Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 199

Usefully Idiotic

A recent rather silly article in ‘The Times’ (of London), which I cannot reproduce because of a paywall, irritated me so much that I sent a letter to that newspaper to express my disagreement. I don’t think it will be published, but, as debate so often does, the argument gave me a new insight into something I had previously known only vaguely.

 

The author was angry with those who though Russia was the wronged party in the current EU/NATO/US attempt to de-neutralise Ukraine and place it firmly into a NATO and EU alignment (not membership, that’s currently impossible, but the Association Agreement is clearly and explicitly politico-military as well as economic).

 

Well, we’re all familiar with this. But he chose to suggest that there was a continuity between those who took this position and those who had been the mental servants of the old USSR. He used the expression ‘Useful Idiots’, said to have been employed by Lenin to describe the willing regurgitators of Soviet Communist propaganda in the West , whose support was welcome but who were secretly scorned by the cynics in the Kremlin for being gullible dupes.

 

It’s actually rather a good phrase, and immediately conveys its message - though at the last count there was no evidence that Lenin himself had ever used it.

 

I would myself be tempted to apply it to quite a lot of leftist intellectuals taken in by Soviet lies, from Beatrice and Sidney Webb to George Bernard Shaw,  and indeed many of the stalwarts of various disarmament and 'peace' campaigns in the Cold War period. These people, in person herbivorous and gentle, unknowingly did the work of the violent and homicidal Bolshevik state, in many cases almost up the moment of its dissolution.

 

Having very much not been one of these people (at least not since I was about 15 years old)  I found the suggestion ridiculous. Indeed, if there is anything that the defenders of Mr Putin’s foreign policy have in common, it is a certain amount of social conservatism, and/or opposition to the European Union. Personally I think this is tangential, and if genuine, the result of a misunderstanding.

 

I have no affection for any aspect of the modern Russian state, though I have noted the paradox that thought and speech on matters of political correctness are probably freer in that dingy polity than they are here or in the USA. This is despite the great lack of freedom in real political choice, and the almost total suppression of real dissent.  

 

This is mainly because Russia simply missed the great PC re-education programmes that swept North America and most of Europe from about 1985 onwards, and its current isolation keeps it that way. It is also because patriotism and religion were persecuted or perverted by the Soviet regime, and so have strongly revived in the years since it fell. Both therefore exist in a much more potent high-octane form than is to be found in most of the ‘West’. Their strength prevents any current moves in the politically correct direction, though one cannot really be sure that this suits the Russian government. And I am sure that the Russian state would leap at the chance to join the EU, with all the compulsory political correctness that would require,  in the highly unlikely event that it was offered.  It is precisely because such an offer is more or less impossible that things are as they are.

 

So there isn’t really any idealistic or dogmatic element in the position that Russia is (in this case) on the receiving end of diplomatic aggression by the EU/NATO/US . It's just a matter of observable, measurable fact.  

 

Some sentimental old leftists, who still yearn for the old red flag,  and have always found Eurocommunism too weak a brew, may enjoy the apparent revival of the old conflict. But they are as ill-informed as those in the West who kid themselves that Vladimir Putin is the product of a KGB plot to win back the world for Marxist-Leninism, and revive the USSR, and is poised to invade the Baltic states and Poland.

 

The point of all this is follows. Those in this argument who are moved by a utopian ideology , and are its 'useful idiots', are not the cynical realpolitik-loving critics of the Euromaidan. Anything but.

 

The ones whose shining, joy-filled (and naïve) faces  belong on a propaganda poster are the young idealists of the Euromaidan, with their flags and their songs and their ludicrous hopes that they can begin the world over again with mass demonstrations and the storming of palaces.

 

It is they who, like the Bolsheviks of a century ago, dream of a new world order, a borderless planet of pace, love and honesty, in which corruption is swept away by nobility, and we all live happily ever after. Such utopianism always attracts its share of foreign admirers, who long for something similar in their own slow-moving, non-idealist and conservative nations. From such dreamers are useful idiots created.

 

Such people no longer look to the dead and buried USSR, nor to the Kremlin. They are inspired instead by the USA as the new liberator. These are the people who thought they could install freedom in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia etc.  Why, they even thought they had installed it in Russia via Boris Yeltsin(big mistake). 

 

And, oddly enough, such ideas have the same Utopian roots as Bolshevism. American neo-conservatism, which allied itself with George W.Bush and Donald Rumsfeld (in the form of the Project for the New American Century) is neatly embodied in the figure of William Kristol, himself the worthy son of that powerful thinker Irving Kristol, who had begun his intellectual life as a Trotskyist. It’s a fundamentally idealist view of the world, not necessarily much to do with the basic interests of the USA, much more to do with a conception of a re-ordered planet, ruled by democratism.

 

Victoria Nuland, the US Assistant Secretary of State prominent in the encouragement of the Euromaidan, is married to Robert Kagan, who prefers to be called a liberal interventionist but whom many regard as a prominent neo-conservative in the Kristol tradition.  Another rather good example of this continuity was of course my late brother, Christopher who never abandoned his admiration for Leon Trotsky and yet managed to combine this with militant support for George W.Bush's invasion of Iraq . He became an enthusiastic US citizen partly to demonstrate his sympathy for the USA’s new role as the headquarters of world revolution. Once people have puzzled out this equation, they are a lot closer to understanding what is actually going on.  Those who still think in pre-1989 categories have no idea what is happening. Anyway, the utopian idealists are all on the other side now. The conservative cynics are around here somewhere.

Another wave of migrants is on its way (but don't you dare mention it)

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Funny how little we have heard from British liberals about a rather nasty outbreak of anti-immigrant violence this week.

Black South Africans burst on to the streets of Durban and Johannesburg, savagely attacking and threatening black immigrants from other parts of Africa.

Whatever this is, it isn’t ‘racist’. The assailants and victims alike are almost all black Africans. The fact that it is happening in a country liberals pretend is a rainbow paradise (when it isn't) is also hard for them to handle.

The sad truth is that mass migration, whatever the colour of the skins of those involved, upsets and worries indigenous people, especially the poorest. If it is not controlled – and South Africa has utterly failed to control it for many years – it can lead to serious social conflict.

And if you think this doesn't affect us, you are worryingly wrong. For Africa is exploding north and south, as war and famine uproot its unhappy millions.

David Cameron’s irresponsible and ignorant intervention in Libya (which alone should be enough to ensure he never holds responsible office again) is now causing one of the greatest human upheavals of modern times.

A wave of human misery is now heading to Europe – and eventually to Britain – from the fiery chaos of post-Cameron Libya.

In one week, at least 10,000 migrants have been ferried to Italy by greedy criminal traffickers. 

These calculating monsters put only enough fuel in the tanks of their boats to get them halfway across. Then they call the Italian coastguard to tell them to pick up the drifting victims before they drown or die of exposure.

And of course civilised Europe does pick them up. What choice do we have? It goes against centuries of Christianity to leave them (as the ruthless traffickers happily do) to their fate, and hope that this will discourage them.

And how can we send them back to the failed and lawless state which has already driven them out after robbing them? So it will not be long before they arrive at Calais and join the queue to be smuggled into Britain.

I can see no obvious solution to this. It reminds me of the great illegal migration of Latin Americans that utterly transformed the USA in the 1990s, and continues to do so.

Should we have listened more carefully to Colonel Gaddafi, whom we drove from power and left to be murdered in a ditch? By assisting in his overthrow, have we replaced the terrible with the horrible?

Back in August 2010, the Libyan despot went to Rome and made a blackmailing offer which many Italian politicians must now be wishing they had accepted.

Gaddafi said: ‘Italy needs to convince her European allies to accept this Libyan proposal – €5 billion [then about £4 billion] to Libya to stop illegal immigration. ‘Europe runs the risk of turning black from illegal immigration, it could turn into Africa. We need support from the European Union to stop this army trying to get across from Libya, which is their entry point.

‘At the moment there is a dangerous level of immigration from Africa into Europe and we don’t know what will happen.

‘What will be the reaction of the white Christian Europeans to this mass of hungry, uneducated Africans?’

You will have to look up what he said next as it is simply too shocking and unpleasant for me to reproduce.

That’s the problem. While we won’t think about it, the unthinkable is actually happening, and we have no idea what to do.

Fairy tale of the Big Bad Bear

Once again there is a lot of squawking about Russian warships passing through the ‘English Channel’ or antique Russian bombers approaching our airspace.

I will let you into a secret. The Channel is an international waterway through which the Russians are quite free to pass, and over which we have no exclusive right. 

And no Russian warplane has entered British airspace. 

Meanwhile, military activity by Nato aircraft close to the borders of Russia has doubled since early 2014, totalling 3,000 sorties that year. So it’s not just the Big Bad Bear.

Also, do you recall the noisy chorus which pretty much assumed Russia’s President Putin was behind the Moscow murder of his liberal opponent Boris Nemtsov? 

Well, maybe he was, but oughtn’t the same people to be just as worried about the mysterious deaths of ten prominent opponents of Ukraine’s new pro-Nato government since February 2014?

The most recent were Oleg Kalashnikov, a supporter of deposed President Yanukovych, found shot dead on Wednesday, and a pro-Russian journalist, Oles Buzyna, murdered by masked gunmen in a drive-by shooting outside his Kiev home on Thursday.

I have no idea who killed them or why. But the belief that Russia is the heart of darkness, and Ukraine is a law-governed, clean Utopia, is ridiculous and silly.

Yet again Tory politicians and commentators are talking up the dull and mechanical Leftist Nicola Sturgeon.

I don’t myself think she is anything special, and am baffled by the praise she receives. But do the Tories have another agenda? Do they secretly want Scotland out of the Union? I am certain that they do. They’ll never say so openly, but former Tory Cabinet Minister Michael Portillo can afford to be frank now he’s become a BBC favourite.

He said in July 2006 that the Scots would probably be better off without English subsidies, adding: ‘From the point of political advantage, the Conservatives have a better chance of being in government if Scotland is not part of the affair.’

