I have responded to it there, but thought the exchange deserved a wider circulation than it will get on that old thread. I have ignored the more wearisome boilerplate in his case, but have offered direct rebuttals of some of the accusations of dishonesty which eh makes against me. My responses are in bold type. 

 

Mr Hitchens,

The only one telling lies here is you. You know full well that prosecuting drug users is a futile strategy, which is why we do not follow it. Proof of that can be found with immediate ease, by looking across the Atlantic, where a vigorous war against drug users is still in full force. The result? The so-called "land of the free" has the biggest prison population in the world, with over two million people behind bars, of which over fifty percent are non-violent drug users.

***PH writes: This sort of misleading phraseology is typical of the drug propagandist. They may well be non-violent drug-users. But they are not in prison *for* non-violent drug use. Anyone with access to a search engine can look up an article from the (far-from-unfunky) US magazine 'Rolling Stone;' (key phrase "Top 10 Marijuana myths") which points out : ' About 750,000 people are arrested every year for marijuana offenses in the U.S. There's a lot of variation across states in what happens next. Not all arrests lead to prosecutions, and relatively few people prosecuted and convicted of simple possession end up in jail. Most are fined or are placed into community supervision. About 40,000 inmates of state and federal prison have a current conviction involving marijuana, and about half of them are in for marijuana offenses alone; most of these were involved in distribution. Less than one percent are in for possession alone.'

Less than one per cent. Got that? The writer also seems to have failed to notice the increasing legalisation of marijuana, either directly or through the ruse of 'medical marijuana' in a majority of US jurisdictions. With a few minor exceptions, the US has followed the British path of de facto decriminalisation of marijuana possession over many years, masked by the maintenance on the books of unenforced laws which appear stringent. ****

 

You are also a liar by omission, because you never invite people to imagine the consequences should we follow the stupid American prohibitionist model. It would require the creation of a police state and prison gulag system the equivalent of....er, the USA. The only beneficiaries would be the evil corporations which profit from human misery through privatised prisons.

You're approach is ilogical & narrow minded. How can it possibly benefit someone who has a drug problem by locking them up? Statistics show that prison sentences for drug addicts in the USA does nothing whatsover to deter use, in fact it does the exact opposite, with the vast majority of drug users who receive prison sentences relapsing on release.

The reason society is moving closer to legalisation is not because of some imaginary "Big Dope" lobby, which is a scare tactic that you have invented, [another lie],

***PH writes: Similarly I ask readers to seek out a 'Washingtion Times' article by Kelly Riddell from 2nd April 2014, which opens with the words : 'Billionaire philanthropist George Soros hopes the U.S. goes to pot, and he is using his money to drive it there.

With a cadre of like-minded, wealthy donors, Mr. Soros is dominating the pro-legalization side of the marijuana debate by funding grass-roots initiatives that begin in New York City and end up affecting local politics elsewhere.

Through a network of nonprofit groups, Mr. Soros has spent at least $80 million on the legalization effort since 1994, when he diverted a portion of his foundation���s funds to organizations exploring alternative drug policies, according to tax filings.

 

His spending has been supplemented by Peter B. Lewis, the late chairman of Progressive Insurance Co. and an unabashed pot smoker who channeled more than $40 million to influence local debates, according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. The two billionaires��� funding has been unmatched by anyone on the other side of the debate.

Mr. Soros makes his donations through the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit he funds with roughly $4 million in annual contributions from his Foundation to Promote an Open Society.'

****

 

 

....but because millions of people, through their personal experience are discovering the complete uselessness of prohibition; that it does absolutely nothing to deter drug use or rehabilitate, in fact prohibition does the absolute opposite by creating forbidden fruit, while at the same time worsening every problem associated with drug use, and creating other problems which did not exist prior to the introduction of prohibition -for example drug gang violence, drug adulteration.

***PH remarks: The principal protection of the individual against adulterated illegal drugs comes form the fact that their sale and purchase is illegal, and people are therefore clearly warned not to use them at all. If they then do so, it is surely at their own risk.

I have several times pointed to the case of Japan, which enforces laws which Mr Falconer would no doubt describe as 'prohibition', and has as a result achieved a much lower level of drug use (as admitted in the recent Home Office report on the subject, though they baselessly ascribed this to 'cultural differences' because it would otherwise have spoiled their argument) than in any other advanced free, law-governed and democratic country.****

The only people who benefit from prohibition are the drug traffickers, corrupt politicians, the security services and the privatised prison corporations. These are the people you side with when you argue for a new front in the War on Drugs. When, eventually drugs are legalised, and the sky does not fall on our heads, you will have to accept that you are entirely on the wrong side of history on this issue, and your arguments are ridiculous and simplistic.

***PH writes: Mr Falconer has shown here no sign of having read or understood my actual case, made in my book 'The War We Never Fought' and in many articles here. So I am not sure we can rely on his description of my arguments.***

I also suggest you watch the excellent film Kill The Messenger, about the journalist Gary Webb, who exposed cocaine trafficking by the CIA, and whose career as a journalist was utterly destroyed as a result. He supposedly committed suicide by shooting himself in the head, twice. Which leads me to ask how much do you get paid for being a shill for prohibition, when you know that any logical examination of prohibition policies leads to the conclusion that it does not work and must be reformed. Thirty pieces of silver by any chance?

***PH writes : I campaign against drug liberalisation because I strongly believe it is wrong. Nobody has ever offered me money to take up this case, or to influence my views on this or any other subject, nor would I accept it if they did. ***

What do the figures really show? Some thoughts on the 2015 election and what went before.

I thought I would try some amateur election analysis here, 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:

 

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.

Billy Morris's Unstately Home

I���ve always found it funny that one of the greatest exponents of beauty and one of the greatest authors of ugliness both carried the name William Morris. It���s the second one I wish to write about today, not the hugely-bearded idealist socialist novelist, wallpaper designer and friend of pre-Raphaelites, but the tough clean-shaven backstreet bicycle repairman who became a millionaire and a great philanthropist, Britain���s miniature Henry Ford.  

