Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 200

If we don't vote for any of them, they might just go away

THIS IS PETER HITCHENS'S MAIL ON SUNDAY COLUMN 

There is still more than a month to go before this national festival of lying and evasion is over. 

Can we bear it? Did anyone but paid professionals and obsessives stick it out to the last bucket of Thursday’s weird quiz show?

First the eyes glaze over, then the brain, then the whole body. The automatic checkouts at the supermarket are less predictable.

In an age when we can go on the internet to punish bad restaurants and hotels, oughtn’t there to be a way of punishing these people, too? 

Imagine what would happen to a restaurant which, when you ordered steak, took an age to bring you a plate of lukewarm baked beans, accompanied by a platoon of spin doctors to tell you that this is what you really wanted, and to point out that the establishment next door was even worse?

I have an idea. At every future Election, there should be a slot, at the top of each ballot paper, in which we can put a cross against ‘None of the below’.

If enough of us did so (I’d suggest a quarter of those voting), the Election would have to be run again. Don’t worry about the wait. It is a fiction that politicians ‘run the country’. Belgium recently managed quite well without a government for 589 days.

The great thing would be that the big parties would by then have run out of money, and their slogans and rehearsed arguments would have worn so thin that we could see right through them from the start. 

Normal human beings would be able to form new parties that actually spoke for them, and to fight against the dead, discredited organisations that currently keep their hold on us through the donations of dodgy billionaires.

I suppose that is why it almost certainly will not happen. But even so, I think most of us will be able to work out our own good ways of refusing to endorse the dead parties. But it will take a lot longer to bring them down, and I am not sure we have enough time.

Were we happier in those days of offal? 

The BBC tv programme Back In Time For Dinner doesn't just have one of the cleverest titles ever. It is a more-than-usually-serious attempt to recreate the recent past, the day before yesterday.

This is sometimes the most remote time zone of all, because those of us who lived through it find it harder and harder to believe what we ate, how we dressed, how we furnished and decorated our homes and what we cared about. 

We’re all so much slicker now, and are embarrassed and even baffled by what we used to be. So we wipe it from our minds.

Anyone over 40 who watches this programme, starring an attractively level-headed and humorous real family (the wife and mother is hilariously clueless about how to wield a tin-opener), will surely have at least one moment of amazed recognition of something forgotten.

And this evokes that other worrying thought that, yes, eating liver is absolutely horrible, but is it possible that in the days when we routinely consumed offal, and had never eaten out in our lives, we were happy and didn’t know it?

Save teachers: bring back the cane

A series of sad stories emerged last week about the wretched lives of many teachers in state schools – subjected to false accusations by pupils, and sometimes by parents, too, harried pointlessly by the commissars of Ofsted, abandoning a job in which they had hoped to do good and found only bureaucracy and drudgery.

May I make an alarming suggestion? Could it have been the abolition of corporal punishment that led to this state of affairs?

No, I’m not keen either. I’m just worried by the possibility that it may actually be necessary, whether we like it or not. It wasn’t that it was used that much.

And those who felt it most were generally the sort of boys (it was usually boys) who didn't care what anyone did to them. 

This is how deterrence works. Incorrigible troublemakers volunteer to have examples made of themselves. The calculating opportunists take note, and stay on the right side of the rules.

What mattered was that it made the teacher a figure of individual authority, in charge of the classroom and the corridors.

Without authority, there can be little teaching, as we have since found out. 

Successful state schools work because charismatic heads or teachers are terrific bluffers, giving the impression that they are to be feared while knowing in their hearts that they have no real power.

Most of the time, the children see these poor, cowed civil servants, burdened with inspections and national curriculums, and they correctly work out that, if the State doesn’t respect them, they don’t have to either. 

It hasn’t worked. It never will work. Dare anyone put it right?

Depression isn't to blame - drugs are

Since last week there has been a stupid chorus of psychiatrists and commentators, telling us not to ‘stigmatise’ people who suffer from depression.

This is their moronic reaction to the concerns of people such as me, who are worried that the suicidal killer pilot Andreas Lubitz was taking powerful mind-altering drugs, whose effects on the human brain and body are too little known and which need to be thoroughly examined.

Do you see the difference? I am not worried about Lubitz because he was depressed. I am worried about the drugs that he was prescribed because he was depressed. 

Even now, we only know the name of one of these medications, the potent tranquilliser Lorazepam, known to make some of its users suicidal.

We refuse to look in the right direction. This is because the importance of the issue and the widespread correlation between such drugs and self-destructive behaviour are still not grasped by the authorities or much of the media.

Almost every major plane crash has led to reviews that have made flying much safer. The destruction of Germanwings Flight 9525 looks like being the first which will not do so. Please stop talking about stigma. It’s the drugs, stupid.

The other night on Question Time, I may have assisted at the beginning of a new romance. 

On air, the ultra-politically correct commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown suddenly realised (partly thanks to me) just what a Blairite liberal Chief Whip Michael Gove actually is.

She said she wanted to hug him. And, as I can now reveal, as soon as the cameras were switched off, that is exactly what she did.