Challenged on this by Andrew Neil, he said: ‘You are continuing to assume the Union is sacrosanct. That is not an assumption I make any more.’

I wonder if the same thought has crossed other minds? It could explain the Government’s otherwise inexplicably clumsy handling of the independence referendum and its result.

There is no such thing as a ‘right to buy’. Proper conservatives don’t believe in invented, taxpayer-subsidised rights, a creation of liberals. 

They believe in freedom. And the break-up of council estates was one of the most unconservative things that ever happened, making life harder for young families and destroying settled communities.

I was moved by the picture of two Muslims praying at a football match, and impressed by their courage in professing their faith in such a secular place as Anfield.

How can this be a disgrace, as one fan spluttered? Didn't we once sing Abide With Me at the Cup Final?

Finlandisation - is There Really an Educational Case for Comprehensive Schools?

How many times have you heard defenders of our disastrous Comprehensive schools claim that Finland has somehow made this mad system work?

 

The source of this claim are the (to my mind rather dubious) PISA tables published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) . In 2001 Finland came top of these PISA tables in mathematics, reading and scientific literacy.

 

Actually, though this is not mentioned so often, Finland slipped down the charts in the PISA tables in 2009, and slipped even further in 2012. So, even if you do think PISA is a reliable guide, the news is no longer so good.

 

Now a new report from the Centre for Policy Studies, ‘Real Finnish Lessons – The true story of an educational superpower’’ , by Gabriel Heller Sahlgren, casts serious doubts on these claims in general.

 

(see the whole report here http://www.cps.org.uk/files/reports/original/150410115444-RealFinnishLessonsFULLDRAFTCOVER.pdf )

 

In fact it opens with this devastating summary: ‘Why did Finland achieve such success in PISA? The standard policy explanations for the country’s rise include its focus on equity, with the comprehensive school reform of the 1970s as the bedrock, and the absence of standardised tests, accountability, and market reforms. Other explanations highlight comparatively little school- and homework, and the country’s current teacher education system. Yet there is little hard evidence for any of the standard explanations – in fact, most research explicitly does not support them.  Furthermore, a closer examination of Finland’s results over time reveals that its rise began well before most of the highlighted policies were able to take effect.’

 

In the Foreword,  Professor Julian Le Grand ( who holds the Richard Titmuss Chair of Social Policy at the LSE) points out ‘Proponents of the traditional explanations for the Finnish success appear either to ignore the on-going decline or to come up with ad hoc arguments in an attempt to save their original ones.’

He adds (and I have often struggled to make the same point when Finland has been introduced into this argument) : ‘His [Sahlgren’s]research is an object lesson in how difficult it is to make international comparisons of policy without a full understanding of the politics, economics, and history of the countries concerned.’

 

 

It opens with a wonderful quotation from a 1954 work by Hannah Arendt, which should be carved in stone above the portals of every Education Ministry in every free country on the planet:

 

‘The problem of education in the modern world lies in the fact that by its very nature it cannot forgo either authority or tradition, and yet must proceed in a world that is neither structured by authority nor held together by tradition.’

 

The Finns were apparently baffled by the first PISA claims of their success. They didn’t think they were that good. An alternative set of tests does not show results anything like as good.  The next time you hear this argument, be sceptical. The case for selection is strong.

 

I append below my own article on the subject from a recent pamphlet

Published by the Think Tank Civitas:

http://astore.amazon.co.uk/civitas-21/detail/1906837716

 

It is a summary, in one place, of all my arguments on this subject. The small numbers in the text refer to footnotes (at the bottom) 

 

Why Is Selection by

Wealth Better Than

Selection by Ability?

Peter Hitchens

Enemies of the grammar schools have a favourite

argument. What about those who fail to get into them,

and are condemned to ‘secondary moderns’? They treat

us to tear-stained reminiscences of the sad day each year

when the 11-plus divided brother from sister, neighbour

from neighbour, friend from friend. The lucky winners

skipped off in their blazers to a bright future. The

miserable losers crept shamefacedly to a sink school,

doomed to be hewers of wood and drawers of water.

Actually, this day still takes place, all over England,

every year at the start of March. It is called ‘national

offer day’, and it is when parents find out if they have

got their children into their ‘first choice’ secondary

school. Officially, about one in five won’t, but the truth

is far worse than that. It is risky to aim too high, as

failure to get into a top school will often rule you out of

a place at a middling one, and send you sliding down

the snake of misfortune. So many parents cautiously opt

for a ‘first choice’ that is in fact nothing of the kind,

settling for second or third best for fear of having their

children exiled to the worst school in the town.

 

Most towns and cities in England have secondary

schools that are known by the well-informed to be the

best. Many are former grammar schools and quite a few

are single-sex. The easiest way to get your children into

them is to live close to them, and estate agents will tell

you that such schools can add an average of £54,000 to

the price of a house, in the capital.1 In some cases it is

more like £200,000. London left-wing parents are

particularly good at this Game of Homes. It is also often

a question of faith, real or alleged. Too bad if you don’t

have well-informed parents, who can navigate the

complex entry procedures of the better schools. Take

The Grey Coat Hospital (Church of England

Comprehensive Academy for Girls), the elite secondary

school favoured for their daughters by fellow-Blairites

Harriet Harman and Michael Gove. Its admissions rules

go on for pages, and give great privileges to those who

show the outward signs of Christian faith. As there is

no way to check the inner truth, points are awarded for

observable levels of piety, work and commitment, such

as turning up for services, contributing to the parish

magazine and sitting on committees. (This is rather

contrary to the spirit of Luke 18:10-14, in which Christ

prefers the genuinely repentant to the ostentatious

worshipper). The Grey Coat Hospital also selects its

sheep from its goats through the use of a catchment area

so precise that it takes 134 words to explain. Here is a

sample: ‘Where it is necessary to differentiate between

applicants living in flats using the same street entrance,

priority will be given to the applicant(s) living closest

to the ground floor and then by ascending flat number

order.’2 This sort of thing is not confined to church

schools.

 

One non-religious former girls’ grammar

school in London has a catchment area which currently

extends 1,230 yards from the school gate, a

measurement that does wonders for property prices in

a few favoured streets nearby, and has caused at least

one millionaire New Labour power couple to move

house at great expense to secure good schooling for

their daughters without committing the socialist sin of

paying actual fees. If anyone can work out the true

moral difference between these two forms of buying

privilege, I should like to know what it is.

Thus can the whole course of a child’s life be decided,

by a parent’s willingness, sincerely or not, to press their

teeth on the Communion wafer, their readiness to

warble in the church choir, their ability to afford to live

sufficiently close to the school gate, or even their

prescient cunning in choosing the ground-floor flat

rather than one higher up the building. I could go on.

These procedures, arbitrary, elaborate, labyrinthine and

ever-changing, are well-known to the pushy and sharp-elbowed.

They are baffling to almost everyone else.

Forget jokes about putting children down for Eton at

birth. To get into some of these alleged comprehensives

it is necessary to start house-hunting before you are

even pregnant. The bright child of a poor home, whose

parents know little of schooling and perhaps care less,

will seldom if ever penetrate through this thicket of

trickery and self-aggrandisement to the best state

secondary schools. And yet the enemies of grammar

schools defend this system of secret knowledge,

privilege and (often) false piety, as being fairer than

open selection by ability. Perhaps that is because it is

fairer to them, personally. Perhaps it is because it allows

them to obtain all the advantages of the old grammar

schools, while not in any way challenging the

egalitarian comprehensive system or threatening their

 political or media careers. All parents are equal, but

some are a lot more equal than others.

 

There’s no doubt that the pre-1965 system had many

faults. There were too few grammar schools in general,

and especially in some parts of the country. There were

far too few grammar school places for girls. An

interesting result of this shortage was that by the mid-

1960s, some secondary modern pupils were winning

good A-levels and getting into university, both

achievements rather more difficult than they are today.

Few of the technical schools that had been planned and

promised in the 1944 Education Act had ever been built.

Many primary schools in poorer areas were not as good

as they should have been at bringing on talent. No doubt

the quality of grammar schools varied, and there was too

little help for children from poor homes who wanted to

stay in full-time education. Even so, the grammars

themselves worked well in several important ways. None

of their faults were fixed by their abolition, and all of

them could have been addressed without their abolition.

The 1966 Franks Report into Oxford University,

published at the very end of the pre-comprehensive era,

recorded that in 1938-9, private school pupils had won

62 per cent of places at that university.3 A further 13 per

cent were won by direct grant schools, independent

schools which took large numbers of bright state pupils

in return for government or local authority payments.

Just 19 per cent came from other state schools,

presumably all grammar schools at that time. The rest

were from abroad, or educated at home. By 1958-9 (14

years after the Butler Education Act created the national

selective system and made grammar schools more

widely available), the private school share was down to

53 per cent, direct grants up to 15 per cent and state

grammars up to 30 per cent.4 By 1964-5, private schools

were down again to 45 per cent, direct grants up to 17

per cent and grammars up to 34 per cent.5

 

How much further this revolution might have gone, we will never

know. It was abruptly terminated by Anthony Crosland

and Margaret Thatcher in their bipartisan dissolution of

grammar schools, just as it was really gathering pace.

The direct grant schools survived for a while longer, but

were casually wiped out by Fred Mulley (more famous

for falling asleep next to the Queen during an air show)

in October 1975.

 

Was this burst of meritocracy just a feature of our post-war

society, as some have suggested? I do not think so.

Interesting figures suggest that the effect would have

continued, if the schools had survived. In Northern

Ireland, which still selects at 11 by ability, the university

chances of a child from a poor home are now almost

one-third greater than those of his or her equivalent in

largely comprehensive England, and almost 50 per cent

greater than in fully-comprehensive Scotland (according

to figures supplied by the independent Higher

Education Statistics Agency).6 It is reasonable to

suppose that the pre-1965 mainland grammar system

(including Scotland’s parallel system of academies) had

a similar effect.

