Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 198

Golden Oldies 2: What I wrote five years ago

Some readers might like to see again the column I wrote for the Mail on Sunday almost exactly five years ago.

 

01 May 2010 11:30 PM
This is the most important article I’ve ever written – and loyal Conservative voters will hate me for it

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Many of you are going to hate me for what I am about to say. I regret this. Perhaps the fact that I am going to do it anyway will convince some of you that I am deadly serious, and prefer unpopularity to doing the wrong thing.

It is one of the most important and urgent tasks I have ever undertaken. I warned, 13 years ago, against New Labour. I warned, seven years ago, against the Iraq War. I was right (as I usually am – full list on application). But in those cases I might as well have tried to halt a tsunami with a feather duster. The country had gone into a sort of craze, and believed what it wanted to believe.

This time, I think and hope that what I say might actually have some effect on an unusually close Election. And it is this. Please do not vote Tory. It will have the opposite result to the one you intend. I don’t care who else you vote for (apart from the BNP, which no decent person can support). But I beg and plead with you not to fall for the shimmering, greasy, cynical fraud which is the Cameron project. You will hate yourself for it in time if you do.

The obvious thing is not necessarily the right one. A little knowledge can save us from making bad mistakes. If you feed a big meal to a starving man, which might seem the kind thing to do, you are likely to kill him. Aeroplanes take off into the wind, not, as might seem more sen­sible, with the wind behind them. If your car engine overheats, you should turn the heater up, not down.

It’s the same here. You may want to ‘Get Gordon Brown out’. So do I. And he’s done for anyway. But do you really want to put in a man who agrees with Gordon Brown on almost every major issue, and is so confident of his liberalism that he doesn’t even try to keep it secret? No muttered remarks in the car about ‘bigotry’ for him. He has said openly that he regards the conservative-minded people of this country as ‘fruitcakes and closet racists’ – and nobody made him apologise for it afterwards. If you now endorse the Cameron Tory Party, you will destroy all real hope of change for the better.

I assume here that my readers mostly agree with me about what this country needs. It needs its independence back, so it can make its own laws and control its own coasts and territorial seas, its armed forces, its foreign policy – like a proper nation.

It needs to regain control of its borders and end the mass immigration which is neither necessary nor good. It needs to stop the destruction of the married family and the undermining of adult authority. It needs to use the law to restrain the grotesque abuse of alcohol and the dangerous spread of drugs. It needs to restore the idea that crime and disorder should be prevented by a police force patrolling on foot – and where that fails, the criminals should be punished in austere and ­disciplined prisons. It needs schools which teach proper subjects in orderly and peaceful classrooms. It needs to shrink and reform a grotesque, unjust welfare state which rewards sloth and neglects the truly poor.

It needs – urgently – to defeat the politically correct fundamentalist zealots, who sneer ‘Bigot!’ at anyone who dares defend the reasonable beliefs and opinions which were normal a generation ago. Some of you may also agree with me that it needs to reassert its debt and its allegiance to the Christian religion, on which our unique civilisation of orderly freedom is based.

David Cameron pretends skilfully to agree with these positions because he knows that is what you think. But he does not really agree with you or me. He is himself deeply politically correct (he has just sacked a parliamentary candidate for having the ‘wrong’ opinions about homo­sexuality, a fact a grovelling media have not publicised).

His supposed ‘Euroscepticism’ is bluster which collapses when it comes into contact with reality, as over the Lisbon Treaty. On Thursday night he ‘guaranteed’ he wouldn’t enter the Euro. He once also ‘guaranteed’ a referendum on Lisbon, a commitment he slithered out of as soon as it became difficult. These ‘guarantees’ fly from his lips whenever he needs to please a crowd, but they are less valuable than Greek Junk Bonds.

His alleged support for marriage (dragged out of him under pressure) is a token and a gimmick, as convincing and genuine as a supermarket price-cut. His pose as the foe of immigration is profoundly dishonest. He knows that, as long as we stay inside the EU, much immigration to this country is beyond his power to control.

Readers of this column over the past few years will have seen the many detailed instances of Mr Cameron’s duplicity that I have provided. And, because there is not space for them all here, I have compiled a full charge sheet against Mr Cameron and his party, in which I show his true aims and opinions, and those of his colleagues. It can be found above. He is truly what he once said he was – the Heir to Blair.

If he wins, he will – as the first Tory leader to win an Election in 18 years – have the power to crush all his critics in the Tory Party. He will be able to say that political correctness, green zealotry, a pro-EU position and a willingness to spend as much as Labour on the NHS have won the day. He will claim (falsely) that ‘Right-wing’ policies lost the last three Elections. Those Tory MPs who agree with you and me will be cowed and silenced for good. The power will lie with the A-list smart set, modish, rich metropolitan liberals hungry for office at all costs who would have been (and who in the case of one of the older ones actually was) in New Labour 13 years ago.

And then where will you have to turn for help as the PC, pro-EU bulldozer trundles across our landscape destroying what is good and familiar and replacing it with a country whose inhabi­tants increasingly cannot recognise it as their own? The Liberal Democrats? They agree with David. The Labour Party under exciting, new, Blairite Mr Miliband, heir to a Marxist dynasty?

He agrees with David, too. You will look from bench to bench in the House of Commons and see nothing but the people whose ideas have wrecked a great country in half a century, and who still won’t admit they’re wrong. This system is only propped up by state funding and dodgy millionaires. The surge to the Liberal Democrats – because of who they are not rather than because of what they are – shows a great hunger for something genuinely different. The expenses scandal has broken many old allegiances for good. That process would actually be ended by the election of a Tory government, committed to the policies of New Labour and headed by a man who happens to be one of the greediest expense claimers of all, and who made you pay the mortgage interest on a large country house he didn’t really need.

We have the power to cast aside the discredited parties and politicians who have so utterly let us down and to make new ones which actually speak for us, and which do not despise us as fruitcakes or bigots. Five years from now we could throw the liberal elite into the sea, if we tried. But the first stage in that rebellion must be the failure of David Cameron to rescue the wretched anti-British Blair project and wrap it in a blue dress.

Golden Oldies 3: My riposte to the 'Vote UKIP get Red Ed' argument

The Tories are still useless, and if you really want to get Labour out, you should not vote Tory

Originally published October 2007, and still valid

I give myself a great deal of trouble by attacking the Tories, the party most of my readers want to support. Why do I do this, condemning myself to many angry and often personally rude messages from affronted people? I could easily make everyone happy by quietly dropping this campaign. It would save me hours spent writing letters and e-mails to Tory loyalists who absurdly accuse me, of all people, of wanting to keep Labour in power(**Contemporary note: Or put them in power, as they now say.

But I cannot, because I think we now have a unique opportunity to remake British politics and recapture Britain from the people who have messed it up and trashed it for so long. The next election cannot change the government. But it can change the opposition - from an ineffectual, useless, compromised one, into an effective one genuinely opposed to what New Labour is doing.

And such an opposition, no longer weighed down by the awful record of the Tories and their miserable reputation, could throw New Labour into the sea, perhaps within five years of coming into being.

The destruction of the Tory Party, which is now both possible and desirable, is the essential first step to this. In our two-party system, new parties arise out of the collapse and splitting of those they seek to replace. They cannot be created until that collapse, and that split, have begun. A serious, undoubted and decisive defeat for the Tory Party at the next election would make this possible and likely. Such a defeat is possible, despite the events of the past few weeks, and can be aided by voters simply refusing to waste their votes on a party that is both likely to lose, and certain to betray them if it wins.

This view is based on careful study of British voting patterns, constituency boundaries, polls and the age distribution of voters. It is influenced by the experienced pollster Peter Kellner's observation that no opposition party has ever reached power unless at some stage it touched 51% in the opinion polls, during its period out of office. The Tories are still a long way from this figure. In 1979, the Tories were far ahead of Labour in the polls. In 1997, Labour, likewise was far ahead of the Tories. 'Leads' of four per cent, of the kind being achieved now, mean little at general election time.

Even if the Tories could win an election (I speculate on this unlikely event at greater length because so many people now seem to believe that this is the case), what would that mean? I predict a government very similar to that of John Major, only even more torn by its unhealable division over the EU.  People forget now, but Major's government was one of political correctness, weakness on crime, failure on education, high taxes and conflict over the EU.

It is claimed that the Tories are now more anti-EU. In truth, this is not really the case. Many Tories have shifted from passive acceptance of the EU to what is called 'Euroscepticism', an unrealistic belief that, while the EU is bad for Britain, it is possible for us to negotiate ourselves a safe corner within it, which does not threaten our independence and laws, or the control of our borders. This 'in Europe but not run by Europe' view simply doesn't stand up to practical politics. The EU demands of its members a constant and accelerating surrender of national independence. If you win a small battle, you will rapidly find that the EU tries another attack from a different direction to achieve the same end. Don't like the Euro? How about a constitution? The end result, the whittling away of sovereignty, is the same. Why shouldn't it be? Ever-closer union is the EU's stated purpose.

