Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 215

A RENEWED WARNING TO RELIGIOUS BORES

Normally on such a Monday as this I would spend some time responding to comments submitted over the weekend, taking the debate further.  But as I scrolled through them this morning I found that, once again, threads which have nothing to do with religion have been almost entirely taken over by arguments among religious bores, on the thinnest excuse. These selfish people must understand that their behaviour drives away others who want to comment. If they will not, then I shall have to act.

Curdling the Blood

Fresh from lecturing Vladimir Putin on international morality, David Cameron(the Victor of Libya, let it never be forgotten, as well as The Man Who Wanted to Back the Rebels in Syria Who Later Turned into ISIS, but luckily failed) is now warning that there is a coming world economic crisis which may wreck Britain's supposed recovery (see my blog of yesterday about being governed by people whose intellects are inferior to those of Garden Gnomes).

Actually,he knows perfectly well that this 'recovery' is founded upon sand, in the form of a cheap housing credit bubble and massaged statistics, and will be exposed very soon when the huge imbalance between spending and our ability to pay for it has to be addressed.

 

Presumably, this article is an early attempt to shift the blame. It s no longer possibe to say that it is Labour's falt, Labour having let office almost five years ago. So the rest of the world must take the blame.

 

By the way, what is Britain's direct interest in Ukraine, and with what armed forces do we presume to warn Russia? Once upon a time, we protected our own interests and had the resources to make our words count. Now we intervene in quarrels that are nothing to do with us, and lack the weapons or troops with which to back up our growls.

Another Frozen Conflict - The People Want Grammar Schools. The Elite Don't

The unresolved war over education is one of the biggest political quarrels in this country.  But it is very difficult to debate, because the major political parties, and the elite as a whole, have made their peace with our disgraceful existing system. So it is a Frozen Conflict, where those who want beneficial change have all the arguments, but no power. And those who have no arguments have all the power. 

 

The rich and influential can, one way or another, buy or wangle their way into reasonable schooling for their young. Most of the rest have no idea how badly they are being cheated, and no means of putting things right even if they did.

 

A few crude lies will usually close the debate. A little knowledge can counter them all. Here are some of those lies, and the counters to them:

 

Lie No. 1. If you have selective schools, you will have secondary moderns’ The unstated claim of this argument (without which it would be a nonsense)  is that the comprehensive system has abolished the secondary moderns. In fact (by the standards existing before 1965) the comprehnsive revolution has created ‘Secondary Moderns For All', with a minority of superior secondary moderns catering for various bits of the elite. No secondary modern pupil benefited in the slightest, then or later, by the closing of grammar schools in his or her area.

 

The comprehensive system as a whole rapidl;y proved how much lower its standards were than those of the grammar schools had been. The comprehensives (or perhaps we should call them 'Secondary Ultra-Moderns') could not cope with the ‘O’ and ‘A’ level exams which grammar school pupils were able to pass, at good grades. That is the main reason why the ‘A’ levels were diluted, and the ‘O’ levels replaced by the hugely inferior and less testing GCSE. These changes prevent a direct comparison between today’s ‘good’ or 'outstanding' schools ( as OFSTED contentiously calls them) and the old grammar schools.

 

The comprehensive revolution has also been an enormous boost to many mediocre private schools, which by selection and the superior discipline which follows automatically, can easily rack up good scores.  The abolition of the grammar schools saved most of Britain’s private schools from an impending disaster. Had the grammar schools been expanded instead , into areas where there were too few, and also by opening more girls’ grammars, all but the most exceptional private schools would have been utterly eclipsed, in the universities and the professions, by now.

 

Lie No. 2. Because the tiny number of surviving grammars are heavily oversubscribed,  and so dominated by those who can afford tuition for their children, this would be so in a national, fully-selective system. Why should this be so? It was not so when there were nationally available grammar schools, nor is it so in northern Ireland, the last remaining fully selective system in the UK, or in Germany, which is largely selective.

 

The reason for the pressure on the tiny number of comparatively good state schools is precisely that – that there are too few of them. The non-grammar ones are of course just as besieged as the non-grammar ones, but the siege takes place in the estate agents’ offices and in the church pews, which seems to be OK among modern left-wing types.

 

The absurdly overpraised Michael Gove blocked very small plans to expand, ever so slightly, grammar provision in Kent.  The opening of new free-standing grammar schools is actually against the law. This is a monstrosity for which New Labour was responsible, but which has  not been put right in almost five years of (allegedly) non-Labour government.  So new grammar places can only be opened as satellites of existing schools, a process easily halted by legal challenged from opponents of selection.  At least selection by ability does give *some* children from poor homes the chance of getting in.  We’re now reduced to the idea of so-called ‘ballots’ – by which they mean a lottery. A lottery?  To decide who gets a good academic education? Welcome to the William Hill academy, the final triumph of irrational egalitarian dogma.

 

Lie No. 3. If only we had a fully comprehensive system, its problems would be solved. No they wouldn’t. Scotland is fully comprehensive. Its private school sector is booming, and Scotland's state schools get proportionately fewer working class pupils into University than wholly-selective Northern Ireland (where private education is rare).  

 

If by ‘fully-comprehensive’ they mean ‘Communist totalitarian, with no private schools allowed’ (fior only a tyranny could banm private education) , it’s also not true. All the Communist countries maintained (or maintain) secret privilege in education, with certain schools open only to the children of the elite. The Lenin High School in Havana, and the Mangyongdae High School in Pyongyang, are surviving examples of this system . School Number One in Moscow was the best-known example in the USSR.

 

Lie No. 4. Grammar schools failed because they didn’t take enough working class pupils and because the middle class benefited from them.  

 

No, they didn’t fail because of this.  The failing, such as it was, was not a consequence of a selective system. It was a consequence of an imprfect selective system which could easily ahve been reformed without being destroyed. The authorities failed to reform them to take account of these problems.

 

I should also say that it is no surprise that the middle class get their children into grammar schools, is it? Why shouldn’t the middle class benefit from them, as long as they don’t do so at the expense of equally talented children from other classes? The middle class is not necessarily rich, and Oligarch-style incomes shouldn’t be necessary for a good education, as they increasingly are.  And it is perfectly true that the grammar schools, as they were in 1965, didn’t take enough working class pupils. They didn’t take enough girls either. They were completely absent in many parts of the country, and sparse in others.  How does closing them all down solve any of these problems? Outreach to primary schools in poor areas, a general improvement in primary education for the poor, a more flexible entry system, more grammar schools in general and more in working class areas and more for girls, would seem to me to be the rational response to these failings.

 

Last week I attended the annual Orwell Lecture, given by the much-caressed historian David Kynaston. The chairman, D.J. Taylor, referred to the event in this article in yesterday’s Independent on Sunday http://ind.pn/1uktmYS , which manages (in its online version)  to suggest wrongly that my intervention was in favour of private schools, rather than in favour of grammars, as it in fact was.

 

In my view quite absurdly, Professor Kynaston turned his lecture into an attack on the private schools, which are a consequence, not a cause,  of the unfairness of our education system, and which could easily be made to serve the general populace by the reintroduction of the excellent Direct Grant System (rightly praised by D.J.Taylor in his article, see link above) . Taylor argues in favour of  ‘ taking, say, 20,000 of the country's brightest 11-year-olds from poor homes and compelling the private sector to educate them on pain of loss of charitable status.’

