Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 208
January 18, 2015
Don't like the PC mob? Well now that makes you a terror threat
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
We are on the verge of founding Britain’s first Thought Police. Using the excuse of terrorism – whose main victim is considered thought – Theresa May’s Home Office is making a law which attacks free expression in this country as it has never been attacked before.
We already have some dangerous laws on the books. The Civil Contingencies Act can be used to turn Britain into a dictatorship overnight, if politicians can find an excuse to activate it.
But the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill, now slipping quietly and quickly through Parliament, is in a way even worse. It tells us what opinions we should have, or should not have.
As ever, terrorism is the pretext. Yet there is no evidence to suggest that the criminal drifters, school drop-outs and drug-addled losers who do much terrorist dirty work (and whose connections with vast worldwide conspiracies are sketchy to say the least) will be even slightly affected by it.
In a consultation paper attached to the Bill, all kinds of institutions, from nursery schools (yes really, see paragraph 107) to universities, are warned that they must be on the lookout for ‘extremists’.
But universities are told they have a ‘responsibility to exclude those promoting extremist views that support or are conducive to terrorism’.
Those words ‘conducive to’ are so vague that they could include almost anybody with views outside the mainstream.
What follows might have come from the laws of the Chinese People’s Republic or Mr Putin’s Russia. Two weeks’ advance notice of meetings must be given so that speakers can be checked up on, and the meeting cancelled if necessary.
Warning must also be given of the topic, ‘sight of any presentations, footage to be broadcast, etc’. A ‘risk assessment’ must be made on whether the meeting should be cancelled altogether, compelled to include an opposing speaker or (even more creepy) ‘someone in the audience to monitor the event’.
Institutions will be obliged to promote ‘British values’. These are defined as ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths and beliefs’. ‘Vocal and active opposition’ to any of these is now officially described as ‘extremism’.
Given authority’s general scorn for conservative Christianity, and its quivering, obsequious fear of Islam, it is easy to see how the second half will be applied in practice. As for ‘democracy’, plenty of people (me included) are not at all sure we have it, and wouldn’t be that keen on it if we did.
Am I then an ‘extremist’ who should be kept from speaking at colleges? Quite possibly. But the same paragraph (89, as it happens) goes further. ‘We expect institutions to encourage students to respect other people with particular regard to the protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act 2010’.
These ‘protected characteristics’, about which we must be careful not to be ‘extremist’, are in fact the pillars of political correctness – including disability, gender reassignment, pregnancy and maternity, race, sex and sexual orientation.
The Bill is terrible in many other ways. And there is no reason to believe that any of these measures would have prevented any of the terrorist murders here or abroad, or will do so in future.
They have been lifted out of the box marked ‘try this on the Home Secretary during a national panic’, by officials who long to turn our free society into a despotism.
Once, there would have been enough wise, educated, grown-up people in both Houses of Parliament to stand up against this sort of spasm. Now most legislators go weak at the knees like simpering teenage groupies whenever anyone from the ‘Security’ or ‘Intelligence’ services demands more power and more money.
So far there has been nothing but a tiny mouse-squeak of protest against this dangerous, anti-British, concrete-headed twaddle. It will go through. And in ten years’ time we’ll wonder why we’re locking people up for thinking. We’ll ask: ‘How did that happen?’ This is how it happens.
British values...it's a baffling topic these days
You'd never guess just how few homosexuals there were from the way we go on about it.
In a spot check to make sure their Christian school was teaching ‘British values’, baffled tots in Sunderland were asked by government inspectors about ‘what lesbians do’.
Almost immediately after this revelation, plans were announced in Manchester for an entire school devoted to homosexual, bisexual and transgender children.
I’m not actually against such a school, if enough people want it. Let a hundred flowers bloom, as far as I’m concerned.
Let’s have atheist schools, too, and see how they work out.
But if we can select pupils on the grounds of their sexual orientation, why is it illegal to select on the grounds of ability? Something wrong here, surely?
As for the lesbian question, I was 12 before I even knew what a call-girl was, let alone a lesbian, and look how I turned out – not to mention my grasp of ‘British values’.
Finally a film that's got it right
For once, a film about real events that comes close to getting it right. The Theory Of Everything, a fictionalised but broadly true account of the marriage of Professor Stephen Hawking and his first wife Jane, is intelligent and profound, irresistibly moving and
surprisingly funny in places.
The recent past is subtly recreated. The plot pivots on the extraordinary fact that Mrs Hawking – an academic in her own right – maintained a Christian belief despite her husband’s active atheism.
Their marriage, her selfless love despite his illness, the marriage’s eventual breakdown, the
dreadful contrast between Hawking’s soaring mind and his collapsing, failing body, must
constantly have challenged the deepest beliefs of both of them.
Eddie Redmayne is, of course, superb as he inhabits the professor’s life and becomes him.
But Felicity Jones is even better, and, rather surprisingly, manages to portray Jane as an even more remarkable human being than her husband.
Lethal cost of the great crime lie
Somehow the Government has so far kept the lid on the fact that despite fiddled figures claiming that crime is dropping, our prisons are full, and exploding with violence, gang rivalry and drugs.
Prison officers, the main civilising influence in these dreadful liberal institutions, are in growing danger of severe violence.
Ten are attacked every day. On Radio 4’s File On 4 on Tuesday, Peter McParlin, the chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association, said: ‘I wake up every morning thinking, “Today is the day one of my colleagues will be murdered in their work.” ’
This crisis is the result of 50 years of Left-wing failure, which has ensured that wrongdoers don’t encounter serious punishment until they are already hardened criminals.
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January 16, 2015
Thank You...but. There's no such thing as a 'Silent Majority'
My thanks to all those who have supported me in my attempt to clear my name after severe misrepresentation. But it is interesting that this support only came when I specifically asked for it. Those who support reason, truth and fairness in argument might ask themselves why it is that, in such cases, the best 'lack all conviction' while the worst 'are full of passionate intensity' and so dominate the web with their views.
I shouldn't have had to ask, and the next time you see someone in trouble for telling the truth, whoever it is, I beg you to take his or her side openly and publicly. There is no such thing as a 'silent majority'. If it is silent it is not a majority, but a nonentity. And a view which is seldom expressed and widely attacked will pretty quickly become a minority.
An Unholy Alliance? Why I won't be speaking alongside Stephen Fry
I have just withdrawn from a Cambridge Union debate, rather than speak on the same side as Stephen Fry. I can, with an effort, imagine taking the same side as Mr Fry, perhaps over some fundamental issue such as freedom of speech, about which he has said some sensible things. Some matters are so all-embracingly important that you don’t really care who your allies are, as long as they don’t retreat without warning, leaving your flank exposed.
But the subject under discussion (the debate will take place on the evening of Thursday 29th January) is the disestablishment of the Church of England. I was due to speak against it. I simply cannot bring myself to accept that Mr Fry, an active and assertive atheist, is seriously in favour of Establishment. Perhaps he will say that it’s picturesque and antique, much as he says of the monarchy, and that removing it will be a bad aesthetic decision.
If he really does seriously favour it, then I can only speculate that I have not considered the matter properly, and that if someone of his general opinions is in favour of it, there must be severe faults in Establishment which I have not yet discovered.
Then there’s the personal problem. I confess it, I do not much like Mr Fry. I have rather enthusiastically repeated Julie Burchill’s remark (I am now pretty sure she first said it) that Mr Fry is ‘A stupid person’s idea of what an intelligent person is like’, though I have always thought this reflected more on Mr Fry’s large fan club than it does on him. He can’t help it if he has such followers. I found his portrayal of Jeeves on television unbearable and wrong and have said so. I don’t enjoy his writing style or his acting in general. I disagree with almost every opinion he has ever uttered. I didn’t like him before I met him, and I like him less now that I have met him. This lone, brief, bleak encounter (after which he called me a 'clod') famously, took place at the memorial gathering for my late brother in New York City . A full account of this can be read here :
Revisited here
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/04/a-clod-writes-.html
and here
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/09/that-stephen-fry-moment-revisited.html
Those interested to the point of obsession may also enjoy this
And they may also be interested in the later controversy, in which Mr Fry called me a ‘slug’
http://www.stephenfry.uk/2014/09/24/writing-selfie/
and I replied
The mix-up over which side Mr Fry was on was accidental. When the Cambridge Union invited me, a few weeks ago, they told me Stephen Fry was speaking and both I and the Union officer involved simply assumed that he would be on the opposite side from me. That was why I accepted the invitation.
