Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 213

Thoughts on the Thought Police

If you want to say something important, but don’t want anyone to notice,  mention it in a speech in the House of Commons in the late evening.  It will be set down in Hansard, the daily verbatim record of what is said in Parliament, but nobody will report it.  On the other hand , if challenged, you can always point to the Hansard account and say that you did in fact raise the matter, presciently, years before.

 

Something similar is true of stories which appear in the newspapers on Saturday mornings.  In this case it’s usually not intentional. For instance, I am sure that Sir Peter Fahy, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, wanted or expected his interview with the Guardian last week to disappear without trace by this Monday.

 

But it has. It was followed by a couple of rival unpopular newspapers on Saturday morning, but that seems to be that so far.

 

The news cycle is an odd thing, which kills off most stories on Saturday night, and renews itself each Sunday morning. Only themes which have a specially strong wind behind them, such as the unrelenting concerted effort to destroy Ed Miliband, can keep going through it.

 

Anyway, I think Sir Peter , whose words were reported here,

 

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/dec/05/peter-fahy-police-state-warning

said something very interesting.  He’s quite wrong, in my view, to swallow the grotesquely exaggerated state-sponsored nonsense about the threat of ‘extremism’ in the first place.  All of us are in much more danger from badly-driven motor-cars, and probably from people driven mad by drugs (though we lack figures on this and must guess).

 

 But he’s quite right to notice that, once you have accepted that there is such a thing as ‘extremism’, which means only that there are no some opinions which authority and conventional wisdom deem so wicked as to be dangerous, you have created a thought police system.

 

I think the key passage is this:

‘If these issues [defining extremism] are left to securocrats then there is a danger of a drift to a police state”. He added: “I am a securocrat, it’s people like me, in the security services, people with a narrow responsibility for counter-terrorism. It is better for that to be defined by wider society and not securocrats.”

Fahy said officers were also having to decide issues such as when do anti-gay or anti-women’s rights sentiments cross the line, as well as when radical Islam veers into extremism: ‘There is a danger of us being turned into a thought police,’ he said. ‘This securocrat says we do not want to be in the space of policing thought or police defining what is extremism.’

Fahy cited the example of protests this summer outside a Manchester beauty shop which sells Israeli products. It was targeted during protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza, where many civilians were killed. The shop complained after pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protesters gathered outside to vent their passionately held views. Fahy said police ended up trying to decide in the midst of protests what was extremist: ‘It is better for others in society to have that debate and not to have public order commanders decide that on the street, outside a shop.’

However, the chief constable also said universities and colleges had to improve their efforts identifying extremist speakers on campuses, to spare police having to decide: ‘If schools and universities do not step up, it leaves a gap, where police are asked to intervene. Institutions should have policies in place identifying who is vulnerable, to keep the police out of schools and education.’

Fahy said concerns about academic freedom should not stop schools and colleges playing their part to counter extremism.’

 

This is not, alas, a plea for sanity on the part of the state, or for a retreat from Mrs Theresa May’s terrifying belief that there is a definable thing called ‘extremism’ which must be discouraged by the state.  It is just a plea for clearer instructions from on high as to who the state wants him to arrest and watch.

 

How dispiriting, that a person of such experience and power should not understand the principles of free speech, that the expression of any opinion is permissible, unless it takes the form of an actual incitement to violence –whereupon the normal criminal law on such incitements applies. A newly-sworn constable should be able to make that decision, without having to consult Mrs May’s ‘Guide to Extremism’, which will no doubt be printed on a (rather large)  shiny yellow card (perhaps a bit like a menu) and distributed to all police officers, pub landlords, social workers,  head teachers, traffic wardens and supermarket checkout operators before we are all much older.

 

 

I have been trying to work out for some time why I nowadays feel a creeping sense of generalised unease about the reliability of justice which used not to trouble me, at least when I was in this country.

 

It’s what you might call the Departure from Objectivity.

 

Political Correctness, so called, is actually a complex speech code enforced not by police and courts but through real and direct threats to job security. It has just grown and grown until it is no longer possible for anyone to be sure that what he or she says in a public place will not be deliberately misinterpreted and sued to destroy him. The growth of Twitter and its ability to conjure an electronic mob into being, is part of this.

 

It simply did not exist as a major force 20 years ago. Now it does. Readers here will know that I have always said that PC is successful because it appeals to our desire to be kind and polite. But it goes far further than that.

 

And since the passage of the Harman/May Equality Act (which had a very fair wind from Mrs May in opposition) , ‘Equality and Diversity’, which are the essence of PC, have been encoded in Law and enforceable in any place of public employment. What’s more, Equality and Diversity are enforceable in private employment as well, as almost all private companies have dealings with the public sector and so must conform.

 

There is a small space, maintained by newspapers and some parts of broadcasting, in which rather more freedom is allowed to prominent individuals. But by contrast there is less space for free thought in the very place where it is supposed to be most highly valued, the universities.

 

The other thing which has worried me has been vaguer, but is symbolized by the current fuss over the ‘Dickens Dossier’ and the unending series of inquiries into past cases of alleged sexual abuse.

 

The difficulty here lies in the fact that anyone who is worried by the *methods* of such inquiries is in a fix. He will be (falsely) suspected by others of objecting to the *aim*, namely the prosecution of a serious and grievous criminal offence. Remember, this is a country in which the home of a paediatrican was attacked , almost certainly by people who thought she was a ‘paedophile’

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/901723.stm

 

and

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/30/childprotection.society

 

Yet there is surely a grave difficulty in pursuing long-ago cases in which there is simply no testable material evidence, just the conflicting recollections of two people, made harder to judge by the natural repulsion we all feel for anyone who has even been accused of child-molesting.