 

I���ve so far failed to get inside the first Morris���s Thames-side home, Kelmscott Manor though have turned up there more than once on my bicycle, hoping to be in luck, but I am seldom free on Wednesdays and Saturdays when it is most likely to be open. It���s a lovely place in a strange and remote corner of England, and sooner or later I���ll organise myself to get there. I had similar problems with the other Morris���s equally interesting house, somehow turning up too late, or on the wrong day. But during my recent brief Spring break, I finally managed to get there.

 

If the National Trust has on its books an odder property than Nuffield Place at Huntercombe on the hills above Wallingford, I���d like to know what it is.

 

My life has been slightly haunted by its one-time owner, who I first heard of as Lord Nuffield, probably thanks to his great generosity in equipping dozens of hospitals with costly ���Iron Lungs���, respirators which allowed the victims of Polio to keep breathing and survive. There���s one of these machines at Huntercombe, in a garden outhouse.  Like almost everything that seemed shiny, modern and sleek in my childhood, it now looks shabby, cumbersome and archaic, but the phrase itself was terribly evocative of another time.  And the name ���Nuffield��� brought to mind another of his philanthropic gestures, the Nuffield United Services Officers��� Club in Portsmouth,  where we would stay on family visits to my father���s Pompey relatives, mainly during the years when we lived in far-off Devon. It was a child���s paradise, a huge building of many rooms (one for reading, one for writing, one for playing cards in,  a grand lounge where white-jacketed waiters served (presumably subsidised) drinks to Naval officers and their families, an (unmechanised) ten-pin bowling alley , a snack-bar and a fruit-machine from which my brother once won the jackpot, a two-minute cascade of silver sixpences. Maybe I grew older and more perceptive, and maybe the Club itself grew shabbier and less populous, but in later years the place seemed diminished, and I suppose its clientele shrank after Suez, and their tastes changed. It was, like a lot of my childhood, much more like the 1930s than the 1950s.  The building , which once seemed vast to me, is I think still there, but appeared to be closed up when I last looked.

 

I would get to know the name even better when we moved to Oxford, by then altered out of all recognition by his car factories (in those days Kingsley Amis and others were predicting that Oxford would end up as ���the Latin Quarter of Cowley���), as the industrial sprawl to the east of the old city spread and spread, and what had been an ancient and rather obscure university and market town became a modern English manufacturing centre in the South Midlands. I sold Trotskyist newspapers outside them, gathering near the foot of the great camouflaged brick chimneys, reminders of the factories��� wartime role as a Spitfire repair shop, and meeting afterwards for the best bacon sandwiches I have ever eaten, and strong brown tea,  at Johnson���s Caf��, , no more than a wooden hut, now vanished. I even did a summer job cleaning one of those factories (I took part in a brief and unsuccessful strike , I confess. It seemed the thing to do. The place was always on strike the rest of the time) and lived to see them pulled down and turned into green fields, their memory preserved by an obelisk recording the rise and fall of the Morris empire. All those furious years of manufacture and invention, Bullnose Morrises, Morris Minors, the original Mini, ending in the collapse of Britain's own domestic motor industry. 'And the wind shall blow over it, and the place of it shall know it no more'. 

 

Funnily enough we spent some time at the Nuffield Club, as we called it, , between homes, when we finally left Portsmouth for Oxford in 1963 - and so we were there in the huge lounge on the day Lord Nuffield died, 22nd August 1963. There was a large piece of black crape on top of his portrait, and a reverential end-of-an-era feeling along the shiny cork-tiled corridors and in all the comfortable, quiet public rooms.  

 

 

The house is a sort of memorial of that day. Lord and Lady Nuffield had no children, so the place was not broken up, refurbished or sold, but was left more or less untouched by Nuffield College, which inherited it. Then someone had the (in my view) brilliant idea of opening it to the public (details are on the National Trust website).  Owners of vintage Morris cars may park right outside. Those who arrive on foot or by bike (Lord Nuffield started as a bicycle repairman, remember)  get a free cup of tea in the modest but pleasant tea-room. It commemorates an era which is now as remote to most British people as the Reformation (more so, as there are no TV dramas about it, and those who lived through it are mostly out of circulation or dead) , the age of home-grown industrialists, the first excitement of the motor car, then still seen as a liberator rather than as a tyrant.

 

Nuffield was plainly a special sort of great man, with a huge will and a furious dedication to hard work, combined with a superb business sense, a lot of ambition and a hatred of idleness (there���s a wonderful tool cupboard in his bedroom, which he used to the end, sometimes resoling his own shoes). His vast philanthropy wasn���t compulsory, and he must be given credit for it, though I must confess that I���ve never really liked the sound of him (he drove Oxford���s old horse-trams off the streets by running his own bus service, and I���ve often wondered if, without him, my home city might now have a fine system of elegant electric trams, a form of transport much better suited to it than cars or motor buses).

 

But his personal modesty is appealing.  The house is really just a big two-storey suburban villa (it was built in 1914 for a shipping magnate, who later sold it to Nuffield,  and designed by an associate of Edwin Lutyens, so it sits quite unobtrusively amid lawns and woods . Nuffield���s idea of luxury is incredibly modest by the standards of today.  There���s a large garden where Morris and his wife spent many happy hours.  There are few books, but there is a large billiard table in its own billiard room, with scoreboards and the rules of snooker and billiards on the wall. There���s a tiny TV and there are a couple of wireless sets. It is all very unassuming, suitable, lower-middle-class and English, and could be the setting for the opening of a Nevil Shute novel. Margaret Thatcher would have liked it, I think.