 

More generally, a recent study of

European schools has produced some very interesting

results, worrying for those on the Left who believe

selection is bad for the poor. Several continental

countries still maintain selective state secondaries, and

Germany has recently successfully restored them in the

former German Democratic Republic (which, being

Communist, was almost wholly comprehensive). This

happened, in the states of the former East Germany, by

popular demand. It is an interesting disproof of the

repeated claim that ‘you can’t turn the clock back’. The

survey, conducted across Europe by France’s National

Institute for Demographic Studies, actually set out to

prove that selective education discriminated against

children from poor backgrounds. But it found that,

when children were taught according to ability, family

wealth had almost no influence on their achievements.

By contrast, in non-selective systems, a poor

background did influence outcomes, with British pupils

doing particularly badly on this scale.7 The study,

(published in the European Sociological Review) reached

its conclusions by examining the reading performance

of tens of thousands of 15-year-olds across 22 countries.

So it is reasonable to say that, whatever was wrong with

the pre-1965 secondary school system, destroying the

grammar schools was not the cure.

 

The policy of annihilating the grammars reminds me of Evelyn

Waugh’s response when news was brought to him that

surgeons had removed a non-malignant tumour from

some part of Randolph Churchill. ‘How typical of the

medical profession’, he said, ‘to have rummaged

through the whole of Randolph, found the only part

that was not malignant, and removed it.’8

Another much-used argument against grammars is

the accurate contention that the few remaining

academically selective secondaries are middle-class

fortresses, with a low take-up of free school meals. This

is perfectly true. But it is a consequence of the abolition

of a national selective system, not an argument against

such a system itself. The middle-class stronghold in

selective secondaries proves nothing except that the

middle-classes will fight very hard indeed to get an

education worth at least £100,000 in taxed income. They

will hire tutors, send their children to expensive

preparatory schools and move into cramped houses in

areas they can ill afford.

 

None of this would be necessary if there were a national system of grammar

schools. The remaining grammars are hopelessly

oversubscribed because there are too few of them. The

same is true of the secretly selective elite schools which

exist where grammar schools don’t, and it is not even

mitigated by the continuing possibility that the child of

a poor home might penetrate the screen of privilege. But

the take-up of free meals in these schools tends not to

be criticised by egalitarian leftists, because that would

draw attention to the very large number of privileged

middle-class families who have made cunning use of

them. These objectors are also very reluctant to discuss

the general destructive effect on state and private

education which has followed the abolition of a national

selective system. This may be the clearest sign that the

comprehensive system has brought about a fall in all

school standards. One of the saddest effects of this is

that many private and state schools can call themselves

‘excellent’ because they regularly harvest sheaves of

high grades in public examinations.

 

But in fact there could well be huge differences between these schools,

which modern examinations do not detect because they

are hostile to or uninterested in excellence, and instead

interested only in ‘qualifications’ for their own sake.

They compress all reasonably high achievers into a

single top grade, and allow children to pass who would

until recently have failed. It is amazing how often

defenders of the egalitarian system will defend it by

saying that it has led to many more children possessing

‘qualifications’. When challenged to show that these

‘qualifications’ are worth anything, or actually qualify

their holders for anything, they fall silent or change the

 subject. As with all vast egalitarian projects, from

collectivisation upwards, the statistics ultimately

become more important than the truth, and end up

concealing it.

 

 

There is little doubt that general levels of secondary

education have fallen since selection on merit was

abandoned. It is now 14 years since the Engineering

Council revealed the results of a ten-year survey of

undergraduates entering maths, science and

engineering courses.9 All were given an identical,

unchanging test. This showed that, as these entrants’ A level

grades had risen, their mathematical

understanding had declined. Students who had

narrowly failed their A-levels in 1991 had actually

scored higher in the Council’s tests than those who

obtained ‘C’ grade passes seven years later.10 Durham

University mounted a similar exercise, giving a general

ability test to its first-year students over a long period.11

As Jenni Russell wrote in the Guardian 11 years ago, ‘The

results show that students of the same ability are now

achieving two A-level grades higher in every subject

than they were 15 years ago.’12 The reality of grade

inflation (shamefully denied by the education

establishment for years, but now grudgingly admitted,

even by them, to have taken place) was in fact quite

evident very early on in the comprehensive experiment.

In October 1975 Raymond Baldwin, a member of

Manchester’s Education Committee, warned of a ‘great

comprehensive gamble’ as GCE results in merged

schools declined in that city.13 Two months before, the

Daily Mail had reported a severe fall in the GCE

performances of schools in Liverpool, following

comprehensive reorganisation in that city.14 Sheffield’s

experience was similar.

 

In a report in November 1974 the Daily Telegraph noted that Sheffield had experienced

a ‘gradual decline in the percentage of comprehensive

school pupils succeeding in GCE examinations’.15 Pupils

at the about-to-be-abolished direct grant schools,

meanwhile, showed ‘a constant increase in GCE success

rates’. But at about that time, the grading system of O levels

was altered, so that candidates who would

previously have failed were now awarded pass

certificates graded ‘D’ and ‘E’. Even this did not manage

to conceal the continuing fall in exam scores, which

eventually led to a further dilution – the creation of the

GCSE in 1987. This wholly different type of examination

makes it impossible to compare today’s secondary

school performance directly with that of the old

selective system. It is tempting to speculate that this was

one of the aims of those who introduced it. But the

Engineering Council and Durham University surveys

both show that a measurable decline has taken place in

the period following the abolition of selection by ability.

Claims that the evidence for decline is based on nothing

more than anecdote are simply false.

 

 

None of the facts above are particularly difficult to

obtain, nor will they come as much of a surprise to

anyone who has been either a school pupil or a parent

of school-age children during the past 40 years. There

is no doubt that English state and private education has

experienced a revolution in that period. Not all of it

resulted from the abolition of selection. Harold Wilson’s

expansion of teacher training in the late 1960s greatly

changed the teaching profession. When I was an

education reporter in the late 1970s, the (then) socially

conservative Daily Telegraph was still crammed with

advertisements for teaching posts. Now, most of this

recruitment is done through the Guardian, and the Daily

 Telegraph has adjusted smoothly to the age of drug

decriminalisation and extra-marital sex. Even if the

grammar schools had survived in large numbers, they

would by now be very different places from the cane-haunted,

mortar-board infested establishments of 1965.

But then the same is true of the German gymnasiums.

Even in conservative Bavaria, they have relaxed a little,

but they still provide an excellent education, compared

with our comprehensives.

 

All this is a rather cautious prelude to a sort of cry of

pain. I have striven to rebut in detail the standard

arguments of those who continue (against all facts and

reason) to pretend that no harm was done by the closing

of the grammar schools. As it happens, it is clear from

Anthony Crosland’s own book The Future of Socialism

(recently re-published) that the man who wrecked state

education had almost no idea what he was doing, and

wholly misjudged the likely outcomes of his own

policies. But the worst thing about this debate is that it

is completely ignored in mainstream politics. The Left

have their own egalitarian reasons for wishing to shut

it off. They actually banned the creation of any new

grammar schools in David Blunkett’s School Standards

and Framework Act.16 Since then, they have been

working hard to minimise selection by ability at the

English and Welsh universities, putting pressure on

them to make social as well as educational judgements

and making public attacks on the ancient universities

where selection by ability is still strong (such as Gordon

Brown’s ill-informed assault on Magdalen College,

Oxford, over the non-admission of the state-school

pupil Laura Spence).

 

The passion of the Left for comprehensive education

is such that at least one former Labour MP (I will not

 name him because I find his behaviour almost

admirable) claims to have attended a comprehensive

school when he could not have done. The school

involved, long ago merged, was at the time a secondary

modern. But I feel quite differently about Frances

O’Grady, now the General Secretary of the Trades Union

Congress. O’Grady allowed the Guardian newspaper to

say in 2012 that she had attended ‘Milham Ford

Comprehensive’ in Oxford.17 This is not exactly

accurate. When she arrived there, in 1971, it was still a

girls’ grammar school. Like most of those who entered

grammar schools during their transition into

comprehensives, O’Grady is likely to have benefited

from a selective education, in a ‘grammar stream’ until

the end of her schooling. In fact (largely thanks to

pressure from Muslim parents) Milham Ford survived

as Oxford’s last single-sex girls’ state secondary until

quite recently. I don’t recollect it ever describing itself

as a ‘comprehensive’ (few schools do, but see below).

Had it really been a ‘comprehensive’ when she entered

it, one has to wonder if O’Grady would now be in

charge of the TUC.

 

It is easy enough to see why a trade

union official might fudge this matter. But far more

significant is the behaviour of Theresa May, the current

Home Secretary, now being spoken of as a possible

future leader of the Conservative Party. May annually

tells the MPs’ reference book Dod’s Parliamentary

Companion, that she attended ‘Wheatley Park

Comprehensive’.18 In fact, when she arrived there (from

a convent school) it was still very much ‘Holton Park

Girls’ Grammar School’.19 Like O’Grady, she would

have been kept in a grammar stream during the school’s

merger with the nearby Shotover secondary modern.

Again had she not been treated so, one has to wonder if

she would have gone on (as she did) to Oxford and to

the Cabinet. Again, I don’t think Wheatley Park has ever

actually described itself as a ‘comprehensive’.

 

 

The Tory surrender to the comprehensive revolution

has been one of the most interesting political

developments of the last 20 years. As late as the 1990s,

John Major (who attended a selective school) talked of

having a grammar school in every town.20 Michael

Howard used to boast of his grammar school past in

parliamentary tussles with the privately educated Tony

Blair.21 Nothing happened as a result of these promises

and flourishes. But since the advent of David Cameron,

even the rhetoric has altered. In May 2007 the Tory

leader had a damaging public quarrel with Graham

Brady MP, and many other members of his own party,

over his decision to abandon past promises to build any

new grammar schools. Presumably Mr Cameron thought

the question important enough to alienate quite large

numbers of supporters (which it duly did). It is

interesting to wonder why a Tory leader might be ready

to do this. In fact it is one of the most startling political

facts of modern times – and so one of the least examined

– that nominal Conservatives have adopted socialist

attitudes towards education. They have done this most

especially by speaking and writing as if it is a self-evident

virtue to send one’s children to a state, rather

than an independent school. Yet this could only be a

virtue for a dogmatic egalitarian, which nominal

Conservatives have never openly said they are. After

all, a rich person who can afford fees and sends a child

to a scarce good state school is actually depriving a poor

family of that place. For a non-egalitarian this must at

least be morally dubious, if not actually greedy and bad.

