Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 202
March 15, 2015
Politicians must stand up and be counted - even if only on TV
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
Actually it does matter that the two main party leaders are forced to face each other in televised debates, each of them alone and cut off from the aides and scriptwriters who would otherwise whisper into their ears and make them look cleverer than they are.
Such events are the last faint trace of the raucous combative debate that politics used to be in this country.
It is incredible now to recall that, 51 years ago, the skeletal, hesitant aristocrat Alec Douglas-Home braved a furious 7,000-strong audience at the Birmingham Rag Market, a traditional ordeal for party leaders that he felt honour-bound to undergo.
His Labour rival, Harold Wilson, did likewise.
But can you remember when you last saw a major politician heckled? These days, audiences are screened to prevent it and offenders are dragged from the hall by heavies, as poor old Walter Wolfgang was when he dared to shout ‘nonsense’ – quite accurately – during a speech on the Iraq War by the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
And it is nearly incredible to note that, in quite recent Election campaigns, party leaders faced daily unscripted press conferences from an unvetted crowd of uncontrollable reporters.
These events had almost vanished at the last Election (I think David Cameron gave three in the entire campaign).
Entry to them required security vetting. Most of those who attended were members of the Parliamentary Lobby, that mafia of mutual flattery in which politicians and journalists eat so many lunches together that it becomes impossible to tell them apart.
Informal questioning is also discouraged. Back in 1992, Neil Kinnock (a gentleman when all’s said and done) had to rescue me from the clutches of his aides, who fell on me in large numbers after I tried to ask him an unwelcome question on his way out of the hall.
On the final evening of the last Election, I attended a tightly controlled meeting addressed by Mr Cameron, hoping to get in a question about his astonishingly lavish parliamentary expenses, still largely unknown to the public.
As he left, I slipped alongside him to pursue the matter but was shouldered brusquely aside by his muscular police bodyguard, who knew perfectly well that I was no physical threat to the Tory leader but took it on himself to guard him from unwanted queries.
And this is how a lot of it has happened. The excuse of ‘security’ has enabled our political leaders to hide within a series of concentric screens and walls, until they see almost nobody but flatterers and toadies.
There is no real chance to make them sweat in public (the worthless exchanges at Prime Minister’s Questions do not count). These debates might just be such an opportunity.
I am sure that is why Mr Cameron has used every trick and dodge to avoid them. Far from breaching their impartiality, the broadcasting organisations are doing their most basic duty by trying to get him to agree to a proper adversarial clash.
Finally a snap that shows the real Dave
Modern political propaganda makes great use of faked-up pictures of unlovely combinations on the steps of Downing Street, or of men in other people’s pockets.
Well, here’s a genuine picture of a very unlovely combination at No 10 (sorry, Mrs Cameron, I don’t mean you, but if you will keep such company…) , which I had never seen before and which seems to me to tell an important truth.
Anthony Blair is by a long chalk the most universally despised politician in Britain, rightly in my view, and mainly because of the Iraq War.
Yet all the vituperation and spite of which the world is capable is aimed at Ed Miliband, who opposed the Iraq War, beat his Blairite brother for the Labour leadership and who is loathed by Mr Blair and his allies.
And the main beneficiary of this sliming of Mr Miliband is… David Cameron, who once called himself the ‘heir to Blair’, who speaks often to Mr Blair on the telephone and who has several times invited Mr Blair to Downing Street. My photograph shows an occasion in 2012 when ex-premiers gathered there to meet the Queen.
Mostly, these events are not photographed.
A ‘source’ told one journalist in 2013: ‘Cherie and Tony have been round there for drinks. Blair and Cameron get on and they like each other. He [the PM] doesn’t like Miliband or Brown, in a personal way. He is very admiring of Blair, whom he regards as a nice person and has conviction.’
I see in this picture the ghost of a rather horrible future – a grand coalition of Blairite Tory, Blairite Labour and Blairite Liberal-Democrat, none of whom can win the Election on their own, but who can together combine against all the normal people in the country.
Why Lefties love a Right-wing buffoon
Jeremy Clarkson is a Left-wing person’s idea of what a Right-wing person is like (I wish this was my own coinage, but I owe it to Andrew Platt, a contributor to my blog).
That is why the BBC have for so long been happy to give him large chunks of prime time, and why the publishing industry gives him so much space.
If Right-wingers are all foreigner-despising petrolheads who hate cyclists and think smoking is a demonstration of personal freedom, how easy they are to dismiss. Nigel Farage is a sort of political equivalent of Mr Clarkson.
The idea that Clarkson is the heroic victim of politically correct commissars is ludicrous. The petition for his reinstatement is grotesque in a world where there is so much real oppression.
If you are in the mood for signing a petition for someone who is really being persecuted, please visit change.org and sign the e-petition for the release of my friend Jason Rezaian, locked up without trial and almost incommunicado by Iran’s secret state since July last year. You can sign it here http://chn.ge/1LCNKfO
Mind the drunk trees
What is the reason for our hatred of trees? Local councils love nothing better than murdering lovely old trees in case they fall down all of a sudden.
