Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 206

A Challenge

I had thought the link below was written by Peter Lilley but I was mistaken. It's interesting anyway, and I shall respond to it as promised.

I have just come across this interesting blog posting from Peter Lilley, one of the few Conservative MPs prepared to think, especially about the Green Cult. 

Mr Lilley is civilized in debate, and asks a reasonable question in what follows:

 

http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/is-peter-hitchens-keynesian.html?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=PeterLilleyMP

 

I will reply next week, if time permits, but soon, anyway. 

 

 

A Challenge from Peter Lilley

I have just come across this interesting blog posting from Peter Lilley, one of the few Conservative MPs prepared to think, especially about the Green Cult. 

Mr Lilley is civilized in debate, and asks a reasonable question in what follows:

 

http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/is-peter-hitchens-keynesian.html?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=PeterLilleyMP

 

I will reply next week, if time permits, but soon, anyway. 

 

 

Think Greece is in a mess? Wait till the UK's debt mountain explodes in our face

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

Would we cope with misery as well as the Greeks? If our great fat cushion of state-backed jobs, welfare payments, tax credits and easy loans were whipped away one morning, how would we get on?

I think we would do very badly. In Greece, the suddenly poor and destitute turned to their strong extended families.

And if those families had not taken them in and supported them, there would have been nothing else. Fortunately, they did.

This country doesn’t have strong extended families any more. In many cases, it doesn’t really have families at all.

In too many places, it has gangs instead. And those that survive are weakest just where they would be needed most in a crisis – among the poor.

This country lives on the edge of serious disorder. The misnamed ‘riots’ of August 2011 were nothing of the kind.

They had no political pretext, no wider aim. I suspect many thought of joining in, but didn’t quite.

They followed the realisation by a large number of people, in a period of good weather, that the forces of order were weak, absent and afraid. Many of them were laughing as they stole, wrecked and burned.

Mostly, they turned on shops rather than private homes or individuals. But this seems to have been a matter of chance.

There were one or two especially frightening moments when the lawless mob came into direct contact with the cosseted middle class, who hid from their hooded attackers under restaurant tables while the kitchen staff, ready to defend their livelihoods with force, beat off the assault with rolling pins.

And almost all of the looters got away with it. It was only the dim stragglers who were caught and whom I watched shuffling through the courts in the weeks afterwards, most of them with criminal records nearly as long as a Hilary Mantel historical novel.

They were baffled to find that, after years of cautions, unpaid fines, suspended sentences, community service and limp rebukes, something might actually now happen to them.

Actually, not much did in the end.

That’s bad enough. But what about the rest of us? Generations of all classes have been taught to expect a comfortable, well-fed existence, a reliable safety net.

How much privation would it take to turn us into beggars, then looters and food rioters? I ask this because we are much closer to a Greek-style crisis than we think.

Our debts, national and personal, are huge. We can never pay them off. Our trade imbalance is just as bad. Our recovery is based entirely on a house-price balloon that could burst in a moment.

The main effort of the Government is to avoid any shocks until the Election is over – but what then?

I feel for the Greeks. I don’t blame them for refusing to endure more collective punishment, though they were foolish – as we are now – to let politicians lead them into a swamp of debt.

But I wonder whether, not far hence, it will be the Greeks who are sympathising with us.

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The riddle behind our Gaddafi disaster

Last week, the BBC rightly but cruelly replayed David Cameron’s ludicrous words from September 2011, when he went to Tripoli to say: ‘Your city was an inspiration to the world as you overthrew a dictator and chose freedom.’

Now it’s an inspiration to nobody. He can’t go there to say so, because it’s too dangerous. Why isn’t he in more trouble over his active destruction of an entire country? It’s all very strange. 

The Gaddafi regime fell because Mr Cameron lent the RAF to various gangs of Libyan jihadis (about whom we knew nothing). 

But less than a year before, in October 2010, Henry Bellingham, a Tory Minister, was referring to Gaddafi as ‘Brother Leader’ at a summit in Tripoli.