 

First of all, who will pay? Most private schools are not especially rich, and many already spend a large sum annually on bursaries. Most private school parents are already stretched to the limit. Why should they be required to pay extra for the dogmatic failure of the state to provide good academic schools? The direct grant system (in my view inseparable from the grammar schools, and using the same form of selection) was financed from taxes.

 

Secondly, who will decide who the 20,000 brightest are, and how will they judge? Surely there will have to be some sort of selection by ability. Funny, that this is so frowned on for schools at age 11, and yet universally accepted at universities, and in the picking of sports and athletics teams. Strange, too, that D.J.Taylor actually suggests selection by ability here, without seeming to realize what he is doing.

 

Oh, and it turned out that Professor Kynaston’s children went to…a grammar school, as he himself revealed.

Trust in our 'political elite'? I'd rather be led by garden gnomes

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column 

For anyone who can count, the constant claims that Britain has recovered from its economic woes are almost physically painful.

For years I’ve had to listen to people saying from public platforms that George Osborne is a successful Chancellor, and being applauded for it – when the truth is that Mr Osborne is actually deepening Britain’s debt every second.

Claims of falling unemployment and industrial recovery are much the same. As so often in modern Britain – and especially in education and crime –the statistics are the only things that are getting better.

But the truth can’t be concealed from everybody for ever. Last week, when the rest of the media were chasing after Ed Miliband like a flock of mad sheep, the Financial Times published the real national accounts.

Safe in the knowledge that very few people read the Pink Paper, our governing elite held their breath and hoped that nobody would notice until after the next Election (when it will be too late).

Here is what the figures said. Whoever is Chancellor at the end of next May must make budget cuts at double the present rate, to meet existing austerity targets.

The utter absurdity of Mr Cameron’s talk of tax cuts, when in reality taxes are bound to rise while spending is massacred, is here revealed.

If the Government continues to protect spending on the NHS, schools and foreign aid from cuts, all other government departments face reductions of one third in their budgets.

Such cuts would devastate what is left of the Armed Forces, the police, transport, pensions and other welfare. They would also be very bad news for crisis-stricken and collapsing parts of the State such as the prisons and border control.

On past performance, the response would be to free more prisoners far too early, and relax our frontiers even further.

As the Financial Times said: ‘Short of an economic miracle in which Britain embarks on sustainably faster economic growth than expected for many years, whichever party wins the next Election will have to implement these spending cuts or something similar.’

All thinking and informed people in Parliament, the media and the Civil Service are broadly aware of this state of affairs.

And while far too many in our supposed elite don’t think and are astoundingly ignorant and gullible, that doesn’t excuse the general silence about this grave prospect. Nor will it excuse the way in which they will reveal it, in tones of pretended shock, about ten minutes after the new government is sworn in next May.

Here’s my theory. Every few years, our new ruling class decides whose turn it is to enjoy the fruits of office. That person is then pretty much spared all criticism. You will never see pictures of him eating messily, or walking through a door marked ‘Exit’. For a decade, that person was the Blair Creature.

Now, all those who fawned over him when he was in power agree that he was a ghastly disaster. But then, he could govern as badly as he liked and no scandal or failure would ever hurt him, even one of the most ill-judged wars in human history.

Now, the heir to Blair is David Cameron, who must be protected against his many bungles and flops by a bodyguard of flatterers. In a few years’ time, when Labour once again has a suitably Blairish leader, everyone will admit that the Cameron years were a buffoonish disaster.

These people haven’t a clue. A cabinet of garden gnomes would have more idea how to fix the nation’s problems. Why wait till after the next Election to punish them all for it?

A sacred moment of history...defiled to sell us chocolate

To me, the Christmas truce between British and German soldiers in 1914 is, literally, sacred. It was the last hour of Christian Europe, a tragic failure.

If only they had continued it by throwing down their guns and walking away in their thousands to their homes and families, their proper work and their peaceful, happy lives, we would have been spared so much loss and ruin.

The more I study that war, the more I am convinced we should not have taken part in it, and that it destroyed European civilisation, which has never recovered and never will.

So I am revolted by the use of this tragic moment by a supermarket chain in a Christmas advertisement. The Sainsbury’s short film is beautifully made and initially very moving.

But as the swelling music sought to seduce me into buying bars of chocolate, my gorge rose.
Some things are too solemn to be turned into commercials, even under the cover of charity.

Another 'drugs tragedy' ignored

Still no answers about whether the killer of Leeds teacher Ann Maguire was a user of mind-altering drugs. But there is a fascinating new sidelight on the death of the actor Robin Williams, which came as a great shock to those close to him.

Mainstream reports of the autopsy said Mr Williams had no alcohol or illicit drugs in his system when he died. Some accounts incorrectly said there were no drugs at all. Actually, his body contained ‘therapeutic’ levels of the ‘antidepressant’ Mirtazapine.

In the USA, this drug carries a ‘black box’ warning that it can promote suicidal thoughts in those who use it. Could this possibly be significant? We won’t find out if we don’t look.

You might also have noticed reports last week that the obviously unhinged Deyan Deyanov was ‘inappropriately’ diagnosed as feigning his mental illness and released from a Welsh psychiatric unit, after which he went to Tenerife and beheaded British grandmother Jennifer Mills-Westley.

Deyanov, like the killers of Drummer Lee Rigby, was a long-term heavy user of supposedly ‘soft’ cannabis. Why won’t we have a proper inquiry into the dangers of mind-altering drugs, legal and illegal?

Quite possibly, the biggest medical scandal since Thalidomide is incubating in our midst. Do we always have to wait for the tragedy before we seek the remedy?

The Blair creature, along with all other  ex-Premiers, is allowed to claim a special allowance of £115,000 a year, mainly for office expenses. Receipts are required, and the payments are all above board.

But given the giant income which he receives from private sources, should the Victor of Baghdad really expect taxpayers to keep him in staples and printer cartridges?

I’m glad to see they’re going to bury a tiny few of those hideous high-tension cables whose pylons spoil so many of our loveliest landscapes.

Too little, too late. And, alas, you can’t really bury wind turbines, though, come to think of it, they wouldn’t be much more useless if we did.

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

David Cameron confirms it - he has more in common with Ed Miliband than with Nigel Farage

While the entire regiment of political reporters continue to pursue the non-story of the non-rebellion against Ed Miliband, based mainly on them repeating their own abuse of Mr Miliband and then producing this abuse as evidence of the fact that he is useless, a real story took place.

 

In this development, there is a fact. And it is an amazing fact, worthy to head front pages and lead bulletins. The leader of the Tory Party so fears losing a by-election in a seat formerly held by his party that he is appealing to Labour voters to save his candidate from defeat.

 

He went on to ask Liberal Democrats and Greens to back him too.

 

This wasn’t an unsourced leak from a ‘friend’, or a unnamed plotter, nor was it a claim of what somebody had said which couldn’t be confirmed. This was the Prime Minister, on the record. He can have had no doubt of the significance of what he was saying. His very presence in Rochester is a breach of what used to be an absolute convention, that party leaders did not take part in by-elections. The idea was that, if they were personally associated with a defeat, their leadership would be in question. Well, by any rational calculus, Mr Cameron is one of the most unsuccessful and bungling leaders the Tories have ever had, but he is immune to the effects, which is perhaps why the entire regiment of political reporters chases after Mr Miliband. It is a sort of displacement activity.

 

Here is what the leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party told the Kent messenger:

 

‘You can vote for UKIP and be part of the national campaign and another notch for them in their development and then the great caravan will move on, or you can vote for Kelly, who is a hard-working person, born and raised locally.