It was only when the Union term card was published this week that I found he was on the same side. For a long day I considered what to do. I had very much hoped to be able to argue against Mr Fry on a substantial issue in front of an audience. I thought this might be the best possible answer to the various personal insults he has directed at me. The idea of being his ally, and of being treated by him as an ally, did not appeal in the same way. Rather the reverse. I tried to imagine all possible permutations of this, and none of them seemed to me to be good. So I’ve withdrawn. I hope very much that there will be another opportunity for us to debate an important matter from opposite sides.
January 15, 2015
How not to argue
I have recently adopted a new method of engaging with contributors, by inserting responses in their actual comments before publising them. I think this speeds up and simplifies the exchange of ideas.
In doing so in a recent contribution from a Mr Ladd, I found it necessary to insert so many responses that I thought it might be helpful to others to see how I marked his work (about 3 out of ten, since you ask, and that's on a generous scheme giving marks for spelling and presentation).
I think his contribution (in defence of Dr Goldacre) a wonderful exercise in how not to argue. Mr Ladd is of course free to respond at length. By the way, if there are any readers who think that I may have a point about Dr Goldacre's behaviour, it would be a great comfort if you would say so. I know one or two have done so, but if that is really all the support I have here, in the face of a great and painful misrepresentation by a prominent person, I feel I may have been wasting much of my time here over the past several years.
Mr Ladd's post, with my responses interleaved:
1. Peter Hitchens: “What ‘suggestion’? I made no suggestion.”
This is a false claim made by Peter Hitchens. You did make a suggestion, you wrote: “Such hospitals would be a much better use for all the money we currently pour into grandiose ‘security services’.”
Here you suggest how public money might be spent in a way in which it is not apparently spent now. Looks like a suggestion to me.
** PH: It's a statement of opinion contrasting what exists with what might exist. As a newspaper columnist, I have no power to propose or dispose. As a newspaper columnist wholly outside the political mainstream, who neither seeks nor receives the patronage of the powerful, my expressions of opinion are exactly that. Had I said :'I urge that we cancel the security budget and spend the cash saved on reopening mental hospitals', it would indeed have been a suggestion. But I didn't, because I know perfectly well that no such thing will happen, whether I urge it or not ( as Mr Ladd also perfectly well knows). It was, at most a statement of regret.
2. “Again, I simply did not say this.” [that terrorist atrocities could be prevented]
Again this is a false claim made by Peter Hitchens about his own words. Actually, he wrote “they would not have been able to kill”. If they were not able to kill, their atrocities would have been prevented. QED.
***PH writes: People should be careful about the use of the word 'false' . Mr Ladd may disagree with my interpretation of my own words, which are here displayed for anyone to check. But it might occur to him that I might have a better idea of my intended meaning than either he or Dr Goldacre . By 'false' he means he disagrees with me. But why does he? I explain at length that I disagree with the classification of these incidents as 'terrorist' at all. The people are mentally ill, probably because of drug abuse. Their actions are not co-ordinated, and do not even have the fanatical and immoral rationality of the terrorist murder. I show in the posting that they are far more comparable with the 40 or so incidents each year in which innocent people are horribly killed by mentally ill persons in politically meaningless incidents of violence. Had we not adopted the 'Care in the Community' policy, such patients would be cared for in hospitals, not roaming the streets. So they would not kill passers-by.***
Mr Ladd takes up his case:
Peter Hitchens: “Its use without any qualification suggests that a discussion of three particular incidents applies to every terrorist atrocity, or to terrorist atrocities in general. I don’t think this, and didn’t say it.”
“Suggests”? Now you are the one misrepresenting other people’s work!
***PH writes. No. The deduction is quite legitimate, based on a reading of Dr Goldacre's text, by contrast with Dr Goldacre's inventions, which are not.
This is not what Dr Goldacre necessarily meant, and looking at his tweet ...
***PH. Mr Ladd is not paying attention. I am not here referring to Dr Goldacre's Tweet, which explained almost nothing. I am referring to his subsequent defence of his behaviour, which he asked me to publish here and which I did publish here, despite my misgivings and despite my repeatedly urging him to try again, and not to post something so embarrassingly bad.
In that defence he explained that he had objected to my column item because he believed it called for a widespread programme of pre-emptive incarceration. As I have shown, I called for no such thing***
Mr Ladd ....it’s not how I would interpret it – he included your full text (I’m glad to see your apology for accusing him of taking your writing out of context)
***PH: This was not an apology to Dr Goldacre but to another contributor, to whom I had made this incorrect claim. I thought and think it important, in such discussions, to admit immediately and without reservation any error of this kind.I wish others were so careful***
Mr Ladd... so to me it is perfectly clear he meant *those terrorist attacks (***PH: Once again, a large part of my point is that these attacks are not in fact terrorist at all. Why cannot Mr Ladd acknowledge this important point?***) to which we have already referred* could have been prevented. But you don’t want to read it that way - it suits your purposes to read it in a different way that you can then complain about.
***PH: Well, having thought of it, and written it, I think I should have a reasonable idea of what I intended, perhaps better than anyone else's. If there *is* another interpretation, then anyone seeking to make it must surely produce quotations which support it. None does. However many times I challenge the Goldacre faction to produce quotations which justify their interpretation, they fall silent.
Mr Ladd continues...
Peter Hitchens: “What justification can be found for the word ‘widespread’ in my actual words?”
You state confidently that if we'd have done this instead, the murders in Woolwich, Ottawa and Sydney “would not” have happened – not might not, not probably would not, but “would not” - those killers would have been locked up before they'd ever had the chance to kill.
***PH: Actually I don't think I used the phrase 'locked up' . I said 'in mental hospitals'. Mr Ladd has invented the phrase 'locked up'.
Mr Ladd:
'Dr Goldacre has attempted to explain, using mathematics and statistics the consequences in terms of numbers, showing how many non-violent people would be removed from society along with the violent ones if money was spent as you suggested it would be better spent.'
***PH: No, he has calculated what would happen if the 'Minority Report' policy of preventive incarceration, which I do not advocate, was adopted. As I did not and do not advocate any such thing, but rather that mentally ill people should be given hospital beds rather than expected to cope on their own in the non-existent 'community' , this is irrelevant to the point.***
Mr Ladd:
' It is not Dr Goldacre’s fault you are only interested in writing rhetoric, not the actual consequences of your rhetoric.'
**PH: No doubt many legislators find their ideas have led to unintended consequences. But one has to advocate the policy first, for it to have such consequences. I have simply not done so. The reopening of residential mental hospitals, my only desire, would (alas) require no effort to go out and find patients. The difficulty would be in building enough places. ***
Mr Ladd:(quoting me)
“Next, what justification can be found for the use of the word ‘incarceration’, a synonym for imprisonment?”
Probably all the writings you have produced over the years referring to people with mental health problems being placed on a “locked ward”. '
***Such wards exist in our current system. I have visited them, and spoken at length to people who work in them. They are tragic places of desperate sadness. Nobody goes out and drags people into them pre-emptively. In some cases, the families of those in them wish there were more such places, and struggle to obtain beds for suffering men and women, which illustrates just how sad their plight has become. It is a matter of fact that people known to me have been placed in such wards. I have mentioned this fact to emphasise the tragic possibilities of drug abuse. I neither oppose nor advocate the existence of locked wards. I just note that they exist, and that people end up in them following certain types of voluntary behaviour.