 

 

Yet in December 2005, soon after becoming leader of his

party, Mr Cameron was asked if he wanted his children to

attend state schools and replied: ‘Yes, absolutely. I’ve

got my eye on a particular one. I’ll make my decision

for my daughter based on my views as a parent not as

a politician. That’s the right thing to do. But I would like

them to go to a local state school.’22 Nobody seems to

have asked him why. Soon after this he (alongside then-

Education Secretary Michael Gove) had succeeded in

inserting his children into a wholly untypical,

picturesque and hugely oversubscribed Church of

England primary school in Kensington, far from his

home. In November 2012, Mr Cameron went further still.

He said:

I would like my children to go to state schools, that’s

my intention, and I think what’s happening in the

state school system is really exciting. What we’re

seeing is something we should have seen years ago

which is the flowering of more choice, more

competition, more diversity and crucially, higher

standards. I want my children to be part of that and

I’m very heartened by what is happening. 23

 

 

The assumption in all these words and actions was

that there was some sort of special virtue inherent in

sending a child to a state school. What virtue is that?

For left-wingers, it is obvious. In the state system the

classes mix, religion is weak or absent, the purpose is

egalitarian. But for conservatives, the classes mix on the

wrong terms. In the grammar schools, everyone aspires

to middle-classness. In the comprehensives, they do not.

The difference is clearly encapsulated by the way that

middle-class children now speak with fake estuary

accents whereas grammar school pupils, such as

Margaret Thatcher and Joan Bakewell, took elocution

 lessons to acquire BBC voices.

 

Michael Gove’s journalist

wife, Sarah Vine, explained in the Daily Mail why she

wanted her daughter to go to a state school:

The private sector is built on very different

principles. Its agenda is a fundamentally selective

one, based not only on ability to pay, but also on

pupil potential. And it is also, let’s face it, about

snobbery. Of course the parents of private school

children are paying for the best teachers and

facilities. But let’s be honest: they’re also paying for

their child to mix with the right kind of kids.24

The school she has chosen for this act of anti-snobbish

social mixing is The Grey Coat Hospital, miles from the

Goves’ modest west London home. Though it (very

unusually) describes itself as a ‘comprehensive’ on its

freshly-painted signboard, it is a former girls’ grammar

school which has somehow managed to stay single-sex,

and whose entry requirements go on for pages, so much

so it would take a combination of Einstein and Thomas

Aquinas to grasp their full meaning. Its official uniform

supplier is Peter Jones of Sloane Square. It may

disappoint her if she wants her daughter to mix very

much with ‘the wrong kind of kids’. When the Labour

politician Harriet Harman chose it for one of her

children some years ago, the Daily Mirror accurately

described it as an ‘elite’ school.25 Just 14 per cent of its

pupils are eligible for free school meals, hardly enough

poor girls to go round for serious inter-class mixing.26

Had the Goves been really keen on egalitarian rough

and tumble, and the mixing of the classes, they would

surely have been better off picking Burlington Danes

Academy, which is also an Anglican school and is a

couple of minutes’ walk from their front door.

 

What is more, it has the former Education Secretary’s personal

warm approval. In 2011 Gove wrote a newspaper

article in which he listed Burlington Danes among

schools in which ‘excellence is becoming a universal

expectation, academic study a driving purpose’.27 Later

he numbered it among ‘some superb state schools

in disadvantaged areas generating fantastic results’.28

He said of these schools:

They do much better in exams than many schools,

including private schools, in leafy areas. Their

students win places at Oxbridge on merit. All

because their heads, from the moment any child

arrives, refuse to accept excuses for underperformance.

29

Why not then choose this paradise, and be spared the

tedious shopping trips to Sloane Square for uniform? It

can’t be that it doesn’t provide enough opportunities for

social mixing. Tom Hodgkinson, a Burlington Danes

parent, wrote in the Independent in March 2014 that

nearly 70 per cent of its pupils were eligible for free

meals, so sharply reducing the risk of snobbery.30 He

added ‘Our daughter says some of her classmates were

amazed she lived in a house with stairs.’

Somehow or other, the oddity of this decision by the

Education Secretary at the time was not much explored

by media who preferred to coo that he was the first Tory

Education Secretary to send his child to a state

secondary (actually even this is not true: Gillian

Shephard did so 20 years before). But it does explain

why the irresistible logic of selection by ability never

seems to gain any supporters at the top of British

politics or our great media empires.

 

Left and right

together have learned to use the state system to get their

own children the advantages of grammar schools,

without the need to face a difficult political battle. The

recent movement for ‘free schools’ has created a similar

escape route for the active and pushy middle-classes. It

is hard to be sure whether these people actually imagine

that their lives are normal. It would be much kinder to

think that they do, for if they understand their own

actions properly, they must know that they are actively

abandoning the children of others to a fate they would

not allow their own offspring to suffer.

 

 

Notes for :

Why Is Selection by Wealth Better Than Selection by Ability?

1 R. Bloomfield, ‘Top London School Catchment Area Premium Hits

£54,000’, London Evening Standard, 29 January 2014.

2 The Grey Coat Hospital Church of England Comprehensive Academy for

Girls, ‘Admissions Policy 2015-2016’, 2015.

3 University of Oxford, Report of Commission of Inquiry, Oxford, Clarendon

Press, 1966, Volume II, statistical appendix, p.47, table 31.

4 Ibid, p.47, table 31.

5 Ibid, p.47, table 31.

6 Higher Education Statistics Authority website, Column ‘V’ of Table 1a

(T1a) ‘Participation of under-represented groups in higher education: UK

domiciled full-time first degree entrants 2012/13’, linked under heading

‘Young full-time undergraduate entrants’.

7 R. Breen and K.B. Karlson, ‘Education and Social Mobility: New

Analytical Approaches’, European Sociological Review, 30(1), 2014, pp.107-

118; M. Howarth, ‘Poor Pupils from Disadvantaged Backgrounds “Benefit

Most in a Grammar School System”‘, Daily Mail, 15 March 2014.

8 E. Waugh, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, M. Davie (ed.), Phoenix, 2010, entry

for March 1964.

9 Engineering Council, ‘Measuring the Mathematics Problem’, 2000.

10 Ibid.

11 P. Tymms and C. Fitz-Gibbon, ‘Standards, Achievement and Educational

Performance: A Cause For Celebration?’, in R. Phillips and J. Furlong

(eds.), Education, Reform and The State: Twenty-five Years of Policy, Politics

and Practice, London, Routledge Falmer, 2002, pp.167-73.

12 J. Russell, ‘Drilled, Not Educated’, Guardian, 20 August 2004.

13 Daily Telegraph, 15 October 1975.

14 Daily Mail, 25 August 1975.

15 Daily Telegraph, 11 November 1974, quoting Sir Rhodes Boyson and

Professor Brian Cox, citing surveys by the education authorities of

Manchester and Sheffield.

16 Schools Standards and Framework Act 1998, c.31, Part III, Chapter II,

Section 99.

17 K. Cochrane, ‘TUC Leader Frances O’Grady: “People Want Some Hope

for the Future”‘, Guardian, 5 September 2012.

18 F. Elliott, ‘Theresa May: “More Than 500 British Muslims Have Gone to

Syria – We Face a Real Threat”‘, The Times, 27 September 2014.

19 Theresa May, born 1 October 1956, would have gone to Holton Park

Grammar aged 11, in 1967 or possibly 1968. The school became

Comprehensive in 1971. J. Chipperfield, ‘Girls Were Taught in Idyllic

Surroundings at Holton Park’, ‘Memory Lane’, Oxford Mail, 8 June 2009.

20 J. Judd and F. Abrams, ‘Time to Bring Back Grammar Schools?’, The

Independent, 23 June 1996.

21 Commons Debate between T. Blair and M. Howard, 3 December 2003, col

498.

22 G. Jones, ‘I Would Send My Children to State School’, Daily Telegraph, 10

December 2005.

23 T. Shipman, ‘SamCam and PM “Will Send Daughter to a State School”‘,

Daily Mail, 10 March 2014.

24 S. Vine, ‘Why I’ve Chosen to Send My Daughter to a State School’, Daily

Mail, 5 March 2014.

25 S. Atkinson, ‘Harman Snubs Local Comp for Top Girls School’, Daily

Mirror, 7 April 1998.

26 K.R. Bradford, ‘Call This a Comprehensive? Grey Coat Hospital Could

Hardly be Called Inclusive – Unlike the Local Secondary Michael Gove

Has Passed Up’, The Independent, 12 March 2014.

27 M. Gove, ‘Academic Rigour is Liberating Not Limiting’, The Times, 15

August 2012.

28 M. Gove, ‘The Crude Social Engineering of A-Levels Insults Any Child

Who Wants to Succeed on Merit’, Daily Mail, 28 September 2011.

29 Ibid.

30 K.R. Bradford, ‘Call This a Comprehensive? Grey Coat Hospital Could

Hardly be Called Inclusive – Unlike the Local Secondary Michael Gove

Has Passed Up’, The Independent, 12 March 2014.

 

 

 

Subversive Thoughts about the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race

The nearest I ever got to rowing was (unbelievable as it seems to me now, with a BMI of 27.4) as cox of the Leys School, Cambridge’s sixth VIII. They only had six of them. And I was only doing it  to get out of playing hockey (what North Americans call ‘field hockey’).

 

I had always thought of this as a girls’ game, and no school I had ever attended had played it. Suddenly I was confronted with it.   A couple of experiences on freezing fenland fields in January persuaded me that it was not for me in any way – a great deal of ridiculous boredom plus the lurking danger of a rather hard ball in the face.

 

How to escape? I would later pay people to play cricket for me (two shillings seemed to me to be a small price for avoiding an entire afternoon of tedium, and nobody ever noticed that I wasn’t there). But this was Cambridge, where there was another Spring term sport, rowing, and somehow there was a shortage of small, slight persons to be coxes.