In practice, those who are honestly in favour of EU membership and all that it entails, or honestly against it (the only two honourable positions in this debate) still cannot possibly agree - and it cannot be long, in the nature of the EU, before any government is confronted with the choice of continued reduction of national independence, or departure. There is no doubt which option Mr Cameron would choose.

The Tories are also fundamentally, irreconcilably divided over several other issues - grammar schools, the unique privileges due to marriage, political correctness in general, immigration, the size and nature of the state, levels of taxation, the Iraq and Afghan interventions. But Mr Cameron is on the left-wing of all these issues, (including his support for the Iraq war), and so are his most influential colleagues. His authority, were he to win an election, would be similar to that of Mr Blair in 1997,  based on the gratitude of a party that had waited too long for office, so his 'right-wing' opponents would not be well-placed to oppose or obstruct him.

The result would be a government mainly similar to New Labour. Is that worth making any great sacrifices for? Not in my view. Worse, such a victory would ensure, for the foreseeable future, that Parliamentary politics remained - as it is now - under the control of a very narrow elite, committed to liberal political, cultural , moral and social positions and hostile to conservative ones. It would confirm Mr Cameron and his media friends in their belief that the future for the Conservative Party is in aping New Labour.

It would be the end, for some time, of any opportunity for radical change. It would cement - under a Tory government - the deep leftward shift in this country under Mr Blair and Mr Brown, not least their republican constitutional reforms and their huge increase in the size of the public sector. It would also mean that nothing serious would be done about mass immigration, about education or about crime and disorder.

 

The restoration of the idea of personal responsibility, and its corollary, punishment for wrongdoing, is not possible in the social democratic state supported by both major parties.  This insists that 'offenders' can blame their actions on circumstances, that victims are sometimes at least partly responsible, and sometimes wholly responsible for the crimes committed against them (see police campaigns to get law-abiding citizens to hide their possessions, behave cautiously on the street in case of attracting criminal attention,  and fortify their homes). These people see the law as a mechanism for negotiating between 'offenders' and victims' rather than a machine for punishing criminals.

I have set out this argument before, but the current craze for David Cameron makes it very urgent that I set it out again.   

For those who say that by doing so I help the left stay in office, I have a simple answer that none has ever rebutted. The result of the next (NB, I was referring here to 2010)election is already decided - the Left will be in office, either with a Labour majority, or a Lib-Lab pact, or a Lib-Con pact, or a Tory government in thrall to left-wing ideas. No radical change, on the areas which Tory voters care about most, will take place.

But it is far more likely that it will be either a Labour government or a Lab-Lib pact.

I first made this case in October 2003, and I reproduce here the article I then wrote, all of which still seems to me to be as true as it was four years ago:

"NO POWER on earth can sustain an idea whose time has gone. Can we all please stop pretending that the Conservative Party is worth saving or keeping, or that it can ever win another Election? This delusion is an obstacle to the creation of a proper pro-British movement, neither bigoted nor politically correct, which is the only hope of ending the present one-party State.

The continued existence of the Tory Party as a bogeyman with which to frighten dissenters is one of the few things that holds together the equally bankrupt Labour Party.

Tory division and decay also feed the growth of the Liberal Democrats, whose votes grow daily not because of what they are but because of what they are not. The Tories are an impossible coalition of irreconcilables. No coherent government programme could ever unite them. Euro-enthusiast and Euro-sceptic cannot compromise without betraying their deepest beliefs. Supporters of marriage and supporters of the sexual revolution have no common ground.

Enthusiasts for mass immigration, on the grounds that it expands the workforce, cannot agree with those who fear that such immigration will damage an ancient culture. Those who believe in rehabilitating criminals are bound to fight those who believe in punishing them. Those who wish to legalise narcotics cannot make peace with those who wish to imprison drug-users. All parties are coalitions full of conflicts, but they cannot function without something fundamental that unites them. Nothing unites the Tories.

This has actually been going on for a long time. Many let the Tories off during the Cold War. They ignored their cowardice over the big social issues, their failure to save or restore the grammar schools, to stand up for marriage, to understand the European issue, to preserve, protect or defend anything old, beloved or beautiful.

They looked the other way as Tory governments and local authorities encouraged or permitted the destruction of ancient beauty and supported the concreting over of towns and countryside. They swallowed their outrage at the Tories' ugly, expensive - and suicidal - local government reforms.

They even tolerated their stealthy rundown of the conventional armed services and their enthusiasm for appeasement in Northern Ireland. They did this because, after all, we could rely on the Tories to stand up against the greatest danger to our liberty and independence, namely the Soviet Union. Then came the unnerving moment when the USSR collapsed and Mikhail Gorbachev's gently smiling spokesman, Gennadi Gerasimov, taunted us with the words: 'We have done the most terrible thing to you that we could possibly have done. We have deprived you of an enemy.' Gerasimov was appallingly right. With the Kremlin menace gone, the Left could no longer be accused of treacherous flirtation with the national enemy, as he had ceased to exist. This meant that the Conservative Party could no longer claim a monopoly on easy patriotism. But much more serious was the realisation that it was social conservatives, rather than the Left, who now risked unpopularity if they stuck to their principles.

Confronting the permissive society, whose creation they had winked at, was risky even if it was right. So many people had now got divorced or had abortions or had children out of wedlock - or could easily conceive of themselves doing so - that attacking these things cost valuable votes.

Having failed to defend the 11-plus when it mattered, they found that the consequences - lowered school standards, worthless examinations and the absurd expansion of the universities - could not be criticised without attracting accusations of offending and upsetting the children involved, and their voting parents too. Having invented life peers, and by implication attacked the hereditary principle, they could not really defend the independence of the House of Lords when it came under serious assault. They knew in their hearts that they could not ultimately defend the Monarchy either.

Having responded to rising crime with the cheapest and most crowd-pleasing measures - destroying the right to silence, threatening the protection against double jeopardy, considering identity cards and attempting to limit jury trial - they could not convincingly stand up for liberty.

Having pretended that national sovereignty was not threatened by the EU, and so having given away great quantities of that sovereignty, they could not even convincingly oppose the Euro. In short, their unprincipled uselessness had now come back to haunt them and the end of the Cold War left them politically naked and ashamed.

The wretched Major years, in which Britain experienced its first New Labour government without realising it, are a warning to anyone who imagines that a Tory victory at the next Election would end our national decline or reverse the damage done by Blairism. The Conservative Party has had ineffectual, directionless leaders since 1990 because it is an ineffectual and directionless party. It is idle and silly to imagine that a different leader might change things now. Get rid of Mr Duncan Smith and the best they can hope for is a chief who will be despised and undermined by a different section of the party. The man or woman does not exist who can unite the irreconcilables now trapped in this dying movement and lead it to victory.

Yet victory is highly unlikely. The Tory Party faces a colossal task if it wishes ever to command a parliamentary majority again. The political scientist Professor Ivor Crewe has pointed out that Labour MPs are elected by a much smaller vote on average than Conservative MPs because they typically represent smaller constituencies with a lower turnout.

In 2001, had the Tory and Labour votes been equal, the latter would have had 80 more seats than the Conservatives and a workable overall majority of 17. This mathematical problem will be just as bad, if not worse, whenever the next Election takes place. The rise of the Liberal Democrats will almost certainly deepen the woe. The near-collapse of Conservatism and Unionism in Scotland and Wales does not help much either. There is no reason at all to hope for a recovery.

So why bother to do so? Why should conservative-minded people make themselves miserable by enlisting in this shambling movement whose chiefs loathe each other more than they hate the enemy? Why should they fool themselves any longer that the Tory Party shares their concerns or can capture political power?

Why should they spend heart and nerve and sinew on a cause that is not only lost but discredited? Why should they all fight and fight and fight again to save a Party they hate?

The Tory Party is a train wreck, not a train, an obstacle rather than a vehicle. There are many good and intelligent people trapped in the twisted ruins who would flourish if only they were released, but are now prevented from doing so by a pointless discipline.

There are many voters, currently unable to vote Tory even while holding their noses, who long for a party that speaks for them and the country. Such a party cannot begin to grow until the Tory delusion is dispelled and this movement, whose time is gone, splits and disappears. Let it be soon."

************

That was in October 2003. The Liberal Democrats, it is true, have run into troubles of their own since then - but it is by no means guaranteed that they will not recover between now and the next election. In fact, I think we can pretty much rely on it. (Note made in 2015. They did)

I then redoubled the message in June 2005, when I wrote:

"The haggard patient heaves himself into a sitting position and, with painful slowness, takes a little gruel, swallowing the disgusting pap with difficulty. He, who until recently was consuming rare beef and good red wine, smiles wanly at this minor, toothless triumph. The relatives around the bed exclaim with forced delight how well he has done and how good it is to see him eating heartily again. They make weak jokes and excessively cheerful remarks about how he will soon be home again.

The whole scene is a ghastly, flesh-crawling deception. Everyone present knows that death is hovering a few beds away and there is no hope.

Yet nobody will say it. Such is the position of the Conservative and Unionist Party.

Now, if the Tory Party were a person and we were its family, there would be a good excuse for this polite fraud. But the Tory Party is not a person and we are not its wife and children, or even its friends. There is no point in pretending that the Tory Party is going to recover.

