Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 218
October 9, 2014
A Debate at Canterbury
Just a few words about a debate about the death penalty last night, in which I argued against David Radlett of the University of Kent. The debate, at Keynes College on the Kent campus, was good-humoured, level-headed, reasonable and thoughtful. I’d guess there were about 100 people there. As is almost always the case when I take part in debates, I won the argument but lost the vote. The great pleasure was the number of students who came up to me afterwards to say that the event had caused them to think.
This is what makes these events (which keep me up way past my bedtime, involve a night away from home, and use up a surprising amount of physical and mental energy) worth doing. Canterbury is always worth visiting, of course, especially since they opened the new bullet-train service from St Pancras, which makes it much easier to get to. The unaccompanied singing of the psalms and canticles at evensong in the cathedral was particularly moving and thought-inducing, though I still can’t see why the mother church of Anglicanism cannot use the Authorized Version of the Bible for its lessons. You can see the floodlit cathedral from the University’s hilltop campus. I had walked from one to the other, and the contrast between the two places, and their architecture, meaning and purpose, was very striking.
My thanks to the Classical Liberal society for organizing the event.
Not Up to the Job? Two Can Play at That Game
If you see articles in the newspapers, or hear items on other media, saying that Ed Miliband is ‘not up to it’, do you ever wonder why so many people use the same phrase, or where it comes from?
Here’s a hint. This e-mail was sent to me, and presumably to scores of other political journalists, by the Tory Party.
Some will say that Mr Miliband is not especially impressive . I tend to agree. But if we are going to make this a personal matter, in terms of being ‘not up to it’ is he any worse than the man who:
Made Tory MPs applaud Anthony Blair on the day he left politics?
Helped to create a failed state in Libya?
Reshuffled his cabinet on the instructions of an image-maker?
Hasn’t managed to publish the Chilcot report on Iraq?
Has managed to menace press freedom by setting up the Leveson inquiry?
Hired Andy Coulson for a key Downing Street job, against the advance of many?
Broke royal confidentiality so that he could show off to the mayor of New York?
Dismissed UKIP?
Refuses to discuss his past drug use?
Never had any ministerial experience before he became Prime Minister
Was one of the greediest claimers of (lawful) expenses in the entire House of Commons despite being extremely well-off?
Was described by Jeff Randall (one of Britain’s leading business journalists) thus: ‘To describe Cameron's approach to corporate PR as unhelpful and evasive overstates by a widish margin the clarity and plain-speaking that he brought to the job of being Michael Green's mouthpiece. In my experience, Cameron never gave a straight answer when dissemblance was a plausible alternative, which probably makes him perfectly suited for the role he now seeks: the next Tony Blair.’
Do We Actually *Have* a Policy in the Middle East?
You might have thought that the fight against Islamic State, or ISIL, or ISIS, or whatever it is this week, was the greatest crisis threatening humankind. You might have thought that NATO, that mysteriously undead Cold War alliance so often cited as crucial in the recent anti-Russian frenzy, was a serious alliance. You might (though readers here have few excuses) have believed that Turkey’s ‘mildly Islamist’ (Copyright ‘The Economist’) government was a firm ally of the ‘West’.
In that case, you’ll be having trouble working out what’s happening at Kobani (or Kobane), a Syrian town on the Turkish border, besieged for some time by ISIS forces and defended rather courageously by Syrian Kurds.
It’s important to stress that they are Syrian Kurds, because the war against ISIS is well-known to have embraced Iraqi Kurds, who are (at the moment) our warm and well-beloved allies. There’s not much difference between Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, in terms of who they are.
The main difference is that the Syrian Kurds have actually been putting up quite an effective fight against ISIS, whereas the Iraqi Kurds have failed. Alas, the Syrian Kurds are also closely allied to Kurdish factions in Turkey which have long been at war with the Turkish government( see below).
The other main difference is that our struggle against ISIS is apparently not that urgent inm Kobane ( despite the fact that an ISIS victory there will not be a pretty sight) , because we, the ‘West’ decline to support the Syrian Kurds with the heavy weapons they need. I believe we have also declined to send liaison officers to them to co-ordinate with US airpower, thus making the air attacks on ISIS near Kobani far less effective than they would otherwise have been. My own impression is that there may have been a shift in this last policy in the past few hours, but I am only guessing. If so, I doubt that it will be officially acknowledged, and it may be too late.
Then there’s the Turkish problem. For many months, Turkey has been allowing foreign fighters to surge across its border with Syria, in the hope of overthrowing the Assad state, which Turkey took against very severely a few years ago (having formerly been on rather good terms with Damascus). But Turkey absolutely forbids Kurdish fighters from within Turkey to head across the same border to aid their compatriots in the battle for Kobani. This policy has caused severe street clashes with Kurds in many parts of Turkey, and looks like ending President Erdogan’s long alliance of convenience with Turkish Kurds, many of who backed him in the belief that he would end Turkey’s policy of discrimination against them.
I find it very hard to work out what Mr Erdogan’s aim is, as he veers so much, but he seems to have decided to line himself up completely with Sunni Saudi Arabia in the new Shia-Sunni confrontation in the Muslim world. His last election campaign is said to have shown signs of being quite blatantly pro-Sunni, or certainly felt that way to Turkey’s understandably sensitive Alevi minority, who are more or less Shias. The Assad State in Syria is dominated by Alawis, a grouping hard to describe but certainly more Shia than Sunni, and Syria is allied with Shia Iran, and with Lebanon’s Shia Hezbollah.
Anyway, the naïve beliefs of some reporters, who greeted the arrival of Turkish tanks on the border near Kobani as a threat to ISIS, have since been exploded by the inaction of these tanks.
A very good and clear explanation of the forces in play, by Patrick Cockburn, can be found here
Yet the policy is not changing. One of the main organs of the Blairite establishment, The Guardian, today counsels strongly against allying with Mr Assad against ISIS
(see here http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/07/guardian-view-on-tackling-isis )
Most of the Guardian argument is moralising piffle of the sort that would have no force at all if ISIS were truly the existential threat our leaders claim it to be. But some of it makes a sort of sense. The key passage is this :
‘Allowing Assad to become what the Americans used to call “our sonofabitch” would only increase the appeal of Isis to mainstream Sunni opinion in Syria and beyond, boosting the very forces the international coalition is set on destroying.’
**To which one replies, what is this ‘mainstream’ Sunni opinion? How does it express itself? In the columns of the 'Aleppo Guardian'? Or the 'Riyadh Guardian'? Or perhaps the 'Cairo Guardian' (Military Edition). Or even the 'Benghazi Guardian', if such a paper can be published amid the screams and flames?
In Syria, mainstream opinion among sane people by now consists of a simple plea that the fighting and destruction, which have ruined the economy, killed countless thousands, driven millions from happy homes and turned a peaceable country into a murderous hellhole, should stop. It doesn’t stop, and won't stop, because the ‘opposition’ (such as it is apart from ISIS), demands the departure of President Assad. This intransuigence, backed by the 'West', makes any kind of brokered compromise impossible and ensures that the war goes on its ghastly way forever.
Were I a Syrian husband and father, I would be tempted to beat my brains out against the nearest wall, in frustration at the West's casual willingness to let my country slide ever deeper into misery, supposedly in the name of principle.
As for ‘mainstream opinion’ beyond Syria, it is touching , after the ‘Arab Spasm’, that the Guardian still believes in the power of public opinion in the Arab world. Those living in fear of ISIS do not care all that much where deliverance comes from. Shias in Iraq are presumably sympathetic to the Assad state. Sunnis in Iraq are much more concerned about getting rid of the sectarian Shia-dominated government in Baghdad. I suspect that what the Guardian means by ‘mainstream’ here is in fact the opinion of the wealthy Sunni oil elites in the Gulf, who have always hated Assad as an infidel, and as an ally of Iran, which they hate too.
And as these Gulf despotisms are at the heart of Western policy in the region, their views are decisive. But to make this out to be some sort of public revulsion against the wickedness of the Assad regime (which by the standards of the Gulf is not significantly more repressive than they are, and has claims to be considerably more religiously tolerant than Saudi Arabia) is plain ridiculous.
The ‘Guardian’ editorial continues ‘It would be all but impossible to convince moderate Sunnis of the legitimacy of western policy if this war were to be run, in any way, in coalition with Assad’s military. The opposition Free Syrian Army has doubts enough about this intervention already.’
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at this piety. Who are these ‘moderate Sunnis’? Where and how do they exercise power? Why are they worried about ‘legitimacy’, so many of them being iron-bound tyrannies? As for the ‘Free Syrian Army’, it is a political figment. The military opposition to Assad has from the start been sponsored, manned and wholly dominated, by Sunni militants of the sort which make up ISIS.
The fact is, our policy is a nonsense. Our key ‘ally’ and fellow NATO member, Turkey, has at the very least, and the very kindest, a foot in both camps. We refuse to give material aid or diplomatic backing to the most effective fighters against ISIS, the Syrian Army and the Syrian Kurds. A year ago we wanted to support the very people we now wish to bomb into oblivion. We have yet to explain or retract or apologise for this apparently mad policy, or even admit that it might have been mistaken.