 

I know from personal experience how unreliable my memory can be . Here’s an example. I once managed to move, in my memory,  an entire Moscow metro station  (Akademicheskaya) 200 yards. I lived for more than a year close to that station, used it frequently , often several times a day. But when after a gap of 12 years or so I went back to look at my old home, I found that the station had in fact not moved to where I thought it was, but  had remained where it had been all along. This could be objectively established. What other things do I believe, with the same complete confidence, about the past which are equally inaccurate but can never be checked? This sort of thing makes me think that there really needs to be a statute of limitations on accusation based purely upon uncorroborated recollection.

 

How can a jury test such claims, or decide between guilt and innocence?

Like the politicians who rage against (perfectly legal) tax avoidance, there’s something a bit lawless about this incessant pursuit of allegations about the past. The law is supposed to punish crime, not to be a way of pursuing people who we do not actually *know* have committed any crime.  Yet, as is increasingly clear, even an accusation of an offence can blight the accused person’s life forever, even if he or she is subsequently acquitted or not even charged.

 

I personally find it worrying when prosecutions open with long and gruelling recitations of the horrors of a particular crime (something that’s increasingly common). The trial is not actually about this. It is the horror of the crime that has caused the prosecution to be brought. The trial is about whether the accused person actually did the crime. If he or she didn't, the horror has no bearing on the matetr at all. But often it seems that this is no longer the case.  In a couple of recent cases the seems to have been no hard evidence – just the undoubted horror of the crime and the pretty undoubted nastiness of the accused person in the dock. I’m amazed when judges don’t simply stop such trials. For most of my life, I like to think they would have done.

 

I also dislike the habit of investigating officers of giving press conferences after trials ends, in which they resort to all kinds of red-top sentiments about the crime and the criminal. It’s not their job. Thye deliver to the court the evidence the jury must judge, without prejudice or animosity. They should be praised for doing so, but should maintain their detachment. Their job is not to put people in prison, but to catch the right person and ensure that proper evidence is found against him. This means tat thye should be equally dedicated to not prosecuting the wrong person. They shouldd always be dispassionate enough that they can pull back when they realise that they are chasing the wrong person. That is why they shoudl *remain* dispasionate *after the case* as well as during it. 

I think all such officers should keep at the backs of their minds the possibility that, some years hence, the convicted person will be standing on the steps of the High Court welcoming his release after a long campaign, or aftr the discovery or examination of previously-ignored DNA evidence,  has established his undoubted innocence. These things happen.

 

Why have we become like this? Am I right in thinking it’s new?  It’s alarming enough when Sir Peter Fahy worries openly about the police being required to supervise our opinions (a danger I’ve been uselessly drawing attention to for years now). But it seems to me to be only a part of a deepening flight from rationality, and an abdication, by the governing classes, of their responsibility towards strict lawfulness, even when it’s unpopular.  The world just feels darker as a result.

No, I won't Remember You, thanks.

I am sorry to say that the final episode of the BBC’s ‘Remember me' was a severe disappointment.

 

Not having written the whole thing, I can’t suggest any other obvious way out, but let me explain what troubles me.

 

First, the reality and motives of the ghost. In M.R.James, the ghost or other horror is generally real and can do real harm, but usually only to the  person who has awoken it .

 

In ‘A School Story’ a murder victim rises from his hidden grave and comes in pursuit of his killer, after sending warnings in a particularly menacing manner.  In ‘Martin’s Close’, a killer is pursued by his rather more recently dead victim, whose approach he identified through snatches of a shared song.  In Count Magnus’, ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’,  ‘A Warning to the Curious’ and ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, a character summons a horror by excessive curiosity. Also, in ‘Warning’, the avenging spirit has ‘some power over your eyes’, so that he can sometimes be seen, and sometimes not.

 

I’d also allude here to Henry James’s ultimately unsatisfactory ‘Turn of the Screw’, filmed brilliantly as ‘the Innocents’ many years ago. In the book, the reader is left wondering whether a repressed and lovelorn governess has imagined Quint and Miss Jessel.  In the film, we see both these revenants, usually at a distance.  And I still shiver at the recollection of the first sight of Miss Jessel, clad in midnight black, her face appallingly white and her eyes deep in their sockets, staring hungrily  and desperately across the dark lake in the sultry day, quite obviously dead but yet quite obviously still moving among us with the power to do harm. And her power has a logic to it. She and Quint, whom we know to be debauched, seek to possess the two children, one of them already quite possibly corrupt in some unstated way.

 

Now, the ghost in ‘Remember Me’ begins well. We see her, obviously dead and black, soaked on the beach, and then – the mind lurches as she begins to rise from the sand in the half-light, her draperies trailing.

 

We see her, in dreams or perhaps nor dreams, beginning to rise from dark corners of rooms. We are told by one of her victims-to-be that she has seen her, standing in the same place as a murdered woman, an incredible circumstance that can be described but not shown. We see her sitting faceless hunched on top of a bus, then disappearing from her seat.

 

We see her appearing, her face fully revealed, in a picture taken when she was not there.  This is quite frightening, but wait. We see her, invisible but powerful enough to interfere with gravity, holding the little boy’s swing, though he never describes this terrifying experience to his sister or her friend, the reassuring policeman.  Then we see her (as we have done once or twice before) with her face almost entirely covered, but what we can see looking as if the rest might be very unpleasant. Yet when she is eventually unveiled, she looks completely alive and rather nice.