A very happy and joyous Easter to all my readers, not least to the very kind Muslim young man who, seeing me beside the road in the drenching Manchester rain, failing to hail a taxi, went miles out of his way to drive me to my hotel.

BBC Question Time, Maundy Thursday 2015

Some of you may wish to watch the BBC Question Time programme which was broadcast on Thursday night, when i really should have been in Church for the stripping of the altar on the most solemn evening of the year, but was instead in an 'Academy' in Salford, tangling with Michael Gove (among others on the 'Question Time' panel) for the first time since we fell out over his choice of school for his daughter.

 

It may be found here:

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pzkmx

 

 

 

 

 

36 Days to Go! How Can We Bear It?

36 days to go ( as it says, menacingly, on the screen of BBC’s News channel broadcasts)! Can we possibly stay awake? Can we bear this lifeless battle of the blancmanges for all that time?

 

Today we have business men weighing in the side of the Tories. Well, that’s only interesting because lots of these these curious people have in the past been equally keen on the other lot. Do they know what they are doing?

 

 

I have never been sure why businessmen or business women (or ‘business ladies’ as Jimmy Savile memorably called them in those old British Rail TV commercials that I am sure lots of people would like to forget) are supposed to be the source of political wisdom. Business is what they are good at, well, supposedly – though I have never been quite sure how much of business success is just luck plus hard work, like so many other trades.

 

Different sorts of businessmen have different political needs. Big business, for instance, is quite keen on heavy regulation, health and safety, national agreements with trades unions, minimum wages and so forth.

 

Small business hates regulation of this kind. That’s one of the reasons why big business likes it – it’s a brake on competitors and helps big industrial dinosaurs stay on top and fight off challenges from small new rivals.

 

And in many cases, businessmen know as much about the great issues of our time as, well, you or I.  Or less. I still feel a great sense of joy at recalling Sir Richard Branson’s attempts to explain on TV why it would be a good idea for us to join the European single currency. What a grasp that man has.

 

What is it that people learn at these grandiose business schools which so many of the great universities have now established? Are they, having done these courses, actually any better at business than a sharp barrow boy who knows how to pile it high and sell it cheap, to work every hour God sends,  and that the customer is always right (not a maxim much beloved in today's business, I find)?

Somerset Maugham long ago wrote a beautiful short story  (‘The Verger’ – spoiler alert, do not read on unless you have read this story)…

 

It is about a man who was sacked from his job as verger of a fashionable London church when the rector found him to be illiterate. As a result, he set up in business with a tobacconists’ shop, and worked so hard, and had such a  knack for picking the right spot for a new shop, that he soon owned a chain of such shops and became very rich and successful. Late in life,  a fellow business man discovered by accident that the man was still unlettered. He said ‘Imagine! And you achieved all this without being able to read and write’ and then asks ‘What would you have become if you *had* been able to read and write?’

 

And the fabulously rich old man replies ‘Why, I can tell you exactly what I would have become. I would still be the verger of St Jude’s, Kensington Square’,  (or whatever it was) .

 

 

….But I digress, a bit.

 

These thoughts trickle through my mind as I listen to the incessant repetition of the news that some great gathering of businesspersons has endorsed the Tory party. Should we care? Some of these people admit having endorsed New Labour in the past - and there is no doubt in my mind that New Labour’s wild (but wholly predictable) decision to go for a huge expansion of public spending in the year 1998  - see here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11277023/Was-this-the-worst-ever-political-blunder-in-our-history.html

 

 

did immense and lasting damage to our economy. The Tories at the time were powerless to resist, having more or less conceded moral superiority to New Labour during the Major era, and having 9 at that stage and since) nothing especially interesting or different to say about the economy or anything else.

 

My favourite example of this is Gordon Brown’s disastrous sale of our gold reserves at rock bottom prices http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/investing/gold/7511589/Explain-why-you-sold-Britains-gold-Gordon-Brown-told.html

 

I well remember, at the time, trying to work up a controversy about this for my Talk Radio programme. I thought (rightly) that the decision was unhinged.   A prominent Tory economic commentator, who shall remain nameless in case I get carried away and say what I really think of him, agreed to come on to the programme, but, as soon as he was in front of the microphone, said he thought the sale was a good plan, thus torpedoing the whole segment.

 

The Tory front bench were utterly uninterested, and made no protests in the Commons – the only person to do so was the majestic backbencher Sir Peter Tapsell, a man who knows a thing or two and will be missed now he has retired.  The Tory Party has since discovered a retroactive fury about this action by Mr Brown, but whenever I write to the authors of these denunciations and ask them where they and their party were at the time, they fall wonderfully silent.

 

The truth is, most politicians know more or less nothing at all about business, economics or anything else. If they do, they’ll swiftly be exiled to the backbenches, where they can’t rock the boat. Businessmen who commend political parties should be warned that their endorsements will be carefully stored, and brought out again five years’ hence, to be displayed as prominently as they were the first time. That should give them pause. 