‘I would say to people who have previously voted Labour, Liberal, Green or anything, that if you want a strong local candidate and don’t want some UKIP boost and all the uncertainty and instability that leads to, then Kelly [Tolhurst] is the choice.’

 

How it must have choked him to mention UKIP at all, after his long and mistaken attempt to get rid of them by ignoring or deriding them.

 

Now that this has failed, he has actually declared that UKIP are the common enemy of Tory, Labour, Lib-Dem, and Green Parties. And that the Tories have more in common with Labour, the Lib-Dems and the Greens than they do with UKIP.

 

Well, I have long known and said that this is the case. But you no longer need to take my word for it. Mr Cameron has confirmed it. I do hope the voters of Rochester and Strood will take note next Thursday, and the voters of the whole country will take note in May. There has never been such a clear statement of the choice – all the establishment parties on one side , UKIP on the other. 

More Thoughts on 'Sex Education'

‘Marcus’ writes: ‘Peter Hitchens strikes again! Honestly! How could you possibly link paedophilia with teenage sex education? Are you totally mad? The purpose of sex education is to educate teenagers on the dangers of unsafe sex, the horror of STD's and to heighten awareness on the dangers which curious young people might encounter once they become sexually active. Peter Hitchens seems to think that by being educated on this subject then the student will become more susceptible to paedophiles.

'The idea that this man can write something so irresponsible is terrifying. Firstly, he is wrong. As we all know, sexual curiosity occupies many teenage minds and therefore surely it helps for them to know the facts. I was lucky enough to receive education on 3 major subjects aged 13; the first being drugs, the second being smoking and the third was sex. I never smoked, I never took drugs and when I eventually had sex for the first time, aged 16 ( and not with a paedophile, but instead with my girlfriend of 3 years) I was very grateful to firstly understand the importance of safety and responsibility but also because I had some idea of what I was doing.

'As a result, we didn’t end up with a teenage pregnancy on our hands and more importantly it did not put me, or my older girlfriend within the dangerous grasp of "sexual terrorists". Peter Hitchens - you seem to think that ignorance is protection. I think most intelligent people would argue the exact opposite. ‘

 

Before I answer this, I think it would be helpful to reproduce what I actually wrote, so that readers can easily refer both to the criticism and to the object of it.

 

Here it is : ‘The mystery of sex education is that parents put up with it at all. It began about 50 years ago, on the pretext that it would reduce unmarried teen pregnancies and sexual diseases. Every time these problems got worse, the answer was more sex education, more explicit than before.

 

Since then, unmarried pregnancies have become pretty much normal, and sexual diseases – and the ‘use’ of pornography – are an epidemic.

 

It is only thanks to frantic free handouts of ‘morning after’ pills and an abortion massacre that the number of teenage mothers has finally begun to level off after decades in which it zoomed upwards across the graph paper.

 

In a normal, reasonable society, a failure as big as this would cause a change of mind. Not here.

If you try to question sex education, you are screamed at by fanatics. This is because it isn’t, and never has been, what it claims to be. Sex education is propaganda for the permissive society. It was invented by the communist George Lukacs, schools commissar during the insane Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, to debauch the morals of Christian schoolgirls.

 

It works by breaking taboos and by portraying actions as normal that would once have been seen as wrong. Last week we learned that the Government has officially endorsed material which says sex at 13, ‘for those of similar age and developmental ability’, is normal.

 

This is, no doubt, a point of view. In a free society, people are entitled to hold it, even if it is rather creepy. But do you want your child’s school to endorse it? And how does it square with our incessant frenzied panic about child sex abuse?

 

If we are so keen on the innocence of the young – and I very much think we should be – then surely this sort of radical propaganda is deeply dangerous. We do not give schools this huge power over the minds of the young for such a purpose.

 

How odd it is that we teach 13-year-olds to go forth and multiply, but can’t somehow teach them their times tables. Shouldn’t it be the other way round?’

 

Thus,  ‘Marcus’ opines that ‘Peter Hitchens seems to think that by being educated on this subject then the student will become more susceptible to paedophiles.’ It’s that word ‘seems’ again, so often used by people who seek to misrepresent what I say. He chooses to think I say this. But I don’t actually say this. ‘Marcus’ , having chosen to believe that this is what I have said, then pronounces this sentiment ‘terrifying’.

 

Actually, my only brief and indirect reference to ‘paedophiles’ is to ask ’ how does it  (’sex education’) square with our incessant frenzied panic about child sex abuse?’

 

I ask the question because it seems interesting to me. In my lifetime, for good or ill (and I think it a mixed bag) attitudes towards sex have been utterly transformed. Pornography, once a matter of deep shame and disgust, has become big business, and people admit to ‘using’ it without shame. Oddly enough, the old claim that by releasing repressions it would improve sexual behaviour is now (understandably) forgotten and nevr made. Yet it was on this basis that the laws against it were dismantled.

 

The open discussion of sex in almost all circumstances, once wholly taboo, was first permitted and has since become almost compulsory. Sex outside marriage, once universally frowned on, has become normal and respectable. Official documents nio longer refer to 'husbands' or 'wives'. Much the same has happened to child-bearing outside marriage, now widely praised. Sexual diseases on the verge of eradication thanks to antibiotics and VD clinics, have now reached epidemic levels, sepcially in the form of genital herpes. Abortion, a crime in all but the most limited circumstances, has now become a form of contraception.  

 

Pharmacists, once coldly disapproving of attempts by obviously unmarried people to buy contraceptives, must now supply morning-after pills free on demand to all without blinking. Etc etc. GPs and advice clinics merrily defy the wishes of parents by prescribing contraceptive pills to girls who are still living at home, Much of this revolution is described in detail in my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’. Whatever you think of it, it *was* a revolution, and the world is utterly different as a result of it. Personally, while I'm in favour of some aspects of it, I think it has done a great deal of damage because it has been so total and so rapid. I think people are permitted to have differing views on this, and even to criticise it, without being abused, denigrated as prudes or otherwise howled down.  

 

Apart from rape, which I never discuss because reasoned argument about it is nowadays impossible, only one form of sexual activity is still universally disapproved of. This is the sexual abuse of the young by those older than them. If people want to understand what our pre-revolutionary society was like, then let them imagine that a similar level of disapproval was once directed at many sexual acts and attitudes which are now common and accepted, if not actually praised.  

 

Having seen this transformation, I am forced to wonder if something similar might happen to the current (in my view perfectly correct) horror of paedophilia. People who wished to license such things were part of the original sexual revolution. At least one leading sexual revolutionary has made statements about the ‘positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships’ and argued that ‘not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful’.

 

Here’s the problem. Once the old Christian boundary has been abolished - under which all sex acts outside lifelong heterosexual marriage were morally wrong -  we struggle to find a clear basis on which to decide what we will and will not approve. To say ‘But that’s just disgusting!’ isn’t enough. That’s what people used to say about lots of things we now applaud.

 

So we move on to the idea that the fundamental problem with ‘paedophilia’ is that the children involved are not giving consent. This isn’t a  bad argument at first glance, but it has one or two faults. The age of consent is not universally agreed (differing as it does between countries). And in reality it’s on its way downwards at the moment. Officially, it’s now 16. But the material which caused me to write my article strongly suggests that this is a dead letter, and that 13 is the new minimum. I suspect that in 20 years or so, the ‘real’ age will be lower still. Also, if there is no arbitrary line, such as an age, who exactly decides what is and what is not legitimate consent? Yet we all know that the police and courts don't enforce that arbitrary line. 