 

Her motives are a bit baffling. If she wants to keep Tom Parfitt, her lifelong charge, what good does it do to go round pushing social workers out of high windows, or drowning care home assistants in their houses? How has she obtained this power to prolong Tom Parfitt’s life, so that he is at least 110- but looks 70ish?The BBC needed her to have this power, so that Tom’s parents could be killed by the Kaiser’s Navy in the (once famous)     bombardment of 1914, but he could still be alive now. If the ghost is so keen on killing people, why didn’t she kill Tom’s wife, who is eventually revealed to have been killed by Tom, thanks to an amazing care-home coincidence.

 

Why would an Indian ghost be in any way incommoded by a Yorkshire song?  

How did she have the power to come alive again after being shipwrecked and drowned? If she knew he was an orphan in Scarborough, why not just stay alive and take the train?  Why would a ship on the way from London to India travel past Scarborough? Why, in any case, did the ghost want to drown the little boy?  The whole thing just dissolves.

 

I think they wanted to have a ghost, but feared making the ghost too real.

Well done, George - now we're just £1,500,000,000,000 in debt

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Sharks bite, cowpats stink and politicians lie. I’m used to all these things. They’re facts of life. But I can’t stand it when people pretend otherwise.

The Chancellor, George Osborne, should this week have been laughed out of the House of Commons and then out of the Treasury.

Yet his ridiculous claims of success, and his comically incredible predictions based on unfeasible spending cuts, were actually taken seriously.

What’s more, many people preferred to concentrate on his blatant electoral bribes than to examine his shocking record.

Think of him as the captain of a rusty and listing ship, whose pumps can barely stay ahead of the water that constantly seeps between its thin and damaged plates, whose engine is close to breakdown, whose fuel gauges are nudging zero.

Yet despite all this, he proposes to you that you accompany him on a voyage to the Antarctic in midwinter. And when you mutter that this is perhaps not wise, he orders an issue of rum from the ship’s emergency reserve.

Do you then praise him for his astuteness? Shocking numbers of people did so this week. The voyage has begun – and we can’t get off the ship.

The trouble is, you have to look carefully to see this. Mr Osborne is missing his borrowing targets, and is less than halfway to getting rid of the deficit, despite having planned in 2010 to have done so by now.

The easiest spending cuts have already been made. Thanks to low tax receipts, he has postponed his vaunted balancing of the books by two years. Nobody believes he can actually do so. The low receipts are caused by the fact many of the ‘jobs’ he claims to have created are so poorly paid. Millions can’t afford to live on their low wages, and are borrowing to bridge the gap. Real wages will be lower in 2019 than they were in 2007. No wonder household debt as a percentage of income is forecast to rise soon from 146 per cent to 180 per cent.

Our boasted ‘growth’ is mostly caused by mass immigration, which has expanded our Gross Domestic Product (GDP). But GDP per head isn’t going up. Nobody believes Osborne or anyone else can make the cuts promised for the next four years. Rob Wood, chief UK economist at Berenberg Bank, described the projected cuts as ‘implausible’, while Paul Johnson, of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said the prophesied reduction was ‘huge by any standards and bigger than the cuts so far delivered’.

Meanwhile, many people still don’t understand the difference between ‘deficit’ and ‘debt’. Nor does the Prime Minister, who once mixed them up in a scripted broadcast.

The deficit is the annual gap between what the government spends and what it raises, made up by borrowing. The interest on this, which could shoot up at any moment if world interest rates rise, currently costs us roughly as much each year as the defence budget. Our budget deficit is 5.2 per cent of our GDP. It is 4.4 per cent in France, which British Tories often deride as a Leftist basket-case. It is 0.2 per cent in Germany. The US deficit, once comparable to ours, has dropped to 2.8 per cent of GDP.

The national debt is what we have piled up by decades of spending more than we make. It is approaching £1.5 trillion (£1,500,000,000,000). We cannot possibly pay it off.

This is an incredibly serious mess. It will not be solved by another mini housing boom or by the building of a few roads. Those responsible now plan to present themselves to the country next May as the people who repaired our economy. In any sphere outside politics, this would be criminal fraud.

*****

Privately schooled Education Secretary Nicky  Morgan says she’s not sure it’s right to separate children at 11 by academic selection. When will such people grasp that children already are separated at 11 – by money?

*****

At last, TV gets properly scary

I love ghost stories, most of all the unmatched ones written by M. R. James. I also love Yorkshire landscapes and am particularly fond of Scarborough, one of the most beautiful bits of coastline in the world.

So I’ve been watching the BBC’s three-parter Remember Me with particular interest. Apart from the needless swearing (you can hardly insist on ‘realism’ in a ghost story), it’s by far the best such thing on TV for years. It has borrowed many things from James – the lonely beach in winter, the shapeless flapping thing in the distance, getting closer, the fear that you have wakened something horrible that will now never leave you alone.

I just hope they don’t spoil it with a stupid ending, the hardest part of any ghost story.

*******

Free with every book... a case of pneumonia

My local Waterstones bookshop was so cold on Tuesday I expected polar bears to come in and browse for books on global warming. The reason? A central edict that the doors must be hooked open to encourage customers to come in. Alas, a freezing north-east wind came in as well, and I went somewhere more sensible.

 

******

I see that the Blair creature is saying his grasp of the world is now ‘much more sophisticated and deep’ than when he was in government. That wouldn’t be hard. By the way, where is the Chilcot Report on the Iraq War?