Nobody is 'Stigmatising' Depression. It's the Pills We Need to Worry About

I did think some good might come out of the horror of the Germanwings Flight 9525 crash, just as hope was found at the bottom of Pandora’s box after all the evil had escaped.  I am beginning to worry that it won’t.

 

This is partly because the ‘depression’ lobby has (either wilfully or because its spokesmen and women aren’t very bright), completely misunderstood the point being made by people such as me.

 

We are not saying that people suffering from depression are a danger to anyone. They are not. We are saying that it may be the case that people who take some ‘antidepressant’ drugs are a danger , often to themselves and in some cases to others, because of the powerful effects these little-studied drugs, and withdrawal from them, may have on their brains.  

 

But take this article from the ‘Observer’ of 29th March

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/28/germanwings-plane-crash-alps-depression-doctor

 

It’s almost all about depression and hardly at all about ‘antidepressants’.

 

A leading psychiatrist. Professor Simon Wessely, (President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists) was quoted by the Observer as saying  ‘Piers Morgan said that it was a disgrace that a man with acute depression was allowed to fly.’  

 

But Mr Morgan said something much more specific. His Mailonline article is to be found here :

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3015033/PIERS-MORGAN-Depressed-pilots-like-Germanwings-Andreas-Lubitz-medication-mental-illness-not-flying-passenger-planes-s-not-insensitive-s-protecting-lives.html

 

He wrote: ‘A co-pilot with a lengthy history of depression, on medication for his illness, and ignoring a specific doctor’s sick note for the very day he was flying, was allowed to command a plane full of 149 people.’ (My emphasis).

 

And later he wrote : ‘Most importantly, I want to know that the airlines know if either pilot has similar mental health issues to Andreas Lubitz, and whether he or she is on medication for them and ignoring doctors’ sick notes. That is their duty of care to both the passengers and the pilots.

That’s not ‘insensitive’, or ‘stigmatising’ people with depression, as some have over-sensitive lobby groups have raced to complain today. It’s about protecting the lives of innocent people.’(my emphasis, again).

 

There are, in fact, already rules about pilots flying while taking 'antidepressants', though they do not amount to a blanket ban and vary in different jurisdictions. This would seem to suggest that there might be some reason for concern, and that authority knows there might be.

 In a similar vein I found this  piece from  ‘Scotland on Sunday’, warning against: ‘further marginalising those who suffer depression.’

 

http://www.scotsman.com/news/dani-garavelli-germanwings-crash-exposes-stigma-1-3732283

 

then , in ‘the Times ‘ today, behind a paywall so I cannot link to it, Libby Purves joins the argument.

 

Ms Purves, in recounting Professor Wessely’s remarks, says: ‘It would be bitterly unfair to feed an impression that anybody with any history of depression is unfit to drive a vehicle, even a plane’.

 

Later she says ‘To demonise all forms of sensitivity and depression is itself crazy’.

 

I completely agree.

My point is different.

 

I have many times here drawn attention to the lack of true evidence for the effectiveness of modern ‘antidepressant’ medications, and the considerable doubts ( I put it mildly) about the serotonin theory on which their use is based - as explored by the distinguished American doctor Marcia Angell. This is why I tend to put the expression ‘antidepressants’ in inverted commas.  

 

Dr Angell’s articles can be found here:

 

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/epidemic-mental-illness-why/

 

And here

 

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/illusions-of-psychiatry/

 

They are written for the intelligent layman, and are reviews of important books on the subject which readers can study for further detail. Personally, I cannot see that anybody who has not read them has anything interesting to say on this subject.

 

 

And I have also urged everyone to read James Davies’ excellent book on the exaggerated claims of modern pill-centred psychiatry, ‘Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm than Good’ (and no, I’m not on commission. It’s a labour of love.)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cracked-Psychiatry-Doing-More-Harm/dp/1848315562

 

Today I must also urge all responsible, thinking  adults, especially any who may influence decisions in these matters,  to read the following article (containing an interesting sideline on a possible correlation between the use of some antidepressants and eyesight, which seems to merit further investigation especially given the eyesight problems which Lubitz is reported to have suffered)

 

http://davidhealy.org/winging-it-antidepressants-and-plane-crashes/

 

It is by the distinguished psychiatrist, Professor David Healy, a courageous dissenter from psychiatric orthodoxy who has paid a significant price for his independence of mind (a careful study of his Wikipedia entry will explain this).

 

The two key statements in this wholly fascinating article seem to me to be the following: ‘The risks of suicide or homicide from mild to moderate depression or anxiety are almost nil.’   (Professor Healy’s emphasis)

 

This would accord completely with Libby Purves’ view, and as it happens my view too.

 

And then: ‘Once treated with a drug, a pilot is never the same again.  Even if the underlying condition clears, he may not be able to stop.  The risks are not eliminated.’

 

The problem is the drugs given for the depression, not the depression.  And that is what we should address. Once again, I do not know the answer. I only know that there is a question, and I ask again: ‘Who could possibly be against a powerful independent inquiry to establish the truth in this matter?’    Well, who? I can't think. 