About the same time, another Minister, Alistair Burt, told the Libyan-British Business Council that Libya had ‘turned a corner’ which ‘has paved the way for us to begin working together again’. 

What changed? Could it be the same forces which decreed that flags in Britain should fly at half-mast to mark the death of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia? 

The Saudis always hated Libya’s dictator because he had overthrown a dynasty very like their own.

Do we still have an independent foreign policy, or is it governed by another, richer country?

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Robots are no match for the most beautiful machines of all...

Some of the best films of modern times feature lifelike robots. 

The latest, Ex Machina, starring Alicia Vikander, left, is a clever and cunning mystery story which I’ll say as little about as possible in case it spoils the ending.

But, as I discovered on a recent visit to a Tokyo robotics expert, we are far, far away from developing anything remotely like a human consciousness, let alone a human ability to move limbs and experience pain, pleasure or grief.

The real wonder in our midst is the astonishing complexity, beauty and mystery of the human body, and the insoluble puzzle of where and what consciousness is. 

We fantasise about creating human-like robots because it helps us close our minds to some of the strongest evidence for the existence of God – an idea we dislike.

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My local police force, Thames Valley, has recently admitted (thanks to a Freedom of Information request) that 54 of its officers, some of them specials, have criminal convictions, including for burglary, arson, drug possession, actual bodily harm, criminal damage and computer misuse. 

I expect other forces have similar numbers. Are the police really so short of recruits that they cannot find people without such pasts? 

Forgiving and forgetting is all very well, but these are the people who come into the homes of burglary victims, and whom we trust absolutely with highly personal details.

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Those who rely on the medical profession’s wisdom should note that the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence now says 1.2 million people may have been misdiagnosed with asthma. 

I’m glad someone has noticed the absurd keenness of doctors to classify healthy children as asthmatics. 

How long before they notice that something similar may be happening with some other fashionable ailments, such as the non-existent complaint ‘ADHD’? 

Or will the fact that huge drug contracts rely on these subjective diagnoses protect them from watchdogs? 

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Have you noticed that the people most excited about women bishops in the Church of England are those who don’t believe in God and never go near a church? 

Personally, I couldn’t care less what sex a bishop is. I’d like it if they believed in God, preferred poetry and beauty to banality, and didn’t mix up Christianity with socialism. 

Perhaps I should start a campaign.

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A slightly truncated recording of a debate about Russia

The Cambridge Union ( where I did not speak last night for reasons I have explained) has now posted a recording of a previous debate in which I took part – about Vladimir Putin. For some reason, my opening remarks have vanished, and what was already an extremely brief speech (time seemed to run out very fast on the night, but not as fast as this ) is even briefer. As the final speaker for my side, I start at around 39 minutes (the previous speaker is cut off as abruptly as I begin)

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFd1K9FGPR0

 

I was right to stay away from the Cambridge Debate on Church Establishment

Here is a report from the student newspaper ‘Varsity’ on last night’s Cambridge Union debate on Disestablishing the Church of England.

 

I think it vindicates my decision to pull out of the debate on the grounds that he would patronise and trivialise the Church. He said it was ‘fun and sweet’ and a ‘fantastic nonsense’. Mr Fry even said he wouldn’t mind which way the vote went ( his celebrity power did not, in fact,  bring victory to the pro-Establishment side).

 

http://www.varsity.co.uk/news/8156

 

A Review of 'Bitter Lake', Adam Curtis's new BBC film

Years ago I first read of the extraordinary meeting between Franklin Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud (also known as AbdulAziz) of Saudi Arabia. This took place soon after the Yalta summit which handed much of Europe to Stalin (and not long before Roosevelt’s death,  in Warm Springs, Georgia with his mistress, Lucy Rutherfurd, at his side).