 

Now, let me quote again from my prominent sexual liberation campaigner (many of you will know who it is, but I named him prominently some time ago, and feel that was enough. I quote him now to show that such ideas do exist and are held by prominent people in our society). The person involved may have said openly what a lot of other sexual revolutionaries think in private, but have more sense than to say.  

 

This person wrote: ‘The positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends – gay and straight, male and female – had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy.’ 

 

It was after those words that he added:

‘While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.’

 

Note that he places the earliest age for such things as nine. Nine.

 

Now, if 13-year-olds are able to consent to sex *with each other*, as the document seems to suggest is all right, I would like to know what (for a non-Christian secular relativist) the objective logical or moral barrier is which says they cannot consent to it with people older than themselves?  For me, the very idea is straightforwardly wrong as well as repulsive. I am also a strong believer in what i think of as the Christian idea that childish innocence is a treasure to be preserved as long as possible.

 

We’ve seen enough horrors in the last century,  when wars and their aftermaths have left huge numbers of children exposed to all the cruelties and rapacities of adult life, with horrible results for them. I suspect that Russia, to this day, suffers the legacy of the huge number of parentless children who roamed wild through the USSR after the Civil War. I think it likely that they grew up to be the terrifying criminals who populated the Gulags and were used by the authorities to prey on and kill political prisoners.  Children need their period of innocence to learn how to be civilized. The longer that period is, the more civilized the country.

 

So it seems to me that , in a much more complex way than is allowed for by ‘Marcus’, the sexualisation of children at 13 runs contrary to our loathing of ‘paedophilia’. For me, that’s not a difficulty. I’m against sex at 13, and against paedophilia. I don’t think 13-year-olds can give true consent.   I think all sex outside marriage is wrong, and I am governed by Our Lord’s saying (Mark 9.42) that ‘whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea’.

 

But for the relativists, where’s the frontier? I believe that before horrible, prudish old Christianity came along, quite a lot of societies allowed the sexual exploitation and even prostitution of quite young children. I’m told it’s not unknown in some societies today.

 

 

But to return to ‘Marcus’, who says : ‘The purpose of sex education is to educate teenagers on the dangers of unsafe sex, the horror of STD's and to heighten awareness on the dangers which curious young people might encounter once they become sexually active.’

 

So he thinks. Well, a few years ago I was asked by the publishers Hodder Headline to contribute to a small volume on the subject (now almost wholly unavailable, alas), and spent some time researching the history of sex education. What I found was that sex education was indeed promoted as a way of protecting the young.  But that from the moment it was launched, in the 1950s, it failed repeatedly to do what it claimed. Those things it was supposed to guard against rose exponentially after it was introduced. On the very kindest reading, that makes it an abject failure. I'd be grateful for some research to see if it might have *contributed* to these things , by giving official sanction to what had reviously been taboo. But I'm not aware of any , so can only speculate. 

 

‘Marcus’ may be surprised to learn this, but even in the 1950s, people were able to find out quite easily how babies were made. In fact, this was evidently true even in the pre-TV dark age before then, or we would have died out, wouldn’t we? The idea that schools need to teach people how to have sex, or what results from it, is a self-evident absurdity so huge that nobody questions it.

 

 

What emerged from my researches was that the supporters of sex education were the same industry that supported the prescribing of contraceptive pills first to the unmarried and then  to girls without their parents’ knowledge. And it was also the same industry which demanded that abortion should be unrestricted.

 

Oddly enough, similar agendas have been followed by revolutionary regimes (usually in their early dogmatic months and years before they begin to require cannon-fodder or factory fodder, and therefore need to raise the rate of reproduction, and also in their declining post-war years when they had destroyed family life but were unable to provide western levels of effective contraception. In the USSR, before the end, the number of abortions actually outnumbered live births (6.46 million to 4.85 million in 1990).    

 

This is the price that radical utopians readily pay for the destruction of the stable married family, the principal obstacle and rival to state power in any advanced society, and also the place where people learn religion, and traditions such as patriotism, which Utopian liberals hope to stamp out.

 

As the late Helen Brook ( heir of Marie Stopes, in many ways) once so succinctly put it (in a letter to ‘The Times’ in February 1980 )‘ From birth till death it is now the privilege of the parental state to take major decisions – objective  unemotional, the state weighs up what is best for the child’ .

 

 

‘From birth till death’, eh? That is what all this is really about – the replacement of individual parents by the utopian parental state.  If that doesn’t worry you, then you lack imagination.

 

Some of you might be interested in an earlier article I wrote on this subject here:

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2008/03/they-ban-father.html

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2008/03/they-ban-father.html 

Hugh Thomas's great book on the Spanish Civil War

For at least two generations, the Spanish Civil War was a huge unavoidable issue. It was, if you like, the original case study for liberal intervention. Perhaps it was because Spain is itself so beautiful, its landscapes so evocative and its language and place-names so memorable so musical. Perhaps it was because so many poets wrote about it, not to mention George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway.  Perhaps it was because it was made to seem such a simple contest between good and evil. I’m not sure, but I think a lot of the Left in my teens would quite have liked another Spanish Republic to go off and fight for.

 

The North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong( as they did not like being called) didn’t seek such help or allow foreigners to enlist on their side. In any case, close acquaintance quickly showed Western socialists that Ho chi Minh was an unlovely tyrant ruling over an unfree people. 

 

Nor did he (or Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, whose real nature has yet to be discovered by much of the romantic left) share their cultural and moral objectives.  Communist revolutionaries tend also to be puritans. A rumour current in 196Os Oxford (Can it be true? Who would know now?) sums up the dissonance between the western 68ers and the Hanoi state.

 

It was said that a group of left-wing students had offered to give blood to aid the struggle of the NLF ( as the Viet Cong preferred to be known). Sympathetic doctors and nurses were willing to collect the donations at a hall in the centre of Oxford. Hundreds queued for the well-advertised, fashionable event. A small number fainted or fled at the sight of the needle, but the whole thing was a great success and a large quantity of privileged corpuscles and intellectual plasma were loaded into the truck which bore them to East Berlin for processing and onward transmission.

 

Then, alack and horror! Word came from beyond the Berlin Wall that most of the heroic Oxford blood had had to be thrown away, as it turned out to be terribly contaminated with traces of marijuana and other substances regarded as undesirable in East Berlin and Hanoi, but viewed as normal in the student Oxford of , say, 1968. Cannabis was already more or less decriminalized in such places then, even before the Wootton Report and the 1971 Act made it more reliably depenalized.  An Oxford Union debate, and references in the Oxford mail and the student paper ‘Cherwell’  of the time showed that student opinion on the subject was much as it is now.  Users just weren’t as public as they are today, and landlords were much more worried about drug use on their premises.

 

Spain was much more serious for British left-wingers, who lived in the age before triviality and drugs,  than Vietnam could possibly be. You might well have to put your body where your mouth was.  Left-wing students went there to join the International Brigades and were (often quite swiftly) killed or badly wounded in dogged, gruelling battles. George Orwell was shot through the throat, before having to flee for his life from the different perils of his own side.

 

And that’s the trouble with Spain. It’s a labyrinth of contradictions and awkward facts. Seen from afar off, it is a simple black and white battle between the supposedly evil fascist Franco, narrow-minded and vengeful rebel against the lawful Republic, and the romantic, red-shirted forces of democracy and freedom, their ranks ornamented by great figures of literature and verse,  who ought to have won.

