Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 217

Lionel Davidson Revisited

Some years ago I wrote a little about the late Lionel Davidson http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/11/goodbye-to-a-fine-author.html , an author who continues to give me great pleasure.

 

Having just re-read two of his books for perhaps the fifth or sixth time (I had been feeling a bit under the weather, and thought (rightly) that a voyage into the land of imagination would make me feel better) , I thought I’d try once more to communicate my enthusiasm for a writer who really ought to be better-known and more widely read.

 

The books concerned were ‘The Rose of Tibet’ and ‘A Long Way to Shiloh’ (published in the USA as ‘The Menorah Men’ because there are so many places in the USA called Shiloh, and it’s not about any of them) . I tend to turn to ‘The Rose of Tibet’ when I’m feeling a bit out of sorts,   because it makes normal life feel so blessed. Like all accounts of wild and dangerous encounters with extreme cold, pain and fear, it intensifies the comfort and cosiness of an armchair in a warm, softly-lit room in a peaceful and ordered land.

 

But this is not just a formulaic shilling shocker, but an astonishing work of imagination, mixed with politics, history, satire and moral commentary.  It features some of the most gruesome violence in literature, but the killing is surprisingly easy to accept, since almost any reader will regard it as just punishment for the victims. Davidson hated writing it (by his own account), and never visited the landscapes he describes so movingly and with such power. I’ve never been closer to Tibet than Bhutan, which is quite a lot lower but similar in many ways, and form what I know he got it right.

 

The book begins in a publisher’s office in London, and I’m told it’s a severe satire on the particular publisher involved, if you know who’s involved. The discovery of the manuscript on which the book will be based is very, very funny about old age and infirmity, if you can bear to laugh about such things ( I think it’s good to, myself) and the accelerating process through which the hero finds himself plucked out of normality into a world of exotic surprise is beautifully done.

 

At what point in this strange journey does it become inevitable that he will cross the high Himalayas, guided only by a hopelessly mistaken map and an inexperienced but movingly courageous Sherpa,   into Tibet and become entangled in the fate of nations? There are several moments, each beautifully described.

 

On the way he must spend many weeks in Kalimpong, a real place alluringly described (I was reminded of it, years after I had first read the book, by a sojourn in Thimphu, the tiny capital of Bhutan. Every sensation is enhanced by the thin clear mountain air, thousands of miles from normality and seemingly designed to lift the spirits. Davidson plainly loves mountains, the way they exhilarate, the way they seem to close in on you as dusk comes down, the way the really huge ones fool you into think they are clouds, until you realize that actually they are solid. The flights to Bhutan go past the Himalayas, which I described at the time as resembling a great frozen storm, and I have seen few such moving sights in all my time on earth.

 

It is in that frozen storm that the book sets and adventure as marvellous as anything Rider Haggard ever wrote about, only very definitely in the modern world . To describe it too carefully would be to spoil it, but imagine a grown-up adventure featuring secret passages, she-devils, sacred treasure, and a terrible chase across the beautiful empty lands of Southern Tibet, and you’ll get the idea. People get very badly hurt, thousands of miles from medical help. It is unsparing about that, and desperately sad about Tibet.

 

‘Shiloh’ is almost as good. Long before Indiana Jones, it casts an archaeologist as a hero in a very dangerous hunt for a scroll which will reveal the whereabouts of, well, something very old that a lot of people would like to find. The setting is Israel a few years before the 1967 war, and the old border, and the crude division of Jerusalem of the time, play a significant part in what happens. Davidson is especially good at being realistically funny without in any way losing the tension or the fear. If his heroes do brave things, they do them believably, as urban cowards would do them if they had to.  Tiny allusions to the past lives of his heroes (which you could miss very easily if reading too fast) are extraordinarily telling.  There is drinking. There is extra-marital sex (though Davidson never regards this as uncomplicated or free of moral problems, rather the reverse, but his heroes don’t necessarily shy away from it). But I can’t imagine any other thriller writer whose hero solves half his conundrum by listening to an old man’s Sabbath speculations on the Torah, and then the other half (amid a stormy night) by studying the text of a beautiful old Bible, part of the collection of an army officer marooned in a desolate oasis in the wilderness of Zin. A good map of the region makes this book even better.

 

I won’t here dwell on his first success ‘The Night of Wenceslas’ (read this if you are planning a visit to Prague) or on the curious, wistful ‘Making Good Again’, which isn’t really a  thriller at all. I’ll just note, as I think I did in the original article, that Davidson had an astonishing childhood, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants to Hull, who taught his own mother to read English, served as a submariner in the 1939 war, and then became an office-boy at the ‘Spectator’.  Would such a person now have any chance of becoming what he became? I rather doubt it. I picture him, as a child in Hull, perpetually seeking solace in books in a cramped and chilly family home in that fishy, remote city, and finding much more than solace.

A Day in the Rain, in Bath

I spent most of Tuesday in Bath, in the rain. I was due to speak that evening in a debate about religion, and decided to make a day of it.  I’ve never especially liked Bath, finding it dispiriting and soggy. And while I enjoy this sort of architecture in small doses in the countryside (see below) , this great concentration of it in long, crumbling terraces always feels to me like some vast mausoleum. Here was a chance to try again, and perhaps persuade myself to like it. But I still don't. How odd it has always seemed to me that Bath of all places is the only English town that has been classified as a World Heritage Site. 

 

Not York? Not Durham? Not Oxford, Not Cambridge? How strange. 

 

What is it that I don't like, apart from the feeling of being in a large and well-ordered cemetery full of tourist shops and cafes?

