Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 219

A Slug Asks Stephen Fry ' Is it witty to call someone a slug?'

Mr Stephen Fry, whose activities I do not admire, has called me a slug. He recently published the following article on the internet: http://www.stephenfry.uk/2014/09/24/writing-selfie/

 

It contains the following passage:

 

‘I have a feeling that the honesty of some parts of the book will attract the unwelcome attention of certain columnists and commentators. I do not read newspapers as I think is pretty well known, but I expect that Peter Hitchens or Judy Burchill or some other slug will be tweezered out of the little crack of rock they inhabit and told to slime over me, which is a thing they apparently like to do. Well, whatever keeps the little darlings happy. To be hated by the hateful is one of the great achievements in life. What the eye doesn’t see the stomach doesn’t heave over.’

 

I don’t know who this ‘Judy Burchill’ is. I hesitate to suggest an alternative, similar name, in case she isn’t his target. But it’s nice that he gets my name right.

 

Of course, Mr Fry and I have some history of disagreement, though we have met only once, at a memorial event to commemorate my late brother’s life. The meeting led to some controversies, described here  http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/04/a-clod-writes-.html and here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/09/that-stephen-fry-moment-revisited.html

 

I confess that there was some provocation. I have striven to popularize the description of Mr Fry (which I found in the ‘Dictionary of National Celebrity’), that he is ‘A stupid person’s idea of what an intelligent person is like’.

 

This has always seemed to me to be a criticism of those who admire Mr Fry and follow him in their millions on Twitter, etc, rather than an attack on Mr Fry himself. Most particularly, it has been my revolt against the BBC, which uses my money and yours (as licence-payers) to give Mr Fry incessant broadcasting opportunities, especially on Radio 4. Radio 4 is one of the few bits of the BBC which still retains a reasonable level of literacy, and it seems to me to inflict more Stephen Fry on its listeners than they can really be said to deserve. Plainly there are some people who like and admire Mr Fry’s work, or (just as importantly) think that they do. And they must be catered for. But it often seems to those who do not love Mr Fry’s work that there is a bit much of him on BBC Radio 4.

 

Mr Fry also took part in what I regard as a tin-eared TV version of P.G.Wodehouse’s stories of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, which I think any true lover of these stories would surely find painful.  It was also in protest at this, and against what I saw as Mr Fry’s virulent attacks upon Christianity,  that I began quoting the ‘Stupid person’s idea’ quotation.

 

Mr Fry says he does not read the newspapers, so I am not sure how he has become aware of my view, but he plainly has. He was worryingly anxious to meet me at that occasion in Manhattan. He has in the past called me a ‘clod’. Now he calls me a ‘slug’.  I really don’t mind such things.  As I’ve said before, I’ve been insulted by experts, both at my long-ago boarding schools and in modern politics. 'Slug' doesn't really qualify.  My main problem with the epithets ‘clod’ and ‘slug’  is that they aren’t particularly witty – surely it is his effervescent repartee and quick wit which supposedly causes his fans to love him so.

He's quite entitled to say rude things about me, and his freedom to do so is one of the joys of our liberty.   

But I do want to record mild objections to three parts of what Mr Fry has written. The first is the suggestion that I ‘hate’ him. Absolutely not. I am not permitted to do so by my faith, wish him no personal ill and live in hope that he will find peace of mind and contentment, which seem to me to elude him much of the time, and perhaps even better things. The second is the idea that I would ever attack anyone for being honest. The third is the suggestion that I need to be told by anybody to criticise Mr Fry’s words or behaviour, or that anyone has ever instructed me to do so.  

 

Believe me, I do it of my own free will. As for the book, I will wait and see what sort of reception it gets. If it is widely praised, I may compel myself to read it, and publish my thoughts on it here or elsewhere.  If not, well, I would be only too happy if others began to view Mr Fry’s works and actions a bit more critically, and I’d be pleased to leave it to them if possible. 