Incarceration can be used as a synonym for imprisonment but its meaning is not identical. It can simply mean “confined”. Both your phrasing “locked ward” and Dr Goldacre’s “incarceration” emphasise confinement.
***This is not true. I did not use 'locked ward' anywhere in in this context. The word 'incarcerate' is in fact etymologically specific to prison, being based on the Latin word 'Carcer' meaning prison. Dictionaries and encyclopaedias do not settle conceptual arguments. But dictionaries do settle arguments about the meanings of words. Here is what the Oxford English Dictionary says:
'Etymology: < participial stem of medieval Latin incarcerāre: see incarcer v. and -ate suffix
Thesaurus »
1. trans. To shut up in prison; to put in confinement; to imprison.1575 J. Rolland Treat. Court Venus ii. f. 23v, 'Tratour I sall thy corps Incarcerate'.
1637–50 J. Row Hist. Kirk Scotl. (Wodrow Soc.) 238 'Mr. Andro Melvill, by great moyen..obtained leave that a servant should be incarcerated with him in the Tower'.
1654 in W. Ross Aberdour & Inchcolme (1885) xi. 329 'The Session desires the Bailȝie to cause apprehend and incarcerate presently Margaret Currie.'
1833 L. Ritchie Wanderings by Loire 57 'We were incarcerated a whole day in the prison.'
1575—1833
***
Mr Ladd(once again quoting me):
“Does Dr Goldacre believe that the housing of mentally ill people in hospitals under the full-time care of nurses and doctors is a form of imprisonment?”
He doesn’t use that word. You misrepresent him again.
***PH. Actually, he does. 'Incarcerate' is beyond doubt a synonym for imprisonment. And while 'Same to you with brass knobs on' may be an effective retort in the playground, the counter-accusation of 'misrepresentation' can't really be made to stick against me for representing the word 'incarceration' as meaning 'imprisonment'. Because that is exactly what it does mean. In this particular passage, Mr Ladd clearly exposes himself as a partisan commentator on the issue. No impartial person would have made this claim***
Bring on the Vats of Snake-Oil - TV Debate time is here
Let’s hope David Cameron sticks to his daft insistence that he won’t take part in a TV election debate unless the Greens are there too. I’m always amused by the claims of toadying commentators that Mr Cameron has a sure touch, a brilliant mind, etc. etc. There is no evidence that this is so, and never has been. He has played a bad hand badly, and if it were not for his only real skill –public relations – and the willingness of so many in the media to be gulled by him, he would long ago have been pushed to the side of the road and left there to rust.
He is almost singlehandedly responsible for the transformation of UKIP from marginal Dad’s Army to semi-mainstream Dad’s Army. He is close to a genius at picking fights with his own constituency which do not (as planned ) gain him support among BBC types and Guardian readers, but which do severely alienate former Tory voters and members. He seems mesmerised by a desire to gain and keep the support of the Murdoch Press, which will (as it always has done) toady to him while he is in office, and drop him as soon as it is sure he is a loser.
Now he has misjudged the TV debates issue. Even I, a person who is interested in politics and needs to know what is going on, strive to stop my mind wandering (nay, not just wandering but happily packing a picnic and setting off on a long hike, perhaps stopping for a while at a picturesque pub or tearoom) during these events.
They are by their nature very boring, as there really isn’t very much left to say on any of the subjects that come up. Worse, there isn’t a major politician in England who can put on a compelling personal performance that you would want to watch for its own sake.
This isn’t true of Alex Salmond, who is at least interesting to watch, or of George Galloway, perhaps the last proper political orator at large in Britain. But both are Scottish, and neither is in the mainstream of English politics. Some people go on about Al ’Boris’ Johnson, but can I be the only one who finds the performance (for such it is) wears a little thin after the first four or five times? Whenever he does admit to having thought about something, the results are generally banal and conventional.
Properly handled, and with close attention paid to the maxim ‘Thou Shalt Not Commit News’, these events will have no effect at all on the outcome of the election. Messrs Cameron, Miliband and Clegg all have teams of helpers who can realistically rehearse the likely clashes, and give them a pretty good idea of the traps that they might tumble into. It is out of these rehearsals that those ‘spontaneous’ , snappy one-liners emerge.
Mr Cameron may have a bit to fear from Nigel Farage, but not all that much. Mr Farage has already gained all he is going to gain this side of 2015, and perhaps as much as he ever will, depending on what happens next. Because he is his party’s only asset and because he has no long-term tribal vote on which to fall back, he has the most to lose from a bungled encounter. He could actually lose the war for UKIP in an evening .
Like a theoretically powerful fleet-in-being whose implied menace keeps its foes at bay, he is probably better off staying in port and keeping his reputation for power intact, rather than risking all on the High Seas, when one lucky shot could send him gurgling to the bottom.
Besides which, having had one lot of leader’s debates (even if they didn’t actually enjoy them much, or learn much from them) the British viewing public now regard them as a sort of Human Right. To deny them this benefit is to look crabby and shifty and dishonest.
But how does Mr Cameron get himself out of his fix, unless he climbs down and makes his previous stance look silly? It is difficult, but not impossible. He’s climbed down lots of times before. But this time it will depend to some extent on how willing the others are to help him. Mr Farage, who I suspect thinks he will do very well , even though he probably won’t, is likely to be the keenest on a deal. Mr Clegg, who knows nothing can save him anyway, less so; Mr Miliband, who just isn’t telegenic, is probably offering humanist prayers to the forces of history (or whoever humanists pray to, when they want a parking space or a promotion) that Mr Cameron carries on refusing, and the TV companies decide not to go ahead, with an empty podium where the premier ought to be.
If they do decide on the empty podium, may I suggest a large vat of hair-gel, where Mr Cameron would otherwise be standing, or a demijohn of snake-oil, if they can get hold of it at short notice?
January 14, 2015
Dr Goldacre's Imagination or 'What I Didn't Say and Don't Think'
I thought I would set down here, in detail, how untruths can be and are created. I take as my text the public attack on me by Dr Ben Goldacre on Twitter, a man who (as I know from direct experience) is always complaining about how he is too busy to respond just now, but who somehow wasn’t too busy to make that attack.
I’ll begin at the end, with Dr Goldacre’s response (sent to me on Monday) to my charges against him. I sent him those charges, in detail, so that he would have time to respond to them before I published them. I’ve edited out a couple of personal details I suspect he didn’t really intend to share widely, and a patronising sign-off which I think we can all do without.
Reproduced after Dr Goldacre’s words, though edited slightly, partly in the light of Dr Goldacre’s reply, are the charges against him, which I sent him so that he would have a full and timely opportunity to defend himself.
So, first, here’s Dr Goldacre’s response to me
'Hi Peter,
I don’t think this is complicated, and I’m surprised to see you write a fifth long blog post about my tweet, and send me hectoring messages demanding that I respond.
I’m aware we’ve already discussed all this on Twitter, but I’m happy to explain my concerns again:
1. You said that terrorist offences would be prevented if the culprits were in psychiatric hospitals.
2. There is only one practical reading of this:
very large numbers of people with mental health problems, who are viewed as being at long term risk of acts of violence, would need to be admitted to hospital. It is very unlikely that these long term admissions to psychiatric hospitals would be voluntary. So these people would be incarcerated pre-emptively. (Think through, for example, whether the offenders whose histories you describe would have agreed to a long term voluntary admission into a psychiatric hospital to manage their risk of violence; let alone whether they would indeed have been mentally ill at the time of admission, and during the many years of their pre-emptive incarceration that would have to follow).
3. I say “very large numbers” would need to be detained, because it is extremely hard to predict these very rare acts of violence among people with mental health problems. I explain why in this piece (which I’ve also already posted in response to one, or possibly two, of your four previous blog posts about my tweet):
http://www.badscience.net/2006/12/crystal-balls-and-positive-predictive-values/
I don’t think you were really aware of the implications of what you were suggesting, when you wrote your piece.