And our supposed allies from the Sunni world, all of them heavily armed, seem unwilling to lift a finger to defeat ISIS. I find it hard to think of any previous example of our foreign policy being in such a hopeless, contradictory mess. And I like to think I am a bit of an expert on stupid British foreign policies.
October 7, 2014
The Case of the Completely Unbelievable Promises
When Sherlock Holmes was flummoxed by a case, he would sit on a cushion and smoke pounds of filthy shag tobacco in his noisome pipe, filling the room with noxious clouds.
I tend to think that a long and vigorous walk is a better way of unscrambling a problem.
This was the case that faced me. As the autumn fogs closed in, and the rumble of traffic was muffled by the hiss of drizzle and the cries of ‘Big Issue’ sellers in the road outside, I settled into my deep armchair and pondered:
'Why I am surrounded by severely deluded people who think that the Tory party is on course to win the next election? Have they put something in the water? Is the whole of England in the grip of a new outbreak of that fell complaint , Dementia Praecox? Or has Professor Moriarty, the hidden genius of crime and disinformation, been at work again, spinning his web of falsehoods like a vast and evil spider, while pretending to be (as he has in modern times) a Professor of Combined Neuroscience, Statistics and Sociology at a former provincial catering college now posing as a University? (The wicked fellow found mathematics far too objectively truthful for his taste, and was delighted to discover that in the 21st century there were alternative subjects that he could bend to his will).'
The Baker Street irregulars had been out through the streets as the late September evenings closed in, listening out for facts, and they all pointed to the conclusion that the Tory Party was as doomed as ever, if not more so.
Mysteriously veiled weeping women had come to my chambers in Derry Street pleading with me to support UKIP, so many of them that I have had to tell Mrs Hudson to admit no more of them, and to pretend that I am out.
All the data I possess tell me that the Tory Party is a decrepit, empty organisation with few active members, a decaying voter base and severe difficulties in winning votes or seats in the North of England, Scotland or Wales. It did very badly at the last general election. It did even more badly at the May local and European elections. A study of opinion polls over the last several years and months shows that it is still doing badly (I think we are entitled to be cautious about instant polls taken immediately after party conferences, but even this, with its magically newsworthy one-point lead would not guarantee a victory). In fact it is doing worse than ever, because a large number of ex-Tory voters have gone irrevocably to UKIP and will not come back in May, though some will.
Yet Inspector Lestrade, and many others in the conventional detective force, insist to me that the Tory Party is in good health. They deride my belief that The Tory Party’s death is being concealed for wicked reasons (readers of Dr Watson’s journals will recall the macabre story of Shoscombe Old Place) by persons with suspect motives.
Well, perhaps the story is more like that of ‘Silver Blaze’ than to that of Shoscombe, for it seems to me to have parallels with that cynical attempt to fix a race in advance.
As I strode out along the autumnal streets on the last golden Sunday of our Indian Summer, I let my mind slip out of gear for a while. The pleasing rhythm of my walk, and the peace of the Sabbath streets and the willow-shaded riverbank in the slanting, warm light that can only be found on English afternoons in the weeks after the September equinox, began to do their work. And so it came to me, the great paradox of Moriarty’s scheme – for who but he could have come up with something so devilish, so simple and so outrageous?
Of course the Tory Party’s close family (the ones who are concealing its political and electoral death from the public and the coroner) know they cannot win the general election. The idea is absurd. They spend huge sums of money on private polls which have been telling them for years that the game is up. To have any hope of victory they would have needed to be well above 40% for many months. They know better than to be fooled by their own propaganda.
They also now realise that they (and their Liberal Democrat allies) made a grave mistake in 2010, by forming an actual declared coalition rather than a minority government. Logically (as I wrongly predicted) , they should have walked out of that coalition after the May elections, or the Liberal Democrats should have done.
But the world is not logical. An attempted putsch against Nick Clegg in the Liberal Democrats, which ought in principle to have worked, failed – perhaps because of lack of will, perhaps because of a failure to keep secrets, who knows until the memoirs are written, if then? Such a putsch would in my view have triggered the events I had foreseen. But the battle is not always to the strong, nor the race to the swift (though, as the old saying goes, that’s the way to bet). And human action is not always subject to reason.
What’s more, who could have imagined the bizarre behaviour of the political media after the May elections, which I analysed in my ‘What the Papers Say’ programme and elsewhere. Somehow or other they managed to portray an unprecedented UKIP surge, combined with a Liberal Democrat collapse and a very bad Tory performance, plus a mild but significant Labour advance in local government (in which they unexpectedly captured some authorities from the Tories) as a ‘Labour setback’, with the ‘Daily Telegraph’ actually printing the headline ‘Labour concedes defeat’, although there had been no defeat, and Labour hadn’t conceded one.
The reports had completely lost touch with the actual arithmetic.
This flight from reality has been combined with the increasing and relentless campaign of personal vilification directed against Ed Miliband, now so pervasive that everyone thinks that Tory propaganda is is his own personal opinion. Beware when everyone agrees.
I don’t know Ed Miliband well, or owe him any favours. I have met him properly once, over a dinner table some years ago, when I was struck by the big difference between his actual appearance and the way he appears on camera. I believe I suffer from a similar problem. I am no oil painting, and have enough sense to know it, but often struggle to recognize myself in some photographs taken of me, and in some TV shots of me (oddly enough, CCTV images in shops tend to seem to me to be more faithful).
I was also much struck by the reverse effect of cameras on Princess Diana, and on Anthony Blair. The cameras made them both look far more attractive than they were in the flesh. The only time I actually saw Princess Diana close to (and I was looking for her at the time) I did not immediately recognize her, so different was she from the photographic image I had seen so many times. There is a mystery in the lens, and (while I have my own theory about it) all we can say for certain is that cameras love some people, and loathe others.
I do not support his party or agree with his views. But he is not stupid, nor is he ill-educated or especially ill-informed, especially by the low standards of Westminster.
What’s more, if we are discussing who is ‘up to the job’ , hasn’t Mr Cameron shown many signs of not being up to it? From his greedy but legal expense claims and his successful attempts to divert attention from them, his (now apparently forgotten) hiring of Andy Coulson as a close aide against the advice of many, to his economic profligacy, to his disastrous miscalculations on the Arab Spring (especially his creation of a failed state in Libya); not to mention his absurd failed putsch against Jean-Claude Juncker, his total miscalculation of the strength of UKIP, his intellectually disreputable U-turns on Greenery, and his recent schoolboy discourtesy to the Queen, he has a long list of blunders, bungles, disappointments and errors to his credit which add up to quite a serious charge sheet when taken together ( as they never are).
This last business of the Queen, by the way, has not been properly examined. The story he told the Mayor of New York (and why choose him? How many others were given the same boastful spiel before Mr Cameron was caught out?) cannot be true.
Does anyone really think that Her Majesty lives in a fairy castle (perhaps constructed out of baby teeth) to which radio and TV signals cannot penetrate? Actually, we do know that she consumes her frugal breakfast in the company of a wireless set tuned to Radio 4. Are we supposed to believe she was waiting for Mr Cameron to tell her, via her solid gold monogrammed hotline to Downing Street, how the Scottish referendum vote had gone; and that she didn’t know until he called? Or that she would choose to confide her most private feelings about the result to a man she barely knows?
As for Mr Cameron’s general intellectual capacity, historical, economic and geographical knowledge, experience of adversity, knowledge of this and other countries, I really don’t see how or why they fit him for any great responsibility, unless we have been totally misled about his past life. When I made my long-ago TV programme about the then Tory leader (‘Toff at the Top’) I sought to interview the journalist and TV presenter Jeff Randall , who had said here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2927187/Passionless-Davis-should-try-Orgasmic-Chocolates.html
‘By contrast, there is something faintly louche about Cameron. I wouldn't trust him with my daughter's pocket money, yet he's so much more interesting than Davis. Watching Cameron pledge to make Britain "the best place in the world to do business" reminded me just how slippery he was during his seven-year spell as communications director of Carlton, the television company.
‘To describe Cameron's approach to corporate PR as unhelpful and evasive overstates by a widish margin the clarity and plain-speaking that he brought to the job of being Michael Green's mouthpiece. In my experience, Cameron never gave a straight answer when dissemblance was a plausible alternative, which probably makes him perfectly suited for the role he now seeks: the next Tony Blair.’
I had hoped I might get him to repeat some or all of it in front of a camera and a microphone. But for some reason Mr Randall wasn’t available.
This is also a man who still won't even tell us about his past drug use despite having rather relevantly backed the radical dilution of the drug laws in his only signifcant political action before leaping from obscurity to become Leader of the Opposition. It's private, apparently, and he's entited to a 'private past', apparently.
Who can say Mr Cameron is 'up to the job'?
Yet ( and this stems from my own experience in the Parliamentary lobby and later, as discussed in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’), I wonder how many secret non-attributable lunches and dinners have taken place at which establishment journalists have been urged to see how many times they can associate the phrase ‘not up to the job’ with Ed Miliband.
Start looking for this pairing. And amaze yourself by how many times you spot it. And then amuse yourself further with the knowledge that the journalist involved will have *paid* for the meal at which he was urged to use it.
So there’s this absurd effort to pretend that Mr Cameron is doing well, that he’s a great speaker. It spreads across the whole spectrum of former Blairites (who loathe Ed Miliband for shafting their hero David Miliband, and for denouncing the Iraq War) and Tory loyalists, who would promote a subnormal chicken if it were elected Tory leader.
