Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 216

An Interview with a Talking Newspaper for the Blind

Some of you may wish to listen to this interview 

https://soundcloud.com/n-vision-tn/peter-hitchens-6-november-2014

Some of you may not.

 

One thing I need to point out - some listeners might conclude from this that my father was a Destroyer Captain in the Royal Navy. He never was, though he did many things at least as risky and romantic. But it was what I once very much wanted to be. 

Some Thoughts on Andalusia, War, Art and Faith

I’ve discovered that it’s worse than pointless to let people know if I’m away from my desk. Some just stop reading altogether. Others speculate wrongly (and annoyingly) about my travels or accuse me of skiving. So this time I just went – as it happens, to Andalusia. This is  a part of Spain I had long yearned to visit properly after a brief but long-remembered excursion from Gibraltar, during the inquest on the IRA members who were shot there by the SAS.  Then I did a couple of speaking engagements in Cambridge, of which more in a later post.

 

Thanks to two different kinds of snobbery, I stayed away from Spain in my years of cheap train travel across and around the continent. To begin with, my left-wing opinions prevented me from going there at all -  though I often leafed wistfully through the Spanish pages of Thomas Cook’s Continental Rail Guide, imagining the journey to Madrid , which I would eventually take in a comfortable sleeper many, many years later.

 

Then, after Franco died, Spain seemed to be a tacky downmarket destination, compared with middle-class France, and I’d never studied Spanish at any level.  I didn’t much like the cult of Barcelona, either. My ideas of Barcelona came from Orwell’s ‘Homage To Catalonia’, and I couldn’t quite see this place of revolution, red guards, death and drama as a good spot for a weekend.  I thought (and still do think, a bit) that to see it in reality would wipe out a large piece of my imagination.

 

Finally, I ran out of excuses.

 

Actually, I think the waiting – partly- paid off. Spanish railways (for the long-distance traveller, though not, I suspect for the ordinary Spaniard trying to make medium-range journeys) are now swift and smooth. But I wish I could have seen Seville before Starbucks arrived, and Cordoba and Granada before Burger King got there.  I can still remember a France of slower trains and grubbier hotels (many of them near the station, with iron bed-frames and brown lino bedroom floors), which was, even so, much more French, much gamier and smellier and full of flavour than what you find now. I think the older Spain must also have been more Spanish.

 

But what really struck me about the incomparable cities of Andalusia was the strange attitude many people now have to the great Muslim monuments in these places.

 

It’s obvious that many churches in this part of the world started life as mosques, and that their towers were once minarets.  The Mezquita in Cordoba, one of the most remarkable and thought-filled buildings in Europe (rivalling the former Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople, and Chartres in France, in its power and uniqueness), is an enormous mosque which has had a Christian cathedral imposed upon it. The Alhambra, a coldly-beautiful Muslim fortress and series of palaces on a hilltop in Granada, is likewise a survivor of an age that ended abruptly in war and conquest more than 500 years ago.

 

The guidebooks tend to be full of a sort of regret about this. They treat the Christian building in the Mezquita as a sort of outrage, and harp nostalgically about the elegance and beauty of Muslim Granada. Not I, even though as a Protestantish Anglican I tend towards the austere and understated in architecture and church decoration (the anatomically correct depiction of the beheading of John the Baptists in the Chapel Royal at Granada is a bit strong for my taste, and quite a few of the statues on Spanish churches seem to me to run up very hard against the prohibition on graven images).  

 

There are some superb mosques in the nicer parts of Cairo which remain unChristianized, if that is what you want. And in Isfahan and Samarkand you may find the abstract beauties of Islamic architecture taken even further than they are in the Alhambra, and still surrounded by the Muslim faithful. They are very lovely, and a solace to the spirit in their places. But I am glad that there is a point on the map at which the pointed dome and the minaret, the mihrab, the muezzin and the minbar, give way to the steeple, the belfry, the pulpit, the lectern, the choir and the sanctuary.  And in the end, I think the mathematical cleverness of Islamic abstraction leaves the spirit unsatisfied, whereas the great representational art of Christianity (especially, for me, the Flemish masters) does not.