The pretence only delays the construction of a new movement, which cannot flourish until we have said goodbye to the old one. It also gives the Liberal Democrats the freedom to supplant the Tory Party, unobstructed, in many of its former strongholds, a freedom they are enthusiastically using.

The Tories' position is hopeless. No man living could conceivably unify the party's contradictory wings.

Europhile or Eurosceptic, pro or anti-marriage, market enthusiast or moralist, each of these quarrels is fundamental and cannot be settled by compromise. To refuse to resolve them is to ask to be dragged, by events beyond our control, into places we never decided to go.

So David Davis, who is opposed to European integration if he means anything at all, is compelled to seek the support of federalists. This, the modified Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact approach, has been tried before – but only by people who forget how that pact ended.

Similarly, Kenneth Clarke is seriously put forward as the saviour of a party he plainly hates. While it is hard not to admire Mr Clarke's lofty scorn for his parliamentary colleagues, the idea is absurd. The issue of the European Union pervades almost every major area of political choice.

It is ridiculous to imagine that Mr Clarke's reasoned support for the EU, which is entirely consistent with his generally Fabian Social Democratic approach to the world, will not bring him swiftly into conflict with those who are committed, just as consistently, to opposing the Union.

As for the other compromise candidates being spoken of, they all offer another period of Majorism, neither one damned thing nor the other, yet encouraging bitter divisions by attempting to impose their opaque blandness on all.

It would also be helpful if people would stop referring to 'big beasts in the jungle'. The metaphor is absurd.

What survives of the Tory Party is more like a decayed municipal park than a jungle, and the little furry creatures that roam about in it may have sharp teeth and ready claws but they are not big. To be big, they would at least have to have large ideas. But there are none of these.

The only argument is, ultimately, about tactics. There is a total lack of original thought, principle or even instinct. Every debate is a pathetic variation on one parasitical theme: will the Tory Party regain its position by becoming more like New Labour or less like New Labour?

The answer is that it cannot regain its lost position by either means – because, for good or ill, it has lost it forever in many parts of the country.

Many cities no longer have any Tory councillors. For good reasons and bad, millions of people in large swathes of the country would rather eat a raw hedgehog sandwich than vote Conservative again. A male under the age of 35 is as likely to support the Tories as he is to smoke a pipe. A female under the age of 35 is as likely to support the Tories as she is to wear a girdle.

The predictable Tory failure in May ought to have been worse, and would have been had Labour had the sense and nerve to get rid of Anthony Blair nine months before.

The Tory result was, in reality, a very poor one and its wretchedness was obscured only by Labour's own demoralisation.

There is deep dislike of the Government, as we would find if there were a referendum on the EU, and as we did find when John Prescott tried to persuade the people of the North East to vote for regional government.

But the Tory Party cannot articulate it and people will not vote Tory to express it.

And here is the core of it. The Tory Party does not know what it is supposed to be opposing. In fact, in general, it has either supported or failed to oppose all the most important actions of New Labour. These are constitutional, moral and cultural and they are the real issue.

The admirable Peter Oborne, a brave and original conservative critic of the Government, insisted two weeks ago in The Spectator magazine that the Tory Party had 'won all the great intellectual and political battles of the last quarter century'.

Regrettably, this is not so.

Margaret Thatcher certainly did not win the culture wars. She did not even fight them. On the great battlefields of marriage and the family, education and culture, morality and law, the Tories have been utterly outmanoeuvred and bypassed.

Because they did not fight, they co-operated in the destruction of their own electorate. To this day, they have no idea why it is that they are so despised by the young and their wretched attempts to toady to fashion – in such areas as civil partnerships for homosexuals – manage to offend or puzzle their supporters while utterly failing to convince their opponents that they are genuine.

It would be perfectly all right to be the Nasty Party if they knew why it was necessary to be nasty and meant it.

Millions long for a truly Nasty government that will be thoroughly horrid to the wicked, the criminal, the dishonest and to the European Union. But to be Nasty, without meaning to, is worse than useless.

And to be Nice about these things is to let down the besieged, oppressed, vandalised, burgled, mugged people of Britain.

The Tories have failed in all these things because they have neither an ideology nor an instinct. They measure success by the length of time they spend in office, not by what they have done while they were there. Once, being a disposition rather than a movement might have sufficed. But in these revolutionary times, faced with opponents wholly committed to political correctness (or Frankfurt School Marxism, to give it its more serious and frightening name), it is not enough.

You cannot properly defend, say, constitutional monarchy if you have no idea why you believe in it and do not understand why your opponents hate it. You cannot effectively oppose the introduction of identity cards unless your every instinct revolts at the imposition of these oppressive breathing licences on a free people. I cannot imagine how a British patriot could have moment's doubt about this – yet serious Tories of my acquaintance have blown around in the wind of fashion, this month against, last month for and who knows what next week?

They cannot even understand patriotism properly. It was clearly never in British interests to join the American invasion of Iraq. The bitterest opponents of this adventure have been traditional conservative types. Yet, precisely because it is not instinctively patriotic, the Tory Party grasped at the war as an attempt to prove that it still loves the country it sold to Brussels in 1972.

And so here we are. The Tory Party was the only opposition that could have lost to Anthony Blair in May and it is the only opposition that can be beaten by Gordon Brown in 2009.

If it does not collapse and split soon, we are stuck with another tedious post-mortem, and another wrangle over the bones, four years hence.

Many intelligent and effective people are still trapped in its immobile wreckage, who would be freed to become serious opponents of the Government if only they could escape. Millions of voters, who could never be reasoned into change, could be jolted by collapse, split and renewal into changing their habits.

Those who wish to hang on to the failed Tory coalition complain that a 'pure, Rightwing' party would repel what they call the centre ground and become a small, if unified sect.

They fail to grasp that the lost middle ground of politics does not lie in the narrow, churned-up, fought-over stretches of mud that lie between the Tory and New Labour front-benches. There is very little space here anyway. Look instead at the vast 39.5 per cent of the electorate who do not vote, and at many of the 13 per cent who vote Liberal Democrat, not because of what Charles Kennedy is but because of what he is not. Remember, Labour won a majority with 22 per cent of electors and the Tories gained an even more pathetic 20 per cent.

Look at the almost total disappearance from Parliament of Labour's old patriotic, monarchist, socially conservative Right wing, leaving many working-class people utterly unrepresented. New Labour's multicultural, metropolitan social liberalism is repulsive to many traditional Labour voters, many of whom stayed at home in May mainly for that reason.

It is surely possible to find a majority out there for a new party, neither bigoted nor politically correct, patriotic and intelligent, committed to national independence and liberty and to the re-establishment of justice. I believe those conservatives willing to think, and to seek allies, could swiftly develop a programme and a coalition far more honourable and realistic than the present Tory impasse.

We cannot go on avoiding this decision forever. There will not be many more chances to wrest Britain from the 'progressive consensus'.

Tories are dying and not being replaced. The party is becoming what marketing men call a 'ghost brand', like Capstan Full Strength cigarettes: still worth selling to a dwindling market but with no hope of regaining its lost position.

The Liberal Democrats continue to grow and will eventually be able to force proportional representation on Labour (the most likely result of the next Election).

This would end all hope of real conservative change. I understand that these arguments are unwelcome to many Conservative loyalists, and I know why, but would it not at least be worth debating them while there is still time?"

*************************

Again, I think this stands up pretty well two years after it was written. Note that, at that point, David Cameron was not a serious contender for the leadership. But my words "As for the other compromise candidates being spoken of, they all offer another period of Majorism, neither one damned thing nor the other, yet encouraging bitter divisions by attempting to impose their opaque blandness on all." seem to me to be pretty close to a prophecy of Mr Cameron's behaviour. The current, temporary media craze for Mr Cameron cannot persuade the enormous anti-Tory mass of post-industrial Britain to vote blue. Mr Cameron presides over a party that remains deeply divided and maintains a sort of discipline only because David Davies prefers to bide his time.

There, now I have set it all out, as clearly as I can. Those who absurdly accuse me of seeking to help New Labour or of supporting Mr Brown should know that I am probably the most consistent and dedicated foe of New Labour, that my 1999 book 'The Abolition of Britain' was described by Andrew Marr (no less) as the "most sustained, internally logical and powerful attack on Tony Blair and all his works", that I refused to toady to Anthony Blair when many other conservative commentators were doing so, that I criticised Mr Brown's bad stewardship of the economy,  when many conservatives were praising him, that I deliberately embarrassed Mr Brown by asking him to reveal if his son had been given the MMR injection he urges on other parents (he never responded) and that New Labour blame me (exaggeratedly, but flatteringly) for helping to lose them the 1992 election (the 'Jennifer's Ear' affair)  and regard me ( accurately) as a dedicated enemy. At the press conference launching the New Labour 1997 manifesto, two press officers, seeing me approach the auditorium, tried to close the door in my face, claiming the room was 'full'. During the campaign I was generally not allowed to ask Mr Blair any questions (and was scolded by Mr Brown for my persistence in seeking to do so). On the one occasion I was allowed to ask a question, Mr Blair dodged it and - when I objected - told me to sit down and stop being bad. When I waited outside a building in which Mr Blair was skulking, in the hope of asking him the same question, the Labour machine arranged an elaborate trick to get me out of the way (details available on request). My treatment during the 2001 and 2005 elections was similar. So no accusations of Labour sympathy, if you please.