It wasn’t the central thrust of your argument, it was an aside, but in my view it was a foolish one, and not what I'd expect to see from you, however much we might disagree on things. It jarred with me, as a doctor reading your piece, to see someone suggesting that psychiatric hospitals somehow have a role to play in preventing terrorist attacks.
I think that’s a reasonable reaction for anyone to have, doctor or otherwise, and a reasonable concern to voice.
Some might view your five long, circular blog posts - in response to one tweet - to be inappropriate or hectoring.
*****
And here are my charges against him, and my description of the controversy.
Anatomy of a Smear. How a supposed apostle of accuracy and responsibility manufactured a false account of what I had said, and then attacked me for it on a public forum.
On January 7th, the day when the whole world was concerned with the terrorist murders in Paris, Dr Ben Goldacre posted on Twitter:
‘Peter Hitchens says terrorists are on drugs and in the 1980s would’ve been in asylums. Jesus’
I think it was reasonable to assume that casual readers of this Tweet would immediately have thought I was referring to the terrorists then on the loose in France.
The story was dominating all news outlets and most people would have assumed any contemporary reference to ‘terrorists’, especially in the present tense, concerned the French episode.
If Mr Goldacre had objected to my sentiments when I first expressed them (and he asserts that he is ‘a big fan of [my] work’), he had had 18 days in which to do so.
But he chose to make his objection - on a medium in which detail is difficult and mature refection close to impossible - ,right in the middle of the Paris atrocities.
He then published the quotation ;
“At Woolwich, in Ottawa and now in Sydney, deranged maniacs kill, in most cases while out of their minds on the drugs we have given up trying to control. Deluded by propaganda, we classify this as ‘terrorism’.
“The streets are flooded with troops and robocops, helicopters clatter overhead and blowhard ‘experts’ drone portentously about how these are ‘lone wolves’, as if that solved the matter.
Actually, they are mad, and in the days before ‘care in the community’ they would not have been able to kill because they would have been in mental hospitals. Such hospitals would be a much better use for all the money we currently pour into grandiose ‘security services’.”
I expand on the view expressed in these words in detail below, explain the background to it and the reasons for my concern. I also explain how and why I initially misunderstood the nature of the attack which Dr Goldacre was making on me. Note that all he says is ‘Jesus’, which for many modern people is (in this sort of context) an expletive denoting exasperated disapproval. A number of people duly did attack me on Twitter, one of them tio the point of tedium.
I had in fact half-expected to be attacked, probably by the cannabis lobby, for my basic point that cannabis abuse is, in many of these cases, a more credible culprit than Islamist extremism. I am used to such opponents deliberately misunderstanding my point and then jeering at what I haven’t actually said.
I had absolutely no idea that anyone could have reached the conclusions which Dr Goldacre had drawn from it, not least because no such conclusion had ever crossed my mind. I thought he was just trying to attack my idea that cannabis may often explain such murders better than anything else, by suggesting it didn’t apply to Paris.
Readers of his Tweet could either click on a photographic reproduction of the article, or follow a link. Only those who followed the link would have known the article was not new, but more than a fortnight old, and written in response to another, specific and different event.
But I do withdraw and apologise for my mistaken suggestion, which I made earlier, that this was an abbreviated version of my article. It was the full text, though without any indication of the date of publication (which would only have been evident to those who followed the link he quite properly gave) . I was mixing up the article on the 21st with another on the same subject. I have in fact written several times about this. For instance, I did so on 30th November
The key passage in that article was as follows:
“‘Not merely is this response crass and wrong, it is based on a total, wilful misunderstanding of the murder of Lee Rigby. We are looking in entirely the wrong direction, and so not seeing the blazing, illuminated signs which show what is actually going on.
Adebowale was obviously crazy when he committed his crime. An eyewitness, Cheralee Armstrong, told police he ‘looked mad, like he’d escaped from a mental hospital’.
During the trial of Adebowale, and of his accomplice Michael Adebolajo, newspapers received a very unusual warning from the judge that they must not report ‘the demeanour of the defendants’ on the video link from prison. What was it about their behaviour that prompted this strange instruction?
It wouldn’t be odd if they had behaved weirdly. Both killers were habitual users of cannabis, a drug increasingly correlated with mental disturbance, especially in young users. It was after Adebolajo began smoking the drug in his teens that his character wholly changed. Many sad parents of ruined teenagers will know about this process.
Adebowale had a history of serious mental illness, heard voices in his head, and was on anti-psychotic drugs while on remand. At one stage he had been recommended for treatment in Broadmoor.
A psychiatrist found him ‘paranoid and incoherent’, and said his symptoms were worsened by ‘heavy use of cannabis’.
Most people don’t even know this, as it doesn’t fit the ‘Al Qaeda plot’ storyline and has barely been reported.
Yet how can these gibbering, chaotic husks have been part of a disciplined, intricate terror organisation?
It’s very strange. Our Establishment sees proper enforcement of the laws against the dangerous drug cannabis as an infringement of liberty. But it is ready to place us under totalitarian surveillance, never before seen in our history, in pursuit of terrorists it will probably give in to later.’”
But as it turned out, Dr Goldacre was not taking this line at all, and was exercised only about the following passage, more or less an afterthought to my main thrust. : “Actually, they are mad, and in the days before ‘care in the community’ they would not have been able to kill because they would have been in mental hospitals. Such hospitals would be a much better use for all the money we currently pour into grandiose ‘security services’.”
He said, after I challenged him : ‘…your suggestion that terrorist atrocities can be prevented by widespread pre-emptive incarceration of people with mental health problems is disproportionate, offensive to those with mental health problems (who make a tiny contribution to the total amount of violence in society), and unjust.’
As Dr Goldacre won’t back away from this , I am afraid I am just going to have to dissect it. Almost every word in the above passage from Dr Goldacre’s e-mail is baseless, including ‘and’ and ‘the’ – as I shall now demonstrate.
1, ‘Your suggestion’.
What ‘suggestion’? I made no suggestion. In no part of the passage do I suggest any action, except the diversion of taxpayers’ money from self-styled ‘security’ services to the treatment of the mentally ill.
I did compare the present to the past and I did say that in the past things would have been different, as I believe they would have been. It’s a belief, perhaps a speculation, about the past. But I made no proposal, urged no action or policy (why would I? Who’s listening?) , though I have for many years believed that ‘Care in the Community’ was and is a grave mistake.
It seems quite plain to me that my principal concern in this and other articles on the subject is to warn of the dangers of cannabis, largely in the hope of preventing even greater relaxation of the laws against it. It was also clearly a warning against the government’s demands for increased powers, which I clearly oppose. If I take this stance over such demands, on what basis can I be accused of favouring the pre-emptive mass round-ups which Dr Goldacre has conjured out of his imagination?
2. ‘that terrorist atrocities could be prevented’ . Again, I simply did not say this.
First the article refers to three specific episodes, classified by governments and media as ‘terrorist’ but actually (in my view) much better understood as isolated crimes of violence committed by people who have lost their reason.
At the very most, an honest description of the category concerned would have to be *some* terrorists. I referred quite clearly to specific cases and individuals, and made no general statement. Its use without any qualification suggests that a discussion of three particular incidents applies to every terrorist atrocity, or to terrorist atrocities in general. I don’t think this, and didn’t say it.
(For those who are having trouble keeping up with the vast difference between what I wrote and what Mr Goldacre says I said, here’s a pause for reflection: Dr Goldacre’s account of my phantasmal ‘suggestion’ so far consists of the following:
A phrase that is totally false – “your suggestion” (it isn’t mine and I didn’t suggest it) ; followed by a serious misrepresentation of the subject under discussion, lazily and/or dishonestly using the word ‘terrorist atrocities’ when I actually dispute the designation ‘terrorist’, and refer only to three particular atrocities.