 

I think Hugh Thomas , author of the great work on the subject in English, must have been influenced by this view, and also by the oddly illogical view that somehow a more resolute stand on Spain by ‘the democracies’ (as ‘the West’ was then known) would have changed the course of events in 1939 and afterwards.  It seems unlikely to me. 1939 went wrong because it was a badly-chosen, badly-timed quarrel between ill-matched opponents.

 

The one outside power that was reasonably resolute on the side of the Spanish Republic was the USSR, and its behaviour did not persuade Hitler to abandon his plans to attack it and seize chunks of its territories as colonies. Nor did France’s wavring but considerable support, especially the supply of aircraft. The USA was totally uninterested in intervening, but that made no difference to its capacity to fight Germany later in the war. Yet the myth, like that of the Rhineland (‘If only we’d stood up to Hitler in 1936, etc etc’, when absolutely nobody was interested in any such action at the time, and this wish is like wishing for the moon in a cheeseburger ) or of Munich (‘if only we had stood up to Hitler in 1938 etc etc..’ when we would have been thrashed even more thoroughly in 1938 than we were in 1939, owing to our inconvenient lack of an army or, at that stage, much of an air force, or any conception of how to use them in modern war even if we had).

 

 

 

Who in his era could not be moved and captivated by the Spanish legend? It was pretty nearly universal.  Francisco Franco, who led the revolt and who became Spain’s supreme ruler for long decades afterwards,  was an unlovely and uninspiring figure, and his narrow, merciless state was impossible to admire.

 

On the other side, the romance and idealism of Spanish anarchism, unique in Europe, has a touching appeal, and had even more of one in the 1930s,  as many in Britain still knew of Spain’s vital alliance with us against Bonaparte. The aspirations of the Basques and the Catalans for self-rule are hard to deny, Catalonia especially being very much apart from the rest of Spain (as the weekend’s unofficial referendum once again showed). The Republic *was* the legitimate government, and so entitled to the support of all who believed in law.

 

Spanish monarchism was politically bankrupt and arrogant.  Primo de Rivera’s personal dictatorship was whimsical, but unsustainable. The country was in a post-imperial dream of importance rather like the one Britain is in now, thinking it was richer and more significant than it was.  But it was also far more ideologically divided, with conservatives who hoped only to restore the lost past, and radicals who imagined they could begin the world over again, and had no patience with their opponents.

 

Life in Spain was very harsh for the  poor. The church, never having experienced a Reformation, was more powerful than we in modern Britain could possibly imagine, and also lacked the allegiance of many of those it took for granted.   One theory is that the Spanish anarchist movement was a delayed Reformation,  so late that it had dispensed with Christianity altogether and replaced it with utopianism. Roman Catholics often upbraid me for my Anglicanism pointing out the destruction of ancient beauty which the English Reformation (unquestionably) involved. I say to them that the Anglican Reformation was far less destructive, of art, liturgy, music and architecture than almost any other that took place. Compare it, for instance, with that in Scotland, or with the French ‘deChristianisation’. Spain, by holding out longer,  suffered an even greater destructive purge.

 

But Spanish democracy in the 1930s was far too dogmatic and ferocious to last. Rather than providing a safety-valve for opposing views, the elections deepened the differences between the two sides, so that exchanges between opponents in the Cortes (Parliament) were full of real menace, menace which was all too quickly fulfilled in action. Generous and tolerant men were thrust aside, seen as ineffectual or not impassioned enough for the times.  The resort to violence was far quicker than in our long-settled society. But let that be a warning, not a source of smugness. The restraints which keep us from each other’s throats seem, to me to be wearing rather thin. It’s also the case that the Republic, on the eve of war was not an ordinary democracy but a fiercely radical state, furiously intolerant of religion and prejudiced against the middle class.  Legitimate as it was, it used its mandate to go far beyond the sane limits of a properly open society. Far worse than that was the later penetration of the state by Communists, with hideous secret police methods. This was, I think, a war in which neither side could have borne anything but total victory. The massacres and prison camps of Franco were a mirror image of what would have happened if things had gone the other way (as they easily could have done – the two sides were more evenly matched in military and material terms than most think).

 

Thomas is repeatedly very fair about two things. He notes, again and again that both sides fought with fearless courage. He notes, again and again, that both sides were appallingly cruel to  their enemies when they had them in their power (though there are a few shining exceptions).  It made me wonder whether courage and cruelty are two sides of the same medal.

 

Thomas’s book is a pleasure to read.  As I read it, I felt as if I was listening to a musical storyteller’s voice, full of expression and humour, speaking to me in a comfortable room in one of our ancient universities. It speaks to me of a time, now gone, when British historians could write about such horrors from the utterly comfortable safety of our island fortress, knowing that such things could never happen here. And so it made me even more conscious that those days are gone.

 

He exerts himself to be fair. He is cautious about making claims. He seeks to understand terrible actions without excusing them. He is moved by bravery and by generosity, and never fails to mention these things, even if they are shown by disagreeable people.  He obviously loves Spain. He has plainly read prodigiously, and travelled diligently, and met as many of the living witnesses to the tragedy as he could have done. This was the book he was born to write and which nothing he will do in the rest of his life can really surpass.  This is not just a duty done or contract fulfilled, but a talent fully employed in something very close to a vocation.

 

As a sample of his writing style , try this account of the eccentric General Queipo de Llano, whose often rather wild broadcasts from Seville were an important feature of the war  : ‘Then Queipo captured the radio station. At eight in the evening, he broadcast the first of what were to become a notorious series of harangues. In a voice seasoned by many years’ consumption of manzanilla, he declared that Spain was saved and that the rabble who resisted the rising would be shot like dogs’.

 

This is a story, not an account book, and he writes it as one, while also being careful to display a tremendous grasp of facts – military strength, economic facts of life, detailed descriptions of battles, how they were fought, how many died, why they were won or lost, who uintrvened and how much, what happened to Spain’s gold.   

 

You can hear the gunfire and the screams, the rattle; of the firing squads mowing down the captured foes, see the burning cities and the desecrated churches,  and the long files of dejected men trudging off into exile. Knowing what I know of Communists, I have never joined in the admiration of Dolores Ibarruri (‘La Pasionaria’) the figurehead of Spanish Stalinism, and I remain deeply unsure of what would have happened to Spain if the republic had won, but her farewell speech to the International Brigades must be one of the most moving brief orations ever given.  It is also most unusual for a Communist to make a speech in which every single word is true.

 

‘Mothers! Women! When the years pass by and the wounds of war are staunched; when the cloudy memory of the sorrowful, bloody days returns in a present of freedom, love and well-being; when the feelings of rancour are dying away and when pride ain a free country is felt equally by all Spaniards – then speak to your children. 

 

‘Tell them of the International Brigades. Tell them how, coming over seas and mountains, crossing frontiers bristling with bayonets , and watched for by ravening dogs thirsting to tear at their flesh, these men reached our country as crusaders for freedom. They gave up everything, their loves, their country, home and fortune, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and children – and they came and told us “We are here, your cause, Spain’s cause, is ours. It is the cause of all advanced and progressive mankind.”

 

‘Today they are going away. Many of them, thousands of them, are staying here with the Spanish earth for their shroud, and all Spaniards remember them with the deepest feeling’.

 

Thomas notes that the Italian socialist Pietro Nenni reflected that the Brigades had ‘lived a modern Iliad’ without knowing it. And it’s true, the war does have a legendary quality to it, by which all its figures seem taller and more sharply-drawn than normal men, and all its battles bigger than they were.