Mr Stoltenberg Disagrees With Me About Who's Expanding in Europe.He's Wrong

I am grateful to contributor ‘EricD’ for drawing my attention to this interview

 

http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/the-interview-nato-secretary-general-jens-stoltenberg/

 

with Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary-General of NATO, in which he specifically dismisses my point, made in a recent Spectator article, here http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9459602/its-nato-thats-empire-building-not-putin/

that Russia, since the fall of the USSR, has lost control of 700,000 square miles, and the EU and/or NATO have gained control of 400,000 of them. (The remaining 300,000 consist of Ukraine, 230,000 square miles, and Belarus, 700,000 square miles).

 

The author of the interview wrongly defines me as a ‘vocal defender of Russia’, when in fact I am simply a vocal defender of objective truth against propaganda, very critical of Russia. But even so, it’s nice to know that the ‘Spectator’ article has penetrated this far.

 

Mr Stoltenberg offers the usual thought-free claim that the nations now under EU control are not really under its control because they ‘chose’ their servitude. Servitude, whether chosen or not, and when nations choose servitude one can only assume that they did so because they felt they had little alternative, or that the alternative was worse. This is not what I would describe as a free choice.

 

The key exchange is here : ‘Q: Peter Hitchens is a vocal defender of Russia. He writes: “Two great land powers face each other. One of these powers, Russia, has given up control over 700,000 sq. miles of valuable territory. The other, the European Union, has gained control over 400,000 of those square miles. Which of these powers is expanding?”

A: I think that’s a completely wrong statement. It’s independent nations that have knocked on the door and wanted membership. It’s not NATO in any way moving east—it’s the east wanting to join NATO and/or the European Union. And that’s the sovereign right of every sovereign nation to decide. So this idea that this is something that is lost for Russia and gained by the European Union is the wrong concept. Every nation has the right to decide its own path, including what kind of security arrangement it will be part of. This is a fundamental principle; it’s enshrined, for instance, in the Helsinki Final Act, which Russia has also subscribed to. No one has been forced to become a member of the European Union or NATO; everyone who has joined the European Union and NATO has joined because of their own free democratic will.’

 

I am amused by the claim that NATO and the EU have not moved eastwards, but that the east has moved towards NATO. It’s  a bit like the old philosophers’ joke about whether the train is leaving the station or the station is leaving the train. Even the philosophers know that it is the train that is moving, though they will have their little jest. Likewise, it is clear to Mr Stoltenberg that membership of NASTO or the EU involves the extension of the power embodied in these organisations on to the soil of their members. But it is obviously not a good moment for him to say so, is it? It rather undermines about 90% of the neo-conservative argument.

 

 I am also not absolutely sure that his final claim is true. How much democratic input was involved in decisions to join or remain in NATO after 1991, by which time it was a wholly different organisation from the one its original members had joined?  As for the EU, Certainly Britain’s membership of the EU was the result of a very flawed, dishonest and unfair procedure which, while ostensibly democratic, involved the systematic deception of the populace about the real nature of what they were joining and an utterly unfair public campaign on the issue made worse by the failure of the BBC to observe proper impartiality. I know this for certain as I was there at the time and have spent a lot of time since looking into the matter. I wonder how many other  countries – even those which went through formal democratic procedures – might have experienced similar unfairness and dishonesty.

 

I deal with this claim in my letter to ‘the Spectator’ published this week:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/letters/9479692/spectator-letters-who-kept-us-out-of-the-euro-and-how-to-deal-with-squirrels/

 

It reads:

 

‘Joining the free world

Sir: Roger Broad (Letters, 21 March) repeats the assertion, so often made, that European countries formerly controlled by the USSR became EU or NATO members by their own free will. It depends what you mean by free will. In a world where even this country no longer feels able to assert sovereignty, few nations freely choose anything. Broken economically and morally by decades of Leninism, Moscow’s former vassals were understandably anxious to climb into any ambulance that offered to pick them up. They have already begun to pay the bill, having lost their frontiers, their ability to make independent foreign policy and (in many cases) their currencies. It may be worth it. But it is not that free, and we should not pretend it is.’

And Now - an even better version of the Cambridge Debate between me and Ed Lucas

The new version is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Q7AgYqoaNs

 

The old one has now had more than 700 views

 

 

Is slippery Salmond secretly trying to get Dave elected?

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

This has been a week of memorable fakery. A Muslim Tory parliamentary candidate was caught colluding with ultra-nationalists to try to look good. The Government hatched a sneaky and dishonourable plot to destroy the Speaker, for daring to stand up to them.

So it seems to me to be worth asking if David Cameron and Alex Salmond are secretly working together.

The Tories claim to be outraged that the Scottish Nationalists say they will deny them a majority. Why? They have no divine right to rule.

Isn’t all this shouting too loud to be true? And the SNP’s voters, who can’t stand the Tories, would never forgive their leaders if they propped up a Cameron government.

The SNP is under no obligation to help the Tories into office, though you might get that impression from the toady Blairite media who have adopted David Cameron, the self-proclaimed heir to Blair, as their last best hope.