I now see that the French government plans to massacre thousands of roadside trees because cars often collide with them.
I assume this is because the trees get drunk, rush out into the traffic and steer themselves into the cars.
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March 14, 2015
I have become an education resource
I have become part of an educational resource, in this intelligent and thoughtful analysis of the books my brother and I wrote about religion.
March 12, 2015
Political Incorrectness Gone Mad
Am I supposed to rush to the aid of Jeremy Clarkson, cruelly suspended by the left-wing politically correct BBC after a row about steak and chips? After all, the BBC is left-wing, and it is politically correct to a fault, we are all (save vegetarians and vegans, of course) in favour of steak and chips, - and Mr Clarkson is….well, what is he, exactly?
For many people, he is the embodiment of what they think of as ‘right-wing’. He is full of machismo, he is noisily patriotic in a sort of ‘we won the war’ Dambusters way, he smokes, he is rude about foreigners and he goes on and on about cars and is (I believe ) responsible for the widespread, ineradicable belief that cyclists do not pay ‘road tax’ – a belief which encourages many drivers to treat cyclists as second-class citizens.
He was, I am told, invited to Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. He is said to be a friend of David Cameron.
Well, I regard him and his opinions as a grave handicap to conservatism. I have never seen any logical reason why roads, a vast nationalised state monopoly paid for out of heavy taxation, should appeal to free market fanatics. Nor can I quite see why motor cars themselves should appeal to this sector of society. Mass-produced cars are barely profitable, the companies that make them often receive open or disguised state support. They spend most of their lives depreciating expensively at roadsides or in car parks, their costly and elaborate engines sitting idle for at least 22 hours out of every 24. It's hard to think of a better example of inefficient use of capital.
They also make us utterly dependent for our main fuel on some of the most unpleasant and fanatical regimes on the planet, who get rich and powerful thanks to our car obsession.
I suspect that these wasteful, ugly machines appeal to individualistic ‘libertarians’ because they enable them to express what they call their personalities, allowing them to be noisier, faster, more dangerous and more showy than they could be if they were not sitting in the midst of a ton of steel, glass and rubber, protected from the world by heavy locked doors, airbags, antilock-brakes, side-impact-protection and seat belts.
Actually cars and roads destroy settled societies, wreck landscapes, divide and distort cities, by subjecting non-drivers to the needs of cars and abolishing the walkable, human spaces which existed before. Once car ownership is general, it becomes obligatory.
Whatever this is, it is not conservative, any more than expressing contempt for other particular societies is conservative. If you respect your own culture, and expect to be left alone to enjoy it, then the least you can do is to show the same favour to other cultures. Patriotism doesn't consist of expressing contempt for other nations.
I know nothing about Mr Clarkson’s steak and chips incident, and I suppose we all have moments when we get angrily frustrated at the end of a long, hard day when a hoped-for pleasure is denied us. I don’t really care whether ‘Top Gear’ is transmitted or not.
But I really cannot see this as the liberal PC BBC versus the free spirit of the right, Jeremy Clarkson. If he is right wing, then I am not.
March 11, 2015
The Novels of Anne Tyler
I promised some time ago to write about the novels of Anne Tyler, having enjoyed many of them myself, and also having noticed that she has an enormous, loyal readership in both Britain and the USA. I haven’t read them all (I’ve so far failed to finish only one) but I feel a bit as if I have.
For those who haven’t ever opened any of her books, it is hard to describe the attraction. They are quiet, even stealthy. When enormous events happen, as they sometimes do, they pass as swiftly and as suddenly as such things generally do in actual life.
They are written in a limpid, unfussy English that has obviously been honed and polished with a great deal of care, proving once again the old saw that ‘it reads easy because it was writ hard’. (I am pretty certain I have read somewhere that she reads the text out loud to review it, the best test of prose there is).
The prose is so like a window-pane (Orwell’s ideal) that there is almost no effort involved in reading. The verbal music of the carefully composed stories simply draws you on, even if you are not all that interested in what is happening just at that moment. I expect many people listen to them as audio books.
They are intelligent, and assume a certain amount of intelligence, experience and wisdom in their readers. I think she expects you to recognise, in her stories, snatches of the tragi-comedy of your own life, your own stupid mistakes, wrong choices, rudeness, misjudgements, rueful recognitions of wrong paths taken.
And she is very concerned with the consequences of actions, particularly of the various desertions - of spouse by spouse, of brother by sister, of children by fathers – which are such a feature of modern life and of her books. The vulnerability of marriages is an undercurrent – in some cases they end on a whim after years of careful negotiation.
And yet most of her wrongdoers escape any real judgment. Disasters, for the most part, eventually resolve into tolerable if disappointing outcomes. There are, perhaps, too many deaths in road accidents, though perhaps in the America of her period – the early 1960s until now, this is a true reflection of life.