 

There’s a full account of this momentous meeting here:

 

http://www.ameu.org/getattachment/51ee4866-95c1-4603-b0dd-e16d2d49fcbc/The-Day-FDR-Met-Saudi-Arabia-Ibn-Saud.aspx

 

Note that it mentions in passing Winston Churchill’s belated, ill-mannered and failed attempt to emulate the meeting soon afterwards (Churchill knowingly ignored the King’s loathing of smoking and drinking, and alienated him in other ways. The more cunning Roosevelt took great care to please the King, and so got what eh wanted ) . Churchill’s meeting went wrong in every conceivable respect.

 

There are also several pictures, and some colour film, of the Bitter Lake Summit. Roosevelt looks close to death. Ibn Saud looks as a King should look, immensely self-possessed and full of unquestioned power.

 

The fascinating, picturesque and momentous event, which ought to be world-famous, is almost entirely unknown. The embarking of the King at Jeddah with his entourage (including an astrologer),  the carpeting of the decks of the destroyer USS Murphy, and the erection of a tent among her torpedo tubes and gun turrets, the corralling of sheep at her stern, the transfer of the monarch by bosun’s chair to Roosevelt’s ship, the heavy cruiser USS Quincy, are all wonderful enough anyway.

 

But the subject matter of the meeting is even better. First, there are the beginnings of US military protection for Saudi Arabia in return for American dominance of the Saudi oilfields (which had begun to flow only in 1938 and which the US oil companies had penetrated in competition with the then powerful British Empire and its oil interests). Then there is the King’s absolute refusal to countenance American support for Jewish settlement in what would soon be Israel.

 

Roosevelt completely accepted this, and wrote to Ibn Saud soon afterwards:

 

 

 

‘GREAT AND GOOD FRIEND:

I have received the communication which Your Majesty sent me under date of March 10, 1945, in which you refer to the question of Palestine and to the continuing interest of the Arabs in current developments affecting that country.

I am gratified that Your Majesty took this occasion to bring your views on this question to my attention and I have given the most careful attention to the statements which you make in your letter. I am also mindful of the memorable conversation which we had not so long ago and in the course of which I had an opportunity to obtain so vivid an impression of Your Majesty’s sentiments on this question.

Your Majesty will recall that on previous occasions I communicated to you the attitude of the American Government toward Palestine and made clear our desire that no decision be taken with respect to the basic situation in that country without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews. Your Majesty will also doubtless recall that during our recent conversation I assured you that I would take no action, in my capacity as Chief of the Executive Branch of this Government, which might prove hostile to the Arab people.

It gives me pleasure to renew to Your Majesty the assurances which you have previously received regarding the attitude of my Government and my own, as Chief Executive, with regard to the question of Palestine and to inform you that the policy of this Government in this respect is unchanged.

I desire also at this time to send you my best wishes for Your Majesty’s continued good health and for the welfare of your people.

Your Good Friend,

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT’

 

Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman,  would later override this by recognising Israel in 1948, and committing the USA to its support.  His decision is believed to have been based on electoral considerations. The tension between the two positions has endured in US policy ever since.

 

So in many ways the foundations were laid for the modern Middle East, the overpowering of a failing British empire by an ambitious America, a contradiction at the heart of American policy between its Saudi alliance and its friendship for the Zionist project, all floating upon a sea of oil.

 

So I knew I had come to the right place when I noted that the meeting provided the title and the main opening scene of Adam Curtis’s astonishing new documentary ‘Bitter Lake’ (the Roosevelt-Ibn Saud meeting took place on the Great Bitter Lake, part of the Suez Canal) .

 

Anyone interested in this occasion must have an unconventional (and therefore interesting) approach to postwar history. He must be able to tell the difference between what was important and what was famous.

 

And so it proves. This programme has never been and, so far as I know, never will be shown on the BBC as such . But it is , rather oddly, available on the BBC iplayer . I am told this was not the result of any BBC rejection of the idea, but a bit of enterprise on the part of the person in charge of iplayer, who sees it as a possible platform for original programming ( and who also doesn’t mind Mr Curtis’s. ah, unusual approach to film-making.