So they can be discounted, as tellers of the truth. They don’t really believe it when they say that the Tories can win. Nobody who can do arithmetic can believe it. Even if you can’t do arithmetic, it’s a stretch.
So why are they saying it? Why is Mr Cameron acting as if he believes it?
The answer is simple.
It is *just* possible that the Tories *could* be large enough after May 2015 to form a minority government (the arrangement they dream of) . In such a government they could pretend (as now, only more so) that they are terribly at loggerheads with the Liberal Democrats. And the Liberal Democrats would have to pretend to hate the Tories. The Liberal Democrats would ‘block’ the referendum Mr Cameron doesn’t want anyway. They would ‘block’ the fake attack on the Human Rights Court which Mr Cameron doesn’t want anyway. They would ‘block’ the tax cuts he cannot afford. He would continue to pretend to want these things, while being quite safe from having to implement them.
Perfect, I should have thought, for such an irresponsible image-driven person.
But not perfect for the country.
This aim can only be achieved if the voters can be fooled into believing in possibility and desirability of a Tory majority. The country, as usual, would be governed much as it is now, and more or less exactly as Ed Miliband would govern it.
The Liberal Democrats would of course not have any ministerial posts. They wouldn’t want any. They can only recover their vote by steering clear of the Tories. But, by becoming an Opposition party they would once again qualify for the so-called ‘Short Money’ , a poorly-publicized state subsidy worth about £5 million a year to Labour now, and almost £2 million a year to the Liberal Democrats back in 2009.
By running a campaign which separates them completely from the Tories, the Liberal Democrats also free themselves to do several different kinds of deal with Labour - should Labour be the largest party after all.
But the only way they can keep these hopes up is through the pretence that they can win, and the linked pretence that, if they do, they will hold the fabled EU referendum.
This EU referendum is a promise made in the certainty that it will not have to be kept. It has no other purpose than to provide an argument (and a very bad one) against voting UKIP. The same can be said of Mr Cameron’s recent taxation pledges, once again pure Jam Tomorrow. I continue to be amazed that anyone could possibly be fooled by them.
So here’s the great paradoxical key to the whole thing, which is undoubtedly the work of some political Moriarty:
Mr Cameron’s personal certainty that he cannot win the election has liberated him to make spectacular promises on the EU and Tax, which he knows he will not have to keep.
He is liberated by knowing he will lose the election. This knowledge frees him to make outrageous promises whose purposes are to shore up his vote, not to win (winning a real majority would be disastrous for him, for he would then have to keep his promises).
Thus he hopes to form a minority government which will certainly not do the things he promises, because only a majority government could do them. If he were to admit that he couldn’t win, his votes would flow away to UKIP by the million, and his party would begin the collapse it has long merited.
But that will only happen if the voters find out. And who is going to tell them, and who will listen if anyone does tell them?
Footnote; I was amused by a recent obituary of Pierre Ryckmans, one of the few people to see through Mao tse Tung when his regime was still fashionable. Some of his reflections seem to me to deserve a wider circulation:
'...He published an essay in the New York Review of Books in which he used a traditional Chinese parable to try to answer the question why so many "experts" had been so consistently wrong about China. The story concerned a man who was able to recognise instantly whether a person was a thief. "The king naturally decided to give him a position in the Ministry of Justice, but before the man could take up his appointment, the thieves of the kingdom banded together and had him assassinated. For this reason, clear–sighted people were generally considered cripples, bound to come to a bad end; this was also known proverbially in Chinese as "the curse of the man who can see the little fish at the bottom of the ocean".'
October 5, 2014
The Dave diet: hair gel, snake oil and terminological inexactitudes
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
How odd it would be to actually watch Oxford beat Cambridge by a mile in the boat race, and then open the papers next morning and read that Cambridge had won.
Last week was a bit like that for me. I watched the Tory conference carefully. And then I read the papers, and it was all plain wrong.
Take this quotation, from a Tory document, describing the ‘key objectives’ of their planned new bill on ‘Human Rights’.
One of them is to ‘put the text of the original Human Rights convention into primary legislation’. In other words, the Tories plan to make Human Rights a permanent part of our constitution. Is that what you thought they were doing?
It goes on to say: ‘There is nothing wrong with that original document.’ Is that what you thought they thought? Because it is.
The only way to escape the ‘Human Rights’ curse is to abolish it entirely, and rely (as we did when we were truly free and independent) on our own well-tried laws, forged in centuries of constitutional battle.
Canada, which has its own homegrown ‘Charter Of Rights And Freedoms’, modelled on the European one, is just as entangled in liberal drivel as we are. It’s not where the Charter comes from that’s the problem. It’s what it is.
You have deliberately been given a wholly false impression of what is planned – and, alas, much of the media has joined in the deception.
There are other falsehoods. Perhaps the worst and most wounding for a British patriot is Mrs Theresa May’s plan to ban ‘extremists’ from the airwaves and the internet. What is an extremist? Why, anyone the Government says is one. I might be one. You might be one.
What joy this idea must have given the Chinese despots currently resisting peaceful demands for more freedom in Hong Kong.
I can just imagine the glee with which they will throw back any British protests at repression, by saying how much they admire Mrs May’s reintroduction of medieval tyranny into our penal code. For this disgraceful outburst, Mrs May was praised as a possible future premier by choirs of sycophants.
But then we must come to that great streak of snake-oil and hair gel, the Prime Minister’s speech in Birmingham on Wednesday. I confess I swore at the TV set several times, enraged by his sheer nerve.
His ostentatious wearing of a Help For Heroes wristband after needlessly prolonging the peril of British troops in Afghanistan was particularly repulsive to me.
I hope his endorsement did not harm that excellent charity too much, though I have never understood why wounded soldiers should need to rely upon charity for their care.
IT WAS full of what I will politely call terminological inexactitudes. Of these the greatest was his pretence that he hates being in coalition with Liberal Democrats. All the rest flowed from this falsehood.
Let me remind you of what he said on September 20, 2009, long before he was allegedly ‘forced’ into this arrangement: ‘On so many progressive issues, there is strong agreement between our parties.’ By ‘progressive’, he means left-wing.
The next greatest falsehood was his pretence that he fears Labour more than he fears Ukip. The opposite is true. His Blairite project would be quite safe under Labour.
Only a Ukip breakthrough offers the poor, betrayed British people any hope of real change. The others must lie, because they know their real aims are hateful to us.
No happy ending for story time
How sad to hear that BBC radio is ending its last children’s programme – because its audience is mostly made up of over-60s.
For me, the words ‘It’s a quarter to two’ and ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’, which began the old programme Listen With Mother, are still infused with magic. I actually did listen to it with my mother, and there were plenty of others who did the same.
We make a lot of fuss about how adults should read to children, but I’m not sure we really do very much about it. It’s difficult. Children are incredibly sensitive to the atmosphere around them, and our age is too noisy and frantic to listen to stories.
It only works if you can see the story unfolding in your head. And modern children face so many distractions – and have their imaginations hoovered out of their heads by TV and computer games at incredibly early ages.
And language gets cruder and coarser every year. I was enraptured when teachers read Conan Doyle’s great historical romances to us on dark afternoons, and John Masefield’s The Box Of Delights. But how many eight-year-olds can cope these days with their richly embroidered English?
A brave attempt to revive the lost art is being made in Oxford now, by the extraordinary new Story Museum, which should get more attention. It has a real wardrobe, through which you can reach a snowy forest, and many other wonders and surprises.
But above all it is devoted to the idea that children who know stories will grow up happier and richer in spirit than those who don’t.
My homebound train slowed, then halted meaninglessly in the middle of some post-industrial wasteland. Late again. In fact, at least a dozen trains were held up by about half an hour, on a major line.
This happens so often that I wouldn’t mention it, except that the delay was blamed on a mysterious ‘object’ on the line, which announcers were careful not to name.
My mind raced. What could it be that was so bad they couldn’t mention it? A dead sheep? A lavatory? A coffin? A Human Right?
By diligent enquiry, I found in the end that it was... a solitary plastic traffic cone. Instead of hooking it off the track with a pole, or jumping down and picking it up, or just letting trains biff it out of the way, now legally perilous, those in charge launched a major alert, as signals switched to red for miles around.
Of course they knew it was silly – that’s why they wouldn’t reveal what the object was. But this is the state of our country since the Thatcher and Major Governments allowed no-win-no-fee lawyers to operate – in the full knowledge of the misery and stupidity they had already brought to the USA. Next time I’ll ring the Cones Hotline – if it still exists.
The Prime Minister says he prefers pounds, pints, yards and miles to litres and metres. Perhaps he does, or perhaps he is just saying that because he knows it plays well with people like me.
If he really means it, then he can do something about it. For many years, the Government – and increasingly the BBC – have acted as if Parliament abolished our traditional measurements.
It never did. Nor was it ever discussed at a General Election. What’s more, these measures are still used in the USA, a successful and efficient country with which we do a lot of trade.
Yet schools and officials act as if feet and inches, yards and acres are antiquated and subversive, coldly refusing to use them. There’s no warrant for this. Mr Cameron has the power to stop it. Everyone in this country should know how many inches make a foot, and how many pounds there are in a stone.