 

 The staff know a lot about him (I think some of them may have known him). One rather touching story was told to me , that , after business trips to London, he would take the train to Henley (the nearest station) , and telephone the local pub in Nuffield, where he was well-known. He���d then ask if anyone was able to give him a lift home. He���d pay for their petrol and give them money to stand a round in the pub, but he���d also quietly pump them for news of who in the village might be in need of help of any kind, which would then be unobtrusively given.

 

The old story, that he was snobbishly refused entry to the nearby Huntercombe Golf Club, and retaliated by buying it, is apparently not true. Staff at the house say he bought it to help it through a bad patch.  The setting, by the way, is glorious ��� looking North-West down a steep valley towards the Wittenham Clumps and beyond for many miles into the Cotswolds. And one bizarre historical note ��� just along the road is HM Prison Huntercombe, whose existence on this sequestered, beautiful spot must surely have annoyed this rich and powerful man and his wife. Before becoming a prison, it was a wartime internment camp in which the mysterious Rudolf Hess was briefly held. What a strange force is history, that could bring two such men within shouting distance of each other.

Why I Place No Hope in a Referendum on Britain's EU Membership

The Tory promise of a referendum has been doubly painful for me. First of all I had to explain that it was never meant to be delivered, and was only made on the (reasonable) assumption that it would form part of the negotiations for a second coalition, or similar arrangement, probably with the Liberal Democrats, and be dropped, with feigned squawks of reluctance.

 

The very risky nature of the Tory manifesto, full of pledges made in the belief that they would never be redeemed,  seems to me to be absolute proof that Mr Cameron and his lieutenants believed (as I did) that an outright victory was impossible. I don���t think they wanted to win, as victory deprives them of a useful double alibi. It would be an excuse, first for not doing things they say they what to do but secretly don���t want to do; and second, for doing things they say they don���t want to do, but secretly do want to do. The biggest broken promise, as Tim Montgomerie rightly pointed out on Radio 4���s ���Any Questions��� last Friday, will be the unattainable pledges to pursue deep and rapid spending cuts.  The Lib Dens would have provided the obvious excuse for watering them down. Now they���ll have to think of another way.  

 

But while I was bogged down in this, I had to neglect the profounder point, that a referendum is not desirable anyway.

 

Plebiscites are a weapon of the state against the people in almost all cases. If elites think they will lose them, they either do not hold them, or (if they are only weak and incompetent elites) they arrange to have them re-run to come up with the desired result.

 

It is quite funny to note that there is ( so far as I know ) no instance of a referendum which has had the ���right��� result (i.e. that desired by the elite) being re-run. There are many instances on the Continent and in Ireland of referenda which have had the ���wrong��� result (i.e. one unwelcome to the elite) being re-run. Sometimes this is achieved by asking what is essentially the same question, but in a different guise, thus the EU Constitution is re-badged as ���the Lisbon Treaty���, amounting to more or less the same thing. And it is  then ratified in these countries which previously rejected it.

 

The exceptions to the general rule that referenda are not to be trusted  (mainly to be found in Switzerland) are: where the initiative for them comes from below;  where the government plays no part in timing them or drafting the question; where the campaigns are protected by unalterable law from gross unfairness.

 

Apart from the vote on ballot reform, which I suspect went unnoticed by millions of electors, the one instance of a referendum in the entire United Kingdom was that of 1975, in which I was a very interested observer, having been given the job of covering many of the main meetings on both sides in the town where I then worked for an evening paper. I am pretty certain that I became so  engaged that I attended some of the meetings simply for the joy of observing a real live national controversy, the last one this country ever experienced.

 

Until the last hour, I was entirely taken in by the ���Yes��� campaign, which appealed to the lingering Utopian in me (a part of myself then still thriving, as I had recently abandoned Marxism-Leninism, but which I think and hope has long since shrivelled and died, like an exhausted verruca). I remember especially being charmed and carried away by an idealistic internationalist oration by Uwe Kitzinger, wearing his piratical eye-patch; and of being appalled by a sub-Churchillian anti-Brussels tub-thumping performance (I think there was an actual tub. He certainly thumped something)  by Peter Shore, who ended by growling ���And damn the Common Market!���

 

On the morning of the vote I received at my scruffy bedsit home a very glossy leaflet containing lavish endorsements of the ���Yes��� campaign by several local notables. One of them (her picture made this unambiguous) was a respected colleague of mine on the evening paper. But they had spelled her surname wrongly, very wrongly. I carried the leaflet into the office and showed her, expecting her to laugh at their incompetence. But instead she said ���I never gave my permission for this ��� and was quite cross.

 

As the urgent minutes scurried by towards our first edition deadline, I telephoned all the people on the list wearing out my finger in the dial of the old black instrument. I was on to something. Several others, likewise, had not given their permission. The response of the organisers was pathetic. I pounded furiously at my typewriter to get this rather important story to the sub-editors in time for the lunchtime paper. It was a friendly, small office and, if we were free, we reporters used to slip down into the machine room towards the end of the morning, to watch the lovely old presses begin to turn. I liked to see and hear them hammer up to full speed, enjoying the sight of the solid, saleable end of the process we had begun, perhaps days before,  by lifting the phone or by some whispered conversation at the back of a meeting hall.  In those days, it was nearly as thrilling as watching a steam locomotive slowly accelerate out of a station.

 

But that day I didn���t go. My story had been held out of the paper. A pale pink mist of fury and disappointment, purely the frustration of a reporter with a good story, still obscures in my memory of the precise events. I can���t recall the excuses offered, though the person offering them, normally receptive and reasonable,  was known as an enthusiastic Liberal and Common Market enthusiast. I think the story was eventually printed the next day, when it had lost all its (pretty limited) power to damage the ���Yes��� campaign. But I had one recourse. I stomped down to the polling station and voted ���No��� to assuage my rage,  thus being saved from doing a stupid thing without knowing it, more by instinct than by reason.