Then of course there is the phrase 'could be prevented', which I did not write, and do not think.
So what do we have next, in this exposition of the truth by this eminent physician and scourge of the inaccurate and the exaggerator?
We have the words ‘widespread and pre-emptive incarceration’.
What justification can be found for the word ‘widespread’ in my actual words? Precisely none. It is another phantasm, based upon nothing. What justification can be found in the context? Precisely none. Events of this kind, though horrible, are mercifully rare, perhaps (see below) 40 a year in a country of nearly 60 million. Only two of the four individuals to which I referred even lived in this country. Even had I called for such a policy, it would not need to be ‘widespread’. The word, once again, has been invented out of whole cloth.
What justification can be found for the word ‘pre-emptive’? Again, there is none. When I said that such people would have been in mental hospitals, I did not say that this would be as a result of some effort to prevent them from doing such terrible deeds. I assumed that, having been found to be ill in this unhappy fashion, they would have been declared ill by doctors, taken to hospital and there treated to the best of the abilities of the medical staff in charge of them, for their own wellbeing.
Their own wellbeing, not some ‘Minority Report’ science fiction attempt to predict the future actions of individuals, would have been the reason for their presence in such hospitals.
I believe this is how people generally found their way into mental hospitals, before we shut most of them down. They were ill. We sought to help them. Once there, I believe, they would not have been in anything like such danger of doing the terrible things of which we speak. That seems to me to axiomatic. The word ‘pre-emptive’ is an invention of a thought I didn’t have, as well as an invention of a view I did not express. I never thought or wrote anything to justify its use.
Do we now live in a society where one must not say things for fear that others will wholly distort their meaning in this way, and then blame us for having given them the opportunity? Is this what Dr Goldacre means when he chides me thus '
'I don’t think you were really aware of the implications of what you were suggesting, when you wrote your piece.'
Well, I certainly wasn't aware that a plea for more mental hospital beds would be so comprehensively misrepresented, no. I mistakenly thought that left-wing persons generally agreed with me that such spending wuld be a good idea.
Next, what justification can be found for the use of the word ‘incarceration’, a synonym for imprisonment? Again, precisely zero. Does Dr Goldacre believe that the housing of mentally ill people in hospitals under the full-time care of nurses and doctors is a form of imprisonment? I do not.
This is surely a major category error, and a slight on the medical staff involved.
I have no access to any information on how many mental patients in British mental hospitals (before they were shut down) were detained against their will. Even if it was all of them, which I very much doubt, this condition was not imprisonment. It followed medical diagnosis, not prosecution, trial and conviction (except, obviously, in the case of the hospitals for the criminally insane which are another matter). It was triggered by the state of the person’s mind, not by criminal acts he or she had committed.
Much slander is nowadays levelled against mental hospitals from the Left (Laingian believers that mental illness is some sort of oppressive social construct) and the Powellite Right (who wanted to save money by closing them) .
No doubt they were far from perfect and had many faults. What human institution can claim that it is perfect? Even Dr Goldacre has his faults. But for many patients, and their unhappy families, they were a welcome refuge from the life they might have had to live (and nowadays do have to live) in the outside world.
So, there go three more words in the bin marked ‘wholly and completely made up’.
What is left of Dr Goldacre’s assertion?
We have this ‘…of people with mental health problems is disproportionate, offensive to those with mental health problems (who make a tiny contribution to the total amount of violence in society), and unjust.’
Well, it is true that I am referring to ‘people with mental health problems’ but since all the previous words are untrue, the strictures which follow are valueless and without weight. If it was never said, it cannot be ‘disproportionate’ or ‘offensive or ‘unjust’ because it doesn’t exist.
The whole thing was a fantasy. Well, if people wish to fantasise, and to write fiction in their spare time (or even as a profession) I am happy with that. I enjoy reading fiction myself. But they must be careful not to mix it up with the truth, or to put real people in their made-up stories, or to attribute to them actions they have not done and words they have not spoken, or thoughts they have not expressed.
I didn’t expect Dr Goldacre to reply to this and, while I was surprised that he did so, and regret that his reply, when it came, was a reiteration of his previous unresponsive claim that I had said things I did not say, and thought things I do not think.
I can’t of course, prove that I did not think something, and I should be expected to have to prove it. But I have provided the appendices below, which explain the facts on which I form my opinions on this subject, for those who are interested. I think it will be clear from them that I have never expressed any desire for pre-emptive round-ups of anybody, and my main desire is that we should be kinder and mre generous to the mentally ill.
They also show definitively that the ‘Care in the Community’ programme originates in the 1960s. It is extraordinary that half-educated leftists are so obsessed with Thatcher-hatred that they find to hard to imagine any bad thing happened before or after she was in office. But Dr Goldacre really shouldn’t make such a basic mistake.
APPENDICES .
It now becomes relevant that on 28th May 2013, on the same broad topic, I had blogged as follows:
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.u...
I’ll quote it in full because it gives such a clear idea of my concern on this matter, and also shows that I am far from alone in worrying about it. Once again, it is descriptive of a problem, not prescriptive about any solution. The only strong practical implication is that cannabis use is unchecked, and that the laws against it certainly should not be further weakened, one of my abiding concerns, many times expressed.
What marks me out from others who are concerned is that I suspect that there may be a link between the growing use of cannabis and the levels of violent mental illness in the Western world. The reason for my suspicion, as I have stated before, is a correlation between the one and the other. I am not definitive, just raising a concern which I believe merits further investigation – and great caution about the legalisation of cannabis.
‘I just thought I would illustrate here the existence of a very serious problem, of innocent people killed by total strangers in our streets (or, in one terrible case, which I mention because it involved a British subject and because the culprit, who had British connections, was undoubtedly an abuser of illegal drugs including cannabis, on a foreign street).
It is hard to quantify because of the shifting definitions involved. Even so, it seems to me to suggest that a danger to life and safety exists in our country which is certainly serious, and is could in my view be significantly reduced by government action.
In the light of what is below, are we seeing straight when we attribute the atrocity in Woolwich primarily to militant politics and religion?
What follows does not pretend to be a complete account of the problem but is the fruit of some hours in the archives.
On 26th February 2005, The Independent published an article by Maxine Frith which began thus ‘In 1992, Jonathan Zito was murdered by a stranger in an unprovoked attack. Yesterday, the man who stabbed to death Denis Finnegan was jailed. In both cases, the assailants were mentally ill patients denied the care they needed. In the years between these two tragic incidents, up to 40 people a year have died in similar circumstances. In 2005, is there still such a thing as care in the community?’ At the bottom of the article, the newspaper published an appalling and desperately upsetting list of recent random killings by mentally ill persons, often using particularly horrific methods - generally involving stabbing though in one case involving the victim [being] burned to death.
The Times wrote on 27th July 1995 ‘One killing a month and two suicides a week are committed by mentally ill people living in the community.’
The variation between the two newspapers’ figures illustrates the difficulty in fixing categories, and in uncovering details of such cases, which are often not much covered by the media, except locally.
Among such cases one of the worst was that (mentioned above) of Christopher Clunis, 30, a mentally-ill man who stabbed to death Jonathan Zito, 27, after selecting him from a crowd at a London Underground station in December 1992, weeks after being released from hospital.
More recently, Deyan Deyanov beheaded Jennifer Mills-Westley, in Tenerife, on 13th May 2011(shortly after being released from a local psychiatric unit). He was a drug abuser (this is completely undisputed). Deyanov, an undoubted user of cannabis, cocaine and LSD, believed he was a reincarnation of Christ, filmed himself smoking cannabis. After committing his terrible deed, he carried his victim’s head on to the street
In February 2013, Nicola Edgington was convicted at the Old Bailey of murdering Sally Hodkin, and attempting to murder Kerry Clark in the town centre of Bexleyheath on the morning of October 10, 2011. Edgington, 32, of Greenwich, virtually decapitated Sally Hodkin, six years after killing her own mother.