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October 3, 2014
David Cameron's Birmingham Speech re-examined
Slogans, claptrap and cliché - half hair-gel and half snake-oil
A lot of David Cameron’s speech in Birmingham was either weary sloganizing, crude electoral claptrap or cliché, so I don’t propose to do a complete analysis of the text (which is currently available here http://press.conservatives.com/ )
But I thought I would look at some of parts of it that seemed to me to be interesting, not necessarily in ways that Mr Cameron or his aides and speechwriters would want them to be interesting. By the way, anyone watching the BBC news channel’s coverage of the speech would have noted that the commentators selected to comment on it afterwards were *both* from the heart of the Tory project, and both from the Blairite ‘Times’ stable. They were Lord (Danny) Finkelstein,long sympathetic to the Cameron project; and Tim Montgomerie, of ‘Conservative Home’. Wouldn’t it have been a touch more balanced to have included a person sympathetic to UKIP, and a person sympathetic to Labour? Also there was a curious segment in which representatives leaving the hall were asked for their opinions. The first two were gushing, one of them embarrassingly turning out to be a keen EUphile. But the third was quite rude about it. It seems to me that it’s quite remarkable to find an activist , who has probably paid to be there, being rude about his own leader’s speech on live TV. The BBC commentator seemed to me to be anxious to portray the speech as a success, and to have been discombobulated by the critic.
What is Patriotism really?
I would first of all note that the Second World War is still the moral gospel of modern politics. Somehow or other, it is confused in his mind with his (pro tem) victory over Scottish separatism. I think this has something to do with the Union Jack. The straightforward, unashamedly patriotic idea of defending the Union because it makes us strong , independent of the continent and less vulnerable to back-door attack ( a clear and honest reason for doing so) is obviously unattractive to him. He doesn’t see the Union in this way, and is very happy with Britain’s post 1945 return to continental entanglements and dependence. Any wars we may have fought, therefore, must be for similarly non-patriotic, idealistic purposes.
He described his constituent, Patrick Churchill, as having been ‘fighting fascism’ in Normandy in 1944, a curiously leftish description of that conflict. Very few actual ‘Fascists’ were involved by 1944, Italy having got rid of Mussolini and changed sides by then. I suspect Patrick Churchill thought back in 1944 that he was fighting ‘Germans’. Many people in Europe, who had done the same before, came to that conclusion. It was a rather particular experience, unlike fighting anyone else. My mother, who was bombed by them, and my father, many of whose friends were killed by them and whose life was in ceaseless perils from their aircraft and ships for months on end, both referred to them as ‘Germans’ during my 1950s childhood when the subject was still all-embracing.
My mother in particular could never abide hearing the German language spoken, saying that it made her shudder. I think she was exaggerating a bit, but not much. Years later we had a German ex-PoW as a neighbour, and ny parents got on perfectly well with him as far as I could see (in fact I think my father had some respect for him as a fellow fighting man from the war) . But that was the 1960s.
It only became an ideological war later.
Mr Cameron unwittingly employs the language of the Comintern
But I don’t think Mr Cameron knows that, Having grown up since the 1960s, he probably uses these Marxoid categories himself without thinking, not knowing that the Soviet Union and the Comintern popularised the term ‘Fascism’ for the Axis enemy (and later as a general boo-word and all-purpose anti-conservative smear) for very specific reasons.
The first was the Nazi-Soviet Pact, as it was widely known ( a recent book on this astonishing alliance, reviewed on this blog a few days ago, can be purchased here
This made the Comintern and the Kremlin a little nervous about the word ‘Nazi’, which would trigger, in millions of minds, memories of the shameful Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty.
They had another difficulty, too. ‘Nazi’ is short for ‘National Socialist’ and once again makes that awkward connection between the two murderous, utopian dogmas of the 20th century, whose profound similarities the Left have always wished us to ignore - and which we all had to ignore anyway when we became Stalin’s ally in 1941. They had so much in common - power worship, leader-worship, militarism, censorship, secret police, destruction of private life , thought control, torture, perversion of the young, turning of children against their parents, hatred of Christianity, means-and-ends ‘morals’, single parties, uniforms, shouting, people’s courts, show trials, labour camps, controlled media, cowed academies, intellectual apologists. One wanted to exterminate on the grounds of race, the other on the grounds of class.
But if we say we were fighting ‘fascism’ in 1944, we don’t have to think about that.
Anyway, I think it culturally interesting that a Conservative Premier should use such language.
Is there really any link between World War Two and Afghanistan?
Then there was this elision : ‘The heirs to those who fought on the beaches of Northern France are those fighting in Afghanistan today. For thirteen years, young men and women have been serving our country there.’
Is that really so? The Afghan War , futile by any measure, was a war of choice in which professional soldiers did as they were told by politicians they don’t respect (and were of course thrown to the wolves if they ever got caught doing anything nasty) . The 1939-45 war, whatever its many faults, often discussed here, was not in the same category in nature, cause, importance or scale. To try to cover up the fact that, for five long years, Mr Cameron sucked up to the Murdoch press by continuing our Afghan engagement, by equating it with the liberation of France in 1944 is, in my view, a bit much.
If politicians knew what servicemen really thought of them, they would never try to pose in the reflected shine of military glory. They would be too embarrassed.
Can we afford to drop these bombs?
Now, again with the frantic encouragement of the Murdoch press, we are using World War Three equipment and weapons to bomb a few 4X4 pick-up trucks in Iraq. I gather each of these missions costs something like £210,000 an hour ( see http://news.sky.com/story/1342768/how-much-will-airstrikes-on-is-cost-taxpayer , and yes, I know this is a Murdoch outlet. He’s not all bad ) , but that’s if they bring their bombs back. If they use them, the mission cost can rise far higher. And yet we are a bankrupt country. How can we afford this?
The only purpose of this war is political, to try to look good at home to the few dim people who think Britain is still a world power, and to suck up to the Americans (who I suspect don’t care whether we turn up or not).
Shamelessly, Mr Cameron intoned ‘The threat is Islamist extremist terrorism – and it has found a new, hellish crucible – with ISIL, in Iraq and Syria. These people are evil, pure and simple. They kill children; rape women; threaten non-believers with genocide; behead journalists and aid workers.’
Well, what does he think is going in Libya, whose fate is his personal responsibility for the rest of his life. Or in Nigeria? Has he studied the governance of our ally Saudi Arabia? Or noted that Western air-attacks on Libya undoubtedly (though accidentally)killed children, as was reliably reported at the time?
As for ‘These people are evil, pure and simple.’, so are the IRA, with whose frontmen he willingly does business.
Did Oxford make a mistake?
All these points have been made many times about his vapourings, by many others apart from me. He must be aware of the criticism. He is supposed, by the examiners of Oxford University, to have a first-class mind. Yet he does not moderate or adapt the crude, Sun-type language. Is this because he is shameless, or because Oxford made a mistake?
As for ‘There is no “walk on by” option. Unless we deal with ISIL, they will deal with us, bringing terror and murder to our streets,’, this is simply untrue. The Iraqi Sunni fanatics probably have as little idea of where Birmingham is as Mr Cameron does of where Mosul is. Most major countries have indeed chosen to ‘walk on by’. I don’t think that will make the Islamists any more likely to attack them
Then there’s a lot of macho bluster about taking passports away from, and locking up, people who , more consistently than Her Majesty’s Government, have stuck with the (admittedly mad and unwise) policy of aiding the Syrian rebels which Mr Cameron (and the interesting Brooks Newmark) wanted to adopt so much - until Parliament got in the way.
For the Syrian rebels were and are of course the same people as ‘ISIL.’
England is, well, a lot bigger than the other members of the UK, yah?
Then we have a section on ‘English votes for English laws’ - The fact that England is far bigger, more populous and richer than any of the other nations of the UK, and has different religious and political traditions as well, still seems to escape Mr Cameron and other Tories. Once you’ve accepted that Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are different from England, then you’re going to have to live with anomalies like the West Lothian Question. If you don’t want to live with them, then why encourage these nations to stay in the UK at all, let alone claim you love them so much that they mustn’t go?
If London starts demanding autonomy, as well it may, will the Tories take the same view, denying London MPs a vote on English laws? I don’t think so. Well, in that case, it’s not a principle.
The First Thumping Terminological Inexactitude
Then we get the first really thumping terminological inexactitude of the speech:
‘Believe me: coalition was not what I wanted to do; it’s what I had to do.
And I know what I want next. To be back here in October 2015 delivering Conservative policies……based on Conservative values……leading a majority Conservative Government.’
Mr Cameron was never forced by anyone to enter a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. He did not ‘have to’ do it. He could have tried to run a minority government, proposed a programme, been defeated, gone to the country and won or lost.
He could have let the Liberal Democrats and Labour form a minority coalition and let them tear themselves to bits before forcing a confidence vote and again causing an election.
He could have negotiated far more fiercely with the Liberal Democrats, who would have sacrificed limbs and organs to get into office for the first time in peacetime for about 90 years. The LibDem negotiators have said since that they were astonished how readily their Tory negotiating partners gave in to their demands, and even asked them if they wanted anything else on top.
He could have proposed a three-year partnership with the freedom to dissolve it before the election. But no, he went for a rigid and detailed pact, and then guaranteed it for five full years with the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act.