Is it that it is, unlike the rest of unplanned England, it is so concentrated, uniform and orderly? It is by far the most concentrated outcrop of Regency architecture in England? I can't really like this era of dandies, boozers and politicians such as Charles James Fox, so terribly fooled by the French Revolution. Classical architecture, though pleasing in a mathematical sort of way, somehow makes my heart sink, unless it's softened by a woodland setting.  

 

In the end, I suppose, its fundamentally pagan character is intensified when you see so much of it, over and over again. Also it was originally conceived for Mediterranean landscapes, cypress trees , vineyards and olive groves. Recreated amid the soggy wooded hills of Somerset, it is even more melancholy – the final years of paganism must, I think have been full of weariness, cynicism and disappointment, all those pointless mysteries, those temple basements full of the rotting offal from thousands of useless animal sacrifices, the beautiful but ultimately lifeless idols  (Eyes, that see not, ears that hear not, mouths that speak not, hands that handle not - They that worship them, as the psalm sneers, are like unto them)  or why did Christianity sweep all before it so easily?  

 

As I roamed around I had the usual odd experiences which minor celebrity brings. People think they know you, but can’t remember how or why. At the Abbey a nice lady half-recognized me and said she was sure she had once known me in Hong Kong (she certainly hadn’t, but this made a change from the gentlemen of a certain age who are sure they know me from the Golf Club, a claim so impossible that it is hard to know how to reply, except gently).

 

The main lesson I take from such encounters is that  ‘More know Tom Fool, than Tom Fool knows’, and that it is wise to behave very well indeed, for any misbehaviour will quickly become public. This is actually quite good for me, and  I suppose I am no more constrained by it than any dweller in a village or small town (where nobody needs to be well-known to be recognized) would have been in the days when we were a smaller and more settled society. Vain as I am, it’s not vanity that makes me assume that there’s a good chance I’ll be recognized. It’s caution.

 

Then I walked up to the University, up a long, steep hill with occasional superb views of the town below. As usual, one enters a another world when one arrives on any British University campus, a kingdom of youth where even quite recent events and ideas are alien, and the modern is completely triumphant. Some of the buildings looked to me as if they were survivors from the 1970s, or even possibly the 1960s, that heavy waterlogged look that really old concrete has.

 

But even that era (still very much alive in my memory) was impossibly long ago in the bustling world of new things, where I couldn’t even get full-fat whole milk to put in my tea. One of the strangest features of modern life is the absurd misconception that fat is bad for you, and the insistence on serving skimmed milk (once reserved for convicts and workhouse inmates who had no choice) as a health benefit. Hilariously, it is usually accompanied by vast quantities of sugar and starch, which are very bad for you,  and consumed by people whose lives are deprived of exercise by motor cars,  lifts and all the other anti-exercise devices which fill our lives.

 

I also noticed (and filed for a possible jest later) that the Student Union lavatories resembled those of a maximum security prison, solid stainless steel without any movable parts. I am fascinated by the assumption in so much modern design that people no longer know how to behave -  the public loos of my youth were ornate affairs of porcelain, glass, brass and wood, now they are increasingly Spartan, armour-plated, unbreakable and unadorned. It’s the same trend that has led many pubs to serve drinks in plastic containers rather than glasses, and that has installed CCTV cameras, those symbols of mistrust and surveillance, everywhere I go (except, interestingly, former East Berlin, where the people have already experienced what happens when we get the balance between privacy and security wrong).

 

We cannot be trusted to behave in a civilized fashion, so we must have our hands kept away from dangerous materials, we cannot be allowed to have breakable or delicate facilities in public places and we must be watched and recorded. What’s more , our testimony cannot be trusted any more unless it is backed up by filmed records. One of the most unexpected effects of CCTV is that it has now set a standard of evidence far higher than the one which previously existed, and the absence of any CCTV records of an alleged crime will usually cause the police to lose what interest they had in the first place (not much, you will rightly say, but you see what I mean).

 

Weary of the standard fare of religion debates, I thought I might as well make this collapse of trust and self-restraint a central part of my necessarily brief attempt to defend faith and absolute  morality against those who argue that we would be better off without it.

 

The first speaker for the anti-religious position astonished me by fully conceding Christianity’s role in the foundation of literacy, science and society as a whole, perhaps putting me off my stroke. I felt the need to point out that my side’s principal point had been made, but I suspect it didn’t have the effect I’d hoped for. If this is so, and I think it demonstrable, it’s surely absurd to say that society would be better off without religion, for without religion, a society capable of discussing this issue wouldn’t exist in the first place.

 

But the real argument is of course always about something else, whatever the formal wording of the motion. I suspect that many of those present care little about how society came to be as it is. What they are interested in is ensuring that it ceases to pay any attention to, or give any authority to religious absolute morality. The desire for total autonomy in their own bodies is the strongest driving force in their lives, and religious rues about sex and drugs are infuriating and absurd to them.

 

Even so, they suffer from a fear that there might just be something in the claims of religion, which is why – whenever I got to universities to discuss the subject - the audiences are bigger and more engaged than they are for debates about any other subject.  As I so often say, believers and unbelievers both fear that God exists. Believers also hope He does. Unbelievers hope He doesn’t.  

 

***Note to religious bores. Comments directly relevant to the above are of course welcome,. But attempts to turn this into a Bible-quoting esoteric row will be frowned upon, and severely discouraged.

Huge Story Breaks, nobody pays any attention

A senior figure in a major party openly admits that its last manifesto contained  a ‘great deception’ over one of the central issues of our time. This is an astonishing story, a political Ratner moment of huge proportions.