Hurry. There may yet be time to prevent this latest folly

I see no evidence that the planned bombing of Iraq is a Just War

 

I sense that tomorrow’s Parliamentary debate on bombing the Middle East has been rigged in advance at the top. But it can't be rigged at the bottom. Individual MPs are still free. There is still time for you to telephone or e-mail your MP to let him or her know that you see no reason to rush into yet another stupid conflict in the Muslim world. And indeed that it is precisely because of the emotive, hurried, propaganda-driven decisions to go to war in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya (and the West’s unwise support of the ‘Arab Spring’) that we have already lost so many lives, and made the Muslim world so much more unstable and dangerous than it would have been had we done nothing at all.

 

 

But you can’t just do nothing!

 

 

Why not? Nothing is often the best thing to do, especially if you are a stony-broke, hopelessly indebted former imperial power which has all its work cut out trying to stay in one piece at home.

 

One thing is surely plain from our moronic, zig-zagging , contradictory failures in the Islamic world year after year, that those in charge don’t know what they are doing, and that nothing, in all cases, would have been a better course of action than the one they chose.  

 

The obedient ‘reporters’ who reproduce government thinking in the media are telling us that the Prime Minister is ‘confident’ of ‘cross-party’ ( i.e. Labour) support . They are also telling us that the Prime Minister believes that this war against the ‘Islamic State’ will last for many years. Has anybody asked him if this is wishful thinking? Is it perhaps the case that the ‘security’ establishments of this country and the USA actually want us to be engaged in yet another unending conflict? George Orwell knew all about that, and also about how the enemy could switch overnight. He'd have been sourly amused by the fact that the people we now want to bomb are the people we wanted to support a year ago (and yes they are- and we helped to create them too. The claim that if we'd given more support to the Syrian opposition it wouldn't have been taken over by Sunni fanatics is a fantasy. They always dominated it, and would always have pocketed all our support).   

 

In any case, there’s absolutely no guarantee that the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, will act with cautious responsibility, as he did last year when faced with Mr Cameron’s absurd demand for a bombing war on Syria.  The initiative collapsed with amazing speed, and Mr Cameron accepted his defeat without quibble (though his press mouthpieces have ever afterwards denigrated Mr Miliband for actually doing his job and leading the opposition).

 

A couple of days later, Washington abandoned its plans for an attack on Syria as well.

 

One explanation of this extraordinary change of mind, one of the swiftest and most total policy reversals I have ever seen in long years of reporting, was provided by Seymour Hersh in the fascinating article to which I link below. Mr Hersh is a distinguished and well-connected journalist, but he is by the nature of his work compelled to rely (as in this case) on sources he cannot ever identify, and which we cannot check.  

 

 

But history shows that far odder things than this have happened. I have no way of knowing if his suggestions here are correct, but mention them to make it plain that this thesis has been advanced by serious people. I might also add that the Syrian state has since then got rid of its remaining chemical weapons with unexpected speed and efficiency, an event that has tended to be covered, if at all, on the inside pages of unpopular newspapers, because it does not fit the narrative.

 

  

 

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line

 

Few now remember that there was never any objective proof of the claims that the Assad state had used poison gas on its people. Efforts to produce such proof rather dried up after the clamour for war came to an end. I remain unconvinced.

 

This is not a question of simple wickedness. The Assad state is clearly capable of terrible actions, and nobody – least of all me – would ever dispute that. But its savagery is rational.   It would have been self-destructive madness on the part of the Assad state – especially in defiance of a specific statement by Barack Obama that such an action would trigger the very US intervention which would have doomed the Assad state -  to have used poison gas on the people of Damascus, the city in Syria most easily investigated by outside agencies and  media.

 

Nothing in the actions of that state suggests that it is that crazy.

 

There is a poignant footnote to this controversy in Patrick Cockburn’s excellent, timely short book on the rise of the Islamic State ‘The Jihadis Return’, reviewed here.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-jihadis-return-isis-and-the-new-sunni-uprising-by-patrick-cockburn-book-review-9697453.html

 

I’ll leave you to find it.

 

But back to War and Peace.

 

1.Why should we intervene at all?

 

Atrocity stories, always a bad guide to action, have been vital to the case for war. The world, alas,  is full of atrocities. Many of them are taking place now in Libya, largely unreported because it is far too dangerous for Western media to go there any more. These horrors are happening because we intervened there ( as we plan to do now in Iraq and Syria) without having a clue about what we are doing. But (rightly) there's no serious clamour for a return. Mr Cameron wants us to forget Libya completely, and no doubt wishes he could. So I hope he'll be asked about it a lot in tomorrow's debate.