All these actions were matters of choice. The choices he made suggest to me that he wanted office above all ( he certainly seems to enjoy it) , and was ready to pay a very heavy price for it .
They also suggest that he had known for some months that he was going to lose, and had thought deeply about what he would do if so. And the deal that he made suggests that he saw the LibDems as an important ally against his own conservative faction. Like the absent Jorkins in ‘David Copperfield’, fear of a LibDem walkout could always be employed to browbeat anti-EU, pro-grammar school types into giving way. Mr Cameron and his allies have always had far more in common with Nick Clegg that they do with ‘Cornerstone’ and its members.
But the arrangement was founded on the belief that Tory conservatives had nowhere else to go. This was true in 2010. It isn’t now. They have dig a tunnel called UKIP since then, and more and more of them are scurrying along it to freedom.
Mr Cameron misses a bit out of his speech
Mr Cameron’s speech was like Ed Miliband’s in two ways. One (in practice rather than rhetoric) he totally ignored the vast deficit which his government increases every week with profligate borrowing. Despite this position of hopeless indebtedness, in which tax receipts cannot be stretched to match the government’s outgoings, he blithely promised tax cuts worth (I believe ) £7,000,000,000 a year. At the same time he promised to safeguard the NHS’ vast budget, which is a bottomless commitment and will strain every other area of spending. Where *is* all this to come from? We are already borrowing £2,000,000,000 a week just to make ends meet. And every penny of that adds to our huge budget for debt servicing.
Two, he spent most of it apparently ignoring another vast and important fact – the existence of UKIP, daily taking form him more votes, more members and more donors.
He did not mention UKIP at all until the last few minutes of his oration, and then not in a serious fashion. Yet his whole purpose was to damage UKIP He pretended throughout that his real opponent was Ed Miliband, a man who struggles to find and show any difference between his plans and the policies of the present government. In fact his main opponent is Nigel Farage, a man who actually disagrees with him and appeals to many of his voters and supporters, and whose breakthrough offers a long-term threat to Mr Cameron and all who sail in him.
Two Phantom Governments are described
Mr Cameron displayed to the electorate two imaginary governments – one a sort of Bolshevik Milibandite spectre which – he implied – was against private education and would ruin the country even more than it has already been ruined by Mr Osborne’s debt-driven housing bubble boom, the bill for which must come in pretty soon.
And the other a sort of Angelic Ghost of Christmas Past, an actual majority Tory government of the type that hasn’t existed for 17 long years, because the Tories can’t win a Commons majority.
This phantasm will fulfil all the ‘promises’ that Tory central office feeds every few months to what’s left of the Tory press . There’s all that stiff, dredged up in great scoops near elections, about being tough with the EU. There’s that ‘British Bill of Rights’ that has been roaming round the edge of the playing field waiting to bat for years now, but whose face we never see (I suspect that if we could see it, it would look remarkably like the Human Rights Act, only with a different name).
There are those tax cuts that can’t possibly be afforded (though what happened to the old inheritance tax promise from 2010?) .
We are proud of our Green Belt Policy and we are building on it
There are those cheap houses. This pledge at least is partly being fulfilled. The Tories’ friends, the developers, are chewing up great tracts of countryside to build more rows of mean, cramped hutches, from which mortgagees can then commute vast distances on choked roads and decrepit railways, to underpaid, insecure jobs, pausing only to stash their infant children in state-subsidised day-orphanages. British liberty reborn, eh?
Actually, anyone who *can* remember the last Tory majority government will recall that it was pretty much the same as the one we have now, monstrously politically correct, hopelessly pro-EU, obsessed with flashy gimmicks and centralisation in education. Its only good policy was the one it was forced into totally against its will – departure from the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which boosted the economy just in time for the Blairites to plunder it again in 1997.
Trying to re-fight the 1992 Election, but without Neil Kinnock, and with UKIP
The election Mr Cameron wants to fight is the 1992 one which extended the Major era. To do so he has to portray Ed Miliband as Neil Kinnock, which he isn’t, and to pretend that UKIP doesn’t exist, which it does.
He also has to pretend that people like me, and I suspect there are quite a lot of them, are as willing to give the Tories the benefit of the doubt as they were in 1992. And he has to pretend that the Tory Party membership, voting reserve and organisation are anything like as good as they were in 1992.
If his recovery were real, he might manage it. As it is a matter of ‘meagre ‘self-employment’, zero-hours contracts and a housing bubble, mostly confined to the better-off bits of the South of England, I think he may be in for a surprise. Certainly, no opinion poll suggests a Tory majority government, or has done for many years.
We all went to bed with David Cameron in 2010, and woke up with Nick Clegg. After that experience, waking up with Ed Miliband isn’t really going to be much of a shock. Mr Cameron would much rather lose to Ed Miliband than to Nigel Farage, because his project, such as it is, would be safe in Mr Miliband’s hands. And ask yourself this, honestly: In a seat where the Tories can’t win, do you think Mr Cameron would rather it fell to UKIP or to Labour?
Their hypocrisy drives me mad. Our hypocrisy doesn’t
Now we come to the section on education.
‘The biggest risk to all this is Labour. You know what drives me the most mad about them?
The hypocrisy.’
There then follows this confused passage about Tristram Hunt, Labour’s education spokesman, who has struggled throughout his tenure to find any substantial policy differences with the Tories
Mr Cameron said :’Tristram Hunt, their Shadow Education Secretary – like me – had one of the best educations money can buy.’
This true. But look at what comes next:
‘But guess what? He won’t allow it for your children.’
Really? I know of no plan by Labour to abolish private fee-paying schools. If you can pay the fees ( and few can) Labour’s happy to let you do so, just like the Tories.
The Prime Minister then mangled facts and logic out of all shape and sense, saying:: ’He (Mr Hunt) went to an independent school that wasn’t set up by a local authority…’
That’s the thing about independent schools. They weren’t set up by local authorities. They are private foundations. Hence the name.
Mr Cameron continued ‘…but no, he doesn’t want charities and parents to set up schools for your children.’
This is the one rather tiny difference between the two parties, which are more or less united on the gimmicky, worthless policy of rebranding comprehensives as ‘academies’ or a something of the kind. Labour doesn’t favour the ‘free schools’ which have, to put it mildly, had a mixed record since they were allowed, and which are as remote as Tibet for most people, since there are so few of them. Not all of us can (or want to) live near Toby Young. And if there are any instances of rich Tory politicians, or Tory politicians living within reach of existing selective state schools, sending their children to Free Schools, I’d like to hear them. Michael Gove himself , living within yards of an academy he had ceaselessly praised, and not all that far from a free school too, chose for his daughter a traditional single-sex Church-based former grammar school. Who could blame him, if it weren’t for his political activities? But Mr Gove’s political hypocrisy escaped Mr Cameron’s fierce eye.
Our premier went on: ‘I tell you – Tristram Hunt and I might both have been educated at some of the best schools in our country.But here’s the difference: You, Tristram – like the rest of the Labour Party – want to restrict those advantages……I want to spread them to every child in Britain.’
American readers baffled by my previous posting on Theresa May’s secondary schooling should grasp the real point here. Until 1965, Britain had many hundreds of first-class state schools, free to the bright children of poor homes, which rivalled the best independent (fee-paying) schools in the quality of their education. By their nature, they were selective, and not everyone could go to them. Entrance was decided by an examination generally thought to be fair.
Tory and Labour parties, influenced by left-wing ideologues who reasoned that if everyone couldn’t have a good schooling, nobody but the rich should get one, shut almost all these schools down. Now, good schooling is only available ( as in the USA) to those who can pay fees, or those who can buy homes in the catchment areas of the better High Schools, or otherwise wangle their children into them. Religion, or simply knowing the complicated rules of admission, is often the ticket to a good High School. For a detailed case of this, see here
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/03/more-thoughts-on-michael-goves-school-choice.html
Less emotion, please
I have in the past commented on Mr Cameron’s references in party political circumstances to the heartbreaking illness and death of his son. I will try not to say any more than this, about the passage on the subject in his Birmingham speech. I really don’t think this has anything to do with policy. I have no doubt that the NHS did all that it could for Mr Cameron’s son, and that the doctors, nurses and others involved exerted themselves greatly in kindness and skill. Likewise I am sure that, had the Camerons hired non-NHS help to aid them in the task of caring for the child, they too would have been models of goodness. Nor do I doubt the great devotion of the Camerons themselves to their child. Heaven knows I would not let political disagreement prevent me from seeing common humanity in an opponent, and sympathizing as far as it is possible to do with his grief and pain.
Most people, confronted with a seriously ill child, will behave in this way, and not expect to be thanked for it. It is what we all know we ought to do. But that was because they were good people in highly moral professions, not because they worked for the NHS, not because the NHS is organised as it is or funded as it is.
These are different arguments. I think they should be kept separate from each other. The NHS is a vast political and economic problem for this country, as well as a vital employer in many parts of Britain where employment is very hard to find. It is a problem which cannot easily be solved, either by simply spending more money, or by reorganisation, or by the market. I don’t think any political party wants to destroy it . I am not by any means sure any of them know how to save it. I would favour a multi-party truce on it, myself , and one in which the mighty weapons of emotion are laid aside.