 

I do urge anyone who can to watch it. It has several marvellous moments, perhaps the best being a British cultural envoy trying to explain Marcel Duchamp’s alleged art ( a urinal) to a group of Afghans, all part of our ludicrous attempt to ‘civilise’ this ancient country, something the West (and then the USSR) has been trying to do, with disastrous results, since the Americans built the canals of Helmand after World War Two. At least Britain’s 19th-century interventions were honest bits of colonialist piracy, shamelessly self-interested.

 

The thing that has marked all these interventions has been the outsiders’ utter failure to understand the country.

 

The simple, devastating explanation of how and why Britain’s Helmand military intervention went so completely wrong from the beginning- despite its good intentions -is so good, so concise and so powerful that it alone justifies the film.

 

There is also far too much footage showing what the words ‘collateral damage’ actually means. Do I mean this? can there be enough? I mean, too much for the mind to want to take in, not too much to drive the message home - this is what a terrified child looks like, this is what a maimed child and her father look like, in the clinic, seeking help and yet knowing that their lives have been irreversibly changed for the worse and it will not get better.

 

All this is accompanied by a great deal of what might be called visual music, in which Curtis surprises, captivates, creates in the mind a demand to know what is happening, and then answers it. See it, please.  I’m told you have until 23rd February.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02gyz6b/adam-curtis-bitter-lake 

A Review of 'the War We Never Fought'

This review of my book about the non-existent 'war on drugs' has been published on an educational website:

 

http://www.educationumbrella.com/curriculum-vital/book-review-the-war-we-never-fought-the-british-establishments-surrender-to-drugs-by-peter-hitchens

 

 

 

A brief comment on the 'Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill'

I was asked by the campaign against this pernicious legislation to record a brief summary of my objections to it.

Some of you might like to watch:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vN-bp4DFl0&feature=youtu.be

 

 

 

Peace, War, Literature and What Lasts - some responses to readers

Time for a few retorts and responses to comments here.

 

Let me first deal with Mr Courtnadge, who wrote of my complaint that it felt a bit lonely to be against the Iraq war: ‘A bit of an exaggeration, author. The Stop The War march in London was one of the biggest the capital has ever seen ; you weren't that lonely, every normal adult who didn't believe everything written in the Murdoch press was with you.’ What a pity he wrote this without reading properly what I said: ’I recall how lonely it was to be anti-war – unless you were on the pacifist Left, which opposes all wars, good or bad, except when they are attacks on Israel (My emphasis).’ The Left was against this war largely because it misunderstood it. Like some misguided Zionists, it also wrongly saw it as helpful to Israel, when it has been anything but and (if anything) followed a pro-Saudi rather than a Zionist agenda, even though the unintended outcome, by favouring Iran,  was not helpful to either Jerusalem or Ryadh. .

 

More intelligent leftists, seeing its anti-sovereignty, globalist implications, supported it, as more of them had supported intervention in Yugoslavia. In the same way, many conservatives, thinking it some sort of revival of British greatness, idiotically supported it. So did the neo-conservatives, many of whom were aware that their point of view has its roots in disappointed Trotskyist utopianism. Not only did I lose nearly as many friends as I had lost when I abandoned the Left. I gained few new ones.  I declined invitations to speak at one ‘Stop the War’ rally because I knew that I would then have to speak alongside anti-Israel persons, and beneath banners calling for ‘Free Palestine’, an absurd slogan given the unfreedom of the areas misruled by the PA and Hamas, and actually meaning the dissolution of Israel.Many non-Murdoch newspapers (including the ‘Observer’) supported the Iraq war. I think all supported the Kosovo dress-rehearsal. I believe the BBC coverage also aided both these wars.