This, by the way, explains why Islington lefties and the BBC are so fervently backing David Cameron against Ed Miliband – and is one of the reasons why I am seriously thinking of registering to vote for the first time in 30 years, and casting my ballot for Labour.

The fashionable Left’s loathing of Mr Miliband, and the incessant spiteful bullying and belittling of this man by much of my trade, make me want to stand up for him against this nasty mob, even though I disagree with him about almost everything.

At least I actually know what the Labour leader’s true opinions are. This is more than can be said for Mr Cameron, whose real aims are harder to grasp than a lavishly greased piglet.

So you see how the world’s turning upside down. Nothing’s what it seems in this Election. For instance, I think the SNP actually want the Tories to dominate the next government.

That’s why they are so helpfully playing this game in which Labour are damaged by being portrayed as Alex Salmond’s prisoners. If Scotland leaves the UK, Tory hopes of power grow, and Labour’s hopes dwindle.

Though nobody in the Tory high command will openly say this, the Conservative Party knows that its only hope of ever again commanding a Westminster majority and governing alone lies in a Scottish exit from the UK.

Nobody will ever be able to say for certain if the Government’s woeful mishandling of the Scottish issue was deliberate sabotage of the UK or mere incompetence. My own guess is that it was bungled ‘accidentally on purpose’, as we used to say in my childhood. What is certain is that it has brought Scotland closer to departure than anyone could possibly have imagined five years back.

And that one of the many unpleasant shocks waiting for us on the far side of this Election will be the break-up of our country, brought about with many crocodile tears, by the very party that pretends to stand for the Union.

If 'bogey man' Ed did this, we'd all be very sniffy...

Have you ever wondered what happened to the vegetables so wantonly sacrificed in the BBC’s carefully stage-managed TV advertisement for David Cameron?

Keen-eyed viewers will have noted the Prime Minister twice giving his nose a jolly good wipe with the back of his hand, as he chopped away at his groceries. Just imagine what would have happened to Ed Miliband if he’d done that: action replays and front-page pictures for days.

But Ed is a target, and Dave isn’t.

So I very much hope that the poor vegetables, so unhygienically treated, ended in the slop bucket, rather than being fed to the Camerons’ innocent children.

But there were other vegetables present. What did the BBC reporter, James Landale, think he was doing, joining in this shameless performance by subserviently tending to a lettuce? He might as well have knelt and done up Mr Cameron’s shoes for him, or some other fagging duty.

If Tory High Command want to make a TV commercial for their leader, in which he pretends to be the normal bloke he most certainly is not (normal people don’t become Prime Ministers, trust me) , then good luck to them. But the BBC should play no part in such fictions.

The kitchen in which they stood was not a normal kitchen in a normal home. Leave aside the armed guards outside. Can we doubt that every action was choreographed, and that every object in it was carefully placed to promote an image? What’s more, you and I pretty much paid for it.

For nearly eight years, in a piece of cheek still widely unknown to the public, the far-from-poor Camerons claimed £1,700 a month, tax-free, in Parliamentary expenses to pay the mortgage interest on this, their Oxfordshire village home.

This made Mr Cameron (who had another home only 70 miles away) one of the highest claimers of housing expenses in Parliament. While it’s good to see inside the house the taxpayer provided, at last, mightn’t a question on this subject have been in order, under the circumstances? Instead the First Lord of the Treasury was asked if it was a handicap to be posh.

Meanwhile, over on the equally impartial Channel 4 and Sky, Jeremy Paxman got clean away with asking Ed Miliband the insulting and patronising question: ‘Are you all right, Ed?’

I was pleased to see that Mr Miliband gave as good as he got. But is this what politics has come to? It seems so.

The loopy logic of losing an hour

In the small hours of this morning, this country went through the mad annual ritual of moving the clocks forward. For me (and I suspect many others), this means many weeks of something rather like jet-lag, only without the journey.

There’s very little hard evidence (if any) that this performance does any good at all. We do it out of inertia, and, if we’re not careful, EU zealots will soon force us to get up even earlier by lining us up with Berlin time. They never give up.

Much like man-made global warming, the strange cultish belief in falsifying the time was spread by fanatics.

An annoying businessman called William Willett was cross that it didn’t stay light long enough in the evening for him to finish his golf game, and also peeved that other people slept in on sunny mornings.

So he resolved to force us all to change our lives to suit people like him. The First World War – wars are always a good moment for crazed ideas to be implemented in a rush – gave him the chance. As with so many other daft things, we have been doing it so long that nobody ever even thinks about them.

The Germanwings crash

For some time now I have been urging an independent inquiry into the correlation between the use of ‘antidepressants’, suicide and (less often) mass killing.

This is not because I know if there is a connection, but because there have been so many episodes suggesting one that an investigation seems to be to necessary.

Now I learn that pilot Andreas Lubitz, who apparently deliberately crashed a plane killing all aboard, had received ‘treatment’ for a ‘serious depressive episode’. Once again, oughtn’t we at least to look?