 

Spain, as it happens, feels more like the Middle East or North Africa than like most of Europe. Orwell wrote of his sad journey north, away from poor ravaged Spain, from the land of the mountain and the vine to that of the meadow and the elm. The Pyrenees are almost as great a barrier as the Channel, and Spain has had to undergo things that most of the rest of Europe hasn’t, at least in modern times. Only Russia, in recent times,  has suffered such a terrible civil war. My journey to Spain gave me a good reason to read Hugh Thomas’s majestic history of the Civil War ( I hope to write about that soon), a complex tragedy which still has the power to move us now, long after almost all those involved have died.  

 

And while I don’t rejoice at the undoubted horrors of the reconquest of Spain, let alone the stupid and inexcusable Inquisition which later followed, can I really, honestly regret that Christianity rather than Islam, won that battle?

 

Those who fought the battles could not afford to be particularly reflective about the matter, whether they lost or won (Perhaps the appalling intolerance and mercilessness of the Civil War, on both sides, resulted from an old belief that those who were not ruthless would lose). Part of the remarkable altarpiece in Granada’s startling and powerful Chapel Royal shows without embarrassment the conversion of Muslims to Christianity after the fall of the city to Christian armies. It doesn’t look very voluntary.

 

But who doubts that the same process would have taken place the other way round, if Islam had triumphed in Europe? I know that the Koran says ‘there is no compulsion in religion’. I also know that this has not always turned out to be quite the case. What if Islam had  (as Edward Gibbon speculated in another context) physically overpowered European Christianity in any of its armed conflicts?

 

As Gibbon wrote of the 8th century Muslim invasion of Spain, turned back at the Battle of Tours  ‘A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet. ‘

 

As it happens, and quite without violence, I think I see something of the kind beginning to come about through mass migration. Oxford now has a fine new Islamic centre. Its elegant dome echoes the Radcliffe Camera on the city’s skyline as seen from the heights to the north-east, and its interesting tower, which apparently isn’t officially a minaret, offers a faint but definite challenge to the officially Christian(but in fact largely secular) towers and spires of the ancient city just across the River Cherwell.

 

And if one day the Muslim call to prayer supersedes the music of bells there, it will partly be because so many in our civilization decided that Christianity was an embarrassing throwback, and that we could rely solely on wealth and technology to defend our culture and society against those who do not share our tastes, our customs, our politics - or our certainty that death is the end and the visible material universe all that there is.  Those who shudder with artistic distaste at the Christianization of Cordoba’s mosque might sometimes wonder what the great English cathedrals would look like, converted to Muslim use.

 

 

 

 

David Cameron's Merkel Delusion

The strange Tory delusion, that the EU can be meaningfully reformed, is immune to all facts. Sunday’s revelations about Angela Merkel’s real attitude to migration should have surprised absolutely nobody.

 

Germany’s construction of a borderless liberal empire from Shannon to Brest Litovsk is exactly that, and the obstruction of its imperial nature – a seamless and unbroken sovereignty, polity and economy – is an unpardonable crime in Berlin's eyes.  What other attitude could she ever have taken? What informed person could conceivably have been surprised?

 

Also she knows that David Cameron is wholly committed to Britain’s continuing submission to this empire, and that by denouncing his absurd and empty brayings on the subject, she damages him. For she also knows that Britain’s media and political classes are scared stiff of life outside the EU, and  will not permit Britain to leave.

 

Yet time and again, Tory propagandists and their media servants try to pretend that Frau Merkel is in some indefinable way sympathetic to Mr Cameron’s plight. So much so that she has once before been forced to set them right in public, during her visit to London in February, see here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/02/angela-merkel-and-the-eurosceptic-delusion.html

 

As I wrote last February : “The ridiculous expectations of Mrs Merkel’s visit, drummed up by the Tories, do make me laugh. Do they really still not understand that the EU never gives back the powers it has gathered in, because that is the whole point of it? Do they really still not grasp that Germany has abandoned national glory and imperial power in exchange for a different dream, of a Europe in which Germany dominates everything but never raises her voice or actually asserts her power in public?

 

If Britain wants to be part of that, Germany will be polite to us, even flatter us, and allow us various trinkets and tokens to soothe those who still like to think we were the victors of 1945. But the great sausage machine of ever-closer-union will continue to mince up the gristly and bony remains of national sovereignty, and turn them into the smooth, bland, pink paste of ‘Unity in Diversity’, with which the Euro-Sausage is so tightly packed.  If Britain seeks to be a serious obstacle to the sausage-machine, then she will be crushed, overborne in the Commission, slapped down in the Luxembourg Court, regulated to death and eventually compelled to accept total submission by joining the Euro and abolishing what remains of her national borders, and signing the Schengen agreement with trembling fingers as her new masters look on, smiling benevolently.