It is precisely because I really do want to get rid of New Labour that I am convinced that the Tories must go. They don't really want to fight new Labour, and they are not specially angered or dismayed by the way in which New labour runs the country. Given the opportunity, they would do little that was different. The polite term for my advice to them is 'Fish, or cut bait'. The less polite one is to do something or get off the pot. Well, in ten years they have not fished, nor done the other thing, so it is time for them to depart. I really do want to free us from Labour government. I think voting is a political act designed to have a practical effect, not an emotional spasm to make myself feel better. Withdrawing your vote from the Tories is the only serious opportunity you have to make the country better. Anyone who responds to this by saying "That's all very well, but the important thing is to get New Labour out" will be showing that they haven't read, or understood, what I am saying here.

Anyone who says "But it's all so negative" simply has to recognise that we have got precisely nowhere by being 'positive' since 1997. There is no sentimental reason for clinging to the Tories. It may have been good to be ' a disposition, not a dogma' when Labour and the Liberals were made up of undogmatic British patriots with a few silly or wrong ideas. But that will not do when the left-wing parties are now in the grip of virulent anti-British, anti-family, anti-education dogmas which threaten to dissolve the country, and civil society, altogether. A dispassionate examination of the Tory Party in power since the 1920s will show it becoming an increasingly social democratic, high-tax party, and then, in the 1960s, adopting left-liberal positions on social and cultural issues, or failing to fight them. There was never a golden age. the Tory Party tends to forget that its supposed hero, Winston Churchill, was kept out in the cold for much of his life by the Tory establishment, and was threatened with deselection by his local Tory Association for (rightly and prophetically) attacking the Munich agreement.  It also tends to forget that its supposed heroine, Margaret Thatcher, failed badly in the areas of family and education, culture and morals, and only grasped the EU danger in her last months in office. .

Anyone who says "why don't you found your new party?' has likewise not been paying attention. The new party can only be founded once the Tories have collapsed - and you will have to found it too. I have no millions stashed away, nor could I by myself hope to achieve anything. Nobody will do this for you. There is no leader waiting upon our northern shores to rescue the beleaguered nation. If you don't like the way the country is being run, you will have to do something about it yourself. Those who say "But what if you fail, and no new party arises, and Labour is still there?' have the best point. It is a grave danger that we may fail. The collapse of the Tories is the necessary condition for a new party, but not a sufficient one. That will depend on us. But even if that happens, we will be no worse off then than we are now, stuck as we are with permanent Labour rule till the crack of doom, each year destroying more and more of Britain. If I wait long enough, I am sure that my view on the Tory Party will become conventional wisdom, as most of my other ‘outrageous’ and 'extremist' positions have done in the last ten years. But can we afford to wait that long?

An Interview of PH by the 'Irish Examiner'

Some of you may enjoy this interview of me in the 'Irish Examiner'. It's a bit different from the usual run of these things .

 

http://www.irishexaminer.com/sport/mhcwqlsnidmh/rss2/?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=Irish+Examiner

 

I am also bound to warn readers (Under the Journalistic Standards and Regulation Act of 2017) that some of you may not enjoy it. Enjoyment may go up as well as down

 

 

Eric Ravilious

This country is blessed with a number of small galleries, often well-hidden in suburbs, that contain powerful concentrations of great art. They’re easier to handle than the great city-centre monsters, where the eyes and brain eventually become too tired to absorb any more beauty.

 

I am thinking here partly of the Barber Institute at Birmingham University, Lady Lever’s gallery at Port Sunlight, and of Kenwood and Dulwich in London. The Christ Church picture gallery in Oxford is also (whenever I have been there) secluded and  tranquil.

 

Dulwich, close to the school that produced P.G. Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler and Nigel Farage, always seems quite astounding when you arrive. Here amid the expansive Edwardian suburbs of the better part of South London sits an extraordinary piece of architecture crammed with Old Masters.

 

One expects such things in the midst of cities. In such a setting it is an incongruous surprise, and all the better for it.  I have only ever visited it three times, because it requires a bit of extra effort to take a train deep into the SE postal districts and, as I work but do not live in London, I’m normally busy during the daylight hours when it’s open.

 

But last Tuesday I had to go to London when I normally wouldn’t have done,  and so I decided that,  since the day was interrupted anyway, I’d visit the Eric Ravilious exhibition which Dulwich is holding for the next few weeks. If you are anywhere within range, then it is a very pleasant (if quite costly) excursion. The gallery is a pleasant destination anyway, ten minutes on foot from the nearest station, with its own restaurant and a café in the rather serene gardens. On a clear sunny spring day, it is especially pleasing, London as one might wish it to be.  If you are not in range, a very fine selection of his pictures has now been published in book form, though it will set you back £25.

 

You’ll almost certainly have seen at least one Ravilious picture – the famous one of the chalk white horse on a hill, viewed through the windows of an old-fashioned railway carriage. Cricket enthusiasts will have many times seen and half-noticed his woodcut of Victorian cricketers, displayed every year since 1938 in the cover of Wisden.

 

Ravilious’s painting is intensely English, in what I might describe as an Orwellian way. Many of his pictures would make good cover illustrations for an edition of Orwell's essays.  I assume, as I look at his pictures,  that he liked strong tea, bitter beer, apples,  country walks, sea-winds and birdsong. His paintings almost radiate Englishness, the consciousness of being an islander, of being quieter, more modest and more determined than our neighbours, the deeper, quieter sense of humour that’s not always obvious. There’s also a feeling that one could be cultured, well-read and informed without intellectual pretension, and when it was not yet necessary to be left-wing to be considered intelligent. The work of that rather different genius, Edward Ardizzone, comes from the same era and gives me a similar sensation (Ardizzone was also a war artist, and his rather unsparing studies of the aftermath of battle come as a shock if you are used to his children's books).

 

I think this sort of Englishness reached its peak in the 1940s, during the early, worrying years of the war  and died away thereafter. You could still find it in odd corners in my childhood, a wistful look, a cadence in the voice, a certain way of smiling, none of them to be seen or heard now. I say all this though I know very little about Ravilious’s life, or even the origin of his unusual name, which sounds a bit as if it comes from Lithuania. They are simply thoughts brought into my mind by looking at his work. 

 

He would be better-known had he not died in the war. He was an official war artist, and was lost somewhere off Iceland in August 1942. He had chosen to fly in a group of aircraft searching for a lost plane, I do not know why. He was apparently very used to flying and had spent long hours in biplanes, sketching other aircraft in flight from the co-pilot's seat. His own machine did not return.

 

Thus his work is poignantly and abruptly cut off, at the age of 39 when he had so much left to do. This consciousness of loss hangs over the little exhibition, with its evocative and powerful studies of warlike things, often from surprising and thoughtful angles (I was especially moved by a view from a camouflaged warship leaving Scapa Flow, where my father was based a few years later).

 

These are all very interesting and full of wartime seriousness endeavour, though in or two cases probably technically a bit odd (it is pretty clear that he did not understand how artillery worked) . But the peacetime work is if anything even more fascinating, bathing machines (already obsolete) in a the pale seaside sunshine of Suffolk, a lifeboat pulled up on the beach, its propellors showing, the famous railway view, studies of those two bizarre and puzzling chalk figures, the (very rude) Cerne Abbas Giant and the Long man of Wilmington. He obviously greatly enjoyed painting amid chalk downs , and there are hints, in or two works, of that other small-scale genius, Samuel Palmer, whose ‘White Cloud’ I especially love.

 

If you do go, be careful not to miss what I think is the loveliest thing in the whole collection. It is a woodcut of a boy birds-nesting, that country activity which is now not just forgotten but illegal. It is very small, and in a flat glass case, not on the wall.  Beside the beautiful, intricate print of the boy taking an egg from a perfect nest as outraged birds flutter round him  is the actual block in which the image was cut, and next to that are the tools with which it was done. It made me gasp to imagine the skill and patience with which it must have been achieved, and the mind which could take what his eyes saw and make such a lovely image of it with his hands. I wish I could do that. But I can’t. and can only rejoice that he could. And be glad that these things survive and can be seen.

Fighting the Fake War on Drugs

The near-total triumph of the drug-legalisation lobby in the BBC was once again illustrated last week by the broadcast (on a BBC Radio Four programme called ‘Four Thought’ ) of a speech by a former police officer, Peter Bleksley.

 

Mr Bleksley was given several uninterrupted minutes to state (without much in the way of supporting argument) that drugs should be legalised. The basis of his argument was the he had been an anti-drugs police officer, that a lot of resources had been put into pursuing drug dealers, that this, despite the energetic engagement of people like himself,  had failed. Oh, and even he had later become a user of illegal drugs, though he was now ‘clean’, largely thanks to being told very firmly to give up drugs by his (admirable) wife.

 

He ‘hated’ drugs. But even so he thought the best thing was to have them legalised so they could be sold unadulterated and pure (as if poison is better if it's pure) though state-licensed high-street drug stores.