 

No, I wasn’t especially good at it, not least because my voice was half way through breaking and would veer from a boom to a squeak , and perhaps back again, in mid-bellow. But I can still recall the set of commands necessary to turn a thin-skinned and fragile boat round in the middle of the Cam, with a large gin-palace pleasure cruiser bearing down on us. (‘Hitchens!!’ a voice from the bank still echoes in my head,  ‘Do you have ANY idea how much that boat COSTS?’ ) . The procedure for lifting the thing out of the river, which I usually managed flawlessly,  has by contrast vanished from my mind.

 

Eventually, we won a race, thanks to the boat in front sinking (one of the crew had put his foot through the bottom and an attempt to stem the leak by stuffing sweaters into it had failed, badly). Still they manfully struggled on, and even as they filled with water we struggled to catch up with them. We just managed to bump them the moment before they went under, which apparently counted.

 

So I  know the difference between bow and stroke, what a slide is and various other arcane things which make me slightly more interested in the boat race than I would otherwise be which, in truth, is not very much.

 

But on Sunday, during an appearance on the Andrew Marr show on BBC1, in which , together with Lesley Riddoch, I reviewed the newspapers,…

 

(The programme can be viewed here,

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05rjst7/the-andrew-marr-show-12042015

the paper review begins at about six minutes into the programme)

 

…the subject came up once again. This time it was because of the decision to row the women’s Oxford-Cambridge race on the same day, and on the same course,  as the men’s, thus giving it parity with the male version.

 

I remarked  ( as I said, subversively) that the winning women’s crew had taken rather longer to finish the course than the winning men’s crew. The difference was about two minutes, which may not seem much, but is quite a bit in a race (imagine if the Cambridge crew in either race had come in two minutes behind Oxford).

 

That was all I said, but it didn’t take long for the protests to begin on Twitter, boring, unresponsive, and baseless as they were. Leftist ultra-feminists instinctively understood that what I had said was indeed subversive of their orthodoxy, but didn’t choose to ask themselves why. For to do so is to admit something about modern ultra-feminism that they do not wish to admit,  that it is no longer a reasonable quest for reasonable equality, but a dogma-driven attack on the married family and on the historic division of labour between men and women, based fundamentally on the fact that women bear children ( and nourish small babies) and men don’t.  

 

It doesn’t matter, for the purposes of this argument, whether you think that this attack is a good or a bad thing.  I think most readers here know that I think it a bad thing, and know why I think it a bad thing. What does matter is that it is advanced under a false flag, and that many of those who give in to it do so without understanding what it is that they are giving in to. This must surely be wrong. If we wish to make deep and radical reforms in our society, then we should call them by their proper names.

 

Instead, they accused me, quite falsely of arguing that the women’s crews didn’t deserve any praise ( I don’t think this ) or of misogyny (I am not a misogynist). I suspect they don’t even know what the word means, and use it as a grandiose substitute for ‘sexist’.

 

Now of course, it is difficult for anyone, in practice, not to be a ‘sexist’, as men and women have many important differences, and if we did not treat them differently in many ways, all the time, we would run into all kinds of trouble. Everybody knows this, but, so that the word can be used as if it were the exact equivalent of ‘racist’, everyone pretends not to know it and feigns shock or outrage when it is pointed out.  By confusing ‘sexism’ with ‘racism’ one also avoids any real examination of the claim that is being made. Racism (or racialism as I still prefer to call it) is repulsive precisely because it is unreasoning and stupid. To treat someone differently from someone else *when he or she is not different* is the essence of unreasoning stupidity.

 

That is also why it is ridiculous to have denied women education, equal pay for equal work, legal autonomy, property rights  or the vote. The differences between the sexes simply do not affect such things.

 

But the next stage of feminism seems to me to have moved out of the area of reason and fact, and into the zone of dogma.

 

There is a new belief, that the evident and undeniable differences between women and men  must henceforth be treated as if they did not exist. This seems to me to be more or less the reverse of late 19th and early 20th century feminism, which rightly pointed out that women were being denied the freedom to do things they were perfectly capable of doing, because *in such matters* there was no difference between the sexes.

 

This stage of feminism was, I think,  content to accept mid-20th-century restrictions on women serving in the armed forces, or the police, or the fire service, or in heavy industry. It did not regard such restrictions as irrational or as unfair discrimination, but as reasonable distinctions between the sexes based on undeniable generalities. These generalities were that women, on average, have far less upper body strength than men; and that women alone are capable of bearing children. Indeed, to this day, many low-prestige occupations demanding physical strength – the crewing of dustcarts and the building trade being the obvious examples, though one might think also of deep-sea fishing and what remains of coalmining  – remain almost totally male-dominated and face no campaigns to alter this, no quotas or anything like them.

 

The armed forces, the police and the fire service are under pressure to change because they are high-status occupations, much admired by children looking for examples.  

 

It is true that some women do have as much upper body strength as most men. It is true that some women cannot bear children, and that some do not wish to do so.  But in general, these facts are a rational basis for generally different treatment –provided that rational exceptions are made when justified by the facts.

 

Why depart from this reasonable view, and move to the dogmatic position that all discrimination, even when it has a rational basis, is in itself wrong?

 

Did we, in fact, do so? I believe we did, in the interesting case of Gillian Maxwell,  pursued and won by by then then Equal Opportunities Commission in  1996-1997.

 

The story was as follows : 5ft 3in Mrs Maxwell applied to be a firefighter. She was turned down by the Northern Ireland Fire Authority because she was not tall enough, under the provisions of Fire Services Act of 1947 which stipulated a minimum height of 5 feet 6 inches. With the support of the EOC, she took them to an employment  tribunal, arguing that the existing height rule discriminated against women *because it excluded 60 per cent of the female population*.

 

(I first wrote about this case and its implications many years ago, in this 2002 article:

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/columnists/article-124076/Why-I-believe-women-brigade-danger.html

 

I notice, looking back at it, that I use the word ‘extremists’, a mistake I regret, would not now make and which I would correct if I returned to the subject. )

 

This argument was enough to overturn the 1947 Fire Services Act.   

 

Note the reason for the ruling. It wasn’t  that anyone had established that it was a good idea to lower the height restriction, but that the height restriction was axiomatically wrong *because it ‘discriminated against 60% of women’*. That is to say, it made it impossible for 60% of women to join the Fire Service. How many of those women under 5’6”in height actually wanted to join the fire service it is very hard to say. I doubt if there are any records that could be usefully studied, especially now, 18 years after the rule was lifted. But I would guess that it was not very many. I imagine it also prevented quite a large number of men from joining. But that was not ‘discrimination’, in the sense in which it is used here.

 

How do we know? Because no man could have successfully brought this case. He could not have maintained that the rule discriminated against him *because he was male*. Nor could he have said it discriminated against him because he was short, as the EOC and its successors have never made physical height a protected status (an attribute through which one could be ‘discriminated’ against in the modern sense).  Discrimination is merely a long word for ‘choice’. We discriminate when we choose one pizza instead of another . A discriminating person used to be a person of good judgement.  But in its modern meaning it is automatically wrong and a tort in law. But only in certain defined matters, chosen for political reasons.

 

Oddly enough, it is quite possible that the main effect of this ruling has in fact been to stop ‘discrimination’ against weedy men by the Fire Brigade.  It doesn’t really matter to those who pursued the case. Theirs is an ideological aim, not a practical one.   

 

The number of women in the brigade (and there were significant numbers of women firefighters before this decision, who had passed the old physical tests with ease) is still quite small . In 2009, the latest year for which I have figures,  it was said to be 3.3 per cent, well short of the 15 per cent target set by the then Home Secretary  Jack Straw in 1999.  This is despite incessant government campaigns for female recruitment, and a general reduction in physical demands for the job . In the period after 1997 the entry requirements changed considerably.  They did not get tougher. Chest expansion and lung capacity tests were dropped. A simple trial - carrying a 12-stone man for 100 yards in less than a minute -  was scrapped.

 

I do not believe any studies have been carried out on the effect of this on the fire service itself. How would one tell for certain without an incredibly detailed and intrusive investigation? My own suspicion would be that, as in the police, greater height and upper-body strength may well be an advantage in certain specific circumstances.   

 

As it happens, thanks to the decline in smoking, the greatly increased use of fire-retardant materials in buildings and furniture,  huge improvements in electrical wiring, the virtual disappearance of open fires and the mass introduction of smoke alarms, much of the Fire Service’s work is now preventive (the opposite of what has happened to the police, who have become almost wholly reactive). What’s more, even after 16 years of pressure, the Fire Service still contains a large number of old-fashioned firemen. No doubt, in emergencies, all work together as hard as they can to ensure the safety of the public. Maybe they have to work harder to achieve this than they did under the old rules. But outsiders would never know.

 

Another formerly male-dominated service, the morale and discipline of the seagoing Royal Navy, were ( according to a huge amount of anecdotal evidence, occasionally supported by lurid courts martial) damaged by the decision to allow women to go to sea in warships. But the political view was that this had to be done, and done it was. An in-depth study of the outcome would not be welcome. In my experience, the modern Navy is far more reluctant than it used to be to allow journalists to spend time aboard HM ships at sea.

 

It may well be that the image of the Fire Service and the reality are now so far apart, that its old role as a rough tough brigade of big strong men who could carry an unconscious fatty out of a running building and down a ladder, is as outdated as the idea of a train driver being a soot-stained bloke leaning out of a rain-swept cab while his fireman colleague shovelled coal into a roaring furnace. You don’t get much fuss these days about women drivers of trains, do you? Though I’m not sure how many there are.

 

But as long as that image persists, I suspect the ultra-feminists will have the Fire Service high on their list as a target for politically-driven change. Likewise the police and the armed services will never be free of this pressure. At all costs the old Ladybird-book idea of the division of labour between men and women must be erased and replaced by one in which every high-status job can be and is done by women exactly as men do, and the raising of children must not be assumed to have any effect on this at all. Indeed, it must be assumed *not* to have any effect on it.   Any mention of real differences between the sexes is subversive of this dogma, and will become increasingly frowned upon until it is impossible.