 

Many more horrors will take place in Afghanistan shortly, when the fragile and unsustainable government we have left behind falls apart, as it must. These horrors will be our fault, as have been the years of violence, sectarianism, injustice and needless poverty in Iraq since our misguided 2003 intervention.

 

I would argue that the recent horrors visited on Yazidis, Kurds and Arab Christians by the Islamic State are also our direct fault. Because we backed away from bombing Syria last year, we often forget the active part which Western (and Gulf) diplomats played in undermining the Assad state for some years before that , actively encouraging rebellion and winking at the flood of foreign fighters, most of them Salafist fanatics, who were allowed into Syria (especially through Erdogan’s Turkey, whose part in these events has been especially irresponsible). The people we now propose to bomb are exactly the same people we proposed to support a year before. Western (and Gulf)  intervention created the Islamic State.

 

By the way, if we so dislike intolerant fundamentalist Islamist regimes that cut people’s heads off in public, then why are we on such good terms with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, one of our main trading partners and the frequent scene of high-level visits from the British Royal Family? We have learned to live with them. We never helped to destabilize them, preferring for some reason to destroy the (relatively) secular regimes of Iraq, Libya and Syria, and cheering on the overthrow of the (relatively) open and easy-going government of Egypt.

 

Now that we have completely smashed up the post-1918 order in the Middle East, what is it that makes us think we can now decide what kind of government is going to dominate the region?

 

I don’t myself understand why we can’t just accept that we no longer rule the world, and must simply put up with the fact that other countries are run differently from ours. My main concern is to retain our liberties and civilisation, not to indulge in failed attempts to bring enlightenment to others by bombing their cities.

 

It’s not a new idea. We have in our time made accommodations with the Bolshevik murderers of the Tsar and his family, and with the Chinese Communists (who this week shamefully jailed a Uighur professor for the rest of his life, and confiscated his savings, leaving his young family destitute, in a shameful unfair trial . No wonder his poor wife howled with hopeless grief when the ‘verdict’ of the court (if this tribunal deserves the name) was read out.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/11115613/China-sentences-Uighur-professor-to-life-in-jail.html

 

2. What about the Hostages?

 

A good question. We must all wish and hope and pray for their release. We know that several Western governments have paid ransom for hostages held by the Islamic State. Well, why don’t we?  We say it’s against our principles. But it isn’t .  Our pretence that we don’t pay ransom was exploded in 1998 when (under heavy American pressure to do so) we released huge numbers of convicted criminals, and handed over a large part of our country to rule by terrorist organisations.

 

We did this in return for promises that the IRA would no longer attack mainland Britain, especially the City of London.

 

Some would say that the elevation of the late Yasser Arafat to the role of world statesman, and the support of the ‘West’ for a Palestinian State, is likewise an example of a ransom being paid.

 

As George Bernard Shaw almost said ‘We have established what we are. Why quibble about the price or the details?’

 

If the hostages held by the Islamic state were my relatives, I would be infuriated by the government’s pretence of puritanical probity. They’ve paid and paid to save their own skins, and would do it again. The terrorists of the world know that our toughness is so much macho bluster. Why not then pay to save a taxi-driver or a journalist from a horrible death? The market for hostages is already flourishing. By standing aside, we won’t reduce it. We’ll just leave people to their fate for a pretence.

 

3. What about the terror threat to Britain?

 

Good question. What about it?  Why are we so willing to be persuaded by media folk and politicians adopting serious voices and citing ‘security sources’ to make our flesh creep? How can these sources ever be tested or held to account? Why don’t we ever wonder if these huge expensive security organisations we pay for feel the need to puff up their importance, so as to secure their enormous budgets at a time of cuts?

I have seen  no serious evidence that there is any such threat. I doubt if the leadership of the Islamic State spends more than a second a day on wondering what we think in London (though they may be more concerned with us if the RAF starts bombing them) .  Even if there were such evidence and we could see it for ourselves, terror’s main power in the West comes from our own governments’ readiness to panic and pass repressive laws in response to terror actions which would not have been prevented by such laws, and which are designed to create the very panic we then indulge in. IMost of us, when we beocme adults, ahve learned not to repond to those who goad us into fights. If someone actively wants a fight, it's usually a good reason not to provide him with one.  Why do governments still respond to such goasing with the emotional spasms of six-year-olds. Are we in fact governed by responsible adults, or by childish fantasists who have seen too many action movies? 