 

It didn���t make the slightest difference to the result, which had been a foregone conclusion anyway. At the start of the contest, opposition to our membership was strong, but a blatantly unfair campaign put paid to that. Membership, then as now, was a fait accompli and opponents had the immediate disadvantage of arguing for a ���No��� vote, No major newspaper (then as now)  favoured a British exit -  and before wiseacres tell me that old ���Daily Express��� (in those days a significant force with a daily sale higher than two million)  was fervently opposed to the Market, it had indeed been so for many years but was swung round to favour it in plenty of time for the referendum.

 

Even the official pamphlets, distributed at taxpayers��� expense to all homes, were grossly biased.   There was one for ���Yes���. One for ���No���, and then another one for ���Yes���. This blatant departure from fairness was excused on the grounds that this  was the opinion of the government. Actually, it wasn���t. Several Labour Cabinet Ministers, from both wings of the party, actively campaigned for a ���No��� vote.  Indeed, just as the repeatedly-offered Cameron referendum was mainly devised to cope with division in the Tory Party, the Wilson referendum was mainly designed to cope with disunity in the Labour Party. The Tory opposition was almost wholly united in favour of staying in, not least its leader, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, who was photographed wearing a fetching jumper embroidered with the flags of all the then Common Market members.  Enoch Powell, the main Tory opponent of EU membership, had by then left his old party.

 

Business gave heavily to the ���Yes��� campaign, which thus looked smooth and confident. The ���No��� campaign, with its thin resources and often passionate but lonely advocates, looked amateur and defensive from the start.

 

Spending figures, and you must allow hugely for inflation here, were : ���Yes��� campaign ��1,850,000, ���No��� campaign ��133,000. But even without inflation, the *proportion* of ���Yes��� money to ���No��� money is astonishing. How could this be fair? Why wasn't there a ceiling? What is there to prevent it happening again? (I am indebted for these figures and other details to Christopher Booker and Richard North���s superb book ���The Great Deception��� by a mile (1.609344 kilometres)  the best account of the history of the EU and our relations with it.

 

The BBC���s role can be left to the imagination, though, as I wrote in the Mail on Sunday on 21st December 2008 :

 

���WHAT a lot of fuss about Ed Stourton being dropped as a presenter of BBCRadio 4's Today programme. My sympathies to Mr Stourton, whose opinion of the BBC may now be closer to mine than it used to be, but I can't see any major significance in the substitution of one BBC standard-issue 'impartial' liberal for another.

'The non-row brings to mind the genuine scandal, still not properly explored, of the removal of the anti-Common Market presenter Jack de Manio from Today. A legendary BBC radio programme, called Document - A Letter To The Times, broadcast on February 3, 2000, records persuasively that the Corporation came under pressure from pro-Market lobbyists to sack Jack, and that he was soon after removed. Coincidence? You may believe that if you wish. I don't. The Labour peer Roy Hattersley creditably recalls his personal disgust when he attended a high-level pro-Market breakfast meeting at which similar actions against anti-Market broadcasters were openly demanded by pro-Brussels conspirators. I do hope the BBC repeats this amazing programme soon.���

 

They haven���t repeated it, and I never cease to be amazed that they transmitted it at all. I did hear it, long ago.  A transcript of it can be accessed on the web, but only if you are prepared to pay.

 

Polls before the campaign showed a majority for departure. But the eventual result, on a 65% turnout was more or less two to one in favour of staying in ��� 67.2% to 32.8%.

 

I expect something very similar in Mr Cameron���s referendum. Indeed, if I were an EUphile, I would have for some time been an enthusiastic supporter of such a referendum. I can think of no more certain way of closing the issue forever.  The route I would take, the steady accretion of power and support by a new political party committed to national independence, neither bigoted nor politically correct, free of the ghastly social and economic  liberalism that all sensible people are rapidly coming to hate but which they now find everywhere in politics,  I suppose there is an argument, once the thing has begun, for making the case for exit.  But in such circumstances, what chance has my side? It has very few people in it who could be counted good TV performers or public speakers. Its arguments are often not very coherent. Its reliance on Thatcherite sentiment, and even its belief that a referendum was a goal worth chasing,  demonstrates its ignorance of our own national history and of the forces at work.

 

Let me predict the course of events. The Tory Party leadership and its backers in business and elsewhere will, in the next few months, appear to merge themselves with ���Eurosceptic��� opinion, reasonably accepting that British independence is practicable and may even be desirable, railing against EU ���bureaucracy��� or some other vague characteristic.

 

Mr Cameron himself will strike increasingly nationalistic poses at gatherings of EU leaders, similar to his non-existent veto  of December 2011 discussed here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/12/dont-forget-they-cheered-chamberlains-victory-too.html

 

And here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/12/david-camerons-phoney-war-or-a-curse-in-disguise-.html

 

���.or perhaps modelled on his bungled attempt to block the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker, another content-free episode of triangulation based on the belief  (why do the Tory strategists think this?) that we are all almost unbelievably stupid.  His logic appeared to run : ���If I have a public row with this very foreign-seeming foreigner, UKIP voters (who, unlike me, the great and broad-minded David Cameron, really don���t like foreigners) will think I am just like them��� .

 

Then there will be negotiations at which we will be told the EU has abandoned some of its ���red tape��� or diminished its demand for ever-closer union, or postponed some other power-grab. This will not be so, but when Mr Cameron, haggard and exhausted after night-long negotiations, emerges into the Brussels dawn to claim his triumph, the rest of the EU will keep quiet about the fact that there is no triumph, just as they kept quiet about the fact that he did not actually wield the veto in 2011. Winners don���t need to boast. They can let the losers vaunt themselves and brag, if it helps the real winners get their way.

 

And then all the Tories who have mingled for months with EU opponents , as if they were friends, will say ���Mr Cameron, with charm and grit,  has won a great and historic deal for Britain. Now we can in all conscience vote to stay in.  So should you. Please join us���. This mingling is the real purpose of 'Euroscepticism', to gull and soothe genuine secessionists with what looks like friendship and agreement, the more powerfully to abandon and undermine them when the decisive moment arrives.