 

The German government was apparently so alarmed by the ridiculous suggestions in the British  media (that Mrs Merkel would somehow be David Cameron’s ally in a great return of lost powers to the individual nations) that it was thought necessary to slap this down hard and fast today.

 

So, in the part of  Mrs Merkel’s speech delivered in English, these words could not have been clearer:

'Some expect my speech to pave the way for a fundamental reform of the European architecture which will satisfy all kinds of alleged or actual British wishes. I am afraid they are in for a disappointment.’”

 

This is still true. What I genuinely find hard to understand is that the conservative media of this country, for years rationally hostile to the EU and all its works, whose logical position must surely lead them to favour a British exit, continue to do all they can to maintain and defend the Tory Party whose aim is the precise opposite of that.

Why do refugees drown? Because liberals like Dave keep starting wars

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

Whose fault is it that so many of our fellow creatures have drowned in the Mediterranean on the way to Britain? Whose fault will it be when many more do so, crying out for help that will not come, in the future?

As usual, I first wrote about this subject long before it was fashionable to do so.

The great migration of the poor and desperate towards the rich north is one of the most troubling and frightening things happening in the world today.

If all those who wanted to enter the rich world managed to do so, they would destroy the thing they sought. We cannot let them all in. If we did, our economy and our society would collapse under the strain, and so would most of civilisation.

So only the stupid and self-righteous – usually people who live far from the areas where mass immigration has changed our country – can pretend that border controls are somehow wicked. The only real question is how strict they should be.

One thing is quite certain. Completely avoidable actions have made this crisis much worse. Surrendering our border control to the EU was one. Destroying parental authority and wrecking our state schools was another.

By making so many of our young people unemployable, we created huge numbers of jobs for hungry, self-disciplined migrants.

But in many ways the worst action of all was the unforgivably stupid decision by David Cameron and others to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi’s state in Libya. I am still amazed that this blunder did not destroy Mr Cameron, as it should have done.

Like all shallow modern politicians, he wanted a cheap and victorious war to make him seem more important than he is. Libya and its people were the unlucky victims of his childish vanity.

Not only did this bird-brained action turn Libya into a hideous, bloody chaos without hope, it removed the single most important barrier between Europe and the Third World.

Without Gaddafi’s stringent control of his coastline, the economic refugees of the whole of Africa and much of the Middle East (many of them fleeing wars and conflicts begun or encouraged by us) can clamber into coffin ships and set out across the Mediterranean.

Their normal lives are so terrible that the danger of death seems worth it to them. Their poverty is so great that our threadbare welfare state glitters on the horizon like a mythical city of gold and jewels.

As long as they think they can get here, they will risk death. And those who have failed to discourage them in their crazy quest will be to blame for those deaths. It is as simple as that.

Liberal vanity kills and goes on killing. And it is all the worse because the culprits continue to have such high opinions of themselves.

Pied piper who peddles poison

Societies at the ends of their tethers follow strange leaders and have peculiar heroes.

Having been brought up in another age, I’m immune to Russell Brand. I don’t think he’s funny, and he is not as clever as he believes he is. 

I’ve had a couple of clashes with him, in which he was first evasive and pretentious, and then insulting. He dislikes being subjected to the mockery he happily inflicts on others. On one occasion he threatened to kiss me (no kiss took place).

But there’s also no doubt he has a potent effect on women – I watched him, in less than a minute, charm two pretty young Olympic medal winners into taking off their medals and draping them over his scrawny, naked chest. 

The sad thing was that they acted as if they were the ones being honoured by the encounter.

And he has the automatic adulation of student audiences. Watching the Pied Piper dance away with the children of Hamelin must have been something like watching Mr Brand, left, run away with the hearts and minds of so many people. 

Magic isn’t always benevolent, and charisma is seldom given to good men.

Since we can’t leave a memorial to the British dead in Afghanistan itself, I suggest a looming granite pillar, deeply incised with the names of the dead, in the middle of the House of Commons.