 

Major Party’s Top Figure Admits ‘Deception’ About Immigration Control’.

 

And almost nothing happens.

 

The media had plenty of Sunday to check the quote (spoken on the BBC’s Andrew Marr programme quite early on Sunday morning) and follow it up, and seek reaction to it, and organise informed comment on it. Until Mr Alexander ("Boris") Johnson made his amazing and damaging confession, none of the Fleet Street papers had an especially strong story with which to carry on coverage of the most extraordinary political upset of modern times.

 

Here are the core words ; ‘I think there were two big deceptions. The first was when Blair took the brakes off in 2004. Other countries kept their borders sealjed and we didn’t. That was a mistake. And the second thing was saying that we could control the numbers when we couldn’t.’

 

Actually the Blair creature actively wanted the migrants in 2004, as Andrew Neather revealed in his famous outburst. The other EU states could only lawfully have kept their borders ‘sealed’ for a limited time. In the end they had to open them as well, and (controls being what they are in the borderless EU) they couldn’t really limit them even then. Our shambolic monitoring of foreigners once in the country, our vast army of unemployable comprehensively-‘educated’ young people who shun low-paid work, and our non-contributory benefits system make us a greater target anyway.

 

The real core remains the words : ‘saying that we could control the numbers when we couldn’t’.

 

But by Monday morning the confession/condemnation had sunk into obscurity. The Blairite ‘Daily Telegraph’, whose readers ought to be wholly baffled by their habitual newspaper’s cultural revolution, hilariously led on a supposed call by Mr Johnson for ‘ quotas on EU immigrants’ which sounded to me remarkably like the very thing he had just denounced – a promise to do something he had no conceivable power to do.

 

This is like calling for air traffic control on flying pigs, as Mr Johnson knows perfectly well. EU law absolutely prevents any such quotas. To suggest that this measure is any more possible now than it was in 2010 is to repeat the deception for which he has just castigated his own leader on national TV.

 

Mr Johnson penned a bizarre article in which he says that the answer to the revolt against David Cameron and his dishonest party (a party Mr Johnson has just explicitly admitted was wholly dishonest in its 2010 migration pledge ) is …vote Tory again.

 

SARCASM WARNING HERE: Generously conceding that not all UKIP voters are racist (how kind!) , and that to be worried about immigration is not necessarily to be personally hostile to immigrants themselves ( my goodness, how magnanimous!) Mr Johnson then recounts the history of his revolting, gazillionaire-infested party’s opportunist lying on the subject, so very similar to the lying done by the other revolting, gazillionaire-infested Blairite Party, New Labour.  

 

You can read the thing in full here

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/11157515/The-answer-to-the-Ukip-anger-is-simple-vote-David-Cameron.html

 

He says : ‘The electorate was told that we could reduce the numbers of immigrants – when in fact it was legally impossible to do so.’

 

See, now here we are in the passive again. The electorate ‘was told’ Who told it? Why, the Tories told it. So why not say  ‘We Tories told voters that we could reduce the numbers of immigrants – when in fact it was legally impossible to do so.’

 

Is it because he still chokes and gags on the admission, like his party?  And if so, why?

 

Could it be that the Age of Deception is not over?

He even admits : ‘There is no way, under current UK law, that we can stop people entering this country in large numbers from all 28 EU countries, including those where wages and benefits are very much lower than our own. The voters aren’t fools. They have spotted this incoherence..’

 

Well, if we’re not fools then why does he then make this laughable claim a few lines further on?

 

‘There is only one man who has both grasped what needs to be done and who is in a position to do it, and that is David Cameron.’

 

I defy anyone to identify a solitary syllable of truth in this assertion. What is Mr Cameron (who pretended he could act in 2010 when he couldn’t) going to do, exactly?

 

What sort of fool would believe it?

 

Well, here’s your answer, uncrammed with practical or legal detail:

‘Only David Cameron can conceivably deliver those changes, since he is the only leader who can lead reform of the EU.’

 

So here we are in the wonderful territory so well summed up by the old chants: ‘with a ladder and some glasses, you could see the Hackney Marshes, if it wasn’t for the houses in between’  . Or ‘If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs’.

 

If we had some ham…Mr Cameron has to win a parliamentary majority in May 2015 (arithmetically and politically impossible even if UKIP sank to the bottom of the ocean tonight). If we had some eggs….He then has to persuade the EU to reverse the ’acquis communautaire’ (its irreversible ratchet under which all powers conceded to it by nation states remain forever in the EU’s hands) .

 

Then, after viewing the Hackney Marshes with his imaginary ladder and glasses, except for the problem of the houses in between, and after cooking and eating his imaginary eggs and ham,  he will deliver phantasmal changes to our relationship with the EU (changes which I for one am by no means sure he or Mr Johnson actually want anyway).

 

Serious people have to keep asking the Tories why they never actually say what their attitude is towards EU membership. They hint, they bluster and blow hot and cold, they leak, they allow people to speculate on certain lines, but have you ever heard any significant senior Tory say ‘Yup, we have to leave if we are to get our borders back, and we will’.

 

No. Nor will you. Because, while they know perfectly well thus is true, they will never leave the EU . But you *will* with increasing frequency hear statements designed to look as if the person is saying this, when he isn’t.

 

The Tories are and always have been the party of the EU. All they have learned from the past 30 years is how to pretend to dislike the thing they support. That’s why we will have to get someone else to do it, if we want this job done.

That Old Sweet Song 'I want for your children what I want for mine'. Sorry they can't actually have it.