What does the Tory Party really think about Scotland? A Clue From the Past

Here’s an interesting footnote on the modern Tory Party’s true attitude towards Scotland. It made little impact at the time, because a Scottish exit then seemed so far away, rather than imminent, as it does now) .

 

The news story involved alleges that the words spoken by Michael Portillo would 'anger' David Cameron. I don't know if they did, and can find no record of any such anger. But if so, was that because what Mr Portillo said was unrepresentative of true feeling in his party? Or because it was representative, and therefore best kept quiet?

 

It’s also perfectly true that Michael Portillo, at the time he said the words reported, was an ex-politician. Well, what of it? Had he still been serving, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been so frank. But we must remember that Mr Portillo was a heavyweight, a Cabinet Minister widely believed by many to be a possible leader.

 

Indeed, if things had fallen out slightly differently, he might have been the Blairite candidate to lead the Tory Party back into BBC and establishment favour.

 

So it’s not unreasonable to suggest that similar thoughts may have crossed the minds of others in that party. What people think about most closely is what they also never ever say.

 

Anyway, it’s a story from the ‘Daily Mail’, of 8th July 2006:

(You may read the original here 

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-394633/Portillos-plea-break-UK.html#StartComments )

 

 

 

‘FORMER Tory minister Michael Portillo called last night for Britain to be broken up because England and Scotland would be better off without each other.

 

He said the United Kingdom is no longer 'sacrosanct' and the Conservatives should ditch their commitment to the 1707 Act of Union and push for English independence.

 

Mr Portillo's views come amid a growing backlash against the Union. Many in England believe Scotland gets too much of Britain's budget and is effectively subsidised.

 

They also claim it is not right that Scottish MPs can vote at Westminster, while English MPs have no influence on the Scottish Parliament.

 

Mr Portillo's comments will anger David Cameron, who fears the Tories are seen as an English, rather than a British, party. But Mr Portillo insists breaking up the Union would give the Tories the best chance of seizing power in England, where they have a majority. On the BBC politics show This Week, he was challenged by host Andrew Neil, who asked: 'So for party advantage, you are prepared to break up our country?' Mr Portillo replied: 'No, not just for party advantage. The Scots would be probably a great deal better off if they weren't subsidised by England.

 

'From the point of political advantage, the Conservatives have a better chance of being in government if Scotland is not part of the affair.

 

'You are continuing to assume the Union is sacrosanct. That is not an assumption I make any more.' He also backed Tory frontbench MP Alan Duncan's claim that a Scottish MP could not be Prime Minister – a clear attack on Gordon Brown.

Dave's EU deceit is staring us in the face - and we still miss it

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

I recently visited a ‘head shop’, one of many totally legal establishments now flourishing on British high streets, where users of officially illegal drugs may buy the equipment they need to enjoy their criminal habit.

I didn’t buy anything. But one of the items on sale was a wall-clock, especially designed to be used to store drugs. ‘Hide your stash in plain sight!’ said the little poster next to it.

It is good advice. If you really want to conceal something, leave it lying about where everyone can see it.
This is what the Prime Minister has done with his supposed promise to hold a referendum on British membership of the European Union.

The dishonest trick at the heart of the offer is so blazingly obvious that nobody notices it.
Let me explain. If Mr Cameron really believed that he would win a parliamentary majority on May 7, he would not make this promise.

He loves the EU so much that he has said that he wants to extend it to the Ural mountains. He absolutely does not want this country to leave it.

But because Mr Cameron knows perfectly well that he will not win such a majority, and that no possible coalition partner or ally would support such a referendum, he feels safe to make a pledge that will never be redeemed.

The purpose of the pledge is to win back some of those voters he and his Blairite friends have long derided as fruitcakes and closet racists. He despises them, but he wants their support to ensure that the Tories are the largest party, and that he stays in office.
It would be disastrous for him if they all took him too literally. He needs some of them, but not all of them.

This is perhaps why the Tory Party’s campaign is so crude, narrow and awful, almost designed to repel thinking and decent people.

The interesting thing about all this is that it is so blatant, yet nobody seems to notice it, just as they don’t notice the perilous state of our economy (another disastrous balance of payments deficit was announced last week). And just as it is obvious that, while we are supposed to have ‘tough’ and ‘draconian’ laws on drugs, shops which help people take drugs thrive all over the country. I sometimes wonder if, one dark and tear-stained morning, all these many lies will be brutally exposed in one dreadful awakening.

Winning at any cost? It's the only Game in town

When I rather guiltily read the books on which the TV series Game Of Thrones is based, I was struck by one thing. The whole point of this saga is that ruthlessness pays, that evil generally wins, that justice is non-existent, and utter cynicism the only wisdom. It is the Middle Ages without the saving grace of Christianity.

The whole idea is symbolised by the ghastly Iron Throne for which the various factions and clans compete, and which, once gained, eats into the souls of all who sit on it.

I won’t watch the TV version because I very much do not want to see a slick and well-acted portrayal of such foul behaviour. But the success of this drama suggests that this sort of merciless immorality now has a wide and receptive audience. Gleeful, unembarrassed ruthlessness, once rightly kept in check, has become normal among us, and Game Of Thrones is a success because this change is now more or less complete.

Political campaigning has played its part in this. I first noticed really dirty tricks in the 1997 campaign, when New Labour screened a particularly vile anti-Tory broadcast personally mocking Tory politicians and conference representatives, and falsely alleging a plan to ‘abolish the old age pension’.

Once, this sort of thing was left to underlings and backstairs-crawlers who could be disowned. But now it seems to have become central. The Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, is a senior Cabinet Minister and an experienced grey head in the Tory Party. I rather like him. But his outburst against Ed Miliband, accusing him of stabbing his brother in the back, and planning to do the same to the country, was a departure from the old rules of gentlemanly combat.

It was also inaccurate, as Mr Miliband stabbed his brother in the front, openly campaigning against him in an election – more than can be said for the Tories, who deviously overthrew Iain Duncan Smith in a cruel and personalised putsch.

But perhaps the most tricky and ruthless political act of the week came from the Blair creature, who ‘supported’ Mr Miliband on the European issue. How can this ghastly, discredited man not know that his kiss is the kiss of death? Of course he does.
Compared with Blair’s embrace, a stab in the back would be an act of kindness.

You shouldn't make it up

The story of how the young Princess Elizabeth and her sister Margaret mingled incognito with VE Night revellers is a moving and very British episode.

So why must the makers of a new film, claiming to be about the event, fabricate falsehoods about the King’s daughters going to brothels and gambling dens, and Princess Margaret getting drunk?

I suppose that having got away with the multiple untruths in The King’s Speech, the movie industry felt that invention was better box office than truth.
And yes, I know Shakespeare made things up, too. But this stuff isn’t Shakespeare.

The devastating attack no one heard

In a grown-up campaign, last week’s attack on David Cameron by a former British ambassador to Syria would have been devastating. As it is, it seems to have passed almost without notice.

Here’s a flavour of the indictment levelled by Peter Ford, Our Man in Damascus from 2003 to 2006. ‘If Cameron had his way, the jihadists could have been in control of Damascus by now,’ and, ‘To call for the overthrow of the secular Syrian government, to demonise it out of all proportion… to predict its imminent fall… and then to wail as though it was nothing to do with them when British Muslims set off to help hasten said overthrow is inconsistent and nonsensical.’

I couldn’t agree more, and still can’t understand how he gets away with it.
Meanwhile, Mr and Mrs Cameron go around the country eating bacon sandwiches and hot dogs with knives and forks to avoid embarrassing photos.

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

Who or What are we Deterring?

It must be 20 years since I watched a British-launched Trident missile leap from the sea off the coast of Florida, and begin its long journey downrange across the Atlantic. It was an astonishing sight – the rockets are belched from their pods in the submarine by a blast of ‘gas and steam’, which appears in a plume, as from nowhere, then hang, apparently suspended, actually fighting gravity,  while their rocket motors ignite in mid-air and blast them off into the far heaven.  

 

I viewed the whole thing from a US Navy warship, the launch clearly being in most respects a US operation, and we were pursued and harried throughout the day by a Greenpeace vessel, which failed in its aim of disrupting the launch.

 

That evening, back in Cocoa Beach, near Cape Canaveral,  I watched HMS Vanguard slipping back to port, her mission accomplished. In the twilight, the huge boat (these beasts are as big as Channel steamers, underneath)  looked extraordinarily menacing, black, sleek and secretive ( I once spent a weekend mainly submerged aboard one of her predecessors, the Polaris submarine HMS Repulse, but chances to see inside the Trident boats are very hard to come by).

 

But in those days I still believed ( and indeed was prepared to spout) the justification that if Saddam Hussein and North Korea were developing such bombs,  we needed one too. Though I do recall thinking even as I said it that it really wasn’t anything like as good a case as I had often keenly made for Polaris during the Cold War. That case – that the existence of those weapons kept the Soviet Army from moving one inch further westwards, for fear of what they might start - was, I still think, pretty good.

 

And it still seems to me that, having spent so many billions of our nuclear weapons capacity, we would be foolish to abandon it altogether. The question is really what kind of weapon would be convincing and useful in our hands. Against major nuclear powers with vast land areas, such as China, Russia and the USA, our ‘deterrent’ simply isn’t one. Our small and densely-populated island could be devastated by a very small number of nuclear strikes, in a way we couldn’t hope to replicate against such powers, even assuming that our submarines are as well-hidden as we like to think and aren’t sunk in the first few seconds of war against other naval powers. I mean, if the Russians or the Chinese had learned how to track our Trident subs, they wouldn’t let on, would they? But acoustic technology never ceases to improve.

 

Mutual Assured Destruction, in such cases, isn’t available to us. We’re too small. They’re too big. It wouldn’t be credible as a threat, let alone effective as an action.