 

An audience (assembled how?) then applauded, and the programme ended.

 

You may listen to it here

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05r3zby

 

Mr Bleksley is an interesting chap.  About 14 years ago, he published a book about his time in the police drug squad. It was called ‘Gangbuster – I don’t care how hard you are, if you cross me, I’ll bring you down’’ , and was serialised in  ‘The Sunday People’ .Here’s a sample : ‘CRACK cop Peter Bleksley is a dead man walking.

And his enemies - gangland bosses, the Mafia and IRA - who put a pounds 100,000 contract on his life couldn't be more dangerous.

Every day for 10 years he knew that one mistake could end with him getting a bullet in his head.

That was the price he would have paid for: -SLEEPING with a drug-smoking moll and snorting cocaine himself to trap a dealer.

-FOILING a pounds 4 million heroin handover by being the main player in a deadly sting and

-BUSTING evil drug barons who brought nothing but misery to Britain's streets.

Peter was the bravest and the best undercover policeman that Scotland Yard ever had and now his amazing exploits can be revealed in his book Gangbuster - exclusively serialised today by the Sunday People.

He rubbed shoulders with Mafia and IRA bosses, slipping effortlessly into the role of a drug baron, gunrunner, gangster or hitman to get close to his target.

Peter - known to his colleagues in the Yard's top-secret SO10 undercover squad as Blex - was armed with nothing more than his own bravado and cunning, yet constantly faced down shotguns, pistols and knives.

His extraordinary ability and courage, which won him 13 commendations, helped catch dozens of crooks, foiled gangland hitmen and stop millions of pounds of drugs and counterfeit cash hitting the streets.

Detective Constable Blex, 41, now retired - a master of disguises - says: "I learned quickly that if I was to stay alive in this dangerous and murky world of make-believe, I had to be f***ing good.

"When I went out as a drug dealer, I BECAME a drug dealer. I knew the language, the moves, the risks.

"You don't get a second chance in the front line. A bullet in the brain is the quick and easy solution to sorting the bastard cop who has infiltrated your scam." ‘

 

Here’s his interesting description of an evening with a female drug dealer : ‘I spared no expense wining and dining her at exclusive Brown's Hotel. Back at her place Jo was pouring drinks when we brushed against each other and there was instant electricity.

Next moment we were in a passionate clinch, tearing off each other's clothes. We stumbled to the bedroom and fell onto the bed virtually naked. She caressed and kissed every part of my body.

It was an incredible night of passion. Jo was insatiable. We'd have sex and then she'd take a toot of crack cocaine, smoking it in a pipe.

This went on all night. She'd stop for another puff on the pipe then leap back for more sex.

I did a couple of lines of powdered coke. If I'd refused it would have blown my cover.

Jo was warming to me a lot, which was a pity as I knew she would have to be arrested.’

 

The footnote is even more interesting : ‘Jo was charged with possessing the drugs she had with her for our dirty weekend. Thankfully, she was only fined.’

 

(I’ve always disliked the expression ’thankfully’ even more than its close cousin ‘hopefully. To whom does it apply? Whom is he thanking? If you can’t or won’t say and mean ‘Thank God’, or ‘Thank Heaven', which is what people said until recently, then to whom are you attributing this wonder, and to whom or what are you grateful?  I’ve often heard people say ‘Thank f***…’ for something or other. This linguistic nullity shows both our need to explain events beyond our power and our dogged refusal to seek that explanation in God, but there, another subject).

 

Why is he pleased she was only fined? Doesn’t possession count? Well, it would seem not much. For Mr Bleksley  or Detective Constable Bleksley, as he was during much of his 20-odd years in the police) admits here to having taken illegal drugs himself in the course of his duty. There’s an excuse of course, though it’s not one I’m personally very inclined to accept.  The enforcement of the law is at bottom a *moral* duty. You can’t break it to enforce it, that’s a breach of the means and ends rule. And if techniques of enforcement are likely to lead to such quandaries, they shouldn’t be used.

 

And then there’s the awkward fact that Mr Bleksley, (by his own admission) took to drugs after he left the police.  

 

But one has to wonder if he wouldn’t have been better employed during all those years going after the users, rather than spending nights of costly passion with the dealers.

 

For, as I so often ask, if the use of these drugs is not in itself wrong, why is dealing in them such a serious crime? And if the use of them is wrong, why don’t we prosecute it?  As I have established in my book ‘The War We Never Fought’, we do not do so. Mr Bleksley’s book describes him , as an undercover cop, driving a Porsche, handling huge quantities of money, and living a costly double life in flashy restaurants and hotels.

 

Yet, by his own admission, it was all a bit of a waste of time. No matter how many huge ‘drug busts’ he and his colleagues achieved, with those displays of huge plastic bags of cocaine and heroin laid out for the cameras,  the stuff just keeps on coming here. Indeed, the farming of hydroponic cannabis has now become one of Britain’s few genuine growth industries, and flourishes everywhere , usually employing stolen electricity.

 

Had he, rather than living this peculiar life been riding a bike and slipping tenners to informers in pubs, he might have managed to book and prosecute a significant number of drug *users* , sending them to prison and so deterring the use of this drug, as it is still sternly deterred in Japan.

 

Of course, it’s not Mr Bleksley’s fault that he was not doing this, and nor was anyone else by the time he became a police officer. The authorities had closed that route off when in 1973, Lord Hailsham  then in charge of the judiciary, ordered the magistrates of England to stop sending anyone to prison for cannabis possession ( as recommended four years before by the Wootton Report, supposedly rejected by the government, but actually accepted by it) . And if you think that the light touch as restricted to cannabis, then check the prosecution figures in my book, and you’ll see that (inevitably) the same leniency was soon extended to the supposedly more dangerous drugs such as heroin and cocaine. I’ve often thought that the overblown claims of ‘drug busts’ and attacks on ‘evil dealers’ by politicians are a conscious camouflage for their failure to pursue use and possession, a deliberate failure written into the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act for anyone who cares to read it carefully.

 

No police force wants to waste its time pursuing offenders who will then be let off or given trivial non-penalties. And offences which fall into this category become a nuisance to police forces, which eventually become lobbies for laxity (other reasons for the apparently strange but actually logical enthusiasm of the police for weakening the drug laws are explained in my book).

 

Anyway, I almost threw the radio at the wall during Mr Bleksley’s ‘Four Thought’ lecture, which seemed to me to give a free run to a poorly-argued and badly flawed case. And so I was pleased to be asked, a short time later, if I would discuss the subject with Mr Bleksley on BBC Radio Two’s Jeremy Vine programme.

 

You can listen to it here, about one hour and 33 minutes into the programme

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05rk8qh

 

It opens with a long interview with Mr Bleksley, punctuated with a song.  There’s then ( at 1 hour 42 minutes)  a fascinating exchange in which Mr Bleksley confesses that his wife’s fierce ultimatum – ‘stop taking drugs or lose your family life ’ . This seems to me to reinforce my case that drug taking (including 'addiction') can be deterred and halted by forceful threats and credible penalties.

 

I come in immediately afterwards, as usual (don’t tell Iain Dale) fighting for the sort of uninterrupted time that my opponent has already had. No doubt  the comment warriors will be along with their usual lies and obfuscations. We are up against a very powerful lobby here, on the brink of victory. Can't you feel the hot breath of frustrated greed and rage at any whisper of dissent?

An Interview of PH on Australia's Radio National - on religion and politics

Some of you may enjoy this interview of me by Andrew West on Australia’s Radio National, roughly  equivalent to (BBC Radio 4 )about religion and politics, and our general election.

 

Some of you may not

 

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/religionandethicsreport/peter-hitchens-on-the-role-of-religion-in-the-uk-election/6431356

 

 

 

War and Remembrance, some remarks on Herman Wouk

As I write this, Herman Wouk (pronounced to rhyme with ‘bloke’, oddly enough) is still with us at the age of 99, and fast approaching his century. Indeed, it is four years since Stephen King entitled a short story ‘Herman Wouk is Still Alive’. Long may he live. But who is he? You may have come across his books, most notably ‘The Caine Mutiny’ , ‘The Winds of War’ and ‘War and Remembrance’ (or you may have seen the film of the first and the TV miniseries made from the later two). You may have read some of his other books , such as ‘Marjorie Morningstar’(which I have never read) or ‘Youngblood Hawke’, which I have read, and which is partly fuelled by resentment over the comparative failure of his second (now forgotten) novel, ‘City Boy’  novel, overshadowed by a Norman Mailer triumph, ‘The Naked and the Dead’.

 

‘Youngblood Hawke’ is actually quite perceptive about the odd world of publishing, at least as it was, and has some interesting insights about 1940s Hollywood as well.

 

I suspect that Mr Wouk, like many writers, wanted from the start to have both a good literary reputation and a large popular sale. He certainly achieved the second. As I am no judge of literary quality at all, and often fail utterly to finish novels of high reputation,  I cannot tell whether his commercial  success has prejudiced the literary world against him. I am the sort of person who likes the works of Charles Dickens and Somerset Maugham, but is less keen on Thackeray and Thomas Hardy, and not keen  at all on Virginia Woolf or D.H.Lawrence. You’ll just have to make allowances for me. But anyone who can create a character as enduring, memorable and believable as Captain Queeg (in ‘The Caine Mutiny’) seems to me to have proved beyond doubt that he can write.