The following is made relevant by a ‘Daily Telegraph’ story on Saturday, in which it is suggested that the Prime Minister may follow the example of his friend and former Education Secretary Michael Gove and send his daughter to a highly selective (though of course not *academically* selective, that would never do) single-sex Church school, rather than to one of the ‘academies’ or ‘free schools' which his government recommends so fervently to the common people.

 

As with Mr Gove, this possibility is spun as a bold decision by a privately-educated Tory to use the state system, a spin which has worked amazingly well, judging by the dim and ill-informed comments which have appeared beneath the story:

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/11154466/David-and-Samantha-Cameron-look-to-send-daughter-to-inner-city-comp.html

 

The story itself portrays his daughter’s fate as being a ‘contrast’ with his ‘privileged’ education at Eton. Yes, Eton is indeed privileged. But so is Grey Coat Hospital. Does the writer really not know that access to schools such as Grey Coat Hospital is one of the most prized and elusive privileges to be found in our society? Most parents in the UK can only dream of it, and they can no more hope for it than they can hope to pay fees of £35,000 out of taxed income.

 

In most parts of Britain, such schools simply do not exist, or if they do, are so oversubscribed or have such tiny catchment areas that many are called, but very few are chosen.

 

 

Joshua Wooderson apparently doesn’t know when to give up. He responded to a recorded discussion in which I attacked Mr Gove’s personal schools policy in front of an audience of privileged public schoolboys who don't know how lucky they are (featured in the post ‘ A Debate at Radley’).

 

He asserted that Michael Gove’s decision, when Education secretary, to spurn, for his own child, a school he had repeatedly praised in print and from public platforms, was not proof that the Tories had done nothing for the children of the poor (while pretending to have done so much for them, as New Labour did).

 

I had said that Mr Gove plainly didn’t believe his own propaganda, and couldn’t have shown his disbelief more clearly.

 

The school he spurned, Burlington Danes, is a short walk from his London home. The school he chose for his daughter instead, a highly selective single sex former grammar school with a complex admission policy, whose uniform supplier is Peter Jones of Sloane, Square, Chelsea,  is miles from his home.

 

It is exactly the sort of school many parents long for, but which  has been whisked out their reach by the mass abolition of grammar schools.

 

In other words, in his actions Mr Gove agrees with me that the best state schools are selective , single sex and traditional. In his rhetoric, he doesn’t.

 

Mr Wooderson wrote ‘I don't entirely understand how it follows from the fact that Michael Gove didn't send his children to Burlington Danes that his party has done nothing for the children of the poor. If you think, as I do, that parents have a right - perhaps even an obligation - to provide their children with the best education possible, then Mr. Gove ought to send his children to whichever school he thinks best, whether or not that school is one he has personally championed. He may well believe that Burlington Danes is a testament to the success of his reforms, but that doesn't commit him to believing it to be the best school available, particularly given that his reforms are comparatively recent, and so may bear fruit only in the long term. By analogy: if selective education were reintroduced (as I believe it should be), thereby improving the education of the poor, would anyone who championed it be obliged to send his children to the local grammar school, rather than a superior independent school? Even if one thinks Mr. Gove should have to suffer (or enjoy) the consequences of his own policies, surely his children shouldn't.’

 

*** Well, start with this: Mr Gove has been unequivocal in his praise of Burlington Danes – see here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/06/if-this-school-is-so-good-why-doesnt-michael-gove-send-his-daughter-to-it.html

 

He has certainly not suggested that his reforms have yet to bear fruit there, or are still waiting to take effect.

 

As for his vew of grammar schools, his government continues (as it has from the start) to enforce the Blair/Blunkett School Standards Act, which makes it illegal to open any new grammar schools.

 

This is not just neutral inertia. Mr Gove himself is far from enthusiastic about reversing the destruction of the grammar schools, as I described here when Mr Wooderson was obviously absent:

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/05/more-details-of-michael-goves-attitude-towards-grammar-schools.html

 

 

Mr Wooderson was (in my view rightly) challenged by the Wiki Man, who weighed in thus:

 

‘Was your comment a wilfully tongue-in-cheek missing of the point? A politician defending a schools policy - his own schools policy - by lauding a nearby school operating according to that policy and who then sends his child to a more distant school not operating to that schools policy, and in fact to all intents defying it, is rightly open to the call of hypocrisy. (The distance issue is in fact a red-herring. The distances could be reversed and it would still be hypocrisy.) The hypocrisy would be lessened somewhat if comprehensive schooling was run alongside grammar schooling as a competitively alternative system. Instead of course new grammar schooling is forbidden. Aggravating the issue in respect of Mr Gove is the role of perception in giving political policy credibility. If Mr Gove is advocating an egalitarian schools policy over which he hopes to establish credibility he must be perceived outwardly to be adopting it in the case of his own children. This used to be called 'leading from the front'.’

 

Mr Wooderson then responded : ‘Well, I wasn’t in fact defending Mr. Gove from the charge of hypocrisy, but from the accusation that, because he doesn’t send his own children to a nearby school that operates according to his schools policy, he obviously doesn’t believe in his reforms or care about the children of the poor.’

 

To which I will reply ***What, then, is his defence? There is no doubt that Mr Gove has done this. If he believed these self-styled academies were as good as he says he does, how can he possibly justify spurning Burlington Danes? Unlike the Wiki Man, I do not think it is anything to do with ‘leading from the front’. Mr Gove may send his children wherever he likes, if he can get them in. I just think it is a matter of flat, unmistakable hypocrisy. The question Mr Wooderson still has to answer is ‘If Mr Gove genuinely believes Burlington Danes and the other academies he praises are so good, why, given the ideal opportunity to do so, does he not back up his statements with action?’