 

I can’t hope to summarise it here. I beg you to read it. But some things do seem to come out of it which ought to be common currency. The first is that it is absurd to call Franco ‘Fascist’. He was a terrible man, but in the manner of old-fashioned murderous despot, rather than the manner of Hitler or Mussolini. He accepted aid from the real fascist, Mussolini, and from the National Socialist Hitler.  For him, Spain was the only concern,. He defeated and killed the liberals and the left not because he had general disagreements with him but because he thought that he would save Spain by doing so.  I suspect he would have taken aid from others, even Stalin,  had they been ready to accept his conditions. He was never friendly either to the monarchist factions or the Falange, which was as near as Spain got to an actual Fascist-type movement, but can’t really be compared to one – not least because it wasn’t in charge. Franco was. In many ways, Franco is more like Stalin than Hitler – mysterious, unimpressive in person, a master of manoeuvre but not of the spectacular, as dangerous to his official allies as he is to his official enemies (he had no serious rivals for the leadership of the putsch).

 

The democracies could and should have learned much more from it. The German and Russian use of aeroplanes and tanks in concert with troops was a clear warning of what was to come.

 

But had they saved the Republic, what sort of government would have emerged triumphant? I have known two veterans of the International Brigades, one a lifelong Communist sympathizer, faithful unto death to his cause, the other an ex-Communist disillusioned by his experiences. The first continued to believe the standard myth of Spain. The second once said to me that he was increasingly sure that a Republican victory would have been a tragedy, since a Moscow-dominated Madrid government would have been a keen supporter of the Stalin-Hitler Pact , and would have allowed Hitler to attack Gibraltar from its territory, as Franco did not.  He suspected this would have destroyed British power in the Mediterranean and quite possibly turned the balance of the war before 1941.

 

Who can be sure? Yet it is certainly true that the Spanish Republic had more in common with its Soviet backers than Franco had with his National Socialist and Fascist supporters.  The Republic was far more of an ideological state than Nationalist Spain, which was an almost entirely negative polity, founded on its objections to things , rather than on enthusiasm for any creed. Franco only discovered an enthusiasm for the Church rather late in his campaign, and was far less romantically political than his fellow-generals.

 

I should have read it long ago, but do so for the first time, as my train sped past miles of olive groves and jagged mountains, or as I sat over coffee in some Andalucian square was perhaps better than to have read it long ago, all unaware of the searing power of Spanish light, and of that almost African landscape.

We panic about child abuse, then tell 13-year-olds how to have sex

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The mystery of sex education is that parents put up with it at all. It began about 50 years ago, on the pretext that it would reduce unmarried teen pregnancies and sexual diseases. Every time these problems got worse, the answer was more sex education, more explicit than before.

Since then, unmarried pregnancies have become pretty much normal, and sexual diseases – and the ‘use’ of pornography – are an epidemic.

It is only thanks to frantic free handouts of ‘morning after’ pills and an abortion massacre that the number of teenage mothers has finally begun to level off after decades in which it zoomed upwards across the graph paper.

In a normal, reasonable society, a failure as big as this would cause a change of mind. Not here.

If you try to question sex education, you are screamed at by fanatics. This is because it isn’t, and never has been, what it claims to be. Sex education is propaganda for the permissive society. It was invented by the communist George Lukacs, schools commissar during the insane Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, to debauch the morals of Christian schoolgirls.

It works by breaking taboos and by portraying actions as normal that would once have been seen as wrong. Last week we learned that the Government has officially endorsed material which says sex at 13, ‘for those of similar age and developmental ability’, is normal.

This is, no doubt, a point of view. In a free society, people are entitled to hold it, even if it is rather creepy. But do you want your child’s school to endorse it? And how does it square with our incessant frenzied panic about child sex abuse?

If we are so keen on the innocence of the young – and I very much think we should be – then surely this sort of radical propaganda is deeply dangerous. We do not give schools this huge power over the minds of the young for such a purpose.

How odd it is that we teach 13-year-olds to go forth and multiply, but can’t somehow teach them their times tables. Shouldn’t it be the other way round?

What is it about Theresa May? She is walking proof that nothing succeeds like failure. She is herself a militant, politically correct liberal, oddly reluctant to admit she went to a grammar school.

Crime is out of control, inefficiently concealed by fiddled figures. Immigration is out of control, a fact that can’t be concealed. She can’t even organise a public inquiry. Yet her media sycophants portray her as a steely guardian of the State, and a potential premier. I ask you.

Here’s another conundrum. A party leader is losing by-elections, is hopelessly low in the polls (as he has been for years), is daily exposed as having no serious policy on the EU (the biggest issue that faces him), recently nearly lost Scotland and slighted the Queen, and is directly personally responsible (thanks to his attack on Libya) for one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of modern times.

And yet he is treated with continuing respect, while his rival (whose problems are small by comparison) is constantly smeared in the newspapers and on the BBC as being ‘not up to the job’ and under threat. Please explain. I can’t.

The honest British Peeler - killed off by Robocop 

This appalling picture of a modern ‘police’ officer is yet more evidence that we have forgotten what the police are for.

If London is really so dangerous that it has to be protected by heavily armed men, then let’s admit it, and deploy the Army on the streets, with perhaps a few tanks or armoured cars at major junctions.

Soldiers are, after all, thoroughly trained in firearms, and are less likely than the police to shoot innocent people in unfortunate accidents.

Who would approach this ludicrous clattering figure, loaded down with killing machines and shackles, for help? He is the exact opposite of the sort of unarmed and unassuming constable Robert Peel wanted when he invented British policing.

The real joke is that the pretext for this macho display is the need to protect soldiers from maniacs. What a strange country, where soldiers need to be protected from civilians by civilians.

Have drugs dodged the blame again?

The whole country was puzzled by the dreadful case of the schoolboy who coldly murdered his teacher, the lovely and irreplaceable Ann Maguire. Countless people in the media called the crime ‘inexplicable’.

I also have no explanation. But I think we might have tried harder to find one. I have made a study of such killings, and have found that in almost all cases where the facts are known, the culprit had been taking mind-altering drugs, sometimes legal, sometimes illegal.

Two very powerful interests don’t want this link investigated. The first is the billionaire lobby for cannabis legalisation, which knows that the drug from which it hopes to make an even bigger fortune is correlated with serious mental health problems. It fears that wide knowledge of this fact will torpedo its campaign.

The other is the giant pharmaceutical industry, which is already garnering tremendous profits from ‘antidepressants’, and does all it can to counter any suggestion that these dubious and inadequately tested pills might have unpleasant side effects.

But that doesn’t explain the inertia of my own trade, journalism. Nor does it explain the seeming lack of interest in this among the police. Two things strike me about the boy involved. One is that he is at the age when many children are exposed to cannabis, and at the age when this drug has sometimes been connected with severe mental illness.

How many British secondary schools can truly say that this drug does not circulate in their corridors and classrooms?

The next is that the day after the killing in Leeds, it was reported by two newspapers that the boy had at some stage taken antidepressants.

I asked West Yorkshire police if they had looked into either of these possibilities. Had they asked his GP about antidepressants? Had they inquired at the school about his possible cannabis use?

Despite repeated requests, they have not given me a specific response to either of these easily answered questions. They have stuck to a bland and unrevealing formula – that the possibility was ‘looked into in detail’. But then they have declined to go into any detail about what that ‘detail’ was.

What a pity. You won’t find anything unless you look for it. Is it too much to ask that we at least examine this possibility properly? And is another schoolboy in another city quietly – and preventably – turning himself into an ‘inexplicable’ killer? I fear so.