 

He’s obviously a highly educated,  well-read and thoughtful man. He’s also politically conservative and (I would guess from certain passages in the ‘War’ books) pretty severely opposed to the pro-Communist movements which flourished among writers and Hollywood types before, during and immediately after the Second World War.

 

He is also that rare thing, an unmilitary civilian who went into the armed forces in wartime and saw the point of them, rather than regarding them as ridiculous or repressive or wholly absurd. I suspect him of conducting a lifelong love-affair with the United States Navy. His Jewish faith and ancestry are also central to his life and writing, and he is unusual among modern authors in being sympathetic to religious faith in general.

 

I thought I would write about the ‘War’ books because, in a moment of disenchantment with the present day, I decided to re-read them (on an e-reader, so avoiding the need to cart these vast tomes about) after a gap of many years. I’d still recommend them to anyone wanting to have a good understanding of that war, and this is why:

 

I’ve thought for some time that they provide a pretty good basic historical background to the understanding of the 1939-45 war, ideal for those who haven’t studied the period in history but want to know what happened. In a way, it’s a  good popular history told through invented characters rather than a novel.  He inserts his central character, a US Navy officer (Victor Henry) , into the midst of several major events, placing him in 1939 Berlin as a naval attache,  also making him an unofficial aide to Franklin Roosevelt who conducts missions for the President in Britain and the USSR, while his adult children and their wives are entangled in several other aspects of the war. There’s also a rather tiresome British journalist, who suffers from the American writer’s  almost invariable inability to get British people quite right.  His daughter is more important to the plot than he is, but I shan’t say why here. |You must read the books to find out.  These are all devices for what is, in essence, a novelised history of America’s engagement in World War Two. They work rather well (among my favourite characters is the American diplomat and self-confessed coward Leslie Slote, who may stand for all poltroons caught in the midst of terror).

 

But perhaps his cleverest creation is an appalling but clever German general, Armin van Roon, who is given lengthy opportunities to provide his acid, snobbish and utterly ruthless commentary on the course of the war as observed from the German point of view.

 

The reader understands, of course, that van Roon is insufferable, self-serving and immoral ( as indeed he is). Wouk repeatedly uses Victor Henry to rebuke his more outrageous statements. I cannot quite work out whether this is because Wouk genuinely thinks his assessment wrong, or because he is worried that readers will think he may suspect it is right.   But it is perhaps because of this that Wouk so often allows van Roon to be right, about politics, strategy and (in my view) the incredibly skilful cynicism of FDR. 

 

Victor Henry ( and so presumably Wouk) is an admirer of FDR. Actually, it’s quite possible to admire the old monster without thinking he was a pleasant, kind or moral man.  There’s a better fictional portrait of him (unnamed) in Allen Drury’s ‘Advise and Consent’, where  he is judged apart from his wartime record, simply as a manipulative and ruthless wielder of naked power. But I suspect most Americans of that era, especially those who fought in war under FDR as commander-in-chief,  seem him or saw him through a warm and fuzzy filter.

 

Later revelations, about his private life didn’t affect them. And Americans, as the beneficiaries of his ruthlessness, are less inclined to be critical of it. So are most British people, because they simply aren’t aware of just how mercilessly he milked us of wealth and empire  ( see here, for example http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/01/not-so-special-an-amazing-account-of-the-usas-unwillingness-to-enter-world-war-two.html ).

 

Readers here will know that I regard this as perfectly reasonable behaviour, and wish our own government had shown similar evidence of self-preservation and cool good sense in the Hitler era, instead of hurling itself into a battle for which it was not armed or equipped, at the worst possible moment (cue chorus of whining voices claiming falsely that I believe we should not have fought the war at all. Read what I say, guys).

 

But, though occasionally sentimental (not unjustifiably) about Russia,  Wouk is generally level-headed about several features of the war usually ignored or resisted by ‘Finest Hour’ and ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ merchants.  He accepts the official version of the effectiveness of the RAF bombing campaign against Germany. But he points out that the German-Japanese alliance was virtually inoperative, and never led to any co-ordinated actions of any size. Had it done so, the effects on Britain and the USSR would have been terrifying. Yet Japan continued to trade freely with the Soviets while its supposed ally was at death-grips with them.

 

 A Jew himself, he is ruthless about anti-Semitism and generally Judophobic callousness in his own nation’s elite. The refusal of American or British officialdom or media to take seriously the increasingly alarming and undeniable reports of mass murder is very well portrayed, and the shameful Bermuda conference, at which the allies decided to do nothing about it,  gets a specific and withering mention.

 

The Pacific Naval war (too little known here) is very well explained and described, and in a rather touching section Wouk lists the tiny number of US naval aviators whose courage decided the outcome of that immensely significant battle, Midway.  He recounts that he had some difficulty, less than 50 years after the war, in obtaining these names, which were already slipping into obscurity in the navy archives. Those names, and the names of the American towns from which these very young men came, are as a result strongly moving.  These were, in their own minds, modern men in modern machines fighting a modern war. Yet they, and the very personal war they fought,  seem to us almost as remote as a cavalry charge.   On more than one occasion, Wouk has reason to defend American fighting courage. He makes a convincing case for it.

 

American characters are honestly shown as doubting Britain’s true capacity to fight (a senior naval officer wonders if the ‘Limey Navy’ is just an empty shell), and the Placentia Bay summit between Churchill and Roosevelt is rightly depicted as a changing of the guard, the actual handover of leadership from London to Washington (which is not how we in Britain saw it at the time, or in many cases have ever understood it). The narrowness of the Congressional decision to maintain the American Army is dwelt upon. The cruelty of Roosevelt to Churchill at Teheran is prominently described, though not as devastatingly as it might have been.  The ghastly British journalist Tudsbury redeems himself at Hollywood gathering of fellow-travellers, with a speech that beautifully torpedoes their Stalinist propaganda. I wonder if this element in Wouk’s work, a cold-eyed refusal to join that particular gang, may have caused lasting resentment against him in the American literary world. It’s notable that it is balanced by an obvious admiration for Russian fighting courage and individual honour.

 

Increasingly, the murder of Europe’s Jews comes to dominate the book, thanks to the thickening cloud of danger which grows around two of the major characters, believably stranded in Italy by bureaucratic stupidity, when Pearl Harbor slams all the normal gates that lead out of Europe.  In the characters of Berel and Aaron Jastrow, very different witnesses to almost all aspects of the crime, Wouk creates a gigantic parable, whose climax comes in a lecture delivered on the edge of death by Aaron, in an attic in Theresienstadt,  the frightful place of deception and misery through which so many European Jews passed on the way to their own murders.

 

The great puzzle of Germany – how can it rise to such heights and sink to such depths - is also very carefully examined, with quite a lot of attention paid to Heinrich Heine’s famous warning (In ‘Religion and Philosophy in Germany, 1832)

 

‘Christianity -- and that is its greatest merit -- has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. ...    

The old stone gods will then rise from long ruins and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and Thor will leap to life with his giant hammer and smash the Gothic cathedrals. ...

... Do not smile at my advice -- the advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and philosophers of nature. Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder…comes rolling somewhat slowly, but ... its crash ... will be unlike anything before in the history of the world. ...At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in farthest Africa will draw in their tails and slink away. ... A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.’

 

The Nazis are not oversimplified or grotesquely caricatured. Their undoubted wickedness is accurately and unswervingly portrayed.. on one occasion so horribly that it is very difficult to read, but also very hard to doubt. But individual Germans are judged fairly.  Oddly enough the scene that lingers longest in my memory is comparatively trivial. Victor Henry and his family, neutral Americans under diplomatic protection in Berlin in the autumn of 1939, refuse to stand for the German national anthem, played over loudspeakers in a lakeside restaurant to mark the defeat of Poland. The waiter at their table reacts with extraordinary spite and rudeness, until the naval officer, summoning all the authority he has earned in years at sea, forces him to behave. The transformation reminds me of the great Churchill remark about how Germans are ‘always at your feet or at your throat’. But I suspect some such incident actually happened. It is very telling. It is quite typical of the books, to approach the truth of history through a small and very personal incident.

A Few Notes on the Election, seen from an English Town

We recoil from the responsibility of deciding the future of the country. We pretend to be interested, but we run from any real decisions. Perhaps twelve times in a lifetime, some of us in marginal seats can alter the destiny of the nation with a pencilled cross. But will we?

 

No. We will pretend to choose, but actually shrink back into our tribal shells, like so many million frightened tortoises. This is why, at general elections, independents and small parties do so much worse than they do in by-elections and Euro polls. Rather than think, we will rally to whatever flag we think is ours.

 

 

That is why there are few things more dispiriting than talking to voters during a general election. Not that this is easy in Swindon, which currently contains two marginal seats, so making its citizens some of the most powerful in Britain on 7th May.

 

It’s an enjoyably dour and workful town, which I know a bit because it’s where I spent three formative years in the forgotten era of Ted Heath, Harold Wilson, wild inflation and the Common Market referendum.