******

Sexism, or a load of hot air from EDF?

How long is it since British schools dared to tell girls they couldn’t study science? Yet all this week, the French-owned energy giant EDF has been plastering unpopular newspapers with advertisements featuring huge pictures of a woman called Niki Rousseau. She appears above the words (in block capitals): My old school taught me that girls don’t do science.

Really? I’m still looking for fellow pupils of Ms Rousseau at that school, Leiston High in Suffolk, in the early 1980s. But EDF eventually admitted to me that Ms Rousseau herself studied Biology at GCE O-level. This is surely very odd if they ‘taught’ her that ‘girls don’t do science’.

EDF blustered that the claim (which has Ms Rousseau’s stern face above it and her name beneath it) isn’t actually in quote marks. So what? What other conclusion could any normal person draw from this display, than that these were her words?

In the end they fell back on saying (over and over again): ‘It’s how she felt.’ Well, she may well have felt this. I might feel that I am a poached egg and start demanding toast to sit on. But if I am not one, my feelings don’t alter the facts. 

One of the nastiest habits of modern Leftism is that it constantly pretends that things are worse than they are, and then uses this exaggeration to demand yet more positive discrimination. I think this is wicked, myself, and plan to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority.

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

 

Some Thoughts on Ghost Stories

Around this time of year Montague Rhodes James’s friends must once have looked forward to an approaching delight –  his annual ghost story, recounted by candle-light, probably in some ancient panelled room at Cambridge or Eton.

 

James was (as I judge partly from his work and partly from what we know of him) a drily humorous man with a genuinely deep knowledge of many subjects. His study of the Apocryphal New Testament is still, as far as I know, the standard work on the subject 90 years after he wrote it. His entry in ‘Who was Who’ is mostly an enormous list of antiquarian or expert works on ecclesiastical and related matters.  

 

I imagine him having what C.P.Snow once described as a ‘creaky, vicarage voice’( his father was a Suffolk country rector), and generous with his wine.

 

The opening passage of what many regard as his best story ( I simply cannot decide which of many qualifies),  ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’,  is full of little jokes at the expense of academic colleagues, which grow better as you know more about such people.

 

But what is it that makes his stories so enduring, so capable of keeping the imaginative reader awake, as a couple of his stories did to me, long ago? They’ve lost (I think) their power to do this any more, but they certainly had it when I first read them all in my university years. Had I done so as a child, I might have missed the point of some of them. Now. Hmm. I wouldn’t open a locked room in an empty old house, even in broad sunny daylight. It might not be rats I found within.

 

I was stimulated into writing about this by the current BBC series ‘Remember Me’, which is probably the best ghost story to be transmitted on TV since ‘The Stone Tape’ more than 40 years ago. I can still make myself shudder by recalling the scientist hero of ‘The Stone Tape’  finding, stuffed into a crack in the wall of a haunted room, a small boy’s plea in childish writing on yellowed paper from decades before ‘All I want for Christmas is – please go away’.

 

‘Remember Me’ employs many of James’s weapons. There are lonely beaches at twilight. A horrid, flapping thing, its face concealed, rises unexpectedly and appears likely to pursue the watcher, first showing him its dreadful countenance.

 

There is a lot of darkness and dankness. Pictures , supposedly unalterable, come strangely to life. Apparently banal tunes or songs take on a sinister, even terrifying import. There is a strong feeling of having , by curiosity, aroused malevolent force which cannot be pacified or returned to the place from which it came – at least not without some horrible sacrifice or quest.

 

Penelope Fitzgerald, I seem to recall, had a go at a James-like story in her book ‘Gate of Angels’. It is pretty horrid, but too physical and clear, and also a bit too recent. Somehow these stories belong in the first half of the 19th century , though ‘A View from a Hill’ successfully revives a Regency-era monster in what must be Edwardian times.

 

 

I think James’s stories work because the horror is always at the edge of our vision, at least until we encounter it fully (if we ever do, sometimes it remains distant, recounted by others, or as in ‘An Episode of Cathedral history’ or Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ glimpsed for a fleeting moment). Thus our own imagination builds them. To me, the single most terrifying figure has always been Count Magnus, in the story of that name, summoned from his huge thrice-padlocked tomb (you’d think he was safe in there, wouldn’t you?) by a naively curious English traveller who (very mistakenly) imagines that it might be interesting to meet this grim old nobleman .

 

Even the lighter ones have a severe message – do we really know what we are trifling with when we make light of the unseen? The story of ‘Number 13’, in which a Danish hotel room mysteriously shrinks in the night,  is one of the least terrifying, but its explanation, if that is what it is, is such a warning.

 

James never claimed to have seen an actual ghost, though it has been claimed that he appeared, looking very much alive, in an Eton College photograph after he had been dead for some time. He wrote once that he was prepared to listen to evidence on the subject, but that was all. I know one person, a highly rational left-wing journalist, level-headed and humorous, who absolutely avers that he once saw the ghost of an old friend a short time after this friend had died. He is quite emphatic that it wasn’t any kind of hallucination, and that the apparition was quite clear, though it did and said nothing. I have never seen any such thing and hope not to, though I have been overcome, briefly,  by stark irrational terror in a dark wood at midnight, aged about 35,  for absolutely no material reason. I simply fought it down.