We could only hope to deter attacks from far smaller threats. And for that we simply don’t need a Cold War armoury of submarines

 

 If it comes to the point where nuclear threats from big powers are real, we can’t deter them with Trident. Mind you, try as I may to imagine the circumstances in which this might matter, I cannot.

 

This is now a problem for those who want to keep Trident. Paradoxically, it was the problem of the disarmers in the Cold War. They had to try to hide the fact that deterrence works, and that it was extremely unlikely that there would have been a nuclear exchange. Both the favourite films of ban-the-bombers in that era , ‘ The War Game’ and ‘The Day After’, are very vague and feeble about how such a war would actually start. They only get into their stride once it comes to portraying the horrors that would follow once it had started.

 

I found this an effective point, when, as a NATO enthusiast, I used to go along and argue the case for the bomb at CND meetings in the 1980s, at which ‘The War Game’ would be shown.  It was also interesting to see the effect when I pointed out that the bombs they had just seen exploding over the English countryside were *Soviet* weapons, whose deployment and use they could not influence, rather than the British and American ones about which they were protesting.

 

Perhaps some of my readers might like to construct a realistic and credible set of circumstances, in which Britain might find a nuclear weapon useful in the post-Cold War world. I’m prepared to accept that there might be one, which is why Id keep some warheads and some means of delivery . But I wouldn’t make my whole defence budget and strategy revolve around it. But I wouldn’t be especially keen on Trident, designed as it is, and immensely expensively and cleverly designed,  to evade Moscow’s anti-missile screen, when Moscow is (in my opinion) inconceivable and incredible as a target.   I struggle more and more to think of what sort of target, in the absence of the USSR’s huge Cold War armies against which we were otherwise defenceless,  , could be conceivable or credible. This is mainly because I can see no military logic in it, but partly because, having visited a (Soviet) atmospheric nuclear testing site, I am rather well aware of what these weapons actually do.  

 

I would also want it to be genuinely independent, which I don’t believe Trident to be. Trident is almost wholly dependent on the USA, for the manufacture of the rockets and their maintenance, and (I believe, though this is disputed) for the targeting satellite systems on which their accuracy depends. I was once on the edges of a vast row which blew up when an unwise civil servant suggested to a group of Defence reporters that Trident missiles were, in effect, leased from the USA and not ours at all. Because it was true, but politically unwelcome that our national virility symbol was not actually ours at all, , that statement got all kinds of people into desperate trouble.

 

So I urge caution about the row which has been stirred up by my old mate Michael Fallon (I covered his first by-election, before he had a  single grey hair, and have always enjoyed his dry humour and lack of soppy sentimentality) .

 

The bomb isn’t the same issue it was back in the 1980s, when Mr Fallon and I first met. Perhaps the clearest sign of that is that, then rightly defying conventional wisdom among my peers by being a keen Cold Warrior, am now rightly defying conventional wisdom among my peers by being a keen opponent of the New Cold War.

 

But there are other differences, notably the vanishing into the air of the giant GSFG (Group of Soviet Forces in Germany) which once lay so heavily on East German territory that you feared that cramped country might sink under the weight. I recall that too.  Venture into the East German countryside and you couldn’t move for them, grinding about in their lorries and shaking the buildings with their sonic booms, occupying huge tracts of land for their tanks and heavy artillery.  I think it was the biggest ever to exist in Europe.  It’s gone, utterly and completely, and it isn’t coming back. Nor is the Warsaw Pact.

 

So a renewal, at a cost of at least £20 billion over perhaps 12 years, is quite a commitment, and really needs to be discussed without political rancour. Plenty of serious defence experts reckon the money could be better spent – if our objective is the defence of these islands.

 

I suspect they are right. What’s funny is that the Labour Party which opposed nuclear weapons when we really needed them, is new probably even more afraid than the Tories of having a sensible discussion on them, when the need for them is in fact hard to demonstrate.

Election jottings: BBC Impartiality, the Syria Mess, and Hot Dogs

As I dipped in and out of the ‘election’ coverage, I was reminded quite strongly of the BBC’s outrageously biased handling of the 1997 election, in which they behaved like a partisan newspaper and turned their huge magnifying glass on any dissent about the EU inside the Tories, until by the end of each day some minor disagreement in an individual election leaflet in one small constituency  had assumed the proportions of a mighty ‘Tory split’.  

 

This would have been perfectly reasonable at the Guardian or the Daily Mirror (or the ‘Sun’ which I think was at the time a keen supporter of the winning side, for a change). But it wasn’t the job of the BBC, with its commitment to impartiality.

 

Similarly, by the middle of today they were reporting ‘confusion’ about Ed Miliband’s proposals on non-domiciled tax status. Well, there isn’t any, really. Mr Miliband, who is the party leader, favours a policy of withdrawing this status and has presumably persuaded his party’s leading councils to approve the speech in which he said so. No doubt some of them disagree with him. Likewise, no doubt, many senor figures in the Tory and Liberal Democrat parties have reservations about things that Mr Cameron or Mr Clegg say during the campaign.

 

But that’s for their enemies to exploit, as and when they can. It’s not ‘confusion’ if they do so – merely a fact of political life.  The job of the BBC , most especially during an election,  is to report these policies, to examine their implications and effects as fairly as possible and to report the reaction to them, using accuracy and proportion,  taking no position on them itself, and staying well clear of any attempt by the other parties to shout them down and muddy the waters.  It should then do exactly the same for the policy announcements of the other parties I do not think it is doing this impartially. I think it has, subconsciously, bought the anti-Miliband conventional wisdom of the rest of the media. One thinks of certain elements of the ‘debate’ in which Messrs Miliband and Cameron were supposedly given equal treatment in face-to-face interviews and audience encounters. In my view, they were not.

 

If these rules are properly observed, voters can then decide if they want to support the policy, or if they want to vote against it. It’s called straight reporting and, as an openly biased person, I can tell better than most when and how it is not being done.

 

But I digress. For me, the most devastating news of the day was an article here (in the Guardian newspaper) by Peter Ford, a former British ambassador to Syria. I have seldom read such a lacerating denunciation of a British Prime Minister by a senior diplomat who formerly served the British government. You may read it all here:

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/07/david-cameron-failure-fuelled-british-jihadism

 

For instance, were I to say :’ But if David Cameron had had his way, we could have been embroiled by now – more than we already are – in yet another Middle East war. As it is, his Syria policy has still backfired, contributing to the rise of jihadism in our own back yard’, the reader would assume that this was all in the way of business, that I had my own axe to grind, etc. But for a former ambassador to Damascus to say this is very damaging indeed.

 

When he adds : ‘If Cameron had had his way, the jihadis could be in control of Damascus by now. Where is the accountability? William Hague took the fall for the embarrassing failure with parliament – after a decent interval he was removed from the Foreign Office – but Cameron is the Teflon man here. Having got away with bombing Libya (with barely a thought for the poor Libyans, whose country is now a tragic mess) he must have arrogantly thought that Syria would make a nice encore’, I have to say I am astonished.

 

AS for his closing line ‘…it’s no good having a strong economy and a sound NHS if all this is going to be put at risk by a leader who bases his foreign, defence and internal security policies on little save arrogance, ignorance and wishful thinking’, a real, live election campaign would surely seize on such a statement from such a person, and propel it into the debate. But no, we are too interested in making Ed Miliband look goofy and rudderless.

 

Talking of which, have you noticed that in recent days Mr and Mrs Cameron have been seen eating a hot dog (him) and a bacon sandwich (her) with a knife and fork (!), which is surely as ludicrous as getting the whole thing snarled up in your teeth. Didn’t King George VI endear himself to the American people in 1939 by boldly sinking the royal teeth into a hot dog or ‘hot dog’, as he no doubt called it, at Franklin Roosevelt’s Hyde Park country home during that famous visit?

Some Thoughts on Christopher Booker's 'The Neophiliacs'

One of the great unsolved mysteries of modern British history is the real reason for the Cultural Revolution which, in an amazingly short time, changed Britain from one country into another, where the remnants of the former nation can increasingly be found only by a  sort of archaeology, so brief is human memory.

 

 

One of the most moving descriptions of a moment in this change is in my brother’s memoir ‘Hitch-22’ in which he recalls a summer twilight in Cambridge when the Leys School’s apology for a ‘pop group’,  as they were then called, held a concert in the grounds. Attracted by the amplified noise – teenagers from the town slipped into the school grounds to listen.  In those days you didn’t walk through gateways marked ‘private’, and public schoolboys didn’t mix with the town.

 

 

To me the account (I wasn’t there. I suspect it must have been the summer of 1964, before I began my brief period as a public schoolboy) is especially evocative.  The former quietness of England was being rapidly invaded in those times, by the incessant whoosh and sigh of cars on the bypass, and by the rapid encroachment of loud popular music into workplaces and public places. I can fix a summer holiday in the Isle of Wight to September 1961, because of a completely clear memory of that very strange and quite unforgettable song ‘Johnny, Remember Me’ being played over the loudspeakers of the car ferry between Cowes and Southampton as we waited by our Morris Minor 1000 for a delayed homeward departure. 

 

Were they transmitting Radio Luxembourg, or were they playing the actual record, number one in the charts for weeks that summer,  to try to pacify the disgruntled passengers?  I have no idea, but the radio had very little time, back in 1961, for modern popular records. If you wanted to listen to them, you had to buy them from quaint shops which allowed you to listen to them free through headphones, before parting with your seven shillings and fourpence for a 45 rpm ‘single’(the main song and the 'flipside', generally but not always forgettable),   as distinct from an ‘EP’, which cost about ten bob, had a proper stiff cover and featured four songs, or an ‘LP’, which cost thirty two shillings and sixpence and had to be played at 33 rpm, later known as an ‘album’. These prices remained the same for years, until Reggie Maudling abolished resale price maintenance  (also confusingly referred to as ‘rpm’) during the dying months of the 1951-64 Tory government

 

Similarly, I can place a holiday in Jersey in 1963 (I’d otherwise have thought it was two years later) because the evenings were rent by the repeated playings of ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ in what passed for the nightclubs of Gorey, the urgent,  meaningless refrain drifting out over the summer sea.