The dead sometimes come back, or seem to come back or are to be anticipated waiting just round a corner for a joyous yet casual reunion, all misunderstandings put aside, ‘Oh, is it really you?’ – the inconsolable loss of the bereaved spouse is a frequent theme, and causes me to doubt Ms Tyler’s claims in interviews that she does not write at all about herself, for she was herself bereaved.
In fact, I wonder if her very unusual life – home-schooled, raised by nomadic Quaker eccentrics, largely in the weird surroundings of the American South (the more I have seen of the South, the stranger I have found it), followed by marriage to an Iranian, has created that unusual thing – an American who is very American but conscious all the time of how strange Americans seem to outsiders.
It could be so. Having lived for two years in a Maryland suburb not all that different from the Baltimore districts in which she sets so much of what she writes, I can smell and feel the sweaty summer heat, hear the night-insects whirr, picture the houses at evening with the children shouting in the street and the adults sitting on the porches. The world she writes of is immediately accessible to me in that way.
But her portrayal of the way people actually talk, and even more so her account of how they actually think, goes far beyond that. There is, as I said, a lot of wisdom here and I suspect many people read these stories as a sort of 21st century gospel, cautioning them against the rages and resentments , the irretrievable revelations, that can shipwreck us and others. Why do that, when by being gentle and restrained you could avoid so much hurt? What on earth were all those quarrels about? Seen form only about 30 feet above ( a vantage point Anne Tyler sometimes seems to me to occupy) , how absurd so many of our battles seem to be.
Her characters are not rich, and often close to being poor. Their businesses or practices are failing or declining, their homes often messy. Disease strikes. Religion, despite its strong presence in American life, is usually very little help and sometimes comically useless.
And in the background, America changes. I haven’t troubled to name any individual books so far, because it seems to me you could start anywhere and still end up in the same place in a few months. I won’t even warn you against the one I didn’t finish, because you might like it. My favourite (I think) , ‘The Amateur Marriage’, is often dismissed as a failure by Tyler aficionados. I can’t think why, not least because its description of the meeting of a couple on a winter’s day in 1941 is so full of the crisp coldness of that fateful winter that you can almost feel the snow underfoot and feel the frost on your cheeks. And also so full of the naïve optimism of that time, before the real meaning of war became apparent. And also because the decay of old American urban life, and the steady flight to the suburbs which so utterly transformed that country, is constantly, movingly present in the plot.
It reminded me a bit of that neglected minor classic ‘Washington Goes to War’, by David Brinkley, which (often in the minute particulars which make so much more impact than the big things) describes the transformation of a somnolent, sweaty southern town, where the loudest sound was the slap of insects flying into car windscreens, into the hard and glittering air-conditioned capital of a warlike world empire, where money and power drone and shout too loud for anything else much to be heard.
Well, anyway, read them. They make life better than it was before, and perhaps kinder too. I can’t imagine anyone not being better for the experience.
March 9, 2015
The Whinge of Fate - Intolerance, Scaremongering, Me, the BBC and Publishing
Actually, I quite like appearing on the BBC’s ‘The Big Questions’. The production staff are efficient and friendly. The presenter, Nicky Campbell, researches his brief carefully, tries hard to be fair, and has a good sense of humour. The topics for discussion are usually interesting. And in my experience the audience at home is engaged.
But yesterday’s programme brought me a series of really odd experiences. You can watch the whole thing here for the next few days :
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b055pqdn/the-big-questions-series-8-episode-9
It began with an argument about immigration in which Saira Grant, of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, advanced the exploded claim that the current wave of mass immigration is normal, and a continuation of a long process. This is not the case, and can be shown not to be the case by simple research. Yet people still say it. It’s also hard to argue that we somehow *need* huge numbers of migrants. There are, currently, 955,000 16-24 year-olds in this country not in education, employment or training (plus plenty more on debt-financed university courses of, er, varying value) . If these people really cannot do the jobs now being done by migrants, or are not wanted by employers, why is that?
Might there be something wrong with our supposedly wondrous, ten-times-reformed school system? Or with the supposedly wonderful anything-goes family life we have adopted? Perish the thought. Only grouches, golden-age merchants, misery-guts and inveterate pessimists think these are real problems. Everyone else knows that life here has never been so wonderful. (NB**$£$*! Sarcasm warning**&%£”$!)
Nor are we especially short of young people. If we stopped wholesale abortion on demand, we’d have an extra 180,000 live births a year. Migrants don’t, by and large, work for the NHS out of selfless virtue, but because they are paid to do so. Just like everyone else.
This stuff, happily, was counterbalanced by the responsible, fact-based and serious arguments of David Goodhart, a fully-paid-up member of the liberal elite who actually researched the issue for an excellent book ‘The British Dream: Successes and failures of Post-War Immigration’ . Anyone who is remotely concerned about this subject should read it. As he showed in his contributions, he is also very well-informed about the crucial labour-market effects of this policy.
We then had an American History Professor from Manchester who said Mr Goodhart was wrong, and added ‘Every day I get hassled because I am an immigrant’. I have written to her to ask what form this daily hassle takes.