 

I shall be interested to see if ‘Remember Me’ manages to bring the story to a satisfactory end, both explicable and frightening . This is the hardest trick for a ghost story writer to pull off. Either you end up with an explanation which is banal and disappointing  - it’s all in the mind, or it might be (see Henry James’s ‘Turn of the Screw’)  it was a dream, someone was trying to frighten the hero away from the scene of a crime, etc etc. Or it just doesn’t obey the rules of the supernatural, as we imagine them to be,  in some other important way.

 

 It’s set in some of the loveliest parts of Yorkshire under glorious dark English skies, which give it an added appeal. The name makes me think of that desperately upsetting Christina Rossetti Poem ‘Remember’, which runs

 

Remember me when I am gone away,

         Gone far away into the silent land;

         When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

         You tell me of our future that you plann'd:

         Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

         And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

         For if the darkness and corruption leave

         A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

         Than that you should remember and be sad.

 

I wonder if it will turn out to matter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Getting the Wrong End of the Stick

Amazing what you can do when you really, really want to get hold of the wrong end of the stick. In a posting on German attitudes towards Britain and the EU , I noted: ’ I believe it [EU membership]was largely forced upon us by the USA, which has had, since 1916, a strong interest in creating a unified Europe in which war has been made highly unlikely.

 

 

My vigilant nitpickers pounced. Was I then accepting the EU’s claim to have prevented war in Europe, which I have often derided? So! etc etc.

 

Please do pay attention. The EU played no part in preventing the Cold War from turning hot. That was achieved by NATO and the successful bluff that a conventional Warsaw Pact attack on Western Europe would lead inevitably to a nuclear war.

 

But, as I have often said, the EU institutionalised the conflict between Germany and France, and the overbearing dominance by Germany of the rest of the continent, which rests ultimately on an implicit threat that, unindulged by EU dominance, Germany will once again go wild. I did so as recently as June this year:

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/06/some-thoughts-on-german-domination-of-the-european-union.html

 

 

As for the USA, I cannot recommend too strongly Adam Tooze’s new book ‘The Deluge’ , by a mile the most illuminating book about the First World War published in recent times, and reviewed by me here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/british-empire/

 

The fact that the USA desires a stabilized Europe, and that it believes an expanding German-dominated EU is the best route to this goal, is one thing, Whether this is a wise policy, and whether it will have the results the USA hopes for, is another. I was stating a fact about what Washington wants, not offering an opinion on whether it was wise to do so. I tend to think the evidence so far suggests that Washington, like so many Anglocentric students of European conflict,  may have missed the point. The fundamental conflict in Europe is not between France and Germany, let alone between Britain and Germany, It is between Germany and Russia.

 

Now the EU has become the modern expression of Germany, and Russia cannot conceivably join the EU as a single nation without challenging Germany’s dominance of that EU (and so cannot join, full stop).

 

So the Russo-German conflict cannot be institutionalised and tame within the EU. Worse, the EU, as the continuation of Germany by other mean, is now through eastward expansion reviving the  perennial quarrel. I am extremely gloomy about the likely outcome of this. The stakes, especially control of the vital Caspian basin, are very high. The cancellation this week of Russia’s planned South Stream pipeline is a development of enormous significance which few have even noticed.  So is France’s refusal to hand over a new warship she has been building for the Russian Navy, an astonishing surrender of national sovereignty by France, whose arms exporting firms have always been immensely powerful in the French state.  There are bad times just around the corner.

How would I feel about the EU if I were German?

Martin Oliver asks me this interesting question: ' If you were German or had moved to Germany and integrated (as I vaguely remember you saying you might do if you were younger), how would you feel about the EU? As an advocate of the nation state, would you support the EU as a (relatively) benevolent mechanism for advancing German interests, while understanding why the British might wish to leave, or would you still abhor the EU because of its globalism? 

There may be a difference between what I would think, and what I hope I would think. Any intelligent, civilised patriotic German has to cope with the fact that his or her country can never behave again as it behaved between 1933 and 1945, internally or externally.

There is much to admire about German culture and civilisation, but the Hitler period lies across all that, an irremoveable stain,  because most thoughtful Germans grasp that Hitlerism is pretty specifically German. Most cultures could create a hell on earth in the same circumstances, but it would be a different sort of hell. 

 

So, just as a French patriot must recognise that his country's Napoleonic era will never return, and it must accede to German domination of the continent, a German patriot must concede that his country's future power and prosperity cannot be advanced by aggressive nationalism. I suspect this has led to the adoption by sensible Germans of the liberal nationalism pioneered by Naumann, which takes the form of domination diluted by limited sovereignty for the dominated countries, and disguised by the acceptance of symbolic nationalism (flags, anthems, powerless parliaments, toy monarchies etc) which allow the semblance of independence.

 

Naumannn was the ancestor of the Free Democrats, the party of Hans-Dietrich Genscher, for many years German Foreign Minister, a tireless fixer who was really the architect of post Cold War Europe. 

 

All this seems perfectly reasonable to me. Proper sovereignty is only available to those who are ready to defend it at all costs, and most continental nations (with the sole exception of Russia, though Switzerland's case is more complex)  recognise that Germany can best be contained and calmed by giving in to her on all major matters, from frontiers to law, free movement and currency.

 

Britain's case *was* different in 1972. At that stage, it was still possible for her to maintain her sovereignty. It was also desirable because her precious legal system was virtually unique and far superior to the Continental one, and her economy was largely turned away from Europe, thanks to her history. It was a mistake, politically and economically, for us to join the Common Market. I believe it was largely forced upon us by the USA, which has had, since 1916, a strong interest in creating a unified Europe in which war has been made highly unlikely.