It's sad to learn that starlings are suffering from antidepressants, apparently because they eat sewage-farm worms that have ingested the drugs from human waste. 

But isn’t it rather more important that so many people are still being persuaded to take these dubious, risky tablets – increasingly linked with inexplicable suicide?

Hated - just for telling the truth on drugs 

Every single part of the latest row about drugs is phoney. The Tories are no better than the Lib Dems on the subject – their supposed ‘firmness’ is an empty pretence, concealing the laxest drug regime in the advanced world. Laws that are not enforced do not exist.

This has been the trick worked for years by Britain’s active and skilful pro-drug lobby, much of it based in the Home Office itself, where senior civil servants have long favoured the soft option.

They realised that Britain could continue to fulfil its treaty obligations by keeping harsh laws on the statute books, while encouraging the police not to enforce them.

This ploy also fools much of the electorate, who constantly see Tory and Labour politicians make grim-faced declarations that they have no plans to repeal the drug laws. They don’t grasp that – at the same time – the police and courts are not applying those laws. There is no ‘war on drugs’. There hasn’t been one for 40 years.

It is taboo to say it – for daring to do so I have been permanently taken off the invitation list of at least one major radio programme, and will never be able to publish another book. That is because our political and media elite are themselves hopelessly corrupted by widespread illegal drug abuse – by themselves and their children.

I experience a great deal of personal hatred for saying unpopular things, and am used to it. On Thursday night I was screamed and sworn at, at one of our ancient universities, for daring to dissent from the conventional view of Russia.

But the special loathing I encounter for telling the truth about drugs is so virulent that it sometimes comes close to frightening me.

This is an enormous campaign for selfish pleasure. If it succeeds in achieving the legalisation it dreams of, and which is the real aim of this relentless lobbying, there are gigantic profits to be made and huge taxes to be raised. So you can see why businessmen and politicians might want it so much.

It’s a pity about the rest of us, who will have to live with all the ruined lives that will result.

This winter, industry may well be paid to shut down factories to avoid power cuts. This is the sort of madness you might expect in a crazy country such as North Korea. 

When will we see that green dogma is as barmy as communism? Too late, I suspect.

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PETER HITCHENS: Don't make an 'Islamist conspiracy' out of a few cannabis-crazed losers

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column 

Why do our politicians and media talk so much drivel about Islam?

We react like superstitious peasants to anything connected with this religion. As a result, we completely miss the point of what is going on.

For example, we imagine that the horrible killings by cannabis-crazed drifters, of Lee Rigby by Michael Adebolajo (right) and Michael Adebowale here and of Nathan Cirillo in Canada, are evidence of some vast secret Islamist conspiracy masterminded from a cave by a robed villain with a beard.

This is partly because a long and expensive international PR campaign has fooled a willing elite (many of them drug abusers themselves) into believing that cannabis is safe when in fact it is one of the most dangerous drugs there is.

So we shut our minds to all the evidence of the terrible harm it can do – even highly publicised killings by cannabis abusers.

It is also because our politicians are even more useless abroad than they are at home.

Here, they try to persuade us that they alone, armed with surveillance and huge police powers, stand between us and a terrorist peril that is a far smaller threat to life than the motor car.

Abroad, they seek to pose as modern-day Churchills, never happier than when pictured among soldiers or climbing into helicopters.

Having destroyed Saddam Hussein’s secular state in Iraq, and boosted Islamist fanatics against the secular Assad state in Syria, and urged on the plainly dangerous ‘Arab Spring’ with rhetoric and bombs, they now claim to be surprised and horrified that Sunni fanatics are close to taking over the Middle East.

At home, they spent years actively encouraging Muslim migration to this country, and apologising for our remaining Christian laws and institutions.

Yet they act surprised when Muslim parents want their children brought up in their own faith in British schools.

Our growing secret police forces go on high alert. Plans are made to nip ‘extremism’ in the bud, and even make it illegal, even though the word means nothing and such a law would be a tyrant’s charter.

These plans are so absurd that last week they exploded in the faces of those who advocate them. A private Christian school was actually reprimanded because it had not been ‘inclusive’ enough.

Rules supposedly devised to curb Islamic ‘extremism’ were used to warn this school that it would be downgraded for failing to bring a Muslim imam to preach to its pupils. Could there be anything more ludicrous?