After I managed to get a (much-interrupted) say, Ms Grant spoke of intolerance in ‘headlines in papers like yours’.
As I was actually in the midst of challenging her on this (about 9 minutes 40 seconds into the broadcast) she shifted her accusation from ‘intolerance’ to ‘scaremongering’. The speed of thought is an interesting thing, especially in TV studios, where it can slow down to nothing under pressure, but I can assure you that I had decided to protest against this remark before she had finished speaking. I’ll explain why this matters.
First, although I don’t write for that paper, I’m more than happy to defend the Daily Mail’s coverage of mass immigration. One man’s ‘scaremongering’ is another man’s responsible reporting. Mass immigration has revolutionised this country in the last 20 years and any newspaper which had ignored this truth or minimised it would have been deeply irresponsible. More to the point, it has never been properly debated or discussed before the electorate, and until recently has been largely ignored by major broadcasters.
I would say that the Mail on Sunday’s sister paper, the Daily Mail has in general been more correct about immigration into this country, sooner and more accurately, than any other daily paper, by miles. It has done so despite being repeatedly smeared as ‘racist’ by its critics for simply stating the truth.
But those who think of this as ‘scaremongering’ will not be shifted from their view by me. The word ‘scaremongering’ contains so many presuppositions, shared by people such as Ms Grant and not shared by me, that it has no objective use here. They don’t like people drawing attention to the huge, unprecedented levels of immigration, presumably in case something is done to stop it. I think it’s a necessary duty. These diverging opinions stem from different views of good, bad, right, wrong, patriotism, progress, benefit and harm.
But what of intolerance, the thing of which my newspaper was being publicly accused? Now , that is a different matter. Who doubts that there are intolerant people in this country? Some of them contribute here, much as I wish they wouldn’t . We recently saw some football oafs in Paris shaming themselves in this way (and people wonder why I dislike this ugly, spiteful phoney game and its hangers-on). In my travels round modern Britain, I have experienced intolerance of one migrant group by another.
But in what way has any headline in my newspaper fostered or encouraged intolerance?
The claim that drawing attention to migration of itself fosters intolerance may be made. Well, I don’t think this is true and know of no evidence to suggest that it is true. And until I am shown that it is true, by reputable research, I will regard the suggestion as a crude attempt to justify censorship of the facts.
The next bizarre fallout from this programme was a tweet by the publisher and LBC presenter Iain Dale, the man who recently said in public that he would have published my book ‘Short Breaks in Mordor’ (which my previous publisher had emphatically said they did not want to bring out, and which an agent whom I have successfully employed in the past brushed aside), if only I had offered it to him.
I then *did* offer it to him, and he instantly retreated at high speed, blustering, saying that its existence as an e-book somehow made this impossible. I then sent him an outline for another book which I would like to write, about the Second World War, and he wrote back to me to say he wasn’t interested.
He likes to jeer at me when I complain about my problems with broadcasting and publishing. Of course, I do complain about these things, because they are true and interesting. I do not think I am ‘whingeing’, because I have, happily, done quite well in my career. I have worked in my chosen trade for more than 40 years, consorted with the mighty, penetrated the White House and the Kremlin, travelled to nearly 60 countries and lived in Moscow and Washington. I have been in grave physical danger and have survived. I have successfully published several substantial books. I have made a number of TV and radio programmes (one of the latter, ‘The Special Relationship’ on Radio 4, gained me unexpected independent praise). I jointly presented, for several hugely enjoyable and exhilarating years, a successful live Talk Radio show on current affairs. I have been named as Columnist of the Year, and shortlisted as Foreign Reporter of the Year. I was awarded the Orwell Prize for journalism. I once narrowly escaped being hired by the BBC as John Simpson’s Number Two.
In the light of this, it strikes me as odd that I have certain difficulties, especially with publishing and broadcasting, because my opinions are not acceptable to the people who dominate and direct both these trades.
I think my case on the publishing industry has recently been made for me. Johann Hari and I are individuals of similar prominence. Both of us have published books on the drug legalisation controversy, as it happens through the same reputable London publisher, Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury does not permit badly-written or ill-researched books to go out under its imprint. Amusingly, both books express doubts about the physical nature of ‘addiction’.
Mine was barely reviewed at all, and two of those reviews were tirades of abuse. It was hard to find in the few bookshops that stocked it. An invitation for me to discuss the book at the Hay Festival, the Glastonbury of the book world, was first made, then abruptly withdrawn without explanation.
Mr Hari’s book has been sympathetically and often generously reviewed in papers and magazines that ignored or excoriated mine. It is prominently displayed in the windows and on the front tables of all the bookshops I have visited in recent weeks.
He has been invited to the Hay festival , and I have (amusingly) been invited to be his supporting act. If I had tried to set up a controlled experiment to prove my point, I could not have done much better.
As for broadcasting, I have explained (not that it does any good) that simply appearing on TV and radio are not the same as presenting programmes on them, and that the way in which I am treated is influenced by the BBC’s hostility to my opinions, itself wonderfully demonstrated by my treatment on ‘What the Papers Say’ and ‘Feedback’, treatment so bad that the BBC later worked quite hard to make it up to me.