 

And precisely because they have feigned sympathy so well, and pretended to be in favour of leaving if the right conditions aren���t met,  their defection will be all the more effective. And the nation will vote heavily to stay in, and the issue will be dead until the EU itself breaks up under its own strains, spitting us out into a pitiful loneliness we weren���t brave enough to choose when it might have been some use to us.

 

We have to get out of the EU through a Parliamentary majority, because that is the way we got in. Our entry into the then Common Market had been agreed by Parliament in 1972, quite properly under our constitution without a referendum, though otherwise dishonestly and immorally because those in favour did not admit the truth about what they proposed.

 

The paradox was that Parliament, acting as the sovereign body it then still was, extinguished its own sovereignty in a  single division, in which the votes of Labour pro-marketeers saved Ted Heath from what would otherwise have been decisive defeat. This was yet another appearance of  the cross-party liberal alliance, never tested openly at any general election (perhaps until now)  which first transformed the country, and then became its permanent government. If you cannot defeat that alliance (now embracing the whole Tory Party)  at the polls, you will never get anywhere.

 

Parliament ceased to be sovereign in this country the moment the European Communities Bill received Royal Assent.  Its last truly sovereign act was to destroy itself , just as the Queen���s last truly sovereign act was to assent to her own abdication form her own sovereignty, and her eventual transformation into a mere citizen of the EU. Thus ���England, which was wont to conquer others, hath now made shameful conquest of itself���. You really think a referendum will get us out of this?

A Bit More on Eric Ravilious

Those of you who read my recent posting on the artist Eric Ravilious may be interested to read this from last Saturday���s ���Guardian��� by the excellent and perceptive Ian Jack

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/16/english-resist-their-one-painter-shows-beauty-eric-ravilious

 

It contains some details about Ravilious that I did not know, not last that he read the ���New Statesman��� (mind you, it was a lot better in those days) .But I would like to say that his work seems to have much the same impression on Mr Jack as it made upon me.

 

By the way, a friend has since pointed out that one of the wonderful things about the woodcut of a boy birds-nesting (the best thing in a very good exhibition)  is that the boy���s socks have fallen down ���as they always did���.

 

This article by James Russell (written partly as a result of a phone call from Ian Jack)

http://jamesrussellontheweb.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/ravilious-auerbach-englishness.html

is also interesting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Abolition of Liberty in the Name of Security

Here we are again with a government talking about laws to control ���extremism���, a state of mind defined by failure to show enough respect for ���British values���.

 

These ���values��� apparently include ���democracy��� and ���the rule of law���.

 

Please see my comments on the previous attempt to move in this direction, including alarming plans for the preliminary vetting of student meetings,  laudably scuttled by (among others) Nick Clegg, whose good deeds should be acknowledged  http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/01/dont-like-the-pc-mob-well-now-that-makes-you-a-terror-threat.html

 

In this article I pointed out : ���Institutions will be obliged to promote ���British values���. These are defined as ���democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths and beliefs���. ���Vocal and active opposition��� to any of these is now officially described as ���extremism���.

Given authority���s general scorn for conservative Christianity, and its quivering, obsequious fear of Islam, it is easy to see how the second half will be applied in practice. As for ���democracy���, plenty of people (me included) are not at all sure we have it, and wouldn���t be that keen on it if we did.���

 

A few months earlier, I had argued that the nebulous concept of ���extremism��� could not possibly be of any use in legal or political matters, having no objective meaning. I suspect the ���definition��� I quote above was cooked up in response to such criticisms.

 

Here, in any case, was my argument in June last year:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/06/the-word-extremism-does-not-mean-anything.html

 

���and I stand absolutely by it now.

 

I often ask readers to answer this question.: How do you think a totalitarian regime could or would be installed in a free society such as ours? Is it more likely that it will arrive in some thunderclap, as black-uniformed fanatics seize the state, or that it will grow in our midst by small and popular increments, introduced on the pretext of saving us from a supposed ���terrorist��� threat?

 

It remains absolutely the case that, with the clear exception of incitement to violence, speech should be free. The law is involved only after a crime has been committed and in a free society cannot and must be used to pre-approve publication or speech. Stifling free speech is the staircase down to slavery. The moment we are having our speeches and articles scanned for ���extremism��� by policemen we are out of the world of freedom and deep in the territory of tyranny ( Social Democrat public meetings in 19th century Germany could only be held in the presence of a uniformed police officer monitoring the speeches ��� do you want this?).

 

There are good practical reasons for this as well. If political fanatics are permitted to organise and publish in the open, we will be much better able to know what they are doing and to observe their interaction with actual men of violence. If we seek to restrict the expression of opinion by law, we will merely ensure that these interactions will take place in secret, where we cannot observe them.

 

I am shocked that any educated British person is not instantly revolted by this, as I am. This is one of the reasons why I noted the other day that the country I grew up in was both more honest and better-educated than the one we now live in. I don���t suppose even one member of the current Cabinet even knows who John Hampden was or what the Trial of the Seven Bishops was, or why it matters, or has more than the vaguest idea of the Petition of Right, the Bill of Rights and the whole thrilling period of our national history during which this country decisively rejected arbitrary power, secret courts, torture, and threw out continental autocracy in favour of liberty under the law.

 

���British values��� indeed. ���British values��� might as well be a taste for instant mashed potato, annual holidays in the sun, bad TV comedy and gassy lager.  

 

These ���anti-terrorist��� oafs know no poetry and no history and they do not love their country, indeed they barely know where and what it is .