 

Personally, I should have thought it mathematically more likely for there to be terror attacks on London if we take part on the raids on Iraq, than if we don’t.  Islamist terrorists tend to attack countries prominent in attacks on the Islamic world. I can’t recall a terror attack on Zurich lately.

 

This same wretched argument was used to sustain, years after it should have ended, our ludicrous and now obviously pointless and futile intervention in Afghanistan. In fact terrorists had no need to come to Britain during that period,  if they wished to kill British citizens. They were able to do so, in horrible numbers, in Helmand.  Have we already forgotten the sad processions through Wootton Bassett? Do we want them to begin again? In a rare example of foresight and planning, the government, who didn’t like the attention these events attracted, have quietly routed such processions away from any urban areas, in the hope that future wars won’t get the same publicity. But the good people of Carterton have so far frustrated this plan, going in large numbers to the route of the corteges, even though it avoids the centre of their town.

 

4. Will bombing work?

 

There’s very little reason to think so. Very few conflicts in modern history have been resolved without infantry.  But once we start bombing, we are so committed that- if it fails – the pressure to commit soldiers will become relentless and hard to resist. Why start down a road whose end is so obvious and so bad?

 

The ostensible pretexts for this action are transparently feeble. I am sure that the response of the war party to articles such as this will be smears (as they were when I opposed bombing Syria on behalf of the Jihadists last year). I was slandered then as an apologist for the Assad state.  Let us see what they come up with this time. But whatever it is, it will show either that they have no real reason for doing what they plan to do, or that they are not prepared to say in public what that reason is.

 

Either way, it will do no harm if you put some or all of these points to your elected representative. The election is quite close, and MPs will be readier to listen than at other times. All history shows that wars are easy to start, and very hard to finish. We really ought to learn from this. It is also worth remembering that war is not a video game, that those ‘smart’ bombs you see on the news still dismember, scar and rend, and cannot actually tell an innocent person from a guilty one. And that if you license their use on others, you are, at some point in the unknown future, licensing others to use them on you and yours.

 

If this is a just war, I have yet to hear the justification.

No more Wars till Chilcot has been published

I have just watched an utterly pitiful appearance on rolling news by a Tory MP it would be kinder not to name, who appeared to be saying that Parliament shouldn’t even be asked its opinion on the plan for war. We are, it seems , to rely upon the ‘statesmanship’ of the PR man currently occupying the post of Prime Minister.

 

He also seemed to be saying that the fact that Parliament had been bamboozled by the executive in 2003 meant that Parliament was the wrong forum for such decisions.  Surely it means that the executive should not bamboozle Parliament with tarted-up ‘intelligence’.

 

Here’s a suggestion which might help deal with legislators of this quality. MPs should simply refuse to vote on any war of choice until the full publication of the Chilcot report on the rush to war in 2003.

 

By the way, wasn’t it presumptuous of the Prime Minister to speak to the UN as he did, without waiting for Parliament’s view?  Wouldn’t it be joyous if they sent him back to New York by the next plane (economy class)  to explain that he is the head of a parliamentary government, not a head of state, and spoke out of turn? 

Some Thoughts on the Stalin-Hitler Pact

Plainly, no event in the 20th century equates to the outbreak of the First World War, rightly compared to the fall of the Roman Empire,  as a moment which utterly altered all that happened after it. 

 

But one moment, in those generally rather dreadful and violent ten decades is almost equally striking – yet far less well-known.

 

It is the Nazi-Soviet (or Molotov-Ribbentrop, or ‘Stalin-Hitler) Pact of August 1939. Yet there are very few books in English about this great event, especially compared with the miles of volumes about the two world wars, about the evils of Hitler and (now that the collapse of the USSR has made this previously neglected topic oddly fashionable in the academy and in publishing) the evils of Stalin.

 

In fact there was so little about it in print that I used to treasure the idea of writing a book on the Pact myself, but never tried because I lacked the time and the languages.