I have decided not to make public issues out of the sudden unexplained last-minute veto on a plan for me to make a TV documentary about grammar schools, or on one specific occasion in which I was vetoed from regular appearances on a particularly desirable radio programme, also without explanation and against the wishes of the programme’s actual editor. The story of my attempt to become an occasional presenter of the Radio 4 programme ‘A Point of View’ after this slot was awarded to Will Self and the former editor of ‘Marxism Today’, Martin Jacques, and the tale of the hilarious upshot of my efforts, are best left for a long winter evening.
Some years ago, I wrote this (rather good) explanation of my difficulties for the ‘New Statesman’
http://www.newstatesman.com/2009/08/labour-party-bbc-conservative
Suffice it to say that one critic managed to claim that this too was ‘whingeing’ about not getting on the BBC.
But this brings us round again to Mr Iain Dale, who Tweeted sarcastically yesterday morning : Oh look! Peter Hitchens is on the BBC again, for the 2nd time in a fortnight. What a travesty it is that they never have him on!’
To which I replied by asking him when and where I had ever said that I am ‘never’ invited on the BBC (The distinguished journalist Mehdi Hasan similarly claimed I had complained of being ‘ignored’ by the BBC, which of course I haven’t done, because the BBC don’t ignore me).
To which this noted trader in words, publisher and national broadcaster, responded : ‘Oh dear Peter. You constantly complain that you don't get invited onto BBC shows. Don't try to split hairs. Won't wash.’
Splitting hairs? Accuracy and truth in attribution are splitting hairs? Hmph. It is possible, of course, to think this. But I am not sure people in Mr Dale’s position should take this view.
Actually, I have in fact never said that the BBC ‘never ‘ have me on. It would be a stupid thing to say. They started having me on back in the early 1990s. In the years before the Iraq war dealt a grave blow to my broadcasting career, I could have papered an entire wall with passes to various BBC buildings, mostly for midnight trysts with Radio 5 live rewarded by cheques for strange sums such £17-43 and £24-14. But the Iraq war confused things terribly. Moral and social conservatives were ‘bad’. Opponents of the Iraq war were ‘good'. I was both. It did not compute, invitations dried up all over the place.
Nor do I ‘constantly’ complain that I don’t get invited on to BBC shows. I don’t do this because it would be silly to do so, given that I do get invited on to BBC shows, more frequently than most people, though not as often as I would like, seldom as a presenter (which a left-wing journalist of my standing would do far more often) , and *never* as a regular presenter.
Just thought I’d mention it.
March 8, 2015
The Great EU Disaster Film : Bill Emmott Hits Back
Some of you might like to see this interesting defence of the ‘Great European Union Disaster Movie’ by one of its makers, Bill Emmott:
One small note. Mr Emmott says : ‘Peter Hitchens even claimed that his own paper is pro-EU (as part of a claim that no mainstream British paper has campaigned against the EU, hence the public are poorly informed). It certainly didn't feel that way when on both Sunday and Monday we and the BBC were monstered in the Daily Mail for the film.'
I didn't 'claim' anything (this verb is generally used to express the writer's incredulity about what follows, and is one of the favourite weapons of the allegedly 'impartial' person who wishes to express an opinion without obviously doing so.'Insist' is another such word).
I said, which is quite true, that no major British newspaper favours a British exit from the EU. ‘Even your own?’ asked Mr Emmott , to which I replied, accurately, ‘Yes’. The MoS is certainly highly critical of the EU, but I think that if it had declared itself in favour of leaving the EU, I should have noticed. So to say what I said is not (how shall I put this?) *exactly* the same as saying that the Mail on Sunday is ‘pro-EU’. There are many positions between ‘pro-EU’ and pro-exit’, as who should know better than I having moved over the years from the one to the other? The fact remains that if the famous referendum ever takes place, which has always seemed remote to me, the British media will overwhelmingly favour our staying in, as they did in 1975.
What's really criminal? The way our 'leaders' let thugs walk free
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
The crevasse between people and politicians is matched by a bottomless chasm between official figures and the truth about life in modern Britain.
Like all ruling castes in the grip of dogma, the Government responds to trouble by pretending it doesn’t exist.
There’s an economic boom that leaves most people feeling poorer, and lots of new jobs that turn out to be empty self-employment.
There’s a massacre of unborn babies that conceals the utter collapse of sexual restraint and responsibility. Even the dwindling marriage figures are artificially boosted by people faking wedlock to get citizenship.
There are schools whose victims walk away dazed after 11 years in full-time ‘education’, barely able to read or count the sheaves of alleged qualifications with which they have been issued.
Some of them are then persuaded to go deep into debt to attend grandiose ‘universities’ which will at least keep them out of the jobless figures for another three years.
And then there’s crime. The simplest way to reduce this is to decide that lots of crimes aren’t crimes any more, so the police stop trying to prevent them and they become normal.Then, you fiddle the figures – until the fiddles are exposed.