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Darker Later - the Tyranny of 'Daylight Saving' Examined

Once again we are on the eve of the mad annual ritual of the clocks. Tomorrow morning, all official time sources from Big Ben to the BBC will be lying about the time, and if you have any sense, all the myriad clocks in your home will be lying too. They will say  that it is 9.00 a.m. when it is in fact 8.00.

 

Churches, shops cafes, railways, buses, TV stations and everyone else will join in the mass deception. You can stand aside if you like, but unless your life is totally private, you will (at the very least) inconvenience yourself.

If you are,  like me, a habitual early riser who has been enjoying the steadily increasing amount of light in the early morning, the change will be an annoying nuisance.  It was fully light around six. Now you will have to wait till seven o’clock for the same amount of light. More likely, you will wake naturally when you normally do, and find that it is physically impossible to catch the train you have been getting regularly for months . Or, by the use of hideous jarring alarms, the nastiest way of waking up outside actual captivity,  you will cudgel your brain and body into rising earlier each day, with the inevitable groggy and unpleasant results, not unlike jetlag.

 

At the other end of the day, the equally enjoyable slow and dusky advance of afternoon into evening will suddenly be violently accelerated. A change that would once have involved weeks of patient acclimatisation will be accomplished in a day,  a disorienting experience for anyone remotely sensitive to his surroundings.

 

What’s it for? Nobody really knows. All sorts of claims are made for it – the most absurd being that it increases the amount of daylight, which cannot be true. It increases the amount of daylight only for late sleepers (politicians are often in this class, and journalists) who have seldom seen the dawn and didn’t like it the last time they did see it.  These people wasted hours of light in the morning. Now, one of those hours has been transferred to the evening, so they can, allegedly, play tennis or otherwise romp around in the extra daylight.

 

They won’t, of course, they’ll go to the pub, or watch the TV, oblivious of what is going on outside anyway.  

 

The rest of us, struggling to get children to go to bed when it is still light, will silently curse them.

 

And we will be told it’s good for the economy, or saves fuel, or increases tourism, or some such excuse. Is there has there ever been, any hard evidence for this?

It was not alluded to during the very few short debates when Parliament agreed to begin this ritual, originally in May 1916 (it first happened by law on the 20th of that month, the first and second readings of the Act having been taken by the House of Lords on the 16th)  and in a tearing hurry, under the usual catch-all excuse that we were at war and therefore must do everything to become more efficient, etc . Opposition was unpatriotic.  The idea had originally been encouraged by a miserable building tycoon called William Willett, and a bug-hunter from New Zealand, George Hudson. Mr Willett was cross that other people stayed in bed on summer mornings while he was out riding his horse, and thought they ought to be made to get up. He was also annoyed because he had to stop playing golf earlier in the evening than he wanted to, because it was too dark to see to play. Mr Hudson, thanks to working shifts, found he had lots of time to hunt insects when most people would have been at work, and was filled with a passion to spread the benefit to others. wanted more time to hunt insects.

 

There are obvious alternative solutions to both these problems – one, let other people live the way they want to, and two, start your golf game earlier.  As for Mr Hudson, he needed to understand that not all of us are the same.

 

The idea, a bit like the man-made global warming cult, is fanatical and dictatorial. We are all to be made to live differently, for our own good, even if the evidence that it *is* for our own good is sparse and open to contest.

 

Introducing the measure on 16th May 1916, the Marquess of Lansdowne (later to be famous for a noble but doomed attempt to end the Great War in a negotiated settlement), said :

 

‘‘It has often been said that if in this country any one were able at five o'clock on a summer's morning to lift the roofs off the houses he would see that, in spite of bright daylight, the greater part of the population was sound asleep with closed shutters; that if, again, he were able to perform a similar operation at ten o'clock in the evening, he would find a great part of the population using artificial light in order to make up for their own mismanagement earlier in the day. The object of this Bill is to introduce a small measure of additional Common sense into these arrangements.’

 

it is a measure which conduces to efficiency and economy, and there can, I think, be no doubt whatever that this Bill will have those results. Our proposal is that in the five summer months we should push on the clock by one hour, and thereby encourage people to begin the day and the night earlier than they have hitherto been in the habit of doing. The arguments in favour of the proposal seem to me fairly obvious. It is, of course, the case that the hours of daylight are limited, and it seems to follow that it is our duty to turn them to the best account that we can. I understand that the result of this Bill will be that during the summer months 130 additional hours of daylight will be available in consequence of it.

 

I will not take upon myself to name to the House the sum which it is believed will be saved to the country by this change in the law. The estimates must obviously be very conjectural. I have seen it placed as high as £10,000,000 a year, but I should be sorry to assume any responsibility for that or any other figure. It is quite clear, however, that if we can get people to consume sunlight instead of electric light and lamp light, the national bill for illuminants must be reduced to a material extent. ‘

 

Not a fact in sight, you see (the estimates of fuel saved are ’conjectural’, a grandiose way of saying ‘guesswork’) , and the barmy claim of 130 additional hours of daylight is made.