Not exactly crime-busting
Mrs May, whom Mr Cameron described as ‘crime-busting’, is nothing of the kind. The government, ably assisted by a sedentary, centralized and bureaucratic police force, has dealt with crime by redefining it. Much that normal people have long viewed as crime is no longer classified or recorded as such , let alone deterred or prosecuted.
Mrs May’s supposedly miraculous survival in what is always said to be a risky job, Home Secretary, is largely due to the removal of some of her department’s trickiest responsibilities, now handled by the ‘Justice’ Ministry. Much of the rest is down to her use of first-rate spin-doctors to feed an image of cool competence to willing media sources – and of course to Mr Cameron’s pressing need for a senior female figure in his government, to please the politically correct faction. Who else is there?
Our immigration policy? Posturing, bluster and inaction as usual
The speech contained no explanation of what Mr Cameron actually plans to do about mass immigration (the only thing that would make any difference, immediate departure from the EU, is impossible under our current leadership). I have discussed elsewhere the problems of the Tory position on the EU
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/09/a-tory-ukip-pact-would-be-bad-for-britain.html
The choice lies elsewhere
So I would only say that it is deeply misleading to describe the next election as a ‘choice’ between the Tories and Labour. Those two parties are so close that most people’s lives will be unaffected by a change from one to the other, or vice versa. The only change available to us is a revolution in our party system in which both Labour and Tory parties are made obsolete, and new parties arise which actually represent the true differences there are among us. Mr Cameron’s main aim is to prevent that revolution from happening. My main aim is to encourage it, for without it there is no hope of the great reforms we so badly need. Please don’t be misled by this stuff.
October 2, 2014
Theresa May's Schooldays Revisited
Some years ago, (see here http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/dec/14/theresa-may-lady-in-waiting )
I noticed that Mrs Theresa May was providing a rather odd account of her education. Apart from her time at Oxford, she seemed reluctant to mention it at all. In Who’s Who, the standard reference book of the British celebrity classes, she mentions no schools - though it is normal practice to mention secondary education and university. In Dod’s Parliamentary Companion, which gives rather fuller biographies for members of the Lords and Commons, she said (and as far as I know continues to say to this day ) she had gone to ‘Wheatley Park Comprehensive School’ before going on to Oxford.
I learned today that her biography on her website states : 'Theresa had a varied education spanning both the state and private sectors, and both grammar school and comprehensive school.' But I do not know how long it has said so.. or if she plans ro change any other entries to bring them into line.
Now, I knew the Dod's description could not be the full picture. Wheatley Park did not exist at all until Mrs May (whose birthday it is today) was a month short of her 15th Birthday, back in the autumn of 1971.
It was created in that year by the merger of Holton Park Girls’ Grammar School and Shotover Secondary Modern. Like many early comprehensive schools its site was to remain split for some years . In this case the split was deep and wide, the two schools being separated by quite a distance and the A40 dual carriageway road. I have never been able to discover whether Mrs May continued in a grammar stream, as many grammar pupils did, until the end of her education. This is all now rather a long time ago, the teachers, local politicians and bureaucrats involved have retired and cannot easily be found, or have passed away. This ‘grammar stream’ arrangement was common during the destruction of the grammars, but not invariable. I am still hoping that another former pupil will contact me with details.
But in any case why would Mrs May not mention her grammar school period (or come to that, her convent school period at St Juliana’s , Begbroke). Her parents (her father was a parson) must have made sacrifices for her to go to St Juliana’s, and she must have made an effort to win her place at Holton Park?
And, having been quite prominently shown up on this in the public prints, why would she carry on doing the same thing? I can’t of course be sure that the information about her schooling which was printed in The Times last Saturday (at the end of an interview with her) was provided by her, though it is identical to the version she places in Dod’s. She was said to have been educated at ‘Wheatley Park Comprehensive’ . It could have come from her office. Or ‘The Times’ could themselves have extracted it from Dod, without further checking. In either case, I don’t think much of it. Incuriosity is endemic in journalism, but it’s not laudable.
Wheatley Park, by the way, does not nowadays describe itself as ‘Wheatley Park Comprehensive’ but simply as ‘Wheatley Park School’ . It may have called itself this in the past. I’m not sure. In my experience it is quite rare for comprehensive schools to call themselves ‘comprehensive’ on letterhead or sign-board .A rare and interesting exception is Grey Coat Hospital, the highly selective single-sex church secondary, whose uniforms can be obtained from Peter Jones in Sloane Square, Chelsea, to which Michael Gove has just sent his daughter. The school next door to his house, Burlington Danes, a non-selective mixed sex church school which Mr Gove has publicly praised but for some reason does not favour for his own offspring, does not call itself by this term. It is, I believe an ‘Academy’ (a term which in Scotland once meant ‘selective state secondary’ but alas does no longer, as there are no such schools in Scotland). Interesting, huh?
It’s not now very hard for any journalist to discover that Mrs May’s education is a bit more complex than appears at first sight. A glance at Wikipedia (on which journalists are not allowed to rely, but which can legitimately be used to guide research elsewhere) will show that the matter might need checking with harder sources. A cursory cuttings search in the electronic libraries, which all newspapers use, will show that Mrs May’s education was not as simple as she says it is. So why does this stuff still get printed?
‘The Times’, after I contacted their corrections and clarifications department, have now altered the description in the online version, to mention Holton Park school. But that’s only going to bother those who trawl through archives of websites. The last time I checked, the version in the associated newspapers electronic library was still the original one. The print version remains (so far) uncorrected. And so the ‘Wheatley Park’ claim will probably appear again soon.
What makes it even more paradoxical is that Mrs May was asked one of those little quizzes for a short section at the end of the interview. Here are some samples : ‘Theatre or cinema? Do you think I have time to go to either?’…’Lidl or Tesco? I'm a Waitrose woman.’…’ EU: in or out? I'm waiting for the renegotiation package’…. And then…. ‘Eton or grammar? Grammar.’
Did you spot that? ‘Eton or grammar? Grammar.’
This question is really a choice between money paying for good schooling, as it does in the independent and state comprehensive sectors, or ability providing it, as happens in an academically selective system. Yet despite claiming to prefer academic selection, she doesn’t seem keen to mention her own grammar school years. Maybe she wasn’t happy at Holton Park. Well, I disliked almost every waking minute of my two years at the Leys School, Cambridge, and look back on them without fondness, but I still put those years in my Who’s Who entry, because to leave it out would be, in my opinion, to mislead people about an important part of my life.
If people were more interested in this sort of thing, and in the related story of Michael Gove’s education choice for his daughter, they might get closer to understanding what is really going on in politics, and what the modern Tory party really is.
Yes, I will get round to the Tory conference. But as I no longer attend these ghastly trade fairs, it takes longer to get full texts of the actual speeches, which I like to read carefully before commenting. I get too cross, watching them on TV, to pay full attention. I’m sorry to say I actually swore at the TV in the later stages of Mr Cameron’s speech. Nobody else was within hearing, so I was the only person harmed.
September 29, 2014
A Tory-UKIP Pact Would be Bad for Britain
In many ways the most damaging and destructive strain in British politics is the one that thinks UKIP is just a crisis for the Tory Party. The idea is that some sort of deal between the two organisations will solve the Tory difficulty – and that this is somehow the beneficial and desirable result for which all should hope.
But why? This quarrel is not about the Tory Party, it is about the country, its independence, laws and liberty. Why would anyone sacrifice the country to save the Tory Party? It would be like sacrificing the ship to save the figurehead.
UKIP is not the reason for the Tory Party’s unending, unstoppable decline. Indeed, the only reason that decline has not been far greater is that the Tory party has long been on life support. This has come from billionaire donors , the state and (since the Tory party became explicitly Blairite under David Cameron) the BBC.
The crisis of the Tory Party long predated UKIP’s rise. No serious opinion poll has predicted a Tory Party general election win for two decades. The Tory Party struggles to get much above 24% of the national vote (though this tends to inflated into 36% in headline figures, by leaving out all the ‘don’t knows’, ‘won’t says’ and ‘won’t votes’ who together now form the biggest single political grouping in the country).
In regional terms, the Tories remain pitufully weak in the North of England, Scotland and Wales. In organisational terms, it barely exists in most of the country. The party’s real membership figures are a secret, with good reason. British Leyland in the days of the Austin Allegro was a more viable prospect than the Tory Party is now.
The Tory Party, as I correctly stated for years before 2010, never had a chance of winning that year’s election. It has even less hope of winning in 2015. This is not because of UKIP.
UKIP has come into being as a result of the Tory decline. It is not the cause of it.
The Tory decline is the result of two things: much of the Tory vote has either passed away, or finally, after enduring years of insults and contempt, realized that the Tory high command hates its members and voters, and simply uses them to obtain office for its own cynical and unconservative purposes.
In fact, such a UKIP-Tory deal would be deeply dishonest, and its only aim would be the destruction of UKIP and the crushing of the conservative revolt against the liberal Tory monolith. It is only being talked about now because the Tory party’s original more honest strategy, of abuse and smears against a declared enemy, hasn’t worked.
You might call it ‘The Hannan Delusion’, since the Euro-MP Daniel Hannan likes to voice the idea.