 

There can be only one answer, can’t there? And there’s no defence. The Tory MP in the discussion makes the same obtuse non-defence of Mr Gove, pretending not to see any connection between Mr Gove’s claims for ‘academies’ and ‘free schools’ and his actual very different choice in practice.

Mr Wooderson continued : ‘As far as hypocrisy is concerned, I don’t know to what extent he’s responsible for, or supportive of, the ban on opening new grammar schools (a ban that was put in place by a previous government, if I’m not mistaken). But suppose he is opposed to selective education. Might he not say in his defence that in an ideal world he would send his children to the sort of non-selective school he champions, but that, the world being imperfect, and there being grammar schools which are better than the schools he champions, it would be wrong for him to give his children a less-than-optimal education in the name of ‘leading from the front’, given that they of course have no say in how the education system is or has been run?’

 

***Mr Wooderson should see above (*the Gove/ grammars link) and also below. The legal ban on new grammar schools was indeed put in place by a  previous government. But Mr Gove's Pary never showed any enthusasm for getting rid of it. Not only did they fail to reopen or build a single new gramar school in 18 years of office between 1979 and 1997.   David Cameron, Michael Gove’s friend and patron, was challenged by backbenchers such as Graham Brady to oppose and overturn this ban in 2007. He acted firmly as Leader of the Opposition to quash any such idea, even when he still thought he might have the power to overturn it. Mr Gove accepted his appointment as Education Secretary in full knowledge of his leader’s views.  See:

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6701877.stm

 

 

I note that the Prime Minister, discussing his children’s education in the ‘Daily Mail’ this morning, praises his daughter’s ‘brilliant state school’ (without at any stage acknowledging how incredibly rare such schools are in the state system, nor explaining precisely how she happens to be at this heavily-oversubscribed establishment so far from either Downing Street or the Camerons’ West London home).

 

If it is true, as he writes , that ‘We have made good progress, with rigour in the curriculum, discipline in the classroom, and well-respected qualifications on exam certificates. Because these aren't just letters on a piece of paper - they're our children's ticket to a better, brighter future.’ , then it is hard to see that he needs to worry about which of the many London secondary schools within reach of either place his daughter now goes to.

 

But, do you know, I think he can still see the difference between Grey Coat Hospital and the others, just as Harriet Harman did in her time, and just as the Blair Creature saw the difference between Islington’s comprehensives and the London Oratory, another exceptional state school. And I think if he really had to accept the National Offer Day decisions which most parents have to face, he'd get out his cheque book pretty quickly.  

 

The interesting thing is that after 17 years of alleged reform (on top of decades of alleged reform by pre-Blair governments) , the difference is still just as clear between the exceptional and the bog-standard.

 

 

History does repeat itself quite a lot. Mr Cameron actually writes : ‘I want for your children what I have for my own’ … adding ‘ because no child in Britain should be born to have a second-rate education’

 

Well, pulling down from its shelf my treasured and dog-eared copy of New Labour’s 1997 Manifesto (adorned with many pictures of the Blair creature looking sincere, human , noble ( and on occasions slightly deranged from oversmiling), with Nelson Mandela, with John Prescott, with Jacques Chirac, with Bill Clinton, with a nameless tot, in a crowd, with some soldiers (!))

 

I find on page 3:

 

‘What I want for my own children I want for yours.’

 

Neither of these statements can possibly be true. There simply are not enough lovely, nostalgic C of E primaries, enough Grey Coat Hospitals, enough London Oratories, for all those parents who want their children to have good, orderly, disciplined education. And there never will be, until we bring back selection by ability at 11 or 13 (we never got rid of it at 18, did we?, but by that time the fates of most are already decided).

 

I really have no idea why Mr Wooderson, or anyone, should wish to defend these people, who grab what they can get, which is natural if unlovely – but then pretend to be bountiful philanthropists the while, which is just nauseating.  

A Debate at Radley

Some of you might enjoy this clip from a debate I did a few months ago at Radley College, the leading independent school near Oxford. Pity they couldn’t spell my name right.

 

Some of you might not enjoy it. 

 

http://www.radleyvideo.co.uk/clips36_qt_2014.html

 

As I recall, this was shortly before the Euro and local elections. The patronising smugness of Mr Loughton now looks (to me) especially misplaced.  I must look up his majority. 

 

 

 

Only one thing can save us from Labour: A Tory split

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The Prime Minister likes to scare us by warning ‘Go to bed with Nigel Farage, wake up with Red Ed’. But, Mr Cameron, most of us have been through a worse nightmare than that.

To use your own rather tacky imagery, they went to bed in 2010 with an apparently conservative, pro-British Tory leader – and woke up in the morning to find it was all just thick make-up, and that you were a fervent Europhile, a politically correct sexual revolutionary and a Green fanatic.

Let’s have no more mornings like that. Those Tory voters and Tory MPs who fear a Labour victory next year have a real, practical answer to both these fears. Here it is.

Ukip has shown that it can beat Labour in the North of England, where the Tories cannot. Ukip has shown it can energise patriotic, socially conservative voters in the South.

If a large number of Tory MPs now defect to Ukip – as many must be tempted to do – Ukip can be transformed in a few weeks into a real third party which can thrash Ed Miliband in seats he would otherwise win.

I believe that this could create the crisis that Nigel Farage needs and hopes for – the possibility of a workable, hard-nosed post-election pact between the Tories and Ukip, an unequivocal deal to take us out of the EU and give us back control over our borders.