 

How about this : ���And whereas also by the statute called 'The Great Charter of the Liberties of England,' it is declared and enacted, that no freeman may be taken or imprisoned or be disseized of his freehold or liberties, or his free customs, or be outlawed or exiled, or in any manner destroyed, but by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.���

 

That���s a British value, if you like. As is this ; ���when complaints are freely heard, deeply consider'd and speedily reform'd, then is the utmost bound ofcivill liberty attain'd, that wise men looke for.���

 

And this, too ;

���It is not to be thought of that the Flood

Of British freedom, which, to the open sea

Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity

Hath flowed, "with pomp of waters, unwithstood,"

Roused though it be full often to a mood

Which spurns the check of salutary bands,

That this most famous Stream in bogs and sands

Should perish; and to evil and to good

Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung

Armoury of the invincible Knights of old:

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue

That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold

Which Milton held.���In every thing we are sprung

Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold.���

 

Or something like that, anyway. Chuck it,  May.

Top Hats and Kierkegaard - Some Thoughts on a Buckingham Palace Garden Party

Passing through London on Tuesday afternoon I found myself mixed up in the mild chaos which always accompanies a Buckingham Place Garden Party. Normally useful cycle routes were cluttered with the cars of Her Majesty���s guests, each adorned with its special coded pass.  One or two of these cars were as grand as the occasion, but most were ordinary suburban saloons, in which it would be quite impossible to wear a top hat. Apparently (at least one must assume this from the extraordinary willingness to allow parking in places where it would normally be regarded as little short of an outrage)it is unthinkable for them to arrive or leave by public transport, though they all end up standing in line at a side gate of the Palace gardens, inches from snarling traffic, like an overdressed bus queue, no doubt while their invitations are sternly checked by the "���security��� services".

 

I have never been invited to one of these occasions, and do not expect to be, having several times criticised the monarch for political correctness and for wrongly and unconstitutionally endorsing the surrender to the IRA in 1998. My one invitation to meet Her Majesty, at a special Windsor Castle event for journalists, was sent by an on-the-ball Buckingham Palace press office to a newspaper from which I had quite noisily resigned five years before. That newspaper didn���t send it on, for some reason.  As a consolation for this mess-up, I was asked instead to a classical concert in the Palace Gardens at which there was no opportunity to meet the monarch, though I seem to remember a plastic glass of champagne, for which I was grateful, and the chance to sing two whole verses of the National Anthem (though not my favourite, which contains the words ���Frustrate their Knavish Tricks���) in the presence of Her European Majesty.

 

I have described elsewhere the comical events which took place after Prince Charles conceived a desire to meet me, which his courtiers talked him out of.

 

So no doubt someone will pop up saying that the thoughts which follow are born out of resentment, jealousy, etc, or from having to manoeuvre tediously round the guests��� cars (or their hats) on my bike.  Maybe they are, though I don���t think so. The magic of this occasion vanished for me when I learned many years ago that the catering was done by an outside firm.

 

What strikes me about it, each time I see these squadrons of portly worthies  (many in spongebag trousers and grey toppers, one actually in a black silk top hat) and their lady wives (many adorned with headdresses which often look as if they were designed by Noel Coward in satiric mood) , being guided to the occasion by untypically polite and accommodating police officers, is that it is part of the fantasy of Britain which keeps us from realising what has happened to us.

 

If such people ventured unescorted into the capital dressed in this fashion on any normal day, they would be unable to find anywhere to park their cars, they would face mockery or worse for their attire, and they would be treated officiously by the police who on these rare feast days smile benevolently on them.

 

As Soren Kierkegaard may have said (I believe the original quotation is longer and more complex): ���A passionate tumultuous age will overthrow everything,  pull everything down; but a revolutionary age which is, at the same time, reflective and passionless, leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance���.

 

Well, we have had a reflective and passionless revolution which had no intention of being either observed or interrupted, let alone reversed, so we are a country full of empty shells, still looking as they did, but emptied of all meaning.

 

 

 

Thus, we have a Monarch who (by being a citizen of the EU) is not and cannot be a sovereign. We have a Conservative Party which is not in any respect conservative, a Labour Party which is not socialist, a Liberal Party which is not liberal and a national Church which can only with much charity be described as Christian. We have armed forces which can no longer be used in defence of their own country, only deployed in ���multilateral��� utopian enterprises. We have laws which are not enforced and police who do not enforce them, juries which are not independent and do not have to be unanimous, ,marriage ceremonies which are meaningless,   prisons whose inmates are disgorged almost as soon as they enter them, elections which are not choices, schools which do not teach, qualifications which do not qualify, borders which are not enforced, liberties which are not maintained, and money which is based upon fantasy.

 

What harm then, if a few hundred EU citizens are allowed to wander the Buckingham Palace lawns with the chance of glimpsing their former Queen who, though she has not abdicated, is no longer their sovereign, pretending in their attire to be living in a country which ceased to exist decades ago? No harm in itself. I hope they enjoyed themselves. But it is all part of the great work of fooling ourselves, from which we shall one day be awakened by raw, cold truth.

The Hated Peter Hitchens writes for 'The Big Issue'

Some of you may enjoy this article, written for that excellent enterprise, 'The Big Issue' (oddly enough at the request of Owen Jones, who was its guest editor last week).

 

http://www.bigissue.com/features/interviews/5182/peter-hitchens-i-am-a-trade-unionist-and-i-favour-nationalisation

 

Some of you may not . 

 

 

On 'legitimacy' and saving FPTP

Some reflections on legitimacy and on FPTP

 

There may be a lot of fuss in the next few days about the ‘legitimacy’ of the various parties’ claims to take part in the new government. There is also a growing lobby, presumably worked up over many lunches and dinners in the manner described in my ‘Cameron Delusion’, aimed at abolishing this country’s voting system and replacing it with a Continental proportional system designed for a wholly different culture.