This case gained prominence because of the failure of the authorities to heed blatant warnings - from the killer herself - of approaching danger.
In the hours before the murder, Edgington called emergency services four times asking for help, saying she was hearing voices again and that she was going to kill somebody.
Note that in these cases that the killer decapitated, or attempted to decapitate, the victim.
In Doncaster on February 14 2012, a woman with a history of mental health problems who stabbed a teenager to death in South Yorkshire was imprisoned for ‘life’. Hannah Bonser, 26, randomly attacked Casey Kearney, 13, as she walked through Elmfield Park in Doncaster. The judge said she would serve a minimum of 22 years.
The Daily Mail reported : 'In 2002, Bonser walked into a hospital on her 17th birthday complaining of hearing voices telling her ‘to kill people’. She was admitted to hospital and given anti-psychotic drugs. Later that year she twice overdosed.
The judge said Bonser had a ‘mental and behaviour disorder due to abuse of cannabis’. She was in regular contact with psychiatric services between 2004 and 2007 and had been given drugs to control her delusions.
The September before the killing, Bonser was warned by a policeman for carrying a knife. She was at that time taking cannabis and regarded as a ‘strange loner’ by neighbours.
In November she was admitted to hospital after attempting suicide and in January her requests to be sectioned were rejected as ‘nothing was wrong with her’.
Looking at many of these cases, I am compelled to wonder how many of them involved cannabis, but were not connected to this drug because a) its use is so common and accepted that the authorities don’t regard it as notable and its users don’t regard it as a drug, , the law against it is not enforced so its presence and use are not recorded, and b) nobody has made the connection or asked the necessary questions.
I know from sources with direct personal experience of mental health nursing that cannabis is frequently smuggled into the locked wards of mental hospitals.
Where we do have the details, usually because it actually came up in the trial, it is often the case that cannabis is prominently involved.
In any case, I fear that most of us are in greater peril from these sad and wretched cases than we are from terror. And I believe that government action could significantly lessen this risk, without attacking the freedom of speech or the privacy of the subject.’
This shows that this is a subject about which I have often expressed opinions, and if Dr Goldacre wished to challenge or disagree with them he has , as a professed admiring reader, had plenty of opportunities for doing so. I think I can guess why one of his readers chose to send him the link to my 21st December article on the 7th January. He could have guessed it too. But why then rush on to Twitter to say what he said?
Then there’s the question of the meaning of the word ‘Jesus’, obviously used as an exclamation of disgusted and scornful amazement, rather than for pious reasons.
I think I may have jumped to conclusions about what, exactly, Mr Goldacre expected his readers to be scornful and disgusted.
I thought he and they believed that I had linked the Paris killings with cannabis use and mental illness. Or perhaps they were trying to discredit this theory by arguing that the Paris killers weren’t cannabis users, or mentally ill (in fact we know for certain that at least one of the killers *was* a long term cannabis user, and that all three probably were. But I have made no such claim in this case as our knowledge of the whole event is still sketchy and incomplete. I haven’t said, don’t argue and don’t believe that *all* such murders might be attributed to this cause. I have said that there appears to be a correlation, and that we should take it more seriously.
It was only later that I realised I was under attack on a wholly different front. I had wrongly thought that the ideas of Dr R.D.Laing, that mental illness is a an oppressive social construct, etc etc, had died and gone away, although they were most useful, as far back as the 1960s and 1970s, in aiding the cynical ‘Care in the Community’ concept under which mental hospitals all over the advanced world were closed and turned into fancy apartments.
In fact they seem to have been reborn in a new politically correct form, which monitors any statements about mentally ill people for possible ‘discrimination’ against what I suppose we must call a ‘community’. Modern psychiatry has ushered so many people into the zone of ‘mental illness’ though its array of ‘disorders’, its certainties about ‘clinical depression’ and ‘ADHD’ and its endless rewriting of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, that it is now quite a large community. Personally, I think most of the people caught in this pharmaceutically-motivated net are not remotely in the same category as the killers referred to in my articles.
Yet any statement which suggests that hospital care is better than ‘care in the community’ it seems, is now interpreted as a ‘discriminatory’ call for ‘incarceration’. I simply wasn’t aware of this trend in thought, which seems to me to make a fair and just discussion of the subject very difficult indeed.
Note on ‘the 1980s’. In his Tweet, Dr Goldacre spoke of ‘the 1980s’ and of asylums’, apparently under the impression that the closure residential mental hospitals begn in that decade. I have since pointed that this isn’t so. This process did *not* begin in the 1980s, though it certainly accelerated greatly during that time.
I fear that ‘care in the community’ is now assumed to have taken place entirely in the 1980s because all bad things in history must be attributed to the Evil Thatcher Regime. This isn’t a good guide to postwar history. Much of what she did was a continuation of Labour and Tory ‘consensus’ policies, stretching back into the days of Butskellism.
I can well remember discussing it with my old comrade Peter Sedgwick (a strong and passionate critic of Laing, when Laing was very modish) in the early 1970s, and it was already well-known by then. We tended to blame Enoch Powell for it, and we were right.
He had made a speech speaking of ‘*our* assault’ on the asylums in *1961*, see here http://studymore.org.uk/xpowell.htm
He proposed then to *halve* the number of beds in mental hospitals thanks to alleged ‘advances in psychiatric knowledge’, ie ‘antipsychotic’ drugs, and spoke of ‘provision in the community’)
Here is a sample from that speech :
‘However tentative, however qualified, however much in need of the revision which it will receive in each succeeding year, this plan must thus embody our aims and ambitions, our vision of the future for 15 years ahead. Let me apply this now to mental health, a field in which the advances in psychiatric knowledge and methods offer a standing challenge to the National Health Service to provide the setting in which that knowledge and those methods can yield their fullest benefit. I have intimated to the hospital authorities who will be producing the constituent elements of the national hospital plan that in 15 years time there may well be needed not more than half as many places in hospitals for mental illness as there are today. Expressed in numerical terms, this would represent a redundancy of no fewer than 75,000 hospital beds. Even so, I would say that if we err, we would rather err on the side of under-estimating the provision which ought to be required in hospitals 15 years from now. This 50 per cent reduction itself is only a statistical projection by the General Register Office of the fall in demand based upon present trends. Yet there is not a person present whose ambition is not to speed up those present trends. So if we are to have the courage of our ambitions, we ought to pitch the estimate lower still, as low as we dare, perhaps lower.
Beds in General Hospitals
But that 50 per cent or less of present places in hospitals for the mentally sick - what will they look like and where will they be ? We know already what ought to be the answer to that question: they ought for the most part to be in wards and wings of general hospitals. Few ought to be in great isolated institutions or clumps of institutions, though I neither forget nor underestimate the continuing requirements of security for a small minority of patients.
Now look and see what are the implications of these bold words. They imply nothing less than the elimination of by far the greater part of this country's mental hospitals as they exist today. This is a colossal undertaking, not so much in the new physical provision which it involves, as in the sheer inertia of mind and matter which it requires to he overcome. There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside - the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day. Do not for a moment underestimate their powers of resistance to our assault. Let me describe some of the defences which we have to storm.
First there is the actual physical solidity of the buildings themselves: the very idea of these monuments derelict or demolished arouses an instinctive resistance in the mind. At least, we find ourselves thinking,
"Can't we use them for something else if they cannot be retained for the mentally ill ?"
"Why not at least put the subnormals into them?'"
"Wouldn't this one make a splendid geriatric unit, or that one a convalescent home."
"What a pity to waste all this accommodation!"
Well, let me here declare that if we err, it is our duly to err on the side of ruthlessness. For the great majority of these establishments there is no appropriate future use, and I for my own part will resist any attempt to foist another purpose upon them unless it can be proved to me in each case that, such, or almost such, a building would have had to be erected in that, or some similar, place to serve the other purpose, if the mental hospital had never existed.’