 

Now, after more than 40 years of salami-slicing, I'm not sure there's enough of us left to reinstate realistic sovereignty, though I think it msut be worth a try. Certainly the horror stories about unemployment, job losses etc if we leave are phantasmal tripe. Trade with the EU would barely be affected, and might even improve. And in a vastly-expanded EU, our votes on EU bodies can be of little concern to Germany. Were I a German, I hope I would have the sense to regard Britain's initial membership as a mistake, largely irrelevant to the EU but damaging for the United Kingdom, and her possible departure from the EU as a matter of indifference.  

Look Who Used to be a Ukrainian Nationalist - Lenin

As I read Richard Pipes’s superb and thoughtful history of the Russian Revolution (the 1992 Fontana paperback edition) I gaped in wonderment at a passage on pages 376-378. This section of the book deals with Lenin, and was necessarily based on very limited access to the archives available before the fall of the Communist Regime in the USSR. Perhaps someone knows if more has come to light about what I shall now recount.

 

After a brief biography of Lenin in which his ruthless personal nastiness, cultural narrowness and personal cowardice and treachery are rather neatly and economically portrayed, Pipes notes that Lenin spent 1912-1914 in Cracow, now in Poland,  then the Austrian-controlled city of Krakau. What was he doing there? Pipes says he was working for an agency of the Austrian Government called, wait for it ‘ The Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine’.

 

Now, I think I’ve mentioned here before that the Austrian government was stirring up Ukrainian nationalism in the pre-1914 period to annoy the Russians. Once the war started, Germany created a puppet ;’Kingdom of Poland’, mainly to cause unrest in the Russian-ruled parts of Poland.  It’s yet another part of one of the most continuous political strains of the past 150 years, between the Germanic and Russian blocs, over Eastern Europe and Ukraine. This has often expressed itself through ‘Western’(for which read ‘German’) backing for Ukrainian ‘independence’ from Moscow. This usually means Ukrainian dependence on Germany (or Austria), dressed up as independence but lacking any of the real aspects of sovereignty. Given the German nation’s unending need for Ukraine’s wheat, coal and workers, and its desire for an opening into the Near East through the Caucasus and the Black Sea, I see no reason why this shouldn’t persist into the present day

 

Pipes notes that , in return for ‘support of Ukrainian National aspiration’s Lenin was paid a subsidy and given help with his efforts to overthrow the Russian Imperial Government. ‘The Union received funds from *both Vienna and Berlin* and operated under the supervision of the Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs’. And the man who fixed Lenin up with this little job was that extraordinary figure of intrigue and mystery, Parvus Helphand, who also helped arrange the famous sealed train, by which the Bolshevik bacillus was inserted into Petrograd by Ludendorff (more German interference in Russian affairs).

 

So when Lenin was arrested by the Austrians  in August 1914 as an enemy alien, he was quickly released and put on an Austrian military mail train to Switzerland (as Pipes says, this is hardly the form of transport you’d expect for an ordinary deported alien).

 

The Bolsheviks themselves made cynical use of national minorities in the former Russian empire, before crushing them when they had the strength to do so. In Ukraine, they were forestalled by the 1918 Brest-Litovsk Treaty which created a brief ‘independent’ Ukraine (actually sponsored by Germany, and doomed to fall once Germany lost the war in the West a few months later, eventually reconquered by the Bolsheviks) .Lenin was so ruthless that he would use anybody and anything to get the power to change the world which he wanted above all things. The only point I want to make here is that the German desire to detach Ukraine from Moscow is both very old and very cynical – and that it is now an accepted part of the Pax Americana under which Germany dominates the European continent, under the camouflage of the EU.

By the way, I do think it hilatrious that a contributor thinks that 'Wikipedia'' can somehpow offer an Olympian impartial assessment of who is right and who is wrong about political or historical controversies. Apart from the fact that rightness or wrongness in such matters may well depnd on whether you believe in (say) national sovereignty or in globalism, every 'Wikipedia' on contentious matters is patrolled by so-called 'editors' who have very strong opinions on the subject. Anyone who doubts this should try adding content that these 'editors' do not like and see what happens. Even if the matter is not contentious, people often regard the entry as their property and resent outsiders, as I found when i tried to insert a short addition on the book'When William Came' in the entry on the author 'Saki'(H.H.Munro). 

It Begins to Dawn on Conventional Opinion - George Osborne is not a Miracle-Worker after all

There’s a healthy amount of doubt surfacing now about George Osborne’s ever-ludicrous claims to have sorted out this country’s profound dogma-driven economic crisis. I’m glad to see it. But I have to say that it has been far too long in coming.

 

I seem to remember encountering audience incredulity during a Question Time in June 2010, soon after the election, when I pointed out that there weren’t, in fact, any cuts, but that spending and borrowing were rising.

 

It’s  not really my subject, so I haven’t perhaps written about it as much as I should have had, but here are a few quotations, the first recent, the others from long ago, to show that even a layman such as I could see that trouble was merley being postponed.  

 

26th May

Does anyone, outside the political commentariat, and outside the Republic of London,  actually believe the stuff about Mr Osborne's economic recovery, which is composed entirely of press releases?

 

Mr Osborne borrows more every day. His new army of the 'self-employed' would be better described as 'self-unemployed'. To examine the growth figures is to intrude into private grief,  and every serious economist is horrified by the housing bubble and its attendant dangers. Our main visible exports continue to be scrap metal and air, with which we pay for our Snickers bars, Pinot Grigio and iphones. 