Actually, there could. The very people who are loudest in their alarmism about the Islamist menace are – almost without exception – the people who are keenest to abandon serious migration controls.

My guess is Britain – and Europe – will become Muslim in a century or so, without anyone needing to fire a shot or explode a single bomb.

We’ve given up our own faith, and left the door wide open. Why be surprised by such a change?

We can all learn from Dame Judi

Dame Judi Dench learns something new every day – a poem or a word – to keep her mind active.

And she is praised for it. Is it possible that the long sneer against ‘learning by rote’ (or ‘learning by heart’ as I call it) is coming to an end?

I learned – and have forgotten – huge chunks of Tennyson and other great English poets. I can sometimes dredge fragments out of memory, and hope that when I get really old it will all come back, as I forget newer things and uncover the buried layers.

But if I’d never been taught, the muscles of my memory would not have developed.

Pity those who have never learned anything by heart.

A final salute to my father's valour

Last week, just in time for Trafalgar Day, I received a medal that should have been given to my father nearly 70 years ago.

It is the Arctic Star, the decoration issued far too late to the survivors of the Russian convoys, one of the most terrifying and merciless campaigns of the Second World War.

It is so far out of its proper time that – though new-minted – it bears the Royal cypher of ‘GRI’, George VI, King and Emperor. Unlike my Great Uncle Harry’s 1914-18 medal, grandly (and mistakenly) inscribed with the words ‘The Great War for Civilisation’, it bears no noble sentiments.

I should think not. The only thing that could be justly engraved on it would be ‘Sorry for taking so long’.

My father died in 1987. Most of his shipmates from HMS Jamaica had taken the long voyage home by then, and they’d given up their occasional dinners because they’d become too small and sad.

He would, I think, have smiled wryly at the little trinket, so hard-won, so long in coming, issued in the name of a dead king and a dismantled empire. I’m not even sure he would have wanted it.

But I think his grandchildren ought to know that he was a man of valour, who endured hardship and danger mainly from a sense of duty – he did not much approve of the politics behind the mission, and would certainly have refused the rival medal which Moscow issued long before London did.

He was never entirely sure we had won the war in which he lost so many friends and saw so many terrible things. Nor am I.

That high-pitched hum you hear is the sound of spin-doctors spinning the Prime Minister’s choice of school for his daughter.

We’ll learn in March – on ‘National Offer Day’ – exactly what is happening. And since this is two months before the Election, that means it will be an elite state school of some sort (if he loses office, maybe she’ll discreetly switch to a private school later).

You’ll be told how brave he is – the first Tory premier ever to send his child to a state secondary.

I ask you to wonder, when this happens, why this is so good. As far as I know, the Tory Party has not (yet) become so totally socialist that it wants to abolish private schools, so why not use one if he can afford it?

Why deprive a poorer family of a place at a good state school? Where is the virtue in that?

The best state schools are just as socially exclusive as the best private schools. They select by house price, by sharpness of parental elbows, by parents’ willingness to appear to be religious (I am told, shockingly, that some people lie about their faith).

When the Blair creature, and Harriet Harman, and a long list of other liberal hypocrites, did the same thing, they were rightly mocked for it. Why then should the Camerons be praised?

We are told that the Blair creature ‘has told allies’ that he ‘believes’ the Tories will still be in power after the Election (even he can’t believe they will actually win a majority, a mathematical absurdity).

What this actually means is that Anthony Blair wants his own party to lose because he rightly regards David Cameron, not Ed Miliband, as his true heir and successor.

Whatever he wants, you shouldn’t want.

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A recording of the Bath University Debate on religion

Some of you may wish to watch this recording of the debate on religion in Bath, in which I took part last week.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubxewhu8NV8&feature=youtu.be

 

Some of you may not wish to do so.

Once Again, nobody cares that a killer took illegal drugs

As I always do, when I hear of rampage shootings such as that in Ottawa on Wednesday, I wondered how long it would be before the shooter turned out to have been taking some sort of mind-altering drug.  This is almost invariably the case in such events. As the authorities and mainstream media are never interested in this aspect of these killings (if they were they’d have to do something about it) , it can take a while, and sometimes some digging on my part.

 

No such effort was needed today.

 

Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, as he called himself after changing his name,  twice came up against the law on marijuana charges .