I think that’s pretty clear. Given Mr Powell’s later record, it is surprising that this rather terrible speech, with its terrible results, isn’t better-known.
What did Mr Yatsenyuk Say about Invasion? (Part 2)
Readers may be interested by this reponse, kindly probvded to me by the Ukrainian Embassy in London, when I asked for their resposne to the controversy about remarks by kraine's Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk. about 'invasion' and the Second World War to the German ADR TV station's 'Tagesthemen' programme.
It read as follows:
'After the interview at ADR Mr Yatsenyuk explained his statement at Deutsche Welle (PH's Note, this is Germany's equivalent to the BBC World Service) .
'Asked to comment on this interview and to compare the conflict in Ukraine and World War II, Mr Yatsenyuk said the following:
"We do remember the Soviet occupation after the WWII of Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Eastern Germany, Baltic states. So Soviets did it for a very extensive period of time. For today, Russia decided to occupy Crimea and Russia decided to occupy the East of Ukraine. This is unacceptable. This is the violation of international law. This is my message. Russia is not allowed to violate an international law. Russia is not allowed to grab the land of an independent country like Soviets did after the WWII."
You may find the video here (watch from the 3rd minute):
http://www.dw.de/safe-ukraine-means-a-safe-europe/av-18185420
January 12, 2015
A couple of responses for the moment
I have a longer post in preparation, but in the meantime, I'd just like to make these two points:
The comparison between Nigel Farage and 'gun control' campaigners is absurd. Mr Farage's response to the matter was rational. 'Gun control' , which only applies to the law-abiding, is an irrational emotional spasm response to gun crime (note that in France, where 'gun control' is ferocious yet the killers somehow obtained AK-47s, the matter is not even being discussed and I have yet to see a word on how they got hold of such weapons).
Oh, and here's a surprise. Some of my automatic critics are getting the wrong end of the stick about my rape suggestion. The precondition of my proposed automatic prosecution for the initiators of failed rape prosecutions is that the complainant *chooses* anonymity. This is voluntary. The procedure is designed to bring home to the person involved (and to unthinking supporters of the anonymity of alleged rape victims) the nature of the thing they are demanding.
Why I'm worried by the sight of a Pro-Government Demonstration
I have been on a lot of demonstrations in my life. I greatly regret having taken part in some of them – especially the Nuclear Disarmament marches of the 1960s. I still think I was right to go on some of the others, against racial prejudice, and in protest at the shooting of innocent British subjects in Londonderry in 1972.
But I don’t believe I’ve ever been on a pro-government march. And I am filled with a feeling of strange puzzlement over the rather weird events in Paris on Sunday. What were they demonstrating for? I’ll come to that
I’ll be told ‘it was for freedom, democracy, free expression’.
Are you sure? (See below) But even if that's actually true, these are self-evident virtues. Nobody (even people who secretly had doubts about free speech and democracy, as many do in fact, see below) would demonstrate against them.
And no doubt I’ll also be told it was ‘against terrorism and murder’.
Once again, who would say he was for such things? The people who favour them have other ways of showing their feelings.
All you need to do is subject such talk to the late Roy Jenkins’s rather neat test of empty banality. Just ask this question: Could anyone conceivably have said the opposite? If not, then nothing of any significance has been said.
We are here, once again, in the rainbow-hued, furry-bunny-and tweety-bird-infested land of Tom Lehrer’s wonderful little satirical song from 1965, called ‘The Folk Song Army’ :
Thus:
‘We are the Folk Song Army.
Every one of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war, and injustice,
Unlike the rest of you squares.’
It was partly the people who were teenagers when Tom Lehrer wrote that who advanced, full of grandiose solemnity, down the streets of Paris on Sunday, though David Cameron’s generation, who didn’t even need to try to be soppy because my lot had made it so easy for them in our teens, were also there.
My favourite participants in this march for virtue were King Abdullah of Jordan, and Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority. Jordan, where I have spent some happy days, is indeed far less frightful than most Arab Muslim regimes, in the torture and freedom of speech stakes. But that’s precisely the problem. By any other standard, especially those of Western Europe, it’s terrible.
The Palestinian Authority is one of the few entities which has managed to establish a very bad record for such things even before it has attained statehood. It’s not terribly good at religious tolerance, either.
Here are some links and details for those interested : Jordan ranks 120th out of 178 countries in the 2010 Press Freedom index maintained by reporters Without Borders. Amnesty international is concerned about torture in Jordan http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/countries/middle-east-and-north-africa/jordan
And http://www.amnestyusa.org/research/reports/annual-report-jordan-2013
Torture is likewise not unknown in the prisons of the Palestinian Authority (see P.17 here
http://jij.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Hidden-Injustices.-Human-Rights-in-the-PA-7.4.13.pdf )
And freedom of the press, speech, assembly and expression are strongly constrained there as well (see pp 19-22 of the above document), likewise freedom of religion ( see pp 22-24 of the above).
Little is done on Palestinian media (though they are far from free) to restrain anti-Semitic attacks ( I put this mildly):
http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=786
And before anyone tries to make an Arabs-vs Israel issue out of this, Binyamin Netanyahu’s Israel has of course rightly come under heavy criticism for its often appalling behaviour in occupied territory, and its unequal treatment of its Arab minority within its own brders, though I think its record on press freedom and freedom of speech is pretty good.
Yet these three leaders, plus a platoon of Eurocrats, were in the front line of the Paris March. So it couldn’t really be called an unambiguous statement about freedom.
And then again, who was absent, who might have been expected to be there, if it was really about democracy?
Well, this is awkward, and I have once again found it hard to pin down the exact nature of the problem (see my article about Arseniy Yatsenyuk, about whose interesting TV interview in Berlin I am also still making enquiries ).
But Marine Le Pen, whose National Front party scored 25 % in France’s Euro elections and who is personally running at around 30% in the polls, a bit mre than two years before the next presidential election, was not there.
Why not? Even if you loathe her, she is a considerable political figure.If the march was truly in favour of democracy, the rukle of the people, she had as much right to be there as several people who were there, if not more.
In fact, Mlle Le Pen ( or is Madame? She’s been married and divorced twice) would beat every major French political figure (including M.Hollande, and M.Sarkozy, who were both present at the forefront of the march) in the first round of a French presidential election, according to a recent survey
So why wasn’t she there? She says she ‘wasn’t invited’, and French journalists seem to agree, some of them saying this was a mistake on the part of President Hollande. I'm not sure it was (see below). I think his mistake is quite different.
Obviously, she didn’t have to be ‘invited’ if she merely wished to turn up as a private individual. Some accounts suggest that President Hollande actually intimated to her that she was welcome to take part as such a private individual.
But this is silly. Of course she was, and so was anyone in Paris that day. So, of course, was President Hollande and so was our Prime Minister. But of course *they* didn’t march as private individuals, because they knew they would be welcome in the front rank. Imagine the scenes of woe and fury if Mr Cameron had been told he was 'welcome' to join the normal, standard-class crowd.
I think we may be sure that some sort of official invitation and pass would have been required to get anywhere near the front row.
The reports I’ve seen don’t make it clear if Marine Le Pen directly asked to be there, and was directly snubbed, or if she just assumed that the absence of an invitation meant she was unwelcome, or something in between. This being France, I’d suspect it was the third.
The fact remains that one of France’s most prominent political figures wasn’t in the front rank, and wouldn’t have been welcome if she’d tried to be there.
I’d be interested to know what treatment was accorded to the other French minority parties and their leaders, including the Communists and the non-Communist left.
The problem civilised people have with the French National Front is mainly caused by Marine Le Pen' s father, Jean-Marie.
He memorably described the gas chambers of the German extermination camps as a ‘minor point in the history of the Second World War’. In my view, no civilised, Christian person could say or think such a thing.