 

Mr D.Reddin writes : ’ What does it matter what Hilary Mantel's political opinions are? You should be able to separate your political and moral values from your ascetic judgments. Your brother (and the "close-minded" Richard Dawkins) was able to appreciate literature that didn't conform to his notion of good morality such as the King James Bible. He also gave a very good review of Wolf Hall. Given his undoubted independence of mind it might just mean that some people like Wolf Hall because it's good literature and not because Mrs Mantel has the "correct" political opinions.
And by the way just because I disagree with you it doesn't mean I want to have you arrested, doesn't even imply it. Your shrieking of "thought crime" and "show trial" every time you are confronted by the "left wing mob" is as hysterical as any of your opponents.’

 

He is accompanied, of course, by ‘Bert’ (who is still after all these years searching for an alternative explanation, other than the EU Landfill directive, for the relentless abolition of weekly rubbish collections – for he has yet to acknowledged that he was wrong about this - but broke off from his research to contribute here in his usual instinctively sympathetic fashion):

‘Well, I thoroughly enjoyed Hilary Mantel’s Tudor books without knowing anything about her politics, and I thought the television dramatisation last week – modern speech included – was absolutely superb. Mr Hitchens may well take a different view, of course, but it’s rather a shame that the only reason, so it seems, to bring the subject up was resentment at what he perceives are the politics of the publishing industry.

 

As for whether ‘modern young actors can begin to understand the depth and scale of the convulsion that war caused in Britain in 1914’, what an odd question. Is it their youth, or the fact that they’re actors which gives rise to this doubt? And, more importantly, what does it matter, if they’re good enough actors?’

 

‘Paul R’ also entered the fray thus : ‘Does every novel or programme about the Tudors have to be in the language of Shakespeare? Does everything have to have a host of tedious pedants pointing out every so called inaccuracy?’

 

Mr ‘Mike B’ is there too (My earlier response to him is posted alongside his comment and also  here) :  ‘Peter Hitchens says that Hilary Mantel "is now a sort of Leftist Saint" because of her story about Margaret Thatcher. Does he have anything to back up that assertion or did it just trip, thoughtlessly, off his tongue?

Again he says that "her book about the horrible Thomas Cromwell", presumably Wolf Hall, is "bought and praised all over Guardianland", wherever that might be. In fact, it has received widespread praise from many reviewers, including those in the Times and the Telegraph.

This just strikes me as lazy journalism. Pick a caricature and stick to it. It's so much easier than thought and reasoned argument.’

***PH writes: ‘Don't be silly. Such statements or assertions are not of the same character as assertions on the lines of 'Charles Foster Kane has received billions of dollars from California oil interests', or similar. These are statements of alleged fact which can be proved or disproved. There is no formal method for creating a Leftist saint, nor any official list of such saints, and the remark is obviously a comment on the extraordinary praise and honour, and favourable coverage, and priceless publicity, heaped upon Ms Mantel and her books.

The book world, as I've pointed out here to cries of 'whingeing!' from leftists, is entirely dominated, in publishing houses, reviews, awards and festivals, by persons of the cultural, moral and political left. Ms Mantel is such a person. I think her success may have something to do with that.’

 

 

Finally, from ‘Louise’ 'Uniforms, trains, clothes are as usual carefully recreated – but not the way people actually talked or thought.

Alicia Vikander plays Vera in the moving film Testament of Youth, but can an actress as young as her understand the effect the First World War had on Britain?' And you can, I suppose?’

 

Yes, to some extent, I can. My surviving grandparents had both grown up before 1914, my older aunts and uncles, and many of my teachers had strong childhood memories of the War and of the changes it brought.  Its memory and its effect pervaded much of our life and conversation, in a way that’s gone now. You can see how the bridge has been broken by watching the powerful BBC2 series on ‘The Great War’, in which most of the interviewees, then still healthy and alert men and women, recalled the war as an event in their lives.  What’s more, I made it my business in my teens and later to read such telling contemporary memoirs as Robert Graves’s ‘Goodbye to All That’ and Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man’ , not to mention John Harris’s superb ‘Covenant with Death’ often mentioned here and based on detailed conversations with survivors of the Somme from Rotherham. And of course to read Vera Brittain’s ‘Testament of Youth’, something I was inspired to do by the BBC serialisation of the book in 1979. 