Arithmetically, such an idea makes much more sense than any other strategy – if your aim is truly to stop Labour. Without a Tory split, mountains of Ukip votes would indeed be wasted.

With a Tory split, they would heap up MPs on the anti-Labour side.

Just as in the SDP breakaway in 1981, large-scale defections from the Tories could utterly change the political balance of power in modern Britain.

The alternative is that Tory MPs remain ‘loyal’ to the end, and that we are indeed guaranteed a Labour Government of some sort in May. They can sit around for the next five years moaning, ‘I told you so’, to anyone who cares to listen.

But what sort of ‘loyalty’ is this? Why should it be thought noble to try to save your party at the expense of your country?

The Tory Party (like Labour) is close to the end of its natural life anyway. It has no automatic right to survive, and its successor is currently being born in places as far apart as Greater Manchester and Essex. Voters are not the property of politicians. When they stop voting for one party, and start voting for another, why do we treat them as deserters who need to be dragged back?

If Tesco fails to attract customers and they go somewhere else, do we browbeat and threaten those customers into returning, or do we recognise that Tesco just wasn’t good enough? If you listen to the BBC and read the grand commentators of the media, you would think that Friday’s election results were bad and disturbing news.

Voters are not the property of politicians. When they stop voting for one party, and start voting for another, why do we treat them as deserters who need to be dragged back? 

They remind me of the East German Communists of 1953, furious and resentful that the people – in whose name they ruled – had risen against them.

The playwright Bertolt Brecht jeered sarcastically that perhaps in that case the government should dissolve the people, and elect another.

Well, I think the people are right and the Establishment wrong. These wonderful, exhilarating and truly historic votes are not bad news to me or to many others who have long warned that our country could not be run in this way much longer without being ruined and abolished.

At last, the bone-headed, complacent consensus which has done us so much damage has been challenged.

Mr Cameron would, of course, be the main casualty of the revolt I am urging, which is why he hopes that no such thing will happen.

But he is not as wonderful as he thinks he is, as I believe Her Majesty has recently pointed out to him.

Hero with a helmet camera

Good luck to cyclist Dave Sherry, who does what we should all do and tries to stop drivers using their phones, especially texting, while driving.

This amazingly stupid activity is also a crime, and many of those who do it are completely unrepentant when challenged – in fact, they are often very rude.

Yet they could easily kill or maim someone thanks to a moment’s crucial inattention. Mr Sherry records them on a helmet-mounted camera, then reports hard cases to the police via a laudable organisation called Police Witness, which passes evidence on to the authorities.

Why is this left to brave private individuals, when the police – endlessly moaning about non-existent staff shortages – have the time and manpower to monitor Twitter and Facebook?

And come to that, to dig into reporters’ phone records? 

Jamie Angus, editor of the BBC Radio 4 breakfast show Today, thinks it is losing listeners because of too much gloomy news from abroad.

He’s quite wrong. The problem is that the programme has become too feminine.

Even the male presenters, including the once-fiery John Humphrys, now pursue consensus and calm.

What we want is to hear smug public figures properly roughed up, and conventional wisdom defied. Instead, the programme is disdainful to dissenters – if it lets them on at all – and regurgitates received opinion.

It sounds as if the studio is full of scented candles. Snoring Boring. 

I wouldn't urge anyone to go to see the new film Gone Girl, so there are no spoiler warnings about what follows.

It contains several episodes of needless violence, one so bloody and lovingly dwelt upon that I had to cover my eyes for what felt like five minutes. There is also some needless explicit sex.

Twice, the female lead, Rosamund Pike, is viciously pushed into walls or furniture by her husband – yet she appears unhurt. I was warned, and I can’t complain.

Miss Pike can be a mesmerisingly good actress, and she is, in fact, superb in this film.

I wasn’t sure if the sex and violence would be too high a price to pay. The answer is that they are. The whole thing is a moral desert of deceit, mistrust, crudity and cynicism.

If this is what sells books and films now – and I think it is – we have much to fear.

Almost everything you thought you knew about the war with IS has been proved untrue by the absurd stand-off at Kobane on the Syrian-Turkish border.

Turkey isn’t our ally, even though it’s in Nato. On the contrary, it’s an increasingly Islamist state run by a dangerous demagogue who should worry us as much as IS does.

That’s why the Turkish tanks stand and watch as IS overwhelms the brave defenders of Kobane.

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

Will They say it's All About Red Ed Again?

As the Blairite media struggle to minimise and misrepresent the by-election results of this morning, I thought some of you might like to listen again to my edition of BBC Radio 4’s ‘What the Papers Say’ , just after the Euro and local elections in May:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmEvZJf7naw

 

What Does it All Mean? Some first thoughts

So what does it all mean? I expect there will be great efforts to portray the election results of Friday as an equal blow to Labour and the Tories.  I have already had this impression from the broadcast coverage today, and expect something similar from the printed media tomorrow.

 

This is not true. The immediate danger is very much to the Tories. The danger to Labour follows from the Zombie effect – that it is only tribal hatred for the Tories that holds Labour together, and that when one cadaver falls, the other will come tumbling after.

 

Just because Labour says its vote held up quite well in Heywood and Middleton, you don’t have to laugh and disbelieve the statement.

 

Look at the comparative results, in Heywood and Middleton, for 2010 and 2014:

 

In 2010 Labour got 18,499 (40.1%)In 2014 they got 11,633 (40.9%)

So their share (of a smaller vote,) was not that bad.

 

The thing was that they faced an opponent who drew from a  far wider base than had previously existed. UKIP could have beaten them. The Tories never could have. 