I have never been an admirer of Mr Hannan, and my regard for this Euro-MP has grown less over the years. The more he parades himself as an intellectual, the less he seems to be thinking.
Take this article in today’s Daily Mail:
The utter wrongness of it is set out very early on:
Mr Hannan laments :‘But the real sadness is that there should be two such parties in Britain, their rivalry retarding their shared objectives.’
Whatever *is* he talking about? The two parties do *not* share objectives. They are rivals because they differ utterly on the right future for the country. A coalition between them would be an abomination, like those science fiction creatures in the horror movies, with the head of a bluebottle and the body of a man.
UKIP exists precisely because the Tory Party has become, in recent years, a socially liberal, globalist, pro-immigration egalitarian party, committed to permanent British membership of the EU.
This is not because the Tory leadership believe in any of these things. It is because they believe in nothing, and so readily absorb the spirit of the age. It rushes into the vacuum in their heads and hearts.
The Tory decision to deal with Blairism by embracing it left no sentient being in any doubt that the Tory Party is simply an alternative New Labour formation.
The substantial number of people who do not share these Blairite objectives have either abstained from voting for the Tories, or, in increasing numbers, have switched their vote to UKIP. They have not, in many cases, done this as a ‘protest’. They have enough experience of the Tories to know that this is futile.
The Tory party does not change in response to protest. It pretends to change.
The best they can hope for are some more attempts to smear the same old lipstick on the same old pig – vague, distant , worthless pledges to do something or other at some point years hence, while doing the precise opposite now.
Many former Tories have grasped (as so many journalists have been incredibly slow to do) that Mr Cameron’s protestations of ‘Euroscepticism’ (whatever that is) are utterly insincere and cosmetic. They have grasped that a jam-tomorrow referendum is not a commitment, but a manoeuvre.
In fact, it may be worse than that. The referendum almost certainly will never take place. But if it does, in the hands of the Tories, it is a danger, not an opportunity.
A referendum on EU membership, in which all the forces of the establishment will fight and lie for a vote to stay in, could close the debate on the subject for 30 years, much as the 1975 vote did.
Before Harold Wilson seized on the idea of a plebiscite, to save his own bacon, most serious experts viewed such votes as violations of the British constitution, in which Parliament is sovereign. I still do.
In any case, what use would a vote to leave the EU be, if the Parliamentary elite still wanted to stay, and there was no Commons majority in favour of leaving?
Westminster’s power to delay and frustrate is enormous, especially if the executive and the civil service are involved. The act of leaving the EU is legally simple. But it would be politically and diplomatically complicated, and we could easily end up officially ‘out’ but actually ‘in’ for all practical purposes.
The only way to leave is for a party committed to leaving to secure a parliamentary majority for that policy, having openly campaigned for it. The Tory Party cannot possibly be that party.
Since it lost the Empire and bankrupted the country in 1939, and then made things even worse at Suez in 1956, the Tory Party has been almost obsessively searching for ways of exaggerating Britain’s power and influence – when a far better policy would have been to accept that we were not what we had been, and work instead on being a successful and prosperous medium-sized independent nation.
Mr Hannan persists: ‘The values of Ukip and the Tories are not so very different: patriotism, freedom, family, enterprise, dislike of the European Court of Human Rights, support for our Armed Services, resentment of the power-crazed EU.’
Let me take these one by one. Firstly, see the bait and switch here? ‘Values’ are not ‘Policies’. ‘Values’ are vague feelings embraced in public by politicians trying to suck up to voters. Specific policies, which you intend to implement in office, are quite different. ‘Values’ are as unlike ‘Policies’ as lottery prize promises are unlike written contracts.
Patriotism as bombast is worthless. Patriotism as policy involves such things as the protection of our distinct legal system, the very thing the Tory party is now actively trying to hand over to the EU, when it doesn’t actually need to.
Freedom depends very heavily upon that legal system. I do not think the present-day Tory Party has much to say about ‘freedom’. How long (now we are at permanent war with ISIS) before we face a new bout of ‘anti-terror’ laws, the usual excuse to undermine habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence, to menace freedom of speech and freedom of movement?
The Tory party has been complicit in the 50-year assault on the family - easy divorce, huge powers for social workers, destruction of the authority of parents, pressure on women to go out to work. Enterprise? I’ll leave it to others to say what they think of the Tory Party’s attitude towards this. All I know is that I’d be terrified of starting a small business in the midst of the current maze of regulation, legal liability and taxation.
As for the ECHR, the question is not whether you ‘dislike’ it but whether you accept or reject the doctrine of ‘Human Rights’ which underpins it, and whether you are prepared to liberate the laws of these islands from this wholly alien and harmful influence.
Westminster politicians love being able to use the ECHR as cover – claiming it has ‘forced’ them to do things they secretly want to do. It has no such power, unless they give that power to it. The Tories have had years to come up with proposals to lift the Human Rights burden. They never emerge, but noisy speeches are made when elections are in the offing. Does Mr Hannan, who is undoubtedly intelligent in a general way, really not grasp what this is about?
As for ‘support for our armed services’, this is actually quite a funny way of describing the most devastating cuts in Britain’s armed forces in the modern era. And ‘resentment of the power-crazed EU’ is just blowhard posturing, like the ludicrous campaign against Jean-Claude Juncker a few months ago. It may even be that the Tories do ‘resent’ the EU (though in practice they seem to get along quite well with its laws and institutions) . But they don’t resent it enough to want to do the only thing that would reduce its influence – leave it.
In any case Mr Hannan is bright enough to know that ‘resentment’ is not equivalent to a policy of withdrawal. That’s why he uses the word ‘resentment’. He knows that if he said ‘opposition’, people would spot his bait-and-switch.
What he seeks to do is to give the impression that Tory posturing and bluster, designed to make it look as if the Tories hold certain positions when they don't really, is equivalent to real UKIP policies, which actually express and aim to fulfil those positions in practice.
As for the fact that a lot of Tory supporters favour a trade-only relationship with the EU, that’s just a measure of how deluded Tory supporters are. The Tory high command, who are totally immune from the wishes of their members and supporters, are wholly committed to continuing EU membership and integration. There is no mechanism in the Conservative Party constitution, by which members or supporters can influence the policy of the party leadership. None. This is why the Tory leadership loathes the Tory membership. The puzzle is why the members don’t give the loathing back with interest. But party loyalty is the secret weapon of the anti-British elite.
Then look at Mr Hannan’s next piece of sleight of hand. He warns that if Ed Miliband come to office he will ‘cancel’ the ‘referendum on EU membership for which Conservative MPs have voted’.
No he won’t.
There is nothing to cancel. The referendum would only take place if the Tories won the next election, which they were never going to do. How on earth are they supposed to win in 2015 if they couldn’t win in 2010? What opinion polls have ever shown them in a position to win? Does Mr Cameron either want or intend to fulfil this airy, distant promise? What do you think? What does Mr Hannan think, honestly? If he’s as bright as everyone claims, how come he is fooled by this transparent dodge?
The most recent poll I’ve seen, done by COMRES for the Independent on Sunday and published yesterday(28th September) shows Labour at 35%, the Tories at 29% and UKIP at 19% (Lib Dems are 7% and ‘others’ at 10%) - and the fieldwork for that must have been done *before* the events of the weekend.
If you look at many poll reports in the pro-establishment papers, they give figures for the popularity of the leaders, but bury or omit the actual voting intention numbers, which are the only ones that matter, and which tend to show Labour in the lead despiet the incessant belittluing of Ed Miliband. This is because the media classes are once more trying to help their friends, the Blairite Tories, by pretending that they are the winning party, in the hope that the appearance of success will bring in more votes.
The fact is, even if you can tell the political difference between Mr Miliband and Mr Cameron, and care which of them is Prime Minister (which I can’t and I don’t), you are quite free to vote UKIP, or abstain. It will make no difference.
Labour will be the largest single party after May next year and might just score a small majority. Anyway, who cares much? Name one significant practical difference between New Labour and the Blairite Tories except (as I never tire of pointing out) that New Labour would never have dared smash up the armed forces as badly as David Cameron has done. Mr Hannan claims that under a Labour government ‘We’ll have more EU integration’ – Oh, you mean, like handing back home affairs powers to Brussels which we could have kept? . Oh, sorry, the Tories are doing that.
And then he prates of ‘a reversal of the education and welfare reforms’ – The education reforms are backed by many Blairites, flatly refuse to address the key question of selection by ability, and entrench the system of selection by money and cunning which has cursed British state education for 40 years. And who will miss the ‘welfare reforms’ - cumbersome , apparently unworkable and in some cases unfair and stupid, totally ignoring the real need to rebuild the married family?
As for ‘higher taxes, higher borrowing, higher immigration, higher unemployment’, isn’t that precisely what the Tories have been doing? The 40% tax rate now reaches into the lives of modest earners. Unemployment is concealed by legions of ‘self-employed ‘ people who aren’t actually working much, borrowing rises every minute of the day thanks to George Osborne’s continuing profligacy.
And immigration – thanks to Mr Cameron’s Libyan adventure, combined with our total loss of control over our EU borders – is about to surge to unprecedented levels.
But it is possible that we might still be able to deliver a death-blow to the Tory party itself, the greatest existing obstacle to the development of a genuinely pro-British political formation, because it is incapable either of standing up for the country, or of winning a majority. And so we would do the country some long-term good.