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Two recent visits to Cambridge

It’s late. I’ve undone my bow tie, worn out what was left of my voice arguing with students in the Cambridge Union bar, and I’m heading to my hotel, my mind already on the column I’m going to have to write in the morning.  It’s been a long evening. As I always try to do when I’m asked to debate at Cambridge, I’ve got to the town early and attended Evensong in King’s Chapel, the single most intense and concentrated experience of thought, scripture, music and architecture that is readily available in England. The choir-screen alone, dark with Tudor history and rightly described as one of the greatest artefacts in northern Europe, is enough to silence the mind with its age and power.

 

I almost always end up near the back of the queue, so sit far from the lectern and (thanks to acoustics designed more for music than speech)can barely hear the lessons being read (for once, as they should be in all such places,  from the Authorized Version of the Bible). But my ancient education kicks in. Catching on the air such phrases ‘ What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind?’ and ‘The desert shall blossom as the rose’, I can more or less reconstruct the bits I cannot hear. I have often thought that, as the senses fail, the repetition of the familiar and the lodging of such things in the heart will make up for what I would otherwise miss. And in the long centuries before glasses and hearing aids were available, I suspect that is exactly what happened. The ancient toothless old wrecks hunched at the back didn’t really need to hear the service. It was in their heads anyway, and in their hearts when they died as well.

 

Anyway, the debate has been about Vladimir Putin and his alleged threat to global security. A vote taken in advance showed 61% in favour of this motion before we’d even begun and 19% against. The vote afterwards showed the noes had increased to 27% and the vote in favour dropped to 59% (I think I have this right. I’ve been unable to trace figures on abstentions).

 

So those of us arguing against it were a bit like the cyclist who’s nearly been killed by a driver, catches up with him, suggests he might be more considerate in future,  and is then told by the driver that ‘You don’t pay road tax’. Before you can even begin to discuss the driver’s atrocious behaviour, you have to explain that there is no such thing as ‘road tax’, that many cyclists pay more tax (towards roads and everything else) than do car drivers, and that even if they didn’t, they have as much freedom to use the road, and are as entitled to as much consideration, as anyone else.  There’s never enough time.

 

In the case of the Putin terror, one has to overcome a similar mountain-range of universally-held misconceptions.  Readers here will know how long my posts have been on this issue, because of what I saw as the need to present a factual rebuttal of the absurdly misleading ‘Totally Evil Russia, Utterly Noble Ukraine’ narrative universally accepted by mainstream media.

 

In a brief Cambridge Union speech, it’s not really possible to do this. The more I list the points I hope to make, the day before the debate, the more I see that there are too many of them. Then, by my own strong desire, I am the last speaker, and it’s necessary to respond to arguments made by the other side (one of whom is Luke Harding of the Guardian, who – quite reasonably - appears before these students in a sort of golden glow because of his involvement in the Snowden affair. Whereas I carry about with me the dark shadow of Mordor, thanks to my association with what they all call ‘The Mail’, which all hate but few read).

 

So I am dissatisfied. So when, in the entrance hall of the Victorian Building,  I meet one of my opponents (not Mr Harding) and some of his friends, I’m unwisely willing to be drawn into a rematch. One of these friends, an American woman,  accuses me of having given wrong information in my speech. I challenge her to back this up. Rather than do so, she begins swearing at me. She also quite likes shouting, I quickly learn. We calm down a bit after that (staff are for some reason constantly carrying bits of heavy furniture out of the debating chamber, so interrupting our flow as we have to stand put of the way), but quite quickly it’s clear that I’m wasting my time by discussing Adam Tooze’s book ‘The Deluge’, the significance of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, the century-old German policy of undermining the Russian Empire by promoting nationalism in its dominions,  or the significance of Brest-Litovsk, or the nature of the European Union’s foreign policy. They’re just not interested. They start calling me ‘mental’. I realise that, even though this is Cambridge, we are not immune here from the fierce intolerance of dissent which cramps so much modern debate.  With a brief comment on the poor psychiatric qualifications of one of my attackers, I go off into the night, even more dissatisfied, and – unusually for me after such an occasion –  more discontented than I was at the beginning of the evening.

 

But by great good fortune, I am due back in Cambridge the following Monday. This time it’s for a panel discussion of the morality of foreign intervention, organized (very well, I might say) by the King’s Politics Society. Interest in this tricky subject turns out to be much greater than expected, and the venue is moved to a much larger hall, which then gratifyingly fills.

The line-up is:

LINDSEY GERMAN - Convenor of Stop the War and organiser of the anti-Iraq War demonstration of 2003

DARREN MURPHY - Former political communications adviser to Tony Blair and strategist for a number of political leaders worldwide

NIGEL BIGGAR - Professor of Moral Theology at Oxford University and author of 'In Defence of War'

RICHARD NORTON-TAYLOR - journalist and former Security Editor for the Guardian

DAVID BLUNT - Fellow at Corpus Christi, International Relations lecturer, and expert on the ethics of political violence.

 

This is a pretty good collection of people qualified to talk about this.

 

Now normally I prefer a debate with sides and a motion, as at the Cambridge Union. I’ve often said that a debate with a vote is like tennis without a net. But at this debate there was enough tension and interest in the room to make me wrong on this occasion. I think everyone managed to say pretty much what he or she needed to. I was also able to confuse a lot of those who had come with prejudices against me, and found that – on this issue – my position was much closer to theirs than they had thought. Anomalies of this kind make people think, which is my main aim.

 

Afterwards, the discussions were entirely amicable. And the next morning, it being my day off, I was able to walk for miles through Cambridge in perfect autumn sunshine (this is the best weather in which to see either of our ancient universities).

 

I’m glad of both experiences, which keep the mind alive. Writing a lot, as I do, forms thought. But arguing with opponents in front of a critical audience, doesn’t just form though, but sharpens it.

Did that Famous Drug Report Really Say What They Said it Said?

Last week there was a great deal of fuss about a Home Office report which (if you believed most media reports) argued against legal deterrence of drug possession.

 

Here’s an example:

 

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/30/punitive-drug-laws-are-failing-study

 

 

 

The report itself can be found here

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/368489/DrugsInternationalComparators.pdf

I’m not sure that a reading of the document actually stands up the claim by the Guardian that ‘There is no evidence that tough enforcement of the drug laws on personal possession leads to lower levels of drug use, according to the UK government’s first evidence-based study.’

 

For a start, there’s this caveat in the Foreword :’ Where there are differences in practice between one country and another, these are often informed by different social and legal contexts. What works in one country may not be appropriate in another. We explore these differences in this report. In many cases, they illustrate the complexity of the challenge, and demonstrate why we cannot simply adopt another country’s approach wholesale.’

 

And again, on Page 4: ‘It is a common aim of every country to reduce drug misuse. The variety of ways in which countries seek to achieve this aim reflects the sometimes stark differences between legal frameworks and cultures.’

 

The alleged comparison is not even really what the report is about. Of course we get reports from Portugal (the shining Promised Land of decriminalization, though actually less decriminalized in practice than London, and whose triumphs are much-disputed by experts here and there). But (I shall come back to this this) there is also a significant amount about Japan, whose laws and attitudes - and levels of drug abuse - resemble Britain’s 60 years ago.  

 

Much of the report is in fact a sympathetic description of various defeatist schemes based on the assumption that drug abuse is a disease, or in some way separate from other crimes, rather than a straightforward crime, schemes which are invariably judged successful by those who promote them, and which are seldom subjected to objective, hard comparisons with the alternative of proper enforcement of existing laws. This would be hard to do, as so few jurisdictions now do enforce laws against drug possession, or have done for many years.