 

If you have grown up on post-cultural-revolution Britain, the modernised, concretised, electrified, motorwayed , denatured place which sprang up after the 1960s, these nuances and indeed these profound differences between generations will escape you completely. Something similar, but not the same, can be said of the infinitely superior Television version of P.G.Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories , featuring Dennis Price and Ian Carmichael, as compared with the feeble version more recently screened. Price and Carmichael had both experienced pre-war London, knew its accents, its signals and flavours and smells. They knew what Wodehouse meant. 

 

As for Hilary Mantel, I think her generally leftist politics are pretty well-known, and became even more so after the publication of her short story ‘The assassination of Margaret Thatcher’. It matters because allegiance of this sort is undoubtedly helpful to writers of all kinds, but most especially in book publishing, where conservative ideas are despised by most reviewers.  This was not only given full-scale publication by the ‘Guardian’, but also serialised on BBC Radio 4,. As it happens, I think ( and have often said ) that her short novel ‘Eight Months on Ghazzah Street’ , set in Saudi Arabia and obviously drawn from real life, is very good. So, despite its gruelling, horrible subject matter is her novel about Africa’ A Change of Climate’.

 

Having read these and thought them good,  I attempted her book about the French Revolution ‘A Place of Greater Safety’, but after about 200 pages in which my interest never caught fire ( and I am fascinated by the French Revolution) I abandoned it. This is a  thing I rarely do to any book after sticking at it for so long.

 

When the fuss began about Wolf Hall, I set it aside for a good moment, looking forward to it and assuming I would find it enjoyable and rewarding. I was surprised to find that it could barely hold my eye to the page.  After about 30 pages, it seemed clear to me that I could only read it by forcing myself onwards with the mental equivalent of kicks and blows. It drained out of my brain as fast as I could get it in. I decided not to continue. For some time, I thought the fault was mine, as its sales climbed and the awards began to come in.

 

Then I began to notice that, if one whispered softly that one had not liked it, one would meet responding whispers and mutters of ‘Thank heaven! I thought it was only me!’ from a surprising number of people. Statistically, men were less likely to enjoy it than women, but it wasn’t as simple as that.

 

As for Thomas Cromwell, I think she has for some reason invested him with all kinds of qualities he probably did not have. I say ‘probably', because we actually know rather little about him personally (much less than we know about Thomas More, for example) . A recent biography of him frequently resorts to conditional verbs and what looks to me like guesswork. By contrast, we know a lot about him politically, and we have the great Holbein portrait in which he looks very much like the 16th century equivalent of a Russian gangster oligarch. In his public life he was merciless, and at the end was shown no mercy.

 

This isn’t some kind of beauty contest between him and Thomas More, and if it were I should choose neither . More is brilliantly undone in Josephine Tey’s  indispensable historical novel ‘The Daughter of Time’, and simply wasn’t the admirable man of conscience portrayed by the great Paul Schofield  in that fine film ‘A Man for All Seasons’ . Nobody was. The people of these times were not like us, did not think as we do, or act as we do.

 

They certainly did not speak as we do, and I don’t just mean that they still used the second-person singular and the ‘eth’ and ‘est’ verb endings which are now more or less confined to Yorkshire.  Actually, Robert Bolt’s use of English in the script of that film, and the play that preceded it, is a good solution. Educated men and women are portrayed as speaking in a more deliberate, grammatical style than that of today. They refer without hesitation or embarrassment to God. They have utterly different attitudes towards such things as oaths. More’s small speech on how a man swearing an oath holds his soul in his hands like water is a lovely example of this, as is his stern explanation of why he will not speak of certain things in his wife’s presence so that she can in all honesty say under examination that she never heard him do so, and his tremendous speech about how easily the Devil would come after us, once we had flattened the great forest of man’s laws that grows all over England, are all examples of that. The film gave Norfolk a Northern accent, but he still avoided speaking too much like a spin-doctor from ‘The Thick of It’.