 

See here  http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/10/23/alleged_gunman_michael_zehafbibeau_had_long_list_of_runins_with_the_law.html

 

He must have been pretty persistent to have this experience, given the reluctance of modern police forces to bother with this drug unless it is smoked under their noses (and not always then). Nothing of any significance happened to him as a result, of course ( despite the alleged draconian ‘War on Drugs’ under whose brutal dictates we supposedly groan).

 

Though not ill enough to be detained (since the Western world shut its mental hospitals by the dozen, preferring  the neglect known as ‘ care in the community’ this is nowadays a very high bar, and few are) , his behaviour was clearly ‘erratic’, and the mosque he chose to attend didn’t seem very keen on him.

 

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/suspected-killer-in-ottawa-shootings-had-a-disturbing-side/article21252419/

 

But I suspect a great deal will be made of his Islamic conversion, and nothing at all of his drug-induced, er, instability. The same was true of the killers of Drummer Lee Rigby, whose ‘erratic’ behaviour during their crime and afterwards has barely been mentioned.

 

It is my opinion that fanaticism cannot be prevented in any free society, but that drugtaking can be. Thus, if we wish to see fewer such horrors, we should worry more about drugs than about fanaticism.

 

I am accused of trying to excuse these people by mentioning this. I’m not. Those who deliberately take mindbending drugs are in my view  responsible for the crimes they commit as a result.  I’m also accused of trying to minimise the influence of Islam. I’m not. I do not wish this to become an Islamic country. I just think we should be more aware of the grave dangers of living in a country where the state only pretends to enforce laws against dangerous drugs. There are quite a few such countries .

 

So how long will it be before we invite the IS jihadis to a white-tie dinner?

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

While we rage and fret about the terrorist outrages of today, how quickly we forget the horrors of the recent past. 

I can’t see why. The grief, loss and pain don’t diminish as the years go by. For those who survive, they deepen.

And I admire Lord Tebbit for his unfashionable refusal to forgive the IRA murderers who tried to kill him and his wife, and who did them terrible harm (as well as slaying or maiming several others) in Brighton 30 years ago.

One of the grisly monsters responsible for this, Patrick Magee, now walks about in freedom, thanks to our surrender to the IRA, a national shame we bury in denial and pretend never happened, sometimes even kidding ourselves that we were the winners.

Well, if we won, how is it that Magee is free and apparently living a happy and contented life, while his victims lie in their graves or suffer daily pain and disability?

He was supposed to serve a minimum of 35 years and actually served 14. He still, disgustingly, claims that he had 'no choice' but to use the weapon of murder.

He has had the nerve to try to get his victims to 'understand a bit better what motivated me'.

Some of those victims have, in my view quite mistakenly, forgiven him. Lord Tebbit says with simple dignity: 'I am often asked if I can find it in my heart to forgive the creature, Patrick Magee, who planted the bomb.

'That is not possible, for Magee has never repented.'

Quite. I do not think the Christian religion instructs us to forgive the unrepentant. Nobody in any age but this could possibly imagine that we are supposed to forgive those who don’t seek our forgiveness. 

Forgiveness without repentance is like a door without a doorway, or a key without a lock. The one implies and demands the other.

This is something that also needs to be understood by the Blairite bag-carrier Jonathan Powell, who took an active part in the surrender talks with the IRA, and who has just written a book saying we will always have to talk to terrorists in the end.

Actually, this isn’t true. We always have done so, but that is not because we had no choice.

We did it because we are weak and have lost our will to survive as a civilisation and a culture. If they knew we would never talk, and that we would crush them utterly, we would have many fewer of them.

As it is, terrorists decide the destiny of much of the world. The more militantly our leaders condemn them now, the more you can be sure that they will be inviting them to a white-tie dinner at Windsor in a year or two.

Mrs Clooney is right: we have to lose our Marbles

I back Amal Clooney in her battle to get the Elgin Marbles sent back to their home in Athens.

We rescued them from the Ottomans. We’ve guarded them well. But now their home is safe again, and we have had them for long enough.

They are one of the glories of human civilisation, and that is exactly why it would be right and generous for us to let them go back to the place they were made in and for.

It is the civilised thing to do, without bargains or conditions.