 

Lord Balfour of Burleigh offered some opposition: ‘I know quite well that it is hopeless now to oppose the Bill. I congratulate myself that at any rate it is ostensibly a Bill only for the duration of the war, and that the chief reason put forward on its behalf is that there will be a certain economy and saving of light and of coal during a portion of the year. I sincerely hope that it will be recognised on all sides that it is put forward as a temporary war measure, and that if we do not oppose it strenuously on this occasion it is because we trust that before it becomes a permanent institution of the country a real opportunity will be given of considering it. In my humble opinion I prophesy—we will see whether my prophesy comes true—that it will be a very serious burden on the, in the Parliamentary sense, least articulate portion of the population. I believe it will do an immense amount of injury to the women of the working classes. They will have to get up an hour earlier in the morning than they do at the present time, and although the clock will decree the ordinary hour of going to bed when it comes to evening I believe that the children for whom they are responsible and the male population will be sitting up later owing to the length of daylight, and that they will have their period of rest curtailed. I think this is very hard upon the women of the working classes, and I believe this will be one of the evil effects of the Bill. And I do not myself for a moment believe that children will go to bed before daylight ends; they, too, will be deprived of a certain part of their rest.’

 

So did many Lords speaking for the (then) powerful agricultural interest, pointing out that farming proceeds according to the sun and not the clock, and that much work cannot begin until the sun has burned the dew off the fields.

 

When it came up for peacetime renewal in 1922, One MP noted:

‘ The Board of Education was evidently doubtful as to the effect of this Measure on the children of the country, and they issued instructions that inquiries should be made among local education authorities as to their opinions upon it. In the White Paper which has been issued as the result of that, it is stated that reference was made to 299 authorities, of which only 183 were in favour, while 27 were uncertain. One of the chief reasons for objection is indicated in the White Paper: It is said there that this would not have been so damaging to the children of the country had it not been that parental control was lacking and that the children could not be induced to go to bed. 

 

 

‘In an Appendix to the White Paper it is stated that an instruction was issued on the matter to parents of school children it is called, "A Message to Parents," and it states, "Many children have been found of late not to do justice to their lessons because they have had too little sleep." This is in consequence of Summer Time, and in consequence of tinkering with the sun. The children consequently stay up an hour later and get an hour's sleep less. Surely the consideration of the children's health and the consideration of agriculture being a very serious business to the country, as opposed to the pleasure which is really what the Bill seeks to encourage—surely these matters are so important that it would be better for the Government to drop the Bill altogether.’

 

I have not been able to trace the White Paper that is mentioned here, and would be glad if anyone can identify it and tell me where I might find it.

 

A Mr Lunn weighed in : ‘Had it not been for the reason that two of my colleagues have spoken in support of this Bill, I should not have desired to speak on this occasion. I know that my own association, the Yorkshire Miners' Association, are unanimously against this Measure, and they have always been opposed to it, because we are satisfied that it is not in the interests of the miner or the industrial worker who has to get up in the middle of the night to go to his work. We are also satisfied that it is not in the interests of the miner's wife. The wife of a man who has to go to work at such an early hour, and who is the mother of a young family, has perhaps the hardest lot of any class or section of the community.

 

‘There are thousands of miners' wives who have to get up in the middle of the night, and a Bill like this forces them to get up earlier than they would otherwise have to do. Sometimes there is a double shift at the colliery Where the son or the lodger works, and then the wife is kept up waiting for the conclusion of the second shift. If she has any young children they will not go to bed because of this Bill and the longer daylight, and the wife has to get the children to school next morning earlier and get them up. I cannot understand why any representative of an industrial community can support this Bill and I am quite prepared to accept the position taken up on behalf of agriculture. I do not suppose that there is any Agricultural Labourers' Union or any body of agricultural workers who would support this Bill. With regard to the views expressed by the hon. Member for St. Helens (Mr. Sexton), I would like to point out that be is a bachelor whilst most of the Members of the Labour party are married men. I hope this Bill does not get a Second Reading. Those who support this Bill are in a minority, and they are not the most useful section of the community. After everything has been said, the people who do the hard work and who have built up this nation ought to be considered and so ought their wives and families. For these reasons I take the view that we ought to reject this Bill.’

 

And Mr Macquisten said : ‘I fully agree with the remark made by the last speaker, that this is one of the most absurd Measures that was ever passed. It has now been passed by this House every year since 1916. It was passed during the period of the War, when. according to the suggestion made by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for the City of London (Sir F. Banbury), we were all mad. I do not know why he should place to that a limitation of time. This Bill is an absurd proposition on the face of it. What is the good of telling lies about the time? It amounts to that? It enacts by Act of Parliament a lie, and it states that that is the time which is not the time, and it is perfectly absurd. There are about 45,000,000 inhabitants in this country, and, therefore, you can take it that there are 7,000,000 households containing at least 7,000,000 clocks. Every one of those clocks has a face, and you cannot expect to train the rising generation in veracity if they have facing them every morning a gross misstatement of fact.’