Now, a new form of deception is being employed. It is called ‘Out Of Court Disposal’, and it’s just a way of magically making crime disappear by not doing anything to the people who commit it.
In some police areas almost half of crimes are dealt with in this way. The lowest figure is 26 per cent – a minimum of a quarter of all reported crime, swept under the carpet and unpunished, throughout the country.
Generally that means the transgressor gets a ‘caution’ or some other vacuous non-penalty. More than 7,000 of the offences written off in this offhand way last year involved violence. There were 82 robberies and 20 rapes.
Even the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, a body so decayed in mind and force that it recently listened with rapt attention to the ‘evidence’ on drugs of the supposed comedian Russell Brand, recognises that 30 per cent of these outcomes are ‘inappropriate’, that is to say, utterly inadequate for the crime involved.
The truth is that, if the police and courts tried to enforce the laws of England as they stand, we would need about a million police officers, hundreds of new courts and a Gulag-sized penal colony in which to house the resulting prisoners.
The whole thing has been out of control for years. The poorer you are, the more you will know this. The closer you are to the political elite, the less you will know it. It is only when the drug-addled robbers begin hammering on the front doors of the elite that they will stop pretending this is a ‘moral panic’ and recognise that there is something wrong.
Well done in China William - now go and shake hands with Vladimir Putin
Prince William, quite rightly, has been consorting with the bloodstained tyrants of China, still up to their unapologetic armpits in gore from the Tiananmen Square massacre, and still cramming critics into an enormous unjust empire of prison camps, the Laogai.
We have to deal with these people because that is what the world is like.
Similarly, we maintain our alliance in Nato with Turkey. That wildly corrupt country’s increasingly erratic President Erdogan persecutes and imprisons his opponents, and has just moved into a megalomaniac 1,000-room palace in Ankara, costing £400 million and 30 times the size of the White House.
It contains a special laboratory in which five experts analyse President Erdogan’s meals for suspicious substances, a 21st-Century version of the food-tasters of ancient times.
In light of this, how can we get so hoity-toity about President Putin of Russia? His crimes are undoubted, but our faked-up moral outrage is as absurd as Mr Erdogan’s palace.
Alliances, royal visits and trade missions for some despots, sanctions and sermons for Mr Putin. It makes no sense.
You’re being fooled, as you were over Iraq 12 years ago. Please don’t be.
Yet another attack on your pension pot
Gordon Brown was rightly loathed for his state-sponsored raid on the pension savings of Britain’s thrifty classes.
Well, who would you like to blame for the latest version of the same thing – six years of state-imposed flat interest rates that have cost the country’s savers £130 billion?
This vast theft of cash from the careful and responsible will mean a pinched old age for many of its victims, who foolishly thought they lived under a government that supported and protected people like them.
Don't fall for Cameron's school con
Gove and Cameron have both turned their backs on having academically selective schools in every town
How strangely our attitudes change.
When Anthony Blair got his sons into an exceptional, elite state school, much of the world howled in derision.
He pretended to support comprehensive schooling, which he knew in his heart was a failure. And then he pretended he wasn’t pretending.
Now, by some strange alchemy, Tory politicians are doing the same thing, and are being praised for it.
David Cameron and Michael Gove have both turned their backs on the one reform of state schools that would put good education back in the reach of the poor – academically selective grammar schools in every town.
Yet both have sent children to a school that selects instead through the public embrace of faith.
Yet is it Christian for rich professionals to fight with sharp elbows for sought-after places in rare good state schools?
Grey Coat Hospital is a comprehensive only in the sense that Number 10 Downing Street is an inner-city terraced house.
Is it so wonderfully egalitarian, to send your child to a school whose uniform must be bought from a Chelsea department store, and where fewer than one in six pupils qualifies for free school meals
I found out a few months ago that Nick Clegg is astonishingly ignorant about the drug laws in this country.
He really believes that the police cruelly persecute drug users (if only they did).
Ignorance of this kind is wilful. The truth is readily available. He remains ignorant because he does not want to know. Why?
As evidence piles up that cannabis is a dangerous drug, those like Mr Clegg and the businessman Richard Branson should be incessantly asked what their interest is in backing the risky cause of decriminalisation. It is certainly not in the interest of the young people of this country.
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March 5, 2015
A Review of 'Frontline Ukraine' by Richard Sakwa
You might have thought that a serious book on the Ukraine crisis, written by a distinguished academic in good clear English, and published by a reputable house, might have gained quite a bit of attention at a time when that country is at the centre of many people’s concerns.
But some readers here now understand that publishing, and especially the reviewing of books, are not the simple marketplaces of ideas which we would all wish them to be.
And so, as far as a I can discover, this book :
‘Frontline Ukraine : Crisis in the Borderlands , by Richard Sakwa. Published by I.B.Tauris
…though it came out some months ago, has only been reviewed in one place in Britain, the Guardian newspaper, by Jonathan Steele, the first-rate foreign correspondent whose rigour and enterprise (when we were both stationed in Moscow) quite persuaded me to overlook his former sympathy for the left-wing cause ( most notably expressed in a 1977 book ‘Socialism with a German Face’ about the old East Germany, which seemed to me at the time to be ah, excessively kind).