 

 

Just as Oxford spring mornings are unique, providing a last faint hint of the medieval celestial city amid river and woodland described by Gerard Manley Hopkins in ‘ Duns Scotus’s Oxford ‘

 

 

‘Towery city and branchy between towers;

Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark charmèd, rook racked, river-rounded;

The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did

Once encounter in, here coped and poisèd powers;’

 

 

….Cambridge summer evenings are also unique, haunted, soft and mysterious, equally in direct touch with a remote past which still persists despite all attempts to drown it out.

 

That little grey town (as J.B. Priestley calls it ‘The Good Companions’) is not like anywhere else I have ever visited or lived, and to this day I cannot go there without feeling I have stepped slightly outside normal time.  It was also the place in which, for me, the ‘Sixties’ ended. Their strange, delusional atmosphere continued long after December 31st 1969 . I will never forget the lovely sun-dappled afternoon I spent on 6th October 1973, punting on the Cam and taking the train back to London, exhausted and happy as one is after a day on the river, to discover abruptly that the Yom Kippur war had broken out, that Egypt and Syria had launched a joint surprise attack on Israel.

 

This was a real war whose outcome was far from certain, which might spread far wider,  and which was bound to have (and did have) huge effects on our economy and on the supply of oil to the western nations. The news instantly dispelled my euphoria, and filled me with a feeling of darkness and cold, entirely justified (as I now know) by the revolutionary change it wrought in relations between the ‘West’ and Saudi Arabia. Not that I would now want to, but I have never recovered the feeling of security and inviolability that I last felt on that afternoon.  I suspect that my apostasy from Marxism, which took place soon afterwards, began that day.

 

 

But let us go back to the insistent drum-beat of the 1960s. In that decade,  the tension between Cambridge’s ordinary inhabitants and the various educational  institutions that stood in their midst must have been very great.  The University was still, just, clinging to the old ways .There were ‘undergraduates’ and ‘Varsity’ rather than ‘students’ and ‘uni’ (I can remember an actual Rag Day in the autumn of 1965 , with undergraduates in silly costumes standing perilously in the empty niches 20 feet above the street on the stone façade of (I think) Corpus Christi college .

 

Most of the time they dressed in sports jackets and wore ties (most of them were male), they all rode bicycles with baskets, and some of them even smoked pipes. Dons were still (just) ‘in loco parentis’ (in the place of the parent) and the age of majority was 21.  My Methodist boarding school was, likewise, still more or less upholding the Edwardian traditions of the public school, with a lengthy rule book, enforced by the writing of lines (‘Few things are more distressing to a well-regulated mind than to see a boy, who ought to know better, disporting himself at improper moments’, transgressors had to write, 20 times, before breakfast, in a large high-ceilinged pre-1914 classroom built to commemorate the Coronation King George V.

 

There was also ‘gating’  - the withdrawal of the (already limited) freedom to leave the school grounds unsupervised. This was a term I’d read about in ’Billy Bunter’ stories in which boys said things like 'yaroo' and leggo', and 'you beast', and was amazed to find still in use in the 1960s.  Oddly enough, the most serious offence in the whole canon of school punishments was being late for breakfast. Commit this offence twice in one term , and you were gated. You could be late for anything else three times before being gated, and you could commit general crimes or misdemeanours of dress, deportment or behaviour five times before being so confined.

 

Given that we were on the southern edge of one of the most beautiful and history-steeped places on the planet, the school had an almost obsessive interest in keeping us away from it. Even by the very different standards of the time this rule was considered so odd that it was given a special mention in a Fabian Siociety pamphlet attacking the public schools of the day.

 

At the top of the library staircase was a map of the town on which the hand of authority had drawn a thick black line, across which we were not supposed to venture without permission except on Sundays and (for some forgotten reason) Wednesday afternoons.  Being a  barrack-room lawyer and column-dodger by nature, I swiftly spotted that the line did not extend all the way to the edge of the map, and so I would legalistically ride my clanking red bicycle round the top of it on forbidden days, happy to point out (if challenged, as I never was) that I had not actually broken the rules.

 

But, yet again, I digress. This is all by way of introduction to a recommendation of ‘The Neophiliacs’. By Christopher Booker, which I recently re-read (The first time I read it, I borrowed it from the Swindon public library. My new copy was personally supplied by the author) after a gap of about 40 years. Alongside Bernard Levin’s ‘The Pendulum Years’,  I much recommend it to those who would understand the 1960s upheaval.

 

Mr Booker’s work is more reflective and less bitterly-enraged than Mr Levin’s. It is crammed with quiet but devastating mockery of the obsession with ‘youth’ and ‘grittiness’ and ‘abrasiveness’ and novelty in general which took hold of the BBC , the media and, increasingly, of politics and the law, during the late 1950s and early 1960s. These obsessions eventually took the form of a sort of large waking dream, of novelty and change in which we are the heroes of the new order,  from which we were repeatedly rather roughly awakened by reality.  Booker uses the term ‘a  froth of expectation’, which accumulated on top of many real moral and material changes, not all of them for the better, which were actually taking place in the economy and society.

 

The book is heavily influenced by the thinking of Carl Jung, who long ago warned of ‘psychic epidemics’ by which man periodically devastates the settled order.

 

If I have understood the argument rightly, these epidemics are rooted in our power of imagination. This power, undisciplined by any deeper understanding of the universe, will often impel us into a sort of dreamworld of impossible, utopian hopes. War and catastrophe - or decline, and the stultifying nature of conservative societies dominated by the old and middle-aged -  stimulate it in certain directions. Powerful new trends in thought, literature, music and the widespread use of drugs carry that stimulus further.  It seems to me that a religious longing, without a  religion to satisfy it, may have much to do with this.   I would say that, wouldn’t I? But Jung seems to sympathise with this view too.

 

In one of the epigraphs to Chapter 12, Booker significantly quotes Jung on the religious question ‘…among all my patients in the second half of life, - that is to say, over thirty-five - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort is not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook'.(C.G. Jung, Psychotherapists or the Clergy’).

 

 

One particular moment of rough awakening from a dream was the Moors Murder Trial . I think I have written before about the effects of this on serious liberal opinion, as shown in Pamela Hansford Johnson’s account of the trial ‘On Iniquity’ and in her husband C.P.Snow’s fictionalised reflection on it, in his novel ‘The Sleep of Reason’. I recommend both books,  taken pretty much together. Snow’s imagined trial of a pair of sexually-motivated child-murderers is one of the best things he ever wrote, containing several moments of real horror, rage and misery all the more potent for being so understated.

 

A forgotten element of this event (now) is that there was no doubt at the time of the connection between Brady’s taste for pornography and the crimes he then committed (The Fleet Street reporters who attended the trial and had to listen to the recordings of Brady and Myra Hindley doing what they did, recordings these murderers themselves had made,  never got over it, hard-bitten old reptiles that they were).

 

As Booker writes : ‘For the child murders by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley had shaken the nation as had no crime since the war. With its mixture of Brady’s background as an illegitimate orphan in the slums of Glasgow, and the fantasy world of Sadism and Nazism he had been able to seize on through the offices of Manchester’s thriving pornographic bookshops, for many people the case threw into sharp relief the darker side of the dream into which Britain had been moving’.

 

That dream involved a thoroughgoing rejection of former authority, but without any replacement for what was rejected.

 

Booker suggests that ‘In order to become mature, in short, we must not only reject the authority of our parents  – but, at the same time, in order to replace them, we must also learn to kill off our own fantasy selves. Only by killing this fantasy self can a man become fully mature. Unless he does so, he is still in a state of rebellion, a perpetual state of immaturity’.

 

This seems to me to describe rather well the generation of perpetual adolescents, balding bejeaned Glastonbury-goers in their sixties,  with drug stashes in the high cupboards of their expensive London houses, still in imaginary combat with a crusty establishment which ceased to exist 60 years ago (but which they imagine to be embodied by Margaret Thatcher or that monster,  ‘The Mail’.

 

Booker writes, rather disturbingly for any modern person:  : ‘Ultimately , to overcome his own fantasy-self is the one supreme contribution that a man can make to mankind. All the fantasies that are around us, that infect the collective human organism, are in the end just one fantasy, made up of all the separate unresolved images and acts of self-assertion that are fed into it form each individual fantasy-self of all the thousands of millions of human beings on earth.

 

‘Every man who asserts his own ego against the general framework in any way, however small, or adds to the sum of unresolved imagery, however idly, is playing his tiny part in increasing the sum of the world’s discords and miseries…’

 

He contrasts this with the more commonly-accepted Freudian orthodoxy ‘the supreme expression of that profound revolt against the ‘father-figures’ of Victorianism, tradition and religion which sprang up in the late 19th century, lay in its uncovering of all the temptations to violation of order which comprise the dream-fantasy level of the mind. But instead of recognising them as imperatives of the way the mind must *not*work. Freud interpreted them as symptoms of ‘inhibition’ and ‘repression’, which must be cleared away , in order that the individual may fulfil himself. It would be hard to find a clearer example than this basic confusion of the self-destructive urge at work in the 20th-centrury subconscious.

 

And he concludes:

 

‘However much one wishes to change the outside world, the only thing one can change or have any control over is ultimately oneself. Which is why the greatest good any man can do to change the world is the least dramatic act of all – to withdraw his own contribution from the general sum of evil’ . Which is as good a point as any to end this sermon on Easter Monday.

Yes, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown DID Hug Michael Gove

For any of you who may have doubted my account of the embrace which Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (open leftist) gave to Michael Gove (unacknowledged leftist) on Maundy Thursday, here is confirmation from Ms Alibhai-Brown herself;

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/our-politics-are-more-confusing-than-ever--but-we-must-understand-whats-at-stake-this-election-10157383.html

 

All we need now is the Chief Whip’s account of the event. I hope this will not be long in coming.

 

But poor Yasmin still doesn’t seem to understand what Mr Gove really is. She says she still thinks he is a ‘High Tory’. Ho ho.  I think she should read this http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/02/the-mystery-of-michael-gove.html

which should cure her of that belief.