 

I think we can assume that Ms Mantel is aware of ‘A Man for All Seasons’, its hagiographical portrayal of More and its depiction of Cromwell (played by Leo McKern in the days before Rumpole made him famous) as a sordid schemer. No doubt it is an interesting idea to reverse the formula. But none of the people in this drama was a modern man or woman. They all lived, thought, believed, spoke and died quite differently from us. Power’s tendency to corrupt could not be obscured by propaganda, or given a velvet cloak by smooth civil servants who took on the actual dirty work. I suppose More was, in a way, a conservative figure (though he is the first Utopian) . And Henry was, of necessity, a radical reformer, and Cromwell his chief instrument . But I don’t think that makes Thomas Cromwell a sort of English Robespierre (or Oliver Cromwell, come to that).

 

By the standards of the French revolutionaries and all that came after them, all these men are severe and unbending reactionaries. It was Madame Guillotine that gave birth to the idea the left still love to this day, though some of those ideas had been in gestation for many decades before the Terror.

 

I do not ‘shriek’ ‘thought crime’ and ‘show trial’ every time I am confronted by the left-wing mob. Only when  it fits.

 

You would have to have a completely tin ear ( and many do, it is true) not to realise that much of the Authorised Version of the Bible is great poetry. Truth, in all matters including literary merit, is the daughter of time, and it was no great leap by my brother (or Professor Dawkins) for him to acknowledge that King James version is beautiful. His problem was in understanding why this might be so and whether there is any connection between form and content.

 

If Hilary Mantel’s books are still around and being read with pleasure and instruction 400 years hence, then it will be clear that I was wrong, For now, I’d only say that the past is littered with the works of authors (Hugh Walpole, Herbert Spencer, Charles Morgan, Sinclair Lewis  spring to mind) who were once loved by all the critics and bought by millions and now are so unread you can’t even find their works at the back-end of obscure second-hand shops.

Some Reflections on Flying Flags at Half Mast

And so with a loud ‘clunk’, it all falls into place. Britain’s apparently mad foreign policy of the past few years now makes almost complete sense. It had seemed to me that a slavish desire to please the Saudi government lay behind our government’s desire to attack Syria.  Well, I can see why we, as an increasingly indebted country with very few flourishing export industries apart from weapons and aircraft, might want to be on good terms with Riyadh, a limitlessly wealthy oil state with a large appetite for… weapons and aeroplanes. It may be an old excuse, but it’s perfectly true that if we didn’t sell them these things, someone else would.  

 

 

Now, I would much rather fly a  flag at half mast from time to time, or get Prince Charles to struggle into a burnous again, than despatch British service personnel into another stupid war. And I prefer British workers to be employed. 

 

But we cannot really square this with our claims to be the apostle of liberty, democracy etc. etc. in the Arab world.  So let’s not do so. Be polite to the Saudi Royal Family by all means. It wudln't be the first or the last despotism with which we have cheerfully done business.

 

Send any number of royal princes and politicians to Riyadh to be nice to them if it saves British jobs.

 

But please, please stop pretending, at the same time,  to be the apostles of liberty, democracy and the rule of law, in the Arab world or anywhere else. It's tiresome, stupid, an insult to the intelligence and it only gets us into conflicts for which we are (to put it mildly) not equipped. 

 

As I wrote nearly a year ago (23rd February 2014)  ‘I was filled with admiring wonder by a  picture last week of Prince Charles in full Lawrence of Arabia gear. Could his trip (one of several in recent  years) have been connected to the  finalising of a contract under which BAE  is supplying 72 Typhoon fighter aircraft to Riyadh? I do hope so.

 

‘BAE is one of our few remaining real industries, because (though nobody admits this) we protect it against foreign competition, and work hard to keep it in orders. The Prince is right to help.

But our continued (and perfectly justified) dealings with the Saudi despotism sit very oddly with our windbaggery over ‘democracy’ in Libya, Syria and Ukraine. One or the other. But not both.’