Finally there’s this outstandingly mistaken passage: ‘From a Conservative point of view, a Ukip MP is surely preferable to a Labour one.’
I should have thought the Tory high command would much prefer to see a Labour MP to a UKIP one. UKIP, for all its faults, is a genuine subversive threat to the pro-EU, pro-immigration, pro-crime, anti-education, anti-marriage three-party consensus which has spent the past half-century messing up the country. Labour is part of that consensus, as are the Tories, and as Mr Hannan is for as long as he remains part of the Tory machine.
September 28, 2014
The Tory Party Should Examine Itself Before Accusing Others of Lying
How funny it is to see the Tory Party’s screeching, Stalinist response to the latest defection by one of its MPs. For years, they happily held Mark Reckless to their bosom. He passed through their horrible anti-thought selection process.
He trotted into the lobbies for them and did all the other humiliating things that backbenchers must do to keep their jobs – for of course the big parties have now (disgustingly) turned membership of the House of Commons into paid service to 'The Party' rather than duty to the country and the voters.
They were happy with that.
But as soon as Mr Reckless woke from his long political sleep and actually started describing the world as it is, we saw Mr Grant Shapps, the Party chairman, squawking that Mr Reckless is guilty of ‘betrayal and lies’
'I share your deep sense of betrayal and anger. We've been repeatedly let down by someone who lied to his constituents and you.’, Mr Shapps told the elderly and bewildered remnant of loyalists, interlarded with heavily-gelled young careerists, which now forms the audiences at Tory Party annual rallies.
'He lied, lied and lied again.'
Well, if lying is counted such a terrible offence in Tory circles, few shall ‘scape whipping.
The Tory leadership have known for years they were lying about almost everything they told the country. They had no plans to control immigration, but pretended they had. They had no idea what to do about crime, or health or schools. But they claimed to do so. They have no intention of releasing this country from the EU – but they pretend they have.
Far from solving the economic crisis, they have made it worse, borrowing more every week, pumping funny money into our balloon economy.
They have covered the gap at the centre of their policy with a thick, brittle, sugary icing of lies and slogans, and pretended there is a cake underneath.
Actually there is a terrible void.
Even before the ‘recovery’ is officially revealed to be the fake it is, the growing economic crisis is already sucking people into a new world of permanent low wages, threadbare welfare, untrustworthy health services, cramped, jammed-together housing, overcrowded and useless schools, devastated savings, and mounting disorder.
Soon the catastrophic effects of Mr Cameron’s half-witted and delusional Libya policy, the most desperate wave of economic migration ever to hit Europe, will begin to make itself felt across Southern England (the first signs are already evident as the authorities run out of places to put the new migrants).
Readers here will know that I have little time for UKIP, and I can’t claim to be an admirer of either Mr Reckless or of Douglas Carswell, the two recent defectors.
Even so, by comparison with the fake moralizing of Mr Shapps, both UKIP and its new MPs are praiseworthy and honourable. They are groping towards the truth about this country, and they have been prepared to undergo risk and abuse to do so. Much as I wish this long overdue crisis had come five years ago (when we could have been saved from so much) I am glad it has at last arrived.
The media political commentariat, so long complacent and sycophantic towards the old parties, are beginning to realize that their lunch partners and fellow careerists may actually have had it. In which case, what’s the future for them?
As for Mr Brooks Newmark, I will only say that I do not much grieve over his downfall, and hope only that it eventually makes him a better man. A year ago, he suggested in the Commons that my opposition to the plan to aid the Syrian rebels was ‘in support of the Assad regime’.
See http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/10/brooks-newmark-mp-the-syrian-regime-and-me.html
I showed beyond doubt that this was not so. I took every possible step to ask him politely to withdraw, including enlisting the non-partisan and effective aid of my own MP, the Right Honourable Andrew Smith. Mr Newmark would not withdraw. Now I no longer care if he withdraws or not. Since he has turned himself into a figure of fun by his own efforts, I no longer need to care what he has said, or now says, about me.
September 27, 2014
Dragged into a war by clowns who can't even run a railway
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
Wars cause far more atrocities than they prevent. In fact, wars make atrocities normal and easy. If you don’t like atrocities, don’t start wars. It is a simple rule, and not hard to follow.
The only mercy in war, as all soldiers know, is a swift victory by one side or the other. Yet our subservient, feeble Parliament on Friday obediently shut its eyes tight and launched itself yet again off the cliff of war. It did so even though – in a brief moment of truth – the Prime Minister admitted that such a war will be a very long one, and has no visible end.
The arguments used in favour of this decision – in a mostly unpacked House of Commons – were pathetic beyond belief. Most of them sounded as if their users had got them out of a cornflakes packet, or been given them by Downing Street, which is much the same.
Wild and unverifiable claims were made that Islamic State plans attacks on us here in our islands. If so, such attacks are far more likely now than they were before we decided to bomb them. So, if your main worry is such attacks, you should be against British involvement.
The same cheap and alarmist argument was made year after year to justify what everyone now knows was our futile and costly presence in Afghanistan. Why should the Afghans need to come here to kill British people when we sent our best to Helmand, to be blown up and shot for reasons that have never been explained?
Beyond that, it was all fake compassion. Those who favour this action claim to care about massacres and persecution. But in fact they want to be seen to care. Bombs won’t save anyone. Weeks of bombing have already failed to tip the balance in Iraq, whose useless, demoralised army continues to run away.
A year ago, we were on the brink of aiding the people we now want to bomb, and busily encouraging the groups which have now become Islamic State. Now they are our hated foes. Which side are we actually on? Do we know? Do we have any idea what we are doing?
The answer is that we don’t. That is why, in a scandal so vast it is hardly ever mentioned, the Chilcot report on the 2003 Iraq War has still not been published. Who can doubt that it has been suppressed because it reveals that our Government is dim and ill-informed?
As this country now has hardly any soldiers, warships, military aircraft or bombs, Friday’s warmongers resorted to the only weapon they have in plentiful supply – adjectives (‘vicious, barbaric’, etc etc). Well, I have better adjectives. Those who presume to rule us are ignorant and incompetent and learn nothing from their own mistakes. How dare these people, who can barely manage to keep their own country in one piece, presume to correct the woes of the world?
Beforethey’re allowed to play out their bathtub bombing fantasies, oughtn’t they to be asked to show they can manage such dull things as schools (no discipline), border control (vanished), crime (so out of control that the truth has to be hidden), transport (need I say?) and hospitals (hopelessly overloaded and increasingly dangerous)?
None of them will now even mention their crass intervention in Libya, which turned that country into a swamp of misery and unleashed upon Europe an uncontrollable wave of desperate economic migrants who are now arriving in Southern England in shockingly large numbers.
We have for years happily done business with Saudi Arabia, often sending our Royal family there. It is hard to see why we should now be so worried about the establishment of another fiercely intolerant Sunni Muslim oil state, repressive, horrible to women and given to cutting people’s heads off in public. Since we proudly tout our 1998 surrender to the IRA as a wonderful and praiseworthy peace deal, it is hard to see why we are now so hoity-toity about doing business with terror, or paying ransom.
We gave the whole of Northern Ireland to the IRA, to ransom the City of London and to protect our frightened political class from bombs. Why can we not pay (as other NATO members do) to release innocent hostages? We conceded the principle of ransom years ago. Talk about swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat.
How is it that we have allowed our country to be governed by people so ignorant of history and geography, so unable to learn from their mistakes and so immune to facts and logic?
Can we do anything about it? I fear not.
Mantel wouldn't dare kill off a Lefty
Liberal Britain rallied round the fashionable author Hilary Mantel, left, after she wrote a (rather dull) short story about an IRA man murdering Margaret Thatcher, and a middle-class person not minding. Those who object are supposedly missing the point. It’s all in the cause of art, see? But I don’t think the reaction would have been the same if Ms Mantel had written a similar tale about an Iranian hitman murdering leftist literary lion Salman Rushdie.
Stephen Fry, BBC favourite and darling of the new Establishment, noisily confesses in a rather sad and attention-seeking new book to possession and use of cocaine in Buckingham Palace.
The official penalty for this offence is seven years in jail and an unlimited fine. Could there be better proof that the elite know perfectly well that the laws against drug possession haven’t been enforced for years, and exist only on paper?
Mr Fry, who last week called me a ‘slug’, seems to think that I need to be instructed to criticise him. He is mistaken. I do it for my own pleasure, and because it is necessary.
I do pay buskers - but only to shut up
Amplified buskers have managed to drown out the timeless beauty of Evensong at Bath Abbey, a neat symbol of our corrupted, blaring excuse for a culture. If a street musician needs an amplifier, he’s no good anyway.
But busking has always been a form of blackmail, under which we pay in the hope they’ll go away. The best busker I ever met came into my carriage on the London Tube with his guitar and said: ‘If you give me some money, I won’t even start.’ Eager to be spared another rendition of Streets Of London, almost everyone paid up. Perhaps the congregation of Bath Abbey should think along these lines.
EU rules allow a convicted murderer from Latvia to breeze in and out of this country unhindered, yet the European Arrest Warrant cannot be used to detain this person, a suspect in an alleged murder. Please tell me. How do we benefit from belonging to the EU?
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