 

During the Second World War, Double Summer Time was imposed, again on the unanswerable claim that it would help win the war (I cannot find any debate on this) . Did it? Does anyone know? It seems unlikely given these highly unusual exact figures supplied to the House of Commons on 4th March 1947 by Chuter Ede, then Home Secretary. Mr Ede was seeking to bring back Double Summer Time in peacetime because of a national fuel crisis:

 

He said:

‘… in some urban centres double summer time was welcomed during the war period. But, in agricultural areas it was always resented, and even in urban areas a large number of people thought double summer time had a detrimental effect on the health of children,

 

‘I was very careful in the statement I made not to emphasise the amount of fuel that will actually be saved by this arrangement, for the saving of fuel is so small in its absolute figures as to be fairly negligible. The best estimate I can give is that there will be a saving of some 120,000 tons of coal in respect of the generating stations, and 10,000 tons in respect of gas and domestic supplies, as far as the additional period of single summer time is concerned. The period of double summer time which we propose will enable an additional saving to be made of some 20,000 tons, making a total of 150,000 tons in all. It is therefore quite clear that if it were merely a question of the absolute saving of fuel, it would not be right to introduce this Bill. What I was very careful to point out was that the enactment of this Measure would enable us to make more effective use of the fuel which is available, and that is the ground on which I must rest my case.

 

‘I can assure the House that as far as my own personal predilections are concerned, I would be the last person to want to introduce summer time at all. 

 

Tom Driberg, that old rogue, spoke for grammar school pupils in his Essex seat:

 

‘This Measure is also rather unfortunate in its effect on schoolchildren. With the increasing tendency to urbanise rural schools, which I deplore—the tendency to transport children daily long distances to and from their schools in the nearest town—the question of summer time becomes a serious consideration. I had occasion recently to draw the attention of my right hon. Friend the Minister of Education to the case of a dozen or two children in my own constituency who attend a grammar school some 15 miles away, and who now have to leave their homes by 6.30 each morning in order to be at school by 9 o'clock. Under double summer time, they will have to leave their homes at what would normally be 4.30 each morning, and still be away for 12 hours daily.’

 

And Sir Alan Herbert, the lawyer and wit who then occupied one of Oxford University’ s two seats   and so gloried in the title of ‘Junior Burgess’ (abolished a year later when we finally introduced universal suffrage democracy, one man, one vote, no more), made the first reference I can find to ‘Berlin Time’,  the ‘reform’ repeatedly proposed by persons who claim it has nothing to do with an attempt to impose a universal EU time, but can never explain why this nightmarish departure from nature (tried and swiftly rejected by the people of Portugal) is justified in any other way:  

 

‘I hate to think that Big Ben, that great bell which has been such a voice in the councils of the world, will be heard booming, through the B.B.C., all around the world, for half the summer, Berlin time, and for the rest of the summer, Moscow time. I do not need to inform hon. Members that Berlin lies in longitude 15 degrees East, and that Moscow is in longitude 3o degrees East—rather more—and that if we advance the clock one hour, we shall use Berlin time, and if we advance it two hours, Moscow time.

 

‘I think that summer time, single or double, is the most frightful confession of weakness of which the human race has ever been guilty. By all means let us change our habits according to the seasons. Even the dumb animals do that. Even the uneducated cock does not crow at the same time all the year round. But let us change our habits without necessarily changing the clocks. I do not see why it is not possible for us to get up one hour earlier because it is good for us, because it is good for trade, or even because it is good for the country, but it is possible if we are deceived by a silly mechanical trick with the clock. That is an idea which must be repugnant surely to anybody who has the smallest respect for the human race. Surely, in the normal times to which the Home Secretary referred—I do not say now—especially when the Government either run or control so many things, it should be the simplest thing in the world for the Government to say that, from a certain date, all Government offices would begin work one hour earlier, and it was hoped that industry would follow suit.’

 

Well, that era passed and we went back to the moderate craziness of Single Summer Time, which we have stuck to ever since, out of inertia rather than reason. I am sure that those who would make an effort to impose decimal coinage or metric measurements, and applaud it, in the name of progress, would likewise oppose any attempt to restore our clocks to the truth, and truth to our clocks. Anything which disorients and uproots is progress. Anything which reassures and is particular and customary, is condemned.

An Interesting Article on Ukraine : Was it a Coup?

I have only just come across this interesting article on the Ukraine and on the Western media's near-unanimous rejection of the view that President Yanukovych was overthrown by a putsch. 

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/01/06/nyt-still-pretends-no-coup-in-ukraine/

 

Amongst many other good points, there are reflections on the USA's past involvement in putsches against governments of which it disapproved, including on the too-often-forgotten 1953 coup in Iran, in which Britain's SIS also played a significant role, and which (in the views of many Iranians) led in the end to the rule of the Ayatollahs.

 

But perhaps the most crucial part of it is its dissection of the absurd black-and-white coverage, in which one side was wholly good and the other wholly bad. 

 

 

That Cambridge Debate - A new version

Here is a new and better-synchronised version of the debate which I had with Edward Lucas about central Europe, Russia and the EU, in Cambridge on 13th March. The sound is weaker, but clearer. The organisers hope eventually to have a louder version. 

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5MXWqllyZE