 

Please try not to be fooled by this stuff. One rule decides who forms a government, and that is the ability to command a majority in the House of Commons. All parties which have not got an overall majority are losers. A party without a majority, even if it has the largest vote or the largest number of seats, is still a loser. It must eat its slice of humble pie with the others.,

 

Thanks to Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg, and their Fixed Term Parliaments Act, this is not as simple as it used to be. It is far harder for the House of Commons to throw out a dud ministry and force an election.

 

And that means that the Queen’s government may well be carried on in the next few years by a series of ad hoc informal alliances, rather than by any formal coalition. For this to work, one party will have to be the government, having all the ministerial posts etc, but heavily constrained by the limits on its action caused by mathematics.

 

This isn’t totally different from the existing arrangement, in which large minorities within parties can keep them from doing things that their leaders would like to do – or the longstanding cross-party socially liberal alliance which pushed through the whole permissive society agenda, and then combined again to get us into the Common Market, as it then was.

 

But its operation will be more obvious.

 

It’s obviously less satisfactory than a clear majority government in some important ways. Foreign policy will be especially weakened. But that’s not the fault of the constitution.

 

It’s a necessary result of the decay of the two major parties, which is not some irrational development but an absolutely true reflection of the fact that they have lost any true reason to exist.

 

They are classic examples of organisational inertia, by which bodies which have outlived their usefulness seek to survive for their own sake, and invent new reasons for doing so (the NATO alliance whose whole purpose vanished in 1991, is another example).

 

We are in a similar fix to the one we were in in the 1920s, when the Liberals had not quite died, and Labour had not yet grown strong enough to supplant them. We got through that without adopting some Belgian sociological system for electing our ancient Parliament.

 

As I said on BBC2’s ‘Daily Politics’ on Tuesday (it’s about 18 minutes in, here  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05twy29 )

The electoral system is not there for the good of the parties, but for the good of the country.

 

It has two irreplaceable and unique characteristics. The first is that it provides strong government, constantly challenged by a vigilant and ambitious opposition.

The next is that it allows the people, when enraged or otherwise disappointed by a bad government, to turn it out completely. A peaceful revolution, immensely good for the people and the politicians themselves, is possible every five years and likely every 15 or so.

 

I cannot tell you what joy it gives me to see a man who was Prime Minister yesterday, powerless the next, supervising only the removal of his furniture from Downing Street.

 

Proportional systems cannot do this, except in very exceptional circumstances. In a proportional system, the leader you loathe could well end up premier of a new and different coalition later.

 

All such coalitions tend to be ludicrously unprincipled, based upon short-term deals. Israel offers the best example of this, with governments often the prisoners of factions they hate.

 

By the way, FPTP undoubtedly forces the formation of open and largely predictable pre-election coalitions, as opposed to the post-election coalitions, whose nature the electorate cannot even guess at, of PR. In this transition,as the FPTP system tries to spit out the dead Labour and Tory Parties, we get a taste of this. But we have no need to put up with it forever. The problem is caused *by* those parties, with their ludicrous unprincipled alliances and their inertia-driven refusal to admit that they no longer stand for anything anyone wants.

 

PR also entrenches small dying parties. Look at the Scottish Tories, a grouplet that ostensibly stands for policies that will never again be implemented in Scotland, and for a Union which is all but dead.

 

Yet thanks to PR, they still offer a career, and broadcasting access, to anyone who is prepared to accept such things on such terms. On my last visit to Cairo I was shown the shabby but central building which still houses the headquarters of the Nasserite party, which remains alive long after its leader and inspiration is forgotten by the world. I believe that a combination of state aid for parties and PR, such as are sought by thoughtless reformers here, allows this party to maintain a salaried bureaucracy.

 

The point about FPTP is that it favours two strong parties, and has hiccups when it does not have two strong parties. But that is not an argument for getting rid of FPTP. It is an argument for hastening the collapse of those dying parties, by banning millionaire contributions, by ending state aid, by reducing the airtime they get on TV, and for us ceasing to vote for those dying parties.

 

It is not an argument for destroying our constitution. Why should we do that because Tory and Labour Parties have both ceased to speak for anyone? Surely they, not we, should pay the price for their failure?

Groundhog Day Comes Round Again

Let me start by saying without equivocation that I was wrong. I am genuinely grateful to the many persons on Twitter who were quick to point this out to me this morning.  I believed, in my heart, that the Tory Party could never again win a Westminster majority. They have done so. You couldn’t be much wronger than that.

 

I never for a moment imagined that Big Money and Big Lies could so successfully scare, cajole and diddle the electorate of this country. I grew up in a Britain both better-educated and more honest than the one we have today. Perhaps that is why I could not see this possibility.   I have not seen, in my lifetime, a campaign so dishonest, so crude, so based in fear and so redolent of third-world and banana republic political tactics.

 

Actually, I think Mr Cameron is even more surprised than I am. I do not think he ever thought that he would achieve such a result. I’m not even certain he wanted it, as the Liberal Democrats were a very useful alibi for not doing all kinds of conservative things he himself secretly didn’t want to do, and for doing all kinds of left-liberal  things he secretly did want to do.

 

How and why did this happen?

 

 Most of you will know the witty and rather profound film ‘Groundhog Day’, in which an obnoxious TV presenter is forced to live the same day over and over again, until he understands that he himself is required to change for the better. When he does (and the moment of realisation, involving a joyous quotation from Chekhov, is surprisingly moving), the calendar at last begins to move again.

 

 

 

This morning I felt as if I were stuck in such a film, and that I had woken up once more to the same unappealing day, indeed to the same unappealing decade, but also that there was nothing I could ever do to release myself from it. No doubt I have done many things in this life for which I thoroughly deserve to be punished but millions of other people are trapped with me in a political calendar which never, ever turns.

 

The problem with Britain’s political Groundhog day is this. Every five years or so, the conservative patriotic people of Britain are somehow dragooned into a ceremony in which they vote for a party which pretends to sympathise with them.

It then turns out that it doesn’t actually do so, that in fact it believes in a series of left-wing and radical policies which are the near-exact opposite of what those voters want.