 

I’m not sure now sustainable this Saudi policy is if we just carry on being ncoe to the, but don't join any more wars. But quite possibly, it is practicable.

 

Does it really require us to attack Saudi Arabia’s enemies in the Arab and Islamic world, as our leaders seem to think?

Personally, I suspect that Saudi Arabia doesn’t much care whether Britain tags along in American operations against Saudi Arabia’s foes. I think it’s just as happy to get the Royal visits, and forget the airstrikes and the ground troops. Likewise, I think Washington is less concerned than we are told it is, about whether a British contingent joins the US armed forces on any of these adventures. The USA does not need our help physically, and don’t think it really needs it diplomatically either. Anyway, these days France seems very happy to act as chief sidekick and is, after all, the home of the poodle.

 

The British government cannot openly explain what I suspect is its reasoning. It is rightly unsure that Britain is willing to pay in lives for Saudi orders. Our leaders would never dare say ‘Saudi Arabia will buy lots of things from us if we attack Syria, so that is what we are going to do’. Because most British people would object to Britain, behaving in this way. They think we’re still an independent, solvent, sovereign country which keeps armed forces to defend itself. (They were also, encouragingly, unfooled in the end by the propaganda campaign for the Syrian war, though they seem broadly fooled by the anti-Russian public relations campaign.)

If Mr Cameron or anyone else were to say such a thing, apart from anything else,  the pretence that the government has solved, or is anywhere near solving, our economic problems would immediately be punctured, quite fatally.

 

But it’s even worse if it isn’t even true – that the Saudi and American  pressure to do these things is small or non-existent, and the real problem is the self-important vanity of our politicians, who like to imagine that they are still significant figures in the world and enjoy almost any excuse to start ordering armed forces into action and watching the resulting pretty explosions (pretty if you’re not nearby)  on 24-hour TV.

 

 

And so we had the ridiculous pretence that we wished to support ‘democracy’, liberty etc etc etc’ in Syria, or wherever it is, is maintained, with a straight face, by Mr Cameron and by the Foreign Secretary, William Hague. At the same time, of course,  Saudi Arabia was using British made armoured vehicles to support the government of Bahrain in its efforts to prevent ‘democracy’ or liberty from breaking out there. And Britain has been silent about the violent military putsch that has put an end to ‘democracy’ in Egypt.  Also, though they never mention it, some of our governing class must be having some misgivings about the disastrous outcome of our ‘democratic’ intervention in Libya, which has turned that country into a circle of Hell from which no easy escape is visible.

 

By the way, there’ve been some interesting revelations recently about the closeness between the Blair government and Colonel Gaddafi. But can anybody tell me what the initial policy of the Cameron government was towards Libya?

 

I will tell you.  Archives reveal ( as I first pointed out some years ago) that the 'Minister for Africa', Henry Bellingham slurped up to the Colonel (referring to him as 'Brother Leader') at an EU-Africa Summit in Tripoli on November 30, 2010. A few weeks before, another Minister, Alastair Burt, told the Libyan British Business Council that Libya had 'turned a corner' which 'has paved the way for us to begin working together again'.

 

Something mysterious happened after that. I wonder what? Perhaps Libya suddenly stopped being ‘democratic’, but I doubt it.

 

It’s so complicated. Sometimes I wonder if the British government actually wanted Parliament to reject the Syria war plan, having realised ( after learning a bit more about the Syrian ‘rebels’) that it had ignorantly talked itself into a disastrous policy but having no other way of telling the Saudis that we couldn’t now take part. The immediate collapse of the government’s efforts to get its war was remarkable . Even more remarkable was the collapse, days later, of President Obama’s desire to bomb Syria.  Seymour Hersh put forward another theory in the New York Review of Books here http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin and here http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line, which is interesting if impossible to prove.

 

Of course, our leaders still pretend they wanted to fight, and blame Ed Miliband for getting in the way (I only wish he had done so more vigorously).   But they would, wouldn’t they?