 

I don’t know quite why, but something in the air seems to make people enjoy clamming up. In many years of canvassing opinion, I’ve never known so many people flatly refuse to speak to me. And don’t think, all you silent ones, that I didn’t notice the Swindonian glint of pleasure in your eyes as you said ‘no’. 

 

Well do I remember, as a cub reporter on the evening paper, rushing to the scene of an explosion in a bacon-packing factory, there to be confronted by a large crowd of workers admiring the plume of smoke heading towards the sky and sniffing the sizzling fumes. ‘What happened?’, I asked the first one I met.

 

A slow smile spread across his face as he studied my eager expression and saw how much I wanted to know. Then he said ‘no comment’ (he pronounced ‘comment’ to rhyme with ‘lament’). One by one, all his colleagues, seeing how annoying this was, did exactly the same. 

 

So thank you to those who did answer my questions. But, oh dear, what a struggle it was to restrain my natural impulse to argue with you. People actually repeated to me, over and over again, the propaganda of the parties.

 

They were worried about the NHS or Tory cuts. Or they genuinely thought the SNP were about to take over the country. Or they actually believed that George Osborne had saved the economy.

 

In the hope of a bit of eccentricity, I approached a rather wild-looking man with a long silver ponytail, only to be met with the answer (delivered in portentous tones and with lowered eyebrows, as if it were hugely profound) ‘Better the Devil You Know’. Then he strode away.

 

Very occasionally I found a UKIP rebel, or a disillusioned person who really couldn’t be bothered to vote, a position with which I strongly sympathise. I don’t buy stuff I don’t want. Why vote for people you don’t like or trust?

 

But one man said, without any sense of embarrassment, that he had always voted Tory, and always would, just as he had always shopped at Tesco, and always would. He wasn’t going to be influenced out of either by better quality, lower prices or more attractive policies elsewhere. Tory was what he was, and Tesco’s too. From what he told me of his life, he didn’t seem to me to have any reason to be contented with either of them.

 

By contrast another rather conservative voter spoke of his sorrow at the spread of zero-hours contracts, and the way insecurity, low wages and unaffordable housing were blighting his son’s life.  He himself had recently spent £150,000 on a new house. ‘It might as well be made of cardboard’, he said. ‘I can hear my neighbours breathing’.  He had wanted privacy, and this was what he had to settle for instead.

 

How he’ll vote, I have no idea. No government on offer will make much difference to these things. But for him, as for many, if this is prosperity he isn’t that pleased with it.

 

A sad man in sunglasses who had spent much of his life in Africa, mourned the death of Christianity among us. I knew what he meant. Another of my Swindon memories was of my search for lodgings, and viewing a small room with a lino floor and an iron bedstead, as the landlady said encouragingly ‘You’ll be safe from the Devil in here’.

 

 

I was, as it happens, so young and foolish that I did not then especially want to be safe from the Devil (who seems to come up quite a lot in Swindon conversations).  A fat lot I knew. But even then, in the early 1970s, Christianity was still a force in the lives of many, many people, far more than now.

 

Swindon’s changed as much as Britain has. Even 40 years ago there were still traces of the old Victorian hierarchy of the company town it had been for a century. Where you lived, where you went to church, where your children went to school, had depended on your place in the vast railway workshops where you would probably toil for your whole life.

 

Now, behold the new Britain, a miniature Milton Keynes astride the M4, where the old Great Western Railway wagon works has been turned into an outlet store. There, beneath the old cranes and pulleys, shiny shops sell fashionable clothes on credit. In the midst of this strange place - metrosexual modern glamour in a building redolent of masculine austerity - a gigantic high-heeled shoe, made out of Lego, revolves slowly on a plinth like an object of pagan worship.

 

Actually, unlike many former industrial towns, Swindon still makes things. Out to the North-East, in a gritty zone of grinding traffic and palisade fencing, is the enormous plant that presses the steel panels for the BMW Mini. Beyond that lies the huge Honda car factory (I seem to remember the site once belonged to Vickers).

 

Is it only me that still finds it odd that, in an age when British politicians still like to use World War Two images to promote themselves, and recall our finest hour, so many of our people depend for their daily bread on factories owned by our defeated foes, whereas the shipyards and factories that built our warships and aircraft in 1940 closed forever, long ago, and their names are forgotten?

 

But what much of Swindon most reminds me of is the USA, the raw, unfinished landscape of outer Detroit or Gary, Indiana, the brutal scrapyards next to the factories, the railway spurs amid the long grass, the bars, supermarkets and drive-in burger joints in the middle of nowhere.

 

There’s even the strange contrast between the sparkling malls with their high-end chains, and the nearby rim of  tattoo parlours, slot-machine arcades and convenience stores selling floppy, faded vegetables. And out beyond all that, the plonked, pop-up suburbs and multiplexes, planned like mazes to discourage through traffic and so give some sense of privacy where there isn’t really any such thing.

 

This may well be the Britain millions want. No more nonsense about class or hierarchy, plenty of fun and fast food for sale, and wide uncluttered highways to drive about on. On top of that, not too much security, in work or at home, but not too many ties to hold us down either. 

 

What can politics say or do about this?  It just is, as the waves of global fortune and misfortune wash over us. I suspect that Swindon’s clever borough council has (whoever ran it) concentrated for half a century on persuading new business, and new people, to come here. Its very willingness to be anything and try anything has made it prosperous, with more private sector jobs than almost anywhere.

 

From having been a Wiltshire town where you had to live there 30 years to count, and the word ‘gas’ was pronounced to rhyme with ‘farce’, it’s now an Everywhereville of newcomers, from all over England and Wales, and indeed from Goa, the Punjab  and Warsaw as well.

 

I have to say Swindon is not excited by the election, though one of its two Tory MPs, Robert Buckland, is in serious danger of losing his seat to Labour. There’s hardly a billboard, loudspeaker or poster to be seen- and those you can see are all Labour.

 

I spoke to two of the candidates (another said she’d meet me but then lost her voice) and attended a lifeless hustings where the Green candidate said she was so nervous she was in danger of vomiting (her rivals shifted away from her in their seats) , and repeatedly told her student audience that she was ‘p***ed off’ about lots of things.

 

Has it come to this?  In packed, dusty halls not far from here, I listened not all that long ago to literate, educated, genuinely passionate speeches from all sides in the 1975 Common Market referendum campaign.

 

The more I look back on those rather thrilling few weeks, the more I think they were the last time politics was properly alive in this country. But that referendum, of course, was the moment when we really ran from responsibility, opting to let our country be run by a committee of bureaucrats somewhere in the Low Countries. Something tells me we don’t really care enough to take it back again. That’s the only prediction I’m making.

When Tebbit says vote Labour, you know something’s gone very wrong

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

In the midst of the most fraudulent General Election I have ever experienced, a clear and honest voice speaks, and is drowned by a tornado of lies.

After 40 years in the trade of journalism, I think I know what news is. And when Norman Tebbit, the fiercest and roughest anti-socialist street-fighter of the Thatcher years, suggests that Tories in Scotland vote Labour, that is news.

This is what he said: ‘From the Tories’ point of view we are not going to come home with a vast number of seats from Scotland. We know that. So the choice is, would we rather have a Scot Nat or Labour? I think, on balance, probably a Labour MP would be a more reasonable thing to have.’

 

Asked if he was advising Tory supporters to vote Labour where it is contesting seats with the SNP, he said: ‘I hesitate to say that. But it is logical from where I stand.’
Of course it is. Anyone who seriously wants to keep Scotland in the UK must seek to stop the rise of the SNP, not to fuel and encourage it.

Lord Tebbit is not the only Tory who has been appalled by the deliberate boosting of the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon by such figures as Chief Whip Michael Gove and Chancellor George Osborne.

Both these men have acted like student politicians, helping one enemy to do down another. This may work in the tail-coated silly-clever struggles of the Oxford Union. But it is quite wrong when a real country is at stake.

Lord Tebbit’s outburst was astonishing from a man who would have been a Tory Prime Minister, had an IRA death squad not confined his wife to a wheelchair and injured him far more badly than he has ever revealed.

So why haven’t we heard more about it? And why hasn’t the Tory Party expelled, or at least suspended him for this blatant defiance of his leader?

I mainly blame the squeaking multitudes of political journalists who, in my view, have settled on a line about what this Election is about and are reading from a script given to them by the Government spin doctors on whom they depend so much.

And Lord Tebbit’s amazing intervention doesn’t fit the script. In fact, it utterly destroys the official version, that this is a contest between a fiscally responsible, unionist Tory Party and a mad Trotskyist Labour Party in hock to the SNP and some trade union maniacs.

In fact, it’s the most amazing development in politics since another former Tory giant, Enoch Powell, urged his supporters to vote Labour in February 1974 and snarled ‘Judas was paid! I am making a sacrifice!’, in response to cries of ‘Judas!’

Yet it’s barely been mentioned, because it’s easier for commentators to ignore it than to explain it, and admit that their whole version of events is wrong. But it is.