 

Five years of growing disenchantment pass,  featuring new concessions to the EU, more political correctness, more education gimmicks designed to avoid the reintroduction of academic selection,  a continuing failure to cope with or even acknowledge the levels of disorder and dishonesty, and a quiet debauching of the currency.

 

Somehow, at the next election, those voters are persuaded, frightened or otherwise bamboozled into voting once again for the Tory Groundhog.

 

And the next morning they awake and find themselves in the same five-year-long gap between promise and reality.

 

The crudest and cheapest methods seem sufficient to rob them of any memory that they have been fooled before. The crudest and cheapest of these is the supposed danger of rule by a Labour Party all of whose policies were long ago adopted in detail by the Tory Party. The difference between the two is that Labour is at least open about its passion for foreign rule, equality and diversity, confiscatory taxation, unsound public finances, mass immigration,  terrible schools and lax criminal justice.

 

Labour , by the way, has to promise its own fake programme of social transformation  to its own deluded electorate, who harbour the same lingering illusion that their party possesses actual principles, and will pursue them in office. Indeed, I imagine that for Labour supporters a matching Groundhog Day is constantly unreeling. That is a matter for them.

 

The truth is that both major parties are now just commercial organisations, who raise money wherever they can get it to buy their way into office through unscrupulous election campaigns. They then presumably reward their donors once they are in office. The electorate are a constitutional necessity for this process, but otherwise their fears, hopes and desires are largely irrelevant. They are to be fooled and distracted with scares (‘The other lot will privatise the NHS!’ ‘The other lot will nationalise your children’s toys and then wreck the economy!’ ) or with loss-leader cut-rate offers, like supermarkets (‘Vote for us and get a cheap mortgage!!’ ‘Vote for us and have your rent frozen!’) . Even if these wild pledges are implemented, the customer will pay for them through higher taxes elsewhere, just as with supermarket loss-leaders.

 

By playing our part in this ludicrous pantomime, we license it to continue forever.  I have thought for years that the key to ending it was simple and obvious.  We could revenge ourselves on these fakes by refusing to vote for them. The arrival of new parties, UKIP on one side, the Greens on the other, made such a revolt and redemption even easier.

 

But I must now admit that the people of this country actually seem to prefer to live the same experience over and over again, and seem astonishingly ready to believe the crudest propaganda. I seethe with frustrated amazement at the Tory claim  to have fixed the economy, so blazingly untrue that in commercial advertising it would get them into serious trouble with the authorities.

 

Ailing GDP figures just before the election were barely mentioned in the media, but easily-obtained statistics on productivity, trade, manufacturing and construction, are all bad and the Tories have  missed their own target (whether wise or not)on deficit reduction. In any case, the Tory record on the economy is dreadful.

 

The idea that they are economically competent in general simply doesn’t stand up to examination. Leave aside Winston Churchill’s disastrous decision to force us back on the Gold Standard , have we all forgotten the ERM catastrophe, in which a Tory government threw £27 Billion into the sea for nothing, because their best brains had mistakenly lashed sterling to the EU’s exchange rate ? What about  the irresponsible Reggie Maudling boom of the early 1960s (Maudling left a note for his Labour successor , Jim Callaghan, saying ‘Sorry to leave it in such a mess, old cock’ which was almost certainly what Liam Byrne had in mind when he left his famous note saying ‘Sorry there’s no money’. What of Harold Macmillan’s decision to spend wildly in 1958  which caused his entire Treasury team to resign in protest , the irresponsible Tony Barber boom of the early 1970s, and of course the devastation of manufacturing industry in the early years of the Thatcher government? Now we have a dangerous housing bubble, official money-printing and the organised theft from savers by the abolition of interest on deposits. I’m not actually saying Labour are much better, or any better, but to vote Tory because you think the economy is safe in their hands is actually daft.

 

As for the Scottish scare, this is if anything even more shocking. Mr Cameron’s macho mishandling of the referendum, refusing an option for Devo Max, came close to bringing about a pro-secession vote. So did his generally cack-handed management of the campaign.  Then, his partisan and petty pursuit of ‘English votes for English laws’ (plus his discourteous gloating about the Queen allegedly ‘purring’ at the result) infuriated Scottish voters who had until then taken the ‘vow’ of maximum concessions seriously. It probably precipitated the landslide to the SNP (one of the few occasions when this expression ‘landslide’has been justified). I have written here about Michael Portillo’s interesting admission that he no longer clung to traditional Unionism. I think we have every reason to suspect that many others in the Tory Party would privately be quite happy to say goodbye to Scotland.

 

A Tory Party really concerned about the loss of Scotland would have done as Norman Tebbit suggested, and urged its supporters to vote Labour to stop the SNP. Instead, to the dismay of elder statesmen and experts such as Michael Forsyth, it talked up the SNP, paying elaborate compliments to Nicola Sturgeon after the leaders’ debate (George Osborne and Michael Gove were observed doing this) .  To claim, while behaving in this fashion, that the Tory Party is a bulwark against the SNP and Labour is in their clutches is absurd. The SNP are delighted by the Tory victory, which makes it all but certain that they will get a repeat landslide in next year’s Scottish general election, with a manifesto commitment to a second referendum, which I think they will then win. Let us see how Mr Cameron now copes with the SNP’s sweeping victory, for which he must take so much of the blame.

 

At least the Sun newspaper was brazenly open about its ludicrous inconsistency, campaigning for a Tory (and supposedly Unionist) victory south of the border, and for the unquestionably separatist SNP north of it.

 

As for the famous EU referendum, who really thinks that the propaganda forces which got Mr Cameron his unexpected majority won’t also be activated to achieve a huge vote to stay in the EU? And then the issue will be closed forever.

 

What is the point of saying all this now, when it’s all over? Because it is true, and because to speak the truth is valuable in itself, at all times.