 

UKIP’s 11,016 (38.7%) is an utter transformation from their turnout of 1,215 (2.6%) in 2010. Even if you add to that the 3,239 (7%)votes scored by the BNP in 2010 (which I think is probably reasonable), what has clearly happened is that both Tory and Lib Dem votes have deserted in large numbers to UKIP.  

 

The Tory vote in the by-election was 3,496 (not much greater than the BNP scored in 2010) . This is a colossal drop from their tally in 2010, of 12,528. Likewise the Liberal Democrat vote fell from 10,474 to 1,457.

 

The crumbling of the Coalition votes in Heywood and Middleton is far, far more dramatic than they fraying of the Labour vote.

 

Interestingly, the Labour vote in Clacton suffered much more, falling from 10,799 (25%) to 3,957(11.2%).

 

This is bad, but nothing like as bad as what happened to the Tories. First, they lost a safe seat. Next, the Tory vote in Clacton fell cataclysmically from 22,867 (53%) to 8,709 (24.6%). The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, shrivelled from 5,577(12.9%) to 483 (1.4%).

 

One or two unconventional points about these results. If more Tories had voted for UKIP in Heywood and Middleton, they would have taken the seat from Labour. If they are really worried about ‘Red Ed’, northern Tory voters should vote UKIP. The Tories could never have won the seat. UKIP could have done.

 

If more Tory MPs decide *now*, or in the next few months to switch to UKIP, they can pretty much guarantee a large contingent of UKIP MPs in May 2015, in many cases winning seats which would fall to Labour if they fought as Tories. This would tear to ribbons the (already dubious) view that a UKIP vote favours Labour. It raises the possibility, remote but real, that the Tories – if they really want what they say they want – could get it by allying with a sizeable UKIP contingent in Parliament after 2015.

Mrs Theresa May - A Correction and a Clarification

I am delighted to announce (though I can’t link or reproduce because it is behind a pay wall) that ‘The Times’ print edition has this morning noted in its ‘Corrections and Clarifications’ corner that Mrs Theresa May, in the slightly coy words of her own website here http://www.tmay.co.uk/biography

“had a varied education spanning both the state and private sectors, and both grammar school and comprehensive school” .  

 

(That is to say, she attended a private Convent School (St Juliana’s, Begbroke), and then gained a place at a (selective) Girls’ Grammar School (Holton Park)  before it was merged into a comprehensive)

 

Our national journal of record had said, on September 27, that Mrs May attended ‘Wheatley Park Comprehensive’, without elaboration.

 

Now that ‘The Times’ has printed this clarification, which will appear in all newspaper libraries, I don’t think any competent journalist will have any excuse, in future, for oversimplifying Mrs May’s secondary education. If she does indeed become a candidate for the leadership of the Tory Party, and even more if she actually wins the post, this will be important.

 

Anomalies, Paradoxes and False Parallels, the IRA, Syria ,Ukraine and Hong Kong

I’m not sure what has happened to the Hong Kong protests, though I cannot believe we have heard the last of them. One contributor criticized me for (as he thought) supporting these protests, claiming this was incompatible with my attitude towards the mobs in Kiev last winter.

This gives me the pretext for another discussion of title, legitimacy and the huge difference between democracy and freedom.

 

This Ukraine-Hong Kong comparison is a strange parallel – as is the one made by another critic, who suggests that my desire for a negotiated end to the Syrian chaos is incompatible with my disapproval of the British surrender to the IRA. I do not believe that Northern Ireland can now truly be described as a law-governed entity, or that Britain’s relations with it are unpolluted by the contact. It is necessary to lie and to conceal, to maintain the illusion that this is a civilized peace – and many people lie to themselves and conceal wicked things from themselves. These are the ones who are most annoyed when I refuse to accept the lies, or leave the evil hidden.

 

The IRA was and remains a violent gang dedicated to the use of murder and violence to overthrow properly constituted lawful authority. There never ought to be any compromise between lawful authority and criminal gangs. Such a compromise does not legitimize the criminals; it corrupts the lawful state, and I think the subsequent treatment of the IRA by the British state, and our concessions to that body,  are a series of demonstrations of this truth.  

 

The Syrian rebels, though I suspect they were,  from the first,  infiltrated by Sunni fanatics, were attempting a violent overthrow of a violent and repressive regime, which has always rested on force, and draws its only legitimacy from the fact that it is the successor (via a putsch in 1963, and a putsch within the putsch in 1966) of the French colonial creation of Syria.

 

The 1963 putsch is now so long ago that it is getting a bit hard to argue that the current Damascus government is not established. But its establishment rests ultimately on force, not law. This could of course be said of most existing states (Britain having been subject to a bloodless but armed coup in 1688, the USA having been established by a lawless rebellion in 1776, and as for Russia, France and Germany, what can I say?) but time does tend to lend legitimacy to almost anything. It’s just that there’s no official set limit.

 

That colonial creation of Syria by France was recognized by the League of Nations and subsequently by the UN as a legitimate state, so it had technical legitimacy even if one might argue about the legal status of any of the entities carved out of the Ottoman Empire by western military force in 1918.

 

It’s possible to argue that any rebellion against the Assad State is at least partially justified by the violence of the regime and its lack of any means of free expression. But the Christian view, that even the overthrow of foul regimes by well-intentioned persons is morally risky, is often borne out in practice. Certainly the horrible fate of millions of Syrians, their happy lives ruined forever, their homes and hopes lost, their wealth wiped out, is a strong argument against insurrection.