I never really understood this until, in an American museum, I saw a sculpture that had once stood in Lincoln Cathedral.  

I was enraged. Why was it not still there, where it belonged? But it was nothing like as important as the Marbles.

There can be no rule or precedent about this. There is only one Parthenon and only one Acropolis.

That is why an act of selfless generosity is the best way of ending the quarrel.

Dave can’t stop deceiving – even after he’s caught

How funny the ‘Conservative’ Party has become. 

Not only are its would-be candidates for the Rochester by-election sternly asked in public if they, too, plan to defect. 

One end of it doesn't know what the other end is doing. Last week the Mayor of London, Al (‘Boris’) Johnson, said the 2010 Tory promise to limit immigration was a ‘big deception’. This is quite true.

David Cameron must have known perfectly well that he had no power to fulfil this pledge as long as Britain stayed in the EU.

After this Ratner moment, in which a very senior party member openly admitted his party had lied to win votes, you might expect a pause before they did it again. But no, Mr Cameron started raging about an ‘emergency brake’ on immigration. 

No details were given, because there weren’t any. Again, no such brake can be applied without leaving the EU. So Mr Cameron contrived to sound as if he was on the verge of favouring a British exit, when in real life he’s almost as Europhile as Jean-Claude Juncker.

Is it just me, or are people at last beginning to see through this amazingly transparent man, who resorts instinctively to dishonesty, as a weed in a dingy backyard climbs towards the light?

Let us hope that his attempt to drown the truth in money, in the Rochester by-election, fails. 

Voters might ask themselves why the oligarchs and sharks who wrote cheques to the Tories at their semi-secret ‘Black and White Ball’ should be so keen to see Ukip beaten. 

I don't think the Labour Party actually wants to win next May’s General Election. Given that government is far more enjoyable and better rewarded than opposition, why is this?

Some of Labour’s Blairites do actually prefer David Cameron to Ed Miliband. Mr Cameron boasts of being the ‘Heir to Blair’ and follows Blairite policies at home and abroad.

And the supposedly ineffectual Ed Miliband had the nerve to beat his Blairite brother in a fair fight, for which he will never be forgiven.

But I think it’s even deeper than that. Labour’s leadership can see there’s a huge economic crisis coming soon, and don’t want to be in office when it happens.

If they exert themselves, the polls show they could get a narrow majority.

If they don’t exert themselves, the Tories can’t get a majority (this is an arithmetical impossibility) but they might just be the largest party.

They’ll have little or no power, but they will take the blame for the coming crash.
It explains a lot, if I’m right.

At this time of year, how I long for the clocks to return to proper Greenwich time. 

The mornings are ridiculously dark. So-called ‘daylight saving time’ (which does nothing of the kind) must have been devised by people who get up late, to torment those of us who get up early. 

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Why Isn't Labour Trying Harder to Win the Election?

As the world economy shudders and jolts on its tracks, and the markets plunge, it occurs to me that there’s an explanation for the generally feeble nature of Labour’s campaign for the May 2015 election.

 

The Tories, as we know, cannot hope for a majority next May, whatever happens. If UKIP were abducted by aliens, it would still be the same. All the sordid and unprincipled Tory weapons - pretending to be hostile to the EU while favouring it, dishonest immigration policies they don’t mean and know they can’t implement, referendums they don’t want and won’t have the power to call,  post-dated cheques written on empty accounts, unfunded tax cuts, panics about terrorism,  claims that they have rescued the economy when they have in fact loaded it down with even heavier chains of debt, personal smears of Labour leaders, drenching marginals with money – can only serve to keep the Tory party on life support. The thing will still appear to be alive, and might just possibly be the largest single party if the complex constituency arithmetic falls that way. But too many of its habitual voters have deserted forever, or passed away (and so deserted for even longer than forever) for it to obtain a majority at Westminster.

 

Labour, by contrast, can actually win. It’s unlikely, especially now that the SNP is chewing up Labour support in Scotland,  but a fierce and vigorous campaign might achieve an absolute majority. The Parliamentary boundaries allow it. Labour’s unchanging lead over the Tories in all serious opinion polls (confirmed recently by ICM after a spate of incredible claims of a Tory lead following Mr Cameron’s laughable tax cut speech in Birmingham) allows it. Despite attempts to pretend that UKIP is as great a threat to Labour as it is to the Tories simply aren’t true. UKIP did  *not* beat Labour at last week’s by-election. It did beat the Tories, and by a huge margin. The Tory vote collapsed in both Clacton and in Heywood and Middleton.  Labour’s vote collapsed only in Clacton. They held their share in Heywood and Middleton and will do so in the higher poll of the general election. I doubt if UKIP will win the seat in May.