 

And it is even harder to do, as the British government continues to pretend in public that it is enforcing laws which it has in practice abandoned. It does this for political reasons. If the voters, en masse, realised that the government long ago surrendered to the drug decriminalization lobby, they would be even angrier than they are, especially when their neighbourhoods are plagued by drug-abuse and the many miseries it brings.

 

But on Page 6 there is another important qualification: ‘The evidence from other countries show that levels of drug use are  influenced by factors more complex and nuanced than legislation and enforcement alone. Levels of drug use vary considerably between countries with similar policies. With regard to Portugal,  where decriminalisation was followed by improvements in health outcomes for drug users, it is difficult to disentangle the effect of decriminalisation from wider improvements in treatment and harm reduction during the same period.’

 

These words would seem a) to diminish the much-trumpeted claims made on behalf of the Portuguese experiment and b) make impossible the ambitious conclusions claimed by the ‘Guardian’ and others.  

 

Then on page 8 we find the hilarious fantasy, repeatedly peddled by the government, that it has accurate knowledge about illegal drug use in this country, and the even more hilarious fantasy that such use is going down.  If this is the level of ‘knowledge’ in the reports from other countries, the report itself should be treated with grave suspicion.  

 

But on page 24 there is at least this admission (deep inside the report and hedged around with self-serving waffle)  that cannabis has, to all intents and purposes, been decriminalized in England:  ‘For instance, police and the criminal justice system have a range of ways to deal with cannabis offences, from simple warnings, to penalty notices, to court proceedings. This allows police and prosecutors to take a proportionate approach, taking into account the circumstances of an offence and of the offender, and giving due regard to the public interest. In 2012, out-of-court disposals were applied in around 80% of cannabis possession cases.’

 

If a crime is met with total inaction in 80% of cases where it is known by the police to have been committed, can we really still claim that it is being treated as a crime. Imagine the (entirely justified) fury  if 80% of rape cases known to the police were dealt with by out-of-court disposals. It would rightly be said that the authorities were not taking it seriously.

 

Noting that nobody had bothered to inquire about drug laws in, say, Singapore (comparison with which would be too shocking, I suspect, and which is problematic because it’s not a free society) I looked for references to Japan, a law-governed free country which still treats drug abuse as wrong and criminal:  

 

Japan: ‘We also visited a prison in Japan, a country which operates far stricter regimes in which

inmates work for 8 to 9 hours per day and are in bed by 9 p.m. Of a total prison population

of around 75,000 in Japan, around 5,000 prisoners (7%) participate in prison based drug

treatment programmes each year. (p.29)

 

and:

 

‘In Japan, the misuse of drugs is seen primarily as a criminal justice issue, with an emphasis on reducing supply. There is often a stigma attached to drug use, with relatively low numbers of people (15,695 admissions per year)

seeking treatment.’ (p.32)

(PH, I’m not sure this is true. Japan ,as far as I know, still treats possession very severely, which doesn’t fit with the claim of an emphasis on reducing supply. As Britain has shown, interdicting supply while doing nothing about demand simply does not work).

 

and:

 

‘We visited Japan, which operates a strong enforcement-led approach to drug

misuse, often regarded as a ‘zero tolerance’ policy. Substances are more strictly

controlled than in many other countries. Some products that are available over the

counter as cold and flu remedies in the UK are banned. Possession of even small

amounts of drugs is punishable by lengthy imprisonment.’(p.46)

 

So in Japan drug abuse is still punished and disapproved of. How has that worked out? You’ll find the answer cunningly hidden on Page 51 : ‘In Japan, where cultural conformity is traditionally valued, drug use is subject to a degree of stigma. In this context, it is difficult to tell whether low levels of drug use are a consequence of legislation, or a product of the

same cultural attitudes that have informed the zero-tolerance approach.’

 

Ah, right, so Japan in fact has low levels of drug abuse, plus tough criminal sanctions. We refer to this fact in passing – I wonder why? Is it perhaps so that people won’t notice it much? But we can’t attribute the one to the other, as that would suggest that we in Britain might do well to do the same,  so we speculate, thus :’.. it is difficult to tell whether low levels of drug use are a consequence of legislation, or a product of the same cultural attitudes that have informed the zero-tolerance approach.’

 

Is it? It doesn’t take a huge IQ to see that social disapproval is reinforced and maintained by severe criminal penalties, nor to grasp that diluting criminal penalties will eventually undermine social disapproval and anti-drug cultural attitudes.  

 

There’s also (on p.51) this extraordinarily tendentious statement: ‘In Portugal, decriminalisation provides a means to direct more users towards the support they need to stop using drugs. These approaches can be seen as a different route to the same overall goal as the policies adopted in Sweden and Japan.’

 

Really? Portugal decides that drug abuse is a disease, and treats it as such. Japan believes it to be an affront against goodness and a crime, and treats it as such. How can these be actions aimed at the same overall goal? One wishes to save people from the consequences of a crime. The other wishes to stop them from committing the crime in the first place.  Portugal’s so-called ‘success’ (which, I repeat, is not universally accepted as such by experts)  has not consisted of reduced drug use , but (supposedly) in declining deaths and HIV infections, a result which even this report concedes could have been brought about by factors other than decriminalisation.

 

Do you still recall what the ‘Guardian’ said? I do. It asserted that  : ‘‘There is no evidence that tough enforcement of the drug laws on personal possession leads to lower levels of drug use, according to the UK government’s first evidence-based study.’

 

I should have thought that the experience of Japan, clearly recorded in the report, was evidence (though not proof, see above) of precisely that proposition.

 

 

The report’s conclusion, which isn’t even called that , but titled ‘Reflections’, is nothing like as confident as the ‘Guardian’. It says : Close consideration of countries with quite different approaches to drug possession demonstrates that the issue is more complex and nuanced than legislation and enforcement alone. Reflecting on the approach taken in the UK, there are elements in common with a range of other countries. As in Sweden, the UK’s legislative framework reflects the fact that drugs cause harm to individuals and wider society. Possession of any amount of a controlled drug is treated as a criminal offence in the UK’

 

 (PH, no it is not. The widely-used and ACPO-approved  ‘Cannabis Warning’ is not a criminal sanction by any honest description).

 

‘The UK’s classification system aims to ensure penalties are proportionate to the amount of harm associated with a substance. Like the Netherlands and many other countries, the UK applies different enforcement practices in cases of cannabis possession to those applied to possession of other drugs. As in Portugal, prevention and treatment are a key element of responses to drugs in the UK. The disparity in drug use trends and criminal justice statistics between countries with similar approaches, and the lack of any clear correlation between the ‘toughness’ of an approach and levels of drug use demonstrates the complexity of the issue.’

 

(PH, Once again this is wrong. There is a clear correlation here between ‘toughness’ and low drug abuse in Japan. Causation can be disputed, but not correlation)   

 

‘Historical patterns of drug use, cultural attitudes, and the wider range of policy and operational responses to drugs misuse in a country, such as treatment provision, are all likely to have an impact. Similarly, achieving better health outcomes for drug users cannot be shown to be a direct result of the enforcement approach. The UK’s balanced approach enables targeted demand-reduction activity, and good availability and quality of treatment. Indeed, while in Portugal, we were encouraged to hear that drug treatment in the UK is well-regarded internationally.’

 

I’d be interested in the views of other readers, but I can’t easily see how a report which says what this report says could have been spun into the call for decriminalisation which it was so widely said to be.