Yes, Cameron IS to blame for this disaster

It was amusing to watch David Cameron’s aides get all hoity-toity when Ed Miliband suggested the Premier might bear some blame for the squadrons of coffin ships now wallowing in the Mediterranean, full of desperate migrants.

Of course Mr Cameron is to blame. He knew nothing of Libya or its importance when he sought to be the shining hero of a brief and glorious war against Colonel Gaddafi in 2011.
The trouble is that Red Ed supported our intervention in Libya too, so can only rather lamely criticise the poor follow-through afterwards.

There’s nothing ‘disgraceful’ about doing this. The disgrace lay in Mr Cameron’s own vainglorious and ignorant intervention, on the phoney pretext of preventing an imaginary massacre. If this hadn’t happened, the Med would not now be full of foundering boats and floating corpses.

All that is left to do for my friend Jason Rezaian is to ask for your prayers for him. Jason is a kind, gentle and rather bumbling person, with a Persian father and an American mother, and he loves his father’s country.

It became his mission to explain Iran and its people to a puzzled and often hostile West. He changed my life and my mind by conducting me round that beautiful and astonishing country, introducing me to his large and friendly family there.
He insisted that – though I was prostrated by some sort of food poisoning – I went with him to Isfahan, the absolute pinnacle of Iranian culture, art and beauty, because he was so proud of it. He was right. It is astonishing.

Now, monstrously, the Iranian authorities are accusing this benevolent and patriotic man of espionage against the country he so obviously loves. They have held him in prison since July. It is all very cruel and wrong and will one day be shown to have been a terrible injustice.

His captors say that they follow a faith of compassion and mercy. I think they need to be reminded of this. Whatever strange purpose lies behind this wicked treatment, it cannot justify it.

The self-righteous supporters of mass immigration think the rest of us are stupid and evil. All over the country there are moronic yellow posters shouting ‘I am an immigrant’ which assume that you and I dislike immigrants personally.

They also make the lame point that immigrants do valuable or useful jobs. There’s a fireman, a postman, a bus driver, a nurse, a teacher and a chef (I’m not so sure about the human rights barrister or the comedian). Of course they do, but, like most people in work, they do their jobs because they are paid to, not because they have come across the oceans solely to be nice to us.

What doesn’t seem to have occurred to the designers of this rather insulting and patronising propaganda is this: we could have trained people who are already here to do these jobs. As we have about a million young people not in employment, education or training, this is a real issue.

What many of us object to is the politicians who, for whatever reason, forget that societies cannot easily absorb huge numbers of new citizens. I resent the suggestion that this perfectly reasonable view is motivated by racial hatred or personal spite.

 

 

****

 

How we love to reintroduce species to places from which they were once drive. I've long been suspicious of this, especially the bringing of red kites back to the Chiltern Hills. Officially, these huge birds are harmless to other living creatures, though other birds often seem rare where the kites are common.

 

Well, on Tuesday, I watched one with what looked like a live bird in its claws, fighting off an aerial attack by a frantic crow. Have we made a mistake? Will we ever recognise it?

 

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

Which of the Big Parties Really Wants a Scottish Exit from the UK?

Have you noticed that the entire Tory election campaign is based on a belief that the Conservative and Unionist Party (its increasingly ludicrous official name)  is automatically entitled to be the government, and indeed to choose its own opposition? This is particularly startling in a party that is shrinking in membership by the day, has in the past few decades lost the great majority of its members and the support of millions of its voters, and has not won a general election since 1992, which seems to me to be 23 years ago.

 

Like a vast, bawling spoiled toddler, the Tory Party howls and snivels about how the mere possibility that anyone else might be the government, or anyone else might win seats in Parliament and so be entitled to determine the direction of events,  is axiomatically unjust. The belief that it is in some way the only rightful government, despite not being able to get many votes, is implicit in everything it says.

 

In the same way, it cannot grasp that it has alienated many who once supported it, by its own deliberate actions.  It dismisses its own disgruntled supporters, who leave it for other loyalties, as ‘fruitcakes and closet racists’, before grasping that this may be unwise and then attempting to woo the self-same ‘fruitcakes and closet racists’, whose fruitcakey and closet racist votes it now finds it needs. If the Tory party were a character in a Roald Dahl children’s story, I think it would have an ugly name and come to a sticky end.

 

 Its entire campaign until last week was based on its opinion (not necessarily binding on all, nor shared by all, as it turned out) that the Labour Party had chosen the wrong leader. Well, leave aside the fact that the Labour Party is separate from the Tory Party partly because it represents different interests and different parts of the country, it is surely reasonable for that party to pick a leader the Tories don’t like. I have to admit that I have not heard any senior Labour person grouch about the undoubtedly strange Tory choice of an utterly-inexperienced and undistinguished PR man (whose bad decisions are one of the principal causes of the current refugee tragedy in the Mediterranean)  as their leader. Anyway, that one blew up in the Tory Party’s face when they pumped it up too hard.

 

So they are currently weeping and keening about the fact that large numbers of Scots voters support the SNP and wish to leave the UK. This, apparently is going to have some effect on Labour if they try to form a minority government after May 7th. Well, so it may. It will have an effect on whoever tries to form such a government, even if it is the Tories. It would even have an effect on the majority government which is, to put it mildly, the least likely outcome of the current campaign. Think about it. If the Scottish people overwhelmingly elect representatives who wish to leave the UK, in preference to representatives who wish to stay, then London is going to have to take that view increasingly seriously.

 

This isn’t a new problem.  It was Mr Cameron’s coalition which granted the referendum to the SNP,  when it was much weaker than it is now. It was Mr  Cameron who handled (mishandled?) the negotiations over the question that would be asked, and who was repeatedly (in the view of most dispassionate observers) outmanoeuvred by Alex Salmond.  It was Mr Cameron who panicked when the vote threatened to go in favour of secession. It was Mr Cameron who stimulated the SNP surge by playing party politics on ‘English votes for English laws’ rather than in keeping the ‘vow’ he and others had made to grant new powers to Scotland after the referendum.

 

I might add that the Tory party is itself unable to persuade most people in Scotland to elect its representatives to anything. As this was not always so, this presumably has something to do with the quality of its leadership and establishment, the very people who ensured Mr Cameron’s smooth accession to the leadership. (Readers here will be familiar with my argument that the United Kingdom cannot coexist in these islands with the European Union, which offers the UK’s constituent parts an alternative form of federation which is rather appealing to the political classes of Scotland and Wales).

 

And now? Say the Tories manage to win enough seats to form a minority government, a perfectly feasible outcome, or even a majority government. Will they be able to ignore the SNP surge, likely  to give the SNP another strong majority in the next Scottish elections, on top of its large new bloc of MPs at Westminster, giving them an almost clean sweep of the entire territory of Scotland?

 

Of course not, especially since it is absolutely in the Tory Party’s interest that Scotland leaves the UK, for crude electoral calculation ( as many times discussed on this weblog, notably in the recent reference to Michael Portillo) .

 

One of this weblog’s favourite rhymes is the one that goes ‘The more that he talked of his honour, the faster we counted the spoons’. Well, the more that Mr Cameron berates Labour for being the putative puppet of the SNP, the more I suspect that this is the role he intends and indeed hopes to play himself.

 

If he is genuinely as alarmed by the prospect of a Scottish defection as he claims, and if he thinks (as he appears to) that the expressed will of Scottish voters cannot be allowed to prevail, he has one option.

 

He must offer to all the UK parties the idea of a coalition to maintain the unity of the United Kingdom (difficult, given that the departure of Northern Ireland,  which we must concede under international treaty if a majority vote for it, is likely to awaken as an issue quite soon, but there).

 

 

Whether this would entail an actual coalition government may well depend on the scale of the ghastly economic crisis which is going to be officially acknowledged some time during the coming summer. The Greek problem is still very serious, and could trigger severe problems in Euroland.

 

The Tories might also simply offer an ad hoc alliance on this issue - a pact to vote with Labour against a further Scottish referendum, or any more moves towards Scottish independence.  They could also offer their votes to prevent any SNP blackmail over defence, or over economic measures designed to overcome our deficit, on which Labour and the Tories are close to agreement. If Labour had any sense, they would ask Mr Cameron to commit himself to something of the kind.

 

Because I do not think Mr Cameron would make any such commitment. He wishes to have a free hand to make some sort of deal with the SNP, if he hangs on to office. His supposed concern for the Union, and for the power of Parliament to make the laws for England without Scottish interference, are not principled but tactical, as he showed quite clearly in the days after the referendum last September.

 

I believe that, with a great show of reluctance, as crammed with fake mourning and as loaded down with insincerity as a gangster’s wreath-strewn funeral, the Tory Party secretly hopes for and will secretly celebrate a Scottish exit from the UK.

The SNP feels much the same way, hence its brazen co-operation with the Tory attempt to portray Labour as the SNP’s tool and patsy, encouraged by Nicola Sturgeon’s unwanted public wooing of Ed Miliband at last week’s TV debate.

 

Labour, for equally unprincipled reasons (namely, the permanent loss of any hope of ever again forming a majority government), genuinely hates the idea of a Scottish exit.  Its mourning at the funeral of the UK will be real, if selfish.

 

All this is surely obvious to anyone who pays attention.