 

I don’t myself believe that either side in the Syrian conflict is legitimate or good. I doubt the motives of the rebels, and suspect they were, from the first, backed by outside forces who had no concern for the wellbeing of actually Syrians. But I think that the lives of ordinary people were immeasurably better before anyone tried to overthrow the Assad state. And I also think that it was and is an illusion to believe that the rebels against Assad would have turned Syria into a paradise of gentleness and tolerance.

 

To support a negotiated peace in Syria is simply to call for an end to suffering. There is no simple choice between good and bad, lawful and lawless, civilized and uncivilized. In any case, I made the point to emphasize the fact that Syria’s ‘opposition’ has been uninterested in compromise, and seems happy to continue the war until the whole country is a ruin. I suspect the Assad state, by contrast,  would make significant concessions to stay in power. But the rebels insist that Assad must go, knowing (I am sure) that he will not.

 

Back to Hong Kong, and the alleged Kiev parallel. Actually, m critic gets me wrong when he thinks I support these demonstrations. I think them hopeless, unrealistic and doomed and would be afraid of encouraging the former Colony’s young people into a confrontation they can only lose. Hong Kong’s long-term fate was decided when the British Empire was defeated in Singapore in 1942. From that moment,  it was only a matter of time before China recovered its lost sovereignty.

 

The idea that Peking would ever allow full representative democracy in Hong Kong is absurd, and in any case Britain never allowed it, perhaps because of fears of mainland propaganda leading to heavy Communist influence in whatever elected bodies might result.

 

The deal between Peking and London is not for all time. All the documents make it clear that Hong Kong is an inalienable part of China, and that ultimately China decides what happens there. But the blow is softened by postponement . The agreement  provides for a transition period (ending in 2047) during which two systems operate in China. China has never had any intention of allowing Hong Kong’s freedoms and laws to spread into China, let alone of allowing Hong Kong to be become even more free during the transition period than it was at the beginning.

 

On the contrary, Peking obviously plans and hopes for Hong Kong to become slowly less free. My understanding is that this has already begun, especially in the press, where critical voices have grown rarer since the handover.  No formal process has taken place. But editors have been aware that they are being observed by cold, unsympathetic eyes to the North. By the way, Hong Kong is culturally very different from most of China. This is partly because the majority language is Cantonese rather than Mandarin, the tongue of Peking. But it is also because it never underwent the Cultural Revolution or the Mao Revolution, so religious and other traditions survive which have more or less been stamped out elsewhere on the mainland.

 

Undoubtedly the growing power of Peking over Hong Kong will also affect the bureaucracy, the police and the judiciary, Britain’s main legacies to Hong Kong. One might expect these to become less incorrupt, less independent of the state and less open.

 

As this becomes more and more apparent, I fear there will be convulsions. These will be either hopeless or tragic, as the moralising interveners who control foreign policy know perfectly well that the heroic, swaggering ‘West’ – master of all it surveys in Sierra leon, Kosovo and Iraq(or not) is puny in the face of Chinese wealth and military power. The problem si that those who have grown up under the rule of law and possessing free speech and a free press are not all like the British, who casually ,let these things be abolished by their own rulers.

 

They are grieved at their loss, and will seek to preserve them. That is why we are in the shaming position we are in, where we understand their plight, and inwardly sympathize with it, but would be wicked and wrong to encourage them on to the streets to try to defend it, because they will be beaten, and worse.

 

But their cause, even so, is more noble than that of the Kiev protesters, manipulated by one foreign power to be the spearhead in the offensive against another foreign power, ignorant armies strung along with empty promises of prosperity and freedom from corruption, which have not and never will come to pass.

 

I have travelled through Hong Kong many times, always on my way somewhere else ( usually to and from mainland China, though also to and from Japan and North Korea). I don’t claim to know it well. I love its old-fashioned British street names, its salty ocean air and its ferries ( for anyone Portsmouth-bred, a ferry is a special joy), but always have to think hard before being certain I have the map the right way up. But it was also the place where I learned something which has never left me .

 

Why exactly, I wondered, was it so different from mainland China? It wasn’t democratic (anything but). Yet it was immeasurably more free, better-ordered, cleaner, safer,  more efficient. It was then that it first came to me that liberty of speech and press,  and the rule of law, were far more valuable possessions than the thing we call ‘democracy’.  

 

I still don’t know what will happen to Hong Kong’s law and liberty. I have assumed for years that it all hinges on what happens to Taiwan. Peking hopes above all to bring Taiwan (which is democratic) back under its rule. Many influences bear on that process, one of them being the slow but definite weakening of American military power in the region. But if Peking’s absorption of Hong Kong turns nasty, then any chance Taiwan can be gently enticed back into the national embrace will be destroyed. So as long as sane and cautious men rule in the secret Zhongnanhai compound in Peking, China will try to be gentle and patient (in its own eyes, not ours) with Hong Kong. But already, that gentleness and patience (as Peking sees them)  are beginning to look (to us) like something a good deal more menacing. That’s no surprise. But we will do nothing, because we cannot.

 

And we will say little, because in our hearts we know that we long ago ceased to be the moral arbiters of the planet, whatever we pretend. .

 

Our moral windbags are too exhausted with attacks on tiny figures such as Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein or Bashar Assad. Could this actually be *because* they despise themselves for kow-towing in their hearts to Xi Jinping, the tyrant of tyrants? Could all this moralising about small despots be a substitute for the real thing? I have no idea, being uninterested in moralising about foreign countries . Liberty begins at home, and I’m more interested in  Teresa May’s wild plans for ‘extremists’ and in the police invading my telephone records, to be worried about civil liberties in Hong Kong. We lost all that when we lost the empire. Time to realise it.