 

6th February

 

I gaze open-mouthed at the praise some of my fellow-scribblers give to the Chancellor of the Exchequer (what is his name? I can never remember it), as the United Kingdom’s unpayably vast national debt climbs rapidly towards the Moon, and increases by about £2,000,000,000 a week. At this rate it won’t be long before it reaches 90% of Gross Domestic Product (it’s now around 75%). It has been higher, mainly as a result of the two enormous wars we fought in the middle of the 20th century, but we had been getting it back under control until the Blair-Brown splurge, in which we still wallow and flounder, because nobody has any idea how to climb out of it.  But what about the lives of the people, employment, income and standards of living.

 

26th January

 

Our hopelessly indebted economy, whose main exports are thin air and rubbish for recycling, is repeatedly proclaimed to be healthy as we tremble  on the edge of a crash worse than 1931.

 

21st March 2013

 

It looks to me as if the government has now decided to inflate its way out of the crisis. The new Governor of the ‘independent’ Bank of England has been given the nod that he may carry on with more ‘quantitative easing’, and the Budget seems to be offering help with mortgages to people who can’t really afford mortgages, which will create a new bubble of unrepayable borrowed money, possibly in return for a short-term boost to the economy. Everyone knows this is a bad idea, after what happened in the USA when they lent mortgages to people who couldn’t repay them. It is not even a kindness.  Why do they do it?

 

It’s all pretty desperate, as one might expect from a  government which never had any ideas in the first place.

 

6th December 2012

 

Also I really cannot see how spending cuts by themselves are a coherent policy in modern Britain. You have to reduce the demand for spending first, and that is a social and cultural matter, which may cost quiet a lot of money.  The entire economy (as economists such as David Blanchflower seem to me to imply) is now so dependent on public spending for survival that large spending cuts, though undoubtedly desirable in principle, will simply kill the patient.  He is too ill for any such treatment. You might as well bleed someone who’s suffering from blood loss.

 

The levels of spending in this country are the consequence of 50 years of leftist social policy. The family, the church, independent charity and self-reliance have been undermined to the point that they barely exist as forces, while the state, and its quasi-independent agencies, have grown enormously.  Manufacturing industry as an employer has shrivelled.  The unproductive public sector wobbles on top of the productive economy. Our ability to export has likewise atrophied.

 

How on earth an immediate radical spending cut will do good under such circumstances, I honestly don’t know. The government’s tax receipts would plunge, as large numbers of public employees stopped paying income tax because they were unemployed. And its liabilities would increase, as they had to be paid various doles and allowances instead. Result: More borrowing, plus less economic activity, as you would have taken so much purchasing power out of the economy. Aldi and Lidl might benefit. I don’t think anyone else would. We did, sort of, go through this before in the Thatcher-Howe era. But the enormous receipts from North Sea Oil (now over) served as great national cushion.

 

18th July 2012 (in a review of ‘Going South’ by Larry Elliott and Dan Atknson)

 

‘An alarming era is beginning, of power shortages, of unaffordable imports, of higher prices and stationary wages, of a vast welfare system which simply cannot function any more because inflation has wiped out the value of the money used to pay for it. I cannot see how the reckoning can be put off much longer.’

 

23rd October 2010

 

What cuts? My favourite two facts about British public spending are these. Housing benefit, probably the single most fraud­ulent and wasteful state handout ever invented, costs more each year than the Army and the Royal Navy combined.

And while Labour spent £600 billion (roughly £10,000 for every human being in this country) in their last year in office, the supposedly vicious cutter George Osborne plans to spend £692.7 billion (£11,500 per head) in 2014-15, after his alleged chainsaw massacre. Britain remains bankrupt in most important ways.

 

We spend more than we earn. We pay huge numbers of people to do silly jobs, or to do nothing at all while pretending to be ill. Our public services, about which we are all supposed to be so sentimental, are often dreadful. And where this is so, it is usually not because of a shortage of money.

Yes, Bert, the End of Weekly Rubbish Collection is the EU's Fault

I am still patiently waiting for ‘Bert’ to provide his long-awaited alternative explanation for the creeping abolition of weekly rubbish collections. Long-time readers here will remember that I blame the EU landfill directive, and the huge fines attached to it for this problem. The evidence for this connection is , er, highly persuasive, but ‘Bert’ (who is one of my automatic critics) still insists (automatically) that I am wrong.

 

See here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/02/thucy-did-or-thucy-didnt-he.html

 

And here:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/02/justice-for-bert-mr-everetts-campaign-to-free-the-peloponnesian-one.html

 

Now, I think this rather good article by James Delingpole (which appeared in Saturday's Daily Mail on the eve of yet more government bluster on the subject) closes the issue even more firmly

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2853700/The-real-culprits-fly-tip-one-mile-long-s-green-fanatics-meddling-EU-going-dump-expensive-nightmare-us.html

 

You have to read on down to see the bipartisan acceptance of EU instructions, stretching back to the Major era, has brought us to this pass.

 

I recall, when I first started writing about this, that lots of people would say *they* still had normal weekly rubbish collections, and what was I fussing about. I don’t get so many of those nowadays, though I think a few areas remain untouched – so far.

 

But what about ‘Bert’. Where is his alternative explanation? 

A Recent Speech by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov

I mentioned in my Sunday column the interesting speech recently delivered by Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister who is by no means a close confidant of his boss, Vladimir Putin. Lavrov is a grown-up diplomat of great experience, who has held his post for ten years. He is a linguist, a scientist by education and a graduate of the old MGIMO, the USSR’s  highly-selective foreign policy academy, its equivalent of our Oxbridge or France’s (now diminished) Grandes Ecoles.  