I think the case against Jean-Marie Le Pen, is quite straightforward. He will carry the burden of such statements to the grave. His daughter, not directly tainted in this way, even so carries the burden of her father, and the party he founded, which links her and her movement to the unlovely past of the French Right, and its despicable and unexpiated behaviour under the German occupation.
I'm emphatically not saying Marine le Pen should have been there. I wouldn’t want to march arm-in-arm with Marine Le Pen in any direction or for any cause. The trouble is that the main opinion she claims to speak for is reasonably held by huge numbers of French men and women, and for good reason. They wouldn’t vote for her if they were offered a more civilised alternative. But they are not offered it, so they do and they will vote for her.
What I want to see is for ‘mainstream’ politicians and media to stop scorning the view she claims to speak for – opposition to mass immigration and multiculturalism. They need to admit they have been wrong, and reverse these policies. Until they do, they feed her and the National Front. By the way, I should note here that France is just as guilty of multiculturalism as Britain. Despite posing as a stern Republican secular state, with illiberal, unenforceable gimmicks such as bans on face-veils, in practice France has permitted the growth of separate solitudes, in which an entirely Muslim culture has grown up on the edges of every major city, especially Paris.
The point remains that the exclusion from the march of Marine Le Pen removes one if its main claims – to be representative of the whole of France. It specifically was not representative of perhaps 30% of the French population and would have been very uncomfortable, and possibly noisily divided, if their representative was there.
What else didn't the march stand for? In my view, the growing clamour for more and better ‘security’ against terror – plus what i suspect will turn out to be exaggeration of the level of planning and organisation in last week’s murders – also removes the march’s claim to be in support of liberty . So, of course, does the presence of heads of repressive states abroad.
In fact, the most worrying thing about this march, and the imitators it will no doubt have in other countries where Islamist commit atrocities, is that it will make it easier for government to introduce the renewed attacks on liberty which they itch to implement, and for which such events provide the pretext. In the end, when we have all moved on to something else, this may be its main legacy.
January 11, 2015
The sinister, screeching mob who want to kill free speech (And no, I DON'T mean the Islamist terrorists in our midst)
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
Once again we are ruled by a Dictatorship of Grief. Ever since the death of Princess Diana, we have been subject to these periodic spasms when everyone is supposed to think and say the same thing, or else.
We were told on Friday that ‘politicians from all sides’ had lined up to attack Ukip’s Nigel Farage for supposedly ‘exploiting’ the Paris massacre.
Mr Farage had (quite reasonably) pointed out that the presence of Islamist fanatics in our midst might have something to do with, a) uncontrolled mass migration from the Muslim world, and b) decades of multicultural refusal to integrate them into our laws and customs.
Rather than disputing this with facts and logic (admittedly this would be hard), the three ‘mainstream’ parties joined in screeching condemnation.
The Prime Minister, whose government was busy exploiting the tragedy to shore up the (already vast) snooping powers of the State, said it was not the day to make political arguments.
Why ever not? What could be more political than discussing how to defend ourselves against this sort of crime? If it is not political, then why is he talking about it at all, instead of leaving the matter to the Archbishop of Canterbury?
The Home Secretary, Theresa May, a hungry headline-seeker and reliable sucker for any scheme to diminish freedom that her civil servants drop on her desk, said Mr Farage was ‘irresponsible’.
Why? Was he any less irresponsible than the chief of that sinister organisation MI5, who seized his chance to make our flesh creep with scare stories, and simultaneously apologise in advance for not actually being able to protect us?
Dame Tessa Jowell squeaked that the Ukip leader’s remarks were ‘sickening’. Why? Ed Miliband, whose very job as Leader of the Opposition depends on the belief that disagreement is a good thing in a free country, moaned that Mr Farage was ‘seeking to divide us’.
The Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg said Mr Farage was ‘making political points’ on the ‘back of bloody murders’.
Well, who wasn’t? A sanctimonious unanimity descended on politics and the media. ‘Je suis Charlie,’ everyone said. It was an issue of liberty, we all said. They can’t silence us, stop us drawing cartoons, etc etc etc.
Great mountains of adjectives piled up on every corner, much like those hills of flowers and teddy bears we like to place at the scenes of tragedies.
You can feel the presence of the snarling conformist mob, waiting for some dissenter on whom they can fall, kicking and biting. So-called social media, in fact an intolerant and largely brainless electronic mob, has made this much worse since the sad death of the Princess.
We should stand up to them. It is especially strange that this conformism claims to speak in the name of freedom, when in fact it doesn’t much like freedom at all.
I suggest that we actually think about this. Of course, we all deplore the murder and grieve for the dead and the bereaved. I don’t need David Cameron or Tessa Jowell to tell me that, thanks.
But for the rest, there’s quite a lot of posing going on. Very few newspapers, magazines or TV stations have published or ever will publish the cartoons of Mohammed that Charlie Hebdo printed.
Let us be frank. One major reason for this is fear. We know that Muslims take this very seriously, and that some of them take it very seriously indeed.
Let us agree it was brave to publish these images. That’s easy for me. I know I wouldn’t do it, and I readily acknowledge that I am a coward.
But it also required compulsory bravery on the part of others, especially the police officers, some of them Muslim, laudably and selflessly guarding people they may not have liked or approved of. Not to mention all the others caught in the crossfire.
And what was the purpose of this bravery? What cause, anywhere in the world, was advanced by it? Surely the point of bravery is that it is self-sacrificial for a purpose, to save others? Who was saved by this?
As for freedom, here’s an interesting thing. The French Leftist newspaper Liberation reported on September 12, 1996, that three stalwarts of Charlie Hebdo (including Stephane ‘Charb’ Charbonnier) had campaigned in their magazine to collect more than 170,000 signatures for a petition calling for a ban on the French National Front party. They did this in the name of the ‘Rights of Man’.
You, like me, may dislike the National Front greatly. But lovers of liberty simply do not seek to ban parties they do not like.
This is a double paradox. The French National Front exists mainly because a perfectly reasonable concern about mass immigration was sneeringly dismissed by the mainstream French parties. Something similar is happening in Germany, where large demonstrations against ‘the Islamisation of the West’ in many cities have been scornfully attacked by that country’s elite.
If reasonable calls for restrictions on immigration had been heeded when they were first made, right across Europe, would we now be in the mess we are in? If it is officially regarded as irresponsible, or ‘exploitation’, or ‘sickening’, or ‘divisive’ to say this, then we do not live in freedom, and those who claim to speak in its name are not telling the truth.
********
If Frau Angela Merkel’s Germany does not dominate Europe, then why does everyone else in the EU toady to her and beg her for favours? The EU is the continuation of Germany by other means. Stop pretending otherwise.
*****
A fond farewell to an old friend and colleague of mine, the great industrial reporter Barrie Devney, who died recently.
In the days when the whole country was convulsed by strikes, he was liked and trusted by both sides in many bitter disputes.
Barrie’s father was a bus conductor and his mother ran a sweetshop, but he ended up on first-name terms with Cabinet Ministers. I think that’s at least partly because he grew up in the age of grammar schools, that great open door which our politicians shut and sealed.
A SIMPLE SOLUTION TO 'SECRET JUSTICE'
Secret justice isn’t justice. Whether in the family courts or in the criminal courts, it is time it came to an end.
The law that allows a person to allege rape in secret, and remain unknown for ever, is particularly intolerable. The case of Mark Pritchard MP is just the latest ordeal faced by an innocent man whose accuser has lifelong anonymity.
Those who seek this protection should be asked to apply the same rule to themselves. They should be told that, if their accusation is dismissed by a jury, they will then face automatic prosecution for perjury, in which they will be named if convicted, while the alleged rapist will not.
If they are happy with this arrangement, then they should keep their anonymity. If not, not. Perjury, in its way, is as foul a crime as rape.
The simpler solution is to stick to the laws of natural justice, and have everything in the open.
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