 

So why aren’t Labour trying? Why isn’t the Labour establishment rallying round to grasp the victory which is within reach? Blairite sulking over the (deserved) failure of the undistinguished and weirdly overpraised David Miliband to beat his brother really has run its course.  What is supposed to be so great about David, who somehow became Foreign Secretary without even knowing that Britain had knighted Robert Mugabe? If they’d wanted to get rid of Ed, they should have done so years ago. They haven’t. It’s too late now, unless some wholly unpredictable cataclysm forces him to resign.

 

All professional politicians normally prefer office to opposition. There’s more fun, more money, more chance of cashing in afterwards.

 

I think Labour knows something which the Tories (who perhaps believe their own propaganda about the economy) don’t know or can’t believe.  They can see that George Osborne’s housing-based bubble cannot last and must burst with a loud bang pretty soon. They can see that higher employment has only been achieved though the creation of huge numbers of ‘self-employed’ jobs which pay so little that the supposed employees earn too little to pay tax.  They know that the City is full of foreboding and that the deep faults of  uncontrollable, unaccountable debt which caused the last crash have not been put right. Far from it.

 

 

 I think Labour fears to be the party in power when the coming economic storm, long in gestation, finally breaks. I think whoever is in power when that crisis comes will be out of office for a very long time, if not wholly broken. And that we may well end up with a grand coalition as we try to pick up the pieces afterwards. So why try now?

What If Harold Wilson Had Lost on this day in 1964?

So Harold Wilson Day comes round again, now the fiftieth anniversary of Mr Wilson’s appointment by Her Majesty as Prime Minister. I can remember the day, and this is odd because 16th October 1964 is as distant in time from me (as I now am) as 16th October 1914 was from me (as I then was).  Even then, the first year of the Great War seemed impossibly distant, a separate age in which men and customs were hardly recognizable. Half a century was far wider than the widest ocean.   I could not have begun, as a 12-year-old boy at a boarding prep school on the edge of Dartmoor, to imagine my present self, the country and the world I live in or the things I would have done and seen. The distance is vast in both directions. Life is not short at all. It is astonishingly long.

 

On that wet and rather puzzling day, we lived otherwise, thought otherwise, spoke otherwise. We had different hopes and fears, we dressed and looked differently and saw the world in completely different way. Many of those changes began when Mr Wilson took office. 

 

A rather good BBC Radio 4 programme, transmitted last Saturday, explored that odd election, and for the moment you may listen to it here

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04kzz6g

 

I seem to recall that the early morning broke without a clear result, and it was some hours before we knew for certain that Labour had won.

What if they hadn’t?

As readers here ought to know, the Tory party has never been a  great defender of tradition, despite its pretence to be such a thing. But before Mr Wilson’s six years in office, the Tory party did not feel as anxious as it now does to fit in with the times, to assist and accelerate radical change.

 

Nor was its leader of 1964, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, a particularly left-wing figure as Tories go.  

 

I don’t think a Douglas-Home government would have allowed, let alone encouraged, the raft of largely ‘private’ Bills which lunched the British Cultural Revolution . I wonder how the BBC and the rest of the ‘satirical’ new establishment would have reacted to yet another Tory government. Would grammar schools have been reprieved for a while, or saved for good? Would the railways have been butchered more or less (Probably more, though Labour, in the end, cut them pretty savagely) ? Would the death penalty have survived into the 1970s? Would the Wootton Report have ever been published,  let alone implemented. Would British troops have been sent to Vietnam?

 

Actually I suspect Labour would have been in power by 1967 anyway. If Sir Alec had won, he could only have done so narrowly, and would probably have needed ( as Wilson did) to call a new election fairly soon. There was, alas, a ‘mood for change’ which wasn’t rational and which would have had its way.

 

And yet some things in history do depend on very narrow decisions. As the event was so close, I’m surprised that I, for one, have never seen any serious attempt to write a counter-factual speculation on the possibilities.