Mr Steele’s review can be read here
I have said elsewhere that I would myself be happier if the book were more hostile to my position on this conflict. Sometimes I feel that it is almost too good to be true, to have my own conclusions confirmed so powerfully, and I would certainly like to see the book reviewed by a knowledgeable proponent of the NATO neo-conservative position. Why hasn't it been?
But even so I recommend it to any reader of mine who is remotely interested in disentangling the reality from the knotted nets of propaganda in which it is currently shrouded.
Like George Friedman’s interesting interview in the Moscow newspaper ‘Kommersant’ ( you can read it here http://russia-insider.com/en/2015/01/20/2561 ) , the book has shifted my own view.
I have tended to see the *basic* dispute in Ukraine as being yet another outbreak of the old German push into the east, carried out under the new, nice flag of the EU, a liberal, federative empire in which the vassal states are tactfully allowed limited sovereignty as long as they don’t challenge the fundamental politico-economic dominance of Germany. I still think this is a strong element in the EU’s thrust in this direction.
But I have tended to neglect another feature of the new Europe, also set out in Adam Tooze’s brilliant ‘The Deluge’ – the firm determination of the USA to mould Europe in its own image (a determination these days expressed mainly through the EU and NATO).
I should have paid more attention to the famous words ‘F*** the EU!’ spoken by the USA’s Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, in a phone call publicised to the world by (presumably) Russian intelligence. The EU isn't half as enthusiastic about following the old eastern road as is the USA. Indeed, it's a bit of a foot-dragger.
The driving force in this crisis is the USA, with the EU being reluctantly tugged along behind. And if Mr Friedman is right (and I think he is) , the roots of it lie in Russia’s decision to obstruct the West’s intervention in Syria.
Perhaps the key to the whole thing (rather dispiriting in that it shows the USA really hasn’t learned anything important from the Iraq debacle) is the so-called ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine’ of 1992, named after the neo-con’s neo-con, Paul Wolfowitz, and summed up by Professor Sakwa (p.211) thus: ‘The doctrine asserted that the US should prevent “any country from dominating any region of the world that might be a springboard to threaten unipolar and exclusive US dominance"’.
Note how neatly this meshes with what George Friedman says in his interview.
Now, there are dozens of fascinating things in Professor Sakwa’s book, and my copy is scored with annotations and references. I could spend a week summarising it for you. (By the way, the Professor himself is very familiar with this complex region, and might be expected, thanks to his Polish ancestry, to take a different line. His father was in the Polish Army in 1939, escaped to Hungary in the chaos of defeat, and ended up serving in Anders’s Second Corps, fighting with the British Army at El Alamein, Benghazi, Tobruk and then through Italy via Monte Cassino. Then he was in exile during the years of Polish Communism. Like Vaclav Klaus, another critic of current western policy, Professor Sakwa can hardly be dismissed as a naif who doesn't understand about Russia, or accused of beinga 'fellow-travlelr' or 'useful idiot'.
He is now concerned at ‘how we created yet another crisis’ (p xiii) .
But I would much prefer that you read it for yourself, and so will have to limit my references quite sternly.
There are good explanations of the undoubted anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathies of some strands in Ukrainian politics. Similar nastiness, by the way, is to be found loose in some of the Baltic States. I mention this n because it justified classifying the whole movement as ‘Neo-Nazi’, which is obviously false, but because it tells us something very interesting about the nature of nationalism and Russophobia in this part of the world. No serious or fair description of the crisis can ignore it. Yet, in the portrayal of Russia as Mordor, and the Ukraine as Utopia, western media simply leave out almost everything about Ukraine that doesn’t appeal to their audiences, the economic near collapse, the Judophobia and Russophobia (the derogatory word ‘Moskal’, for instance, in common use), the worship of the dubious (this word is very generous, I think) Stepan Bandera by many of the Western ultra-nationalists, the violence against dissenters from the Maidan view ( see http://rt.com/news/ukraine-presidential-candidates-attacked-516/). The survival and continued power of Ukraine’s oligarchs after a revolution supposedly aimed at cleaning up the country is also never mentioned. We all know about Viktor Yanukovych;s tasteless mansion, but the book provides some interesting details on President Poroshenko’s residence (it looks rather like the White House) , which I have not seen elsewhere.
The detailed description of how and why the Association Agreement led to such trouble is excellent. I had not realised that, since the Lisbon Treaty, alignment with NATO is an essential part of EU membership (and association) – hence the unavoidable political and military clauses in the agreement.
So is the filleting of the excuse-making and apologetics of those who still pretend that Yanukovych was lawfully removed from office: the explicit threat of violence from the Maidan, the failure to muster the requisite vote, the presence of armed men during the vote, the failure to follow the constitutional rules (set beside the available lawful deal, overridden by the Maidan, under which Yanukovych would have faced early elections and been forced to make constitutional changes) .