 

In short, he’s not just a politician who’s had to make a sudden study of the atlas. And it is interesting sometimes to go beyond our tiny horizons and see how the world looks from the looming gothic fortress of Russia’s Foreign Ministry in Smolensk Square, staring out through the winter fog across the Moscow River.

 

Here’s the speech

http://www.mid.ru/brp_4.nsf/0/24454A08D48F695EC3257D9A004BA32E

 

It’s not especially well translated (and I am not endorsing it as a whole or in part by reproducing it, before anyone accuses me of doing so) , but the sense is there.

 

This passage is crucial : ‘Long before the country was plunged into the crisis, there was a feeling in the air that Russia’s relations with the EU and with the West were about to reach their moment of truth. It was clear that we could no longer continue to put issues in our relations on the back burner and that a choice had to be made between a genuine partnership or, as the saying goes, “breaking pots’

 

But not as crucial as what follows, where he quotes (with a sideswipe that we know him ‘all too well’) Leslie Gelb, a grandee of American foreign policy think tankery.

 

Gelb, he says, ‘ wrote that Ukraine’s Association Agreement with the EU had nothing to do with inviting Ukraine to join the EU and was aimed in the short term at preventing it from joining the Customs Union.’

 

Well now. That would seem to put a different angle on the whole thing. In this endless battle of Who,  Whom? and EU EUM?, Dr Gelb’s contribution suggests that it was the ‘West’ which was trying to close off a Ukraininian opening to the East, not the other way round.

 

Readers will know that this is very much my view, because it simply accords with the historical tendency of Germany ( now subsumed into the EU) to woo chunks of eastern Europe away from Russian influence by backing anti-Kremlin national movements in those territories.

 

See http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/08/1914-revisited-part-3-the-price-of-vainglory-is-paid-in-power-as-well-as-gold.html

For a full discussion of the German liberal nationalist idea of ‘Federative Imperialism’ which eventually became the EU.

 

Ass Adam Tooze puts it in his superlative unmissable book ‘The Deluge’ : ‘What the more far-sighted strategists in Imperial Germany were advancing was a vision of negotiated sovereignty in which economic and military independence was pooled by smaller states with larger states’.

 

The advance of the EU and the USA into Ukraine, using civil society organisations and people power,  doesn’t just look aggressive to Russia. It might be that sobersided knowledgeable persons.

 

Talking of which, I have been amused by stories in the last few days in the Financial Times and new York Times, suggesting Russia is behind various anti-fracking protests in Eastern Europe. It’s a perfectly reasonable guess.   Successful fracking in this region would weaken Russia’s hold om the region’s energy supplies.  But if so, the methods used  (’civil society’ organisations and popular street demonstrations) are almost comically similar to those employed by ‘The West’ in Ukraine.

 

People really shouldn’t imagine that Russians have no sense of humour. In my experience, they have a very mischievous one.

 

Their view of such actions may well be that they are simply responding in kind. Mr Lavrov says : ‘It has become fashionable to argue that Russia is waging a kind of “hybrid war” in Crimea and in Ukraine. It is an interesting term, but I would apply it above all to the United States and its war strategy – it is truly a hybrid war aimed not so much at defeating the enemy militarily as at changing the regimes in the states that pursue a policy Washington does not like. It is using financial and economic pressure, information attacks, using others on the perimeter of a corresponding state as proxies and of course information and ideological pressure through externally financed non-governmental organisations. Is it not a hybrid process and not what we call war? It would be interesting to discuss the concept of the hybrid war to see who is waging it and is it only about “little green men.”

Apparently the toolkit of our US partners, who have become adept at using it, is much larger.

 

 

But there are some other passages worth reading carefully.

 

There’s this. Is it true about sanctions’ I think it is. If so, was this major change in policy ever publicly discussed: ‘ Of course, one can damage our economy, and damage is being done, but only by doing harm to those who are taking corresponding measures and, equally important, destroying the system of international economic relations, the principles on which it is based. Formerly, when sanctions were applied (I worked at the Russian mission to the UN at the time) our Western partners, when discussing the DPRK, Iran or other states, said that it was necessary to formulate the restrictions in such a way as to keep within humanitarian limits and not to cause damage to the social sphere and the economy, and to selectively target only the elite. Today everything is the other way around: Western leaders are publicly declaring that the sanctions should destroy the economy and trigger popular protests. So, as regards the conceptual approach to the use of coercive measures the West unequivocally demonstrates that it does not merely seek to change Russian policy (which in itself is illusory), but it seeks to change the regime -- and practically nobody denies this.’

 

But the really savage part comes here ‘Many reasonable analysts understand that there is a widening gap between the global ambitions of the US Administration and the country’s real potential. The world is changing and, as has always happened in history, at some point somebody’s influence and power reach their peak and then somebody begins to develop still faster and more effectively. One should study history and proceed from realities. The seven developing economies headed by BRICS already have a bigger GDP than the Western G7. One should proceed from the facts of life, and not from a misconceived sense of one’s own grandeur.’

 

 

There are plenty of other interesting points, notably about Washington’s attitude towards Syria, and Russian desires to take steps specifically against the persecution of Christians, which the ‘West’ is unwilling to do (anyone who seriously thinks there is apolitical continuity between the USSR and modern Russia should take note of the increasingly and specifically Christian alignment of its elite).

 

But in general, it’s just interesting, more interesting to me than the ‘war on terror’ or George Osborne’s reheated plans to build some roads in marginal constituencies. The fault’s in me, no doubt.