Then here we have Ms Nuland again, boasting of the $5 billion (eat your heart out, the EU, with your paltry £300 million) http://www.state.gov/p/eur/rls/rm/2013/dec/218804.htm which the USA has ’invested in Ukraine. ‘Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the United States has supported Ukrainians as they build democratic skills and institutions, as they promote civic participation and good governance, all of which are preconditions for Ukraine to achieve its European aspirations. We’ve invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.
It’s worth noting that in this speech, in December 2013, she still envisages the supposedly intolerable Yanukovych as a possible partner.
Other points well made are the strange effect of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, which has created the very tension against which it now seeks to reassure border nations, by encouraging them, too, to join, the non-binding nature of the much-trumpeted Budapest memorandum, the lack of coverage of the ghastly events in Odessa, the continuing lack of a proper independent investigation into the Kiev mass shootings in February 2014 .
Also examined is the Russian fear of losing Sevastopol, an entirely justified fear given that President Yushchenko had chosen to say in Georgia, during the war of August 2008, that Russia’s basing rights in the city would end in 2017. The ‘disappearance; of the ‘Right Sector’ and ‘Svoboda’ vote in recent elections is explained by their transfer to the radical Party led by Oleh Lyashko.
Professor Sakwa also explores Russia’s behaviour in other border disputes , with Norway and China, in which it has been far form aggressive. And he points out that Ukraine’s nationalists have made their country’s life far more difficult by their rigid nationalist approach to the many citizens of that country who, while viewing themselves as Ukrainian, do not share the history or passions of the ultra-nationalists in the West.
Likewise he warns simple-minded analysts that the conflict in the East of Ukraine is not desired by Russia's elite, which does not wish to be drawn into another foreign entanglement (all Russian strategists recall the disastrous result of the Afghan intervention). But it may be desired by Russian ultra-nationalists, not necessarily controllable.
He points out that Russia has not, as it did in Crimea, intervened decisively in Eastern Ukraine to ensure secession. And he suggests that those Russian nationalists are acting in many cases independently of Moscow in the Donetsk and Lugansk areas. Putin seeks to control them and limit them, but fears them as well.
In general, the book is an intelligent, well-researched and thoughtful attempt to explain the major crisis of our time. Anybody, whatever he or she might think of the issue, would benefit from reading it. It is shocking that it is not better known, and I can only assume that its obscurity, so far is caused by the fact that it does not fit the crude propaganda narrative of the ‘Putin is Hitler’ viewpoint.
How odd that we should all have learned so little from the Iraq debacle. This time the ‘WMD’ are non-existent Russian plans to expand and/or attack the Baltic states. And of course the misrepresentation of both sides in the Ukrainian controversy is necessary for the portrayal of Putin as Hitler and his supporters as Nazis, and opponents of belligerence as Nazi fellow-travellers. The inconvenient fact , that if there are Nazis in this story , they tend to be on the ‘good’ side must be ignored. Let us hope the hysteria subsides before it carries us into another stupid war.
He doesn't Think Putin Did It, Either....
I have argued in private and in public with Roger Boyes, a former East Europe correspondent of the Times of great distinction, on the subject of Russia, the Ukraine and our attitude towards Vladimir Putin. It would be true to say that we disagree on almost every particular.
So I think I am entitled to draw readers’ attention to his article on the Nemtsov murder in ‘The Times’ of London today . I cannot link to it, because it is behind a paywall, nor quote extensively from it, so you must seek it out for yourselves. But I think the ‘Putin must have done it’ faction will not enjoy it.
It is a thoughtful article based on Roger’s extensive experience, especially in Poland, and it rings pretty true to me.
The crucial; quotation is this ; ‘I don't think he [Putin] killed Boris Nemtsov and I think he has seen in that assassination a hint of his own melancholy future.’
I shall have a bit more to say on the Ukraine issue in the next few days.
Report shows Selective Schools are Better Shock. Bigger Shock is - they're Illegal
As the Tory party dithers on the edge of another PR stunt – the possible, maybe, one day, who knows, keep ‘em guessing, perhaps. maybe, sort of, creation of a new, or rather satellite grammar school, seconds before a general election will almost certainly lead to the cancellation of it (if anyone is really fooled by this they deserve everything they get) - the Guardian publishes this story.
What it says is what everyone already knows, what all wealthy and/or powerful people recognise when they find schools for their own children (the schools they choose are always selective though usually secretly so) , but which official education policy refuses to address – that comprehensive education is by its nature second-rate, and that academically selective schools are by their nature better nurseries of talent.
Two key quotations : ‘thousands of highly performing primary pupils are not realising their early promise when they move to secondary school,… and ‘students with the same primary school performance who attended selective or grammar schools were far more likely to achieve the highest grades at GCSE – 57% compared with 32% in non-selective schools.’
Of course, the Guardian put in their own caveat, because it hates selection, but it’s much to the credit of that newspaper that they carried the story at all.
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