 

Yet what a subject it is. Here were the century’s two regimes of utter evil, both close to the high tide of their violence and murder,  supposedly each other’s most irreconcilable enemies – yet actually forming an alliance. When they did so, they appeared, in all visible respects, to be on friendly and civil terms with each other. They even held joint victory parades, their armies mingled, in Brest-Litovsk, Pinsk and Grodno. Polish sources, until Warsaw sold its soul to Berlin and Brussels, used to be the best place to find entertaining photographs or even films of these immensely sinister events, ghostly in grey and white. The Polish embassy in Berlin did for a while have a fine window-display on the joint parades, back in the late1990s.  I always thought it amazing that any records survived at all, given the USSR’s strong interest in keeping the whole thing quiet later. As everywhere in that whole blasted part of the world, one is always amazed to find that anything has survived at all. 

 

(There is even a bitter little Trotskyist song about it called ‘Oh My Darling Party Line’  (to the tune of ‘Clementine’) , one of whose verses ran:

‘Leon Trotsky was a Nazi – yes we knew it for a fact, ‘Pravda’ said it, we all read it . till the Stalin Hitler Pact.

 

‘Once a Nazi would be shot, see? That was then the party line.

Now a Nazi’s hotsy-totsy - Trotsky’s laying British mines’

 

The refrain ran ‘ Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Party Line.

Oh I never will forsake thee, for I love this life of mine’. )

 

Paradox reigned supreme. I believe that  leading French Communists approached the German occupation authorities in June 1940, to seek the lifting of the ban on France’s Communist daily newspaper ‘L’Humanite’ which had been imposed by the Daladier government in August 1939.  The Germans did, I think, authorize Communist newspapers in occupied Belgium, Norway and Denmark, but were afraid of the much greater power of the French Communists and couldn’t be sure they would accept Nazi censorship. The ban wasn’t lifted.

 

Still, it’s amazing that these discussions should ever have taken place  - or at least it would be if the orthodoxy were true – that the political Left (and above all its revolutionary wing)  was, is and always will be the most reliable and militant foe of Hitlerism.

 

In fact, that orthodoxy was never true. Communism and National Socialism were both based on power worship (itself founded on Utopian ideals which allowed each faction to believe its absolute triumph was absolutely necessary for the good of ‘mankind’), and so had no inescapable moral certainties. Both could therefore make deals with each other without reservation. Both were also scientistic creeds which believed in the ultimate malleability of man, rather than in his being created in the image of God (and therefore fundamentally unalterable). Communism's modern heirs suffer from the same problem, which is why they hate God so, simultaneously jeering at the idea that he exists at all, much as the Bolsheviks did. 

 

Thus, for both creeds, no action was ruled out on moral grounds. If a pact with the other was needed for ultimate triumph, then a pact there would be. And in fact that pact was a good deal less uneasy than the more reluctant alliances formed by the liberal democracies with Stalin. Because when they met each other, National Socialists and Communists got on rather well together.

 

What a subject for a TV documentary , or even a Michael Frayn or Tom Stoppard drama, this bizarre pact would be, a couple of minor characters, just offstage – a Red Army officer (preferably a Jewish one, as actually happened in real life) and his Wehrmacht counterpart arranging whose tanks went first through the shocked and silent streets of Brest, or a French Communist explaining to a German officer in 1940 Paris how their interests now coincided.

 

But if there have been any such works, I’ve missed them.

 

As it happens, there was a book, whose existence I’d never heard of (I must have been abroad a lot, I suppose, or perhaps the reviewers ignored it ). It was called ‘The Deadly Embrace – Hitler, Stalin and the Nazi-Soviet Pact 1939-41’, and written by Anthony Read and David Fisher, published by Michael Joseph in 1988. Neither of the authors is an academic. In those days it wasn’t a good idea for academics to be too critical of the USSR.

 

I heard of this thanks to the reviews of a new work on the subject ‘The Devil’s Alliance- Hitler’s Pact With Stalin 1939-41’, by Roger Moorhouse. Some of them mentioned the previous book.

 

The covers of both books, inevitably, are decorated with Swastikas and Hammers and Sickles. The earlier one is cleverer, showing both symbols as scorpions , one black and one red, stinging each other at one end, and merging at the other.

 

I read them in tandem, turning from one to the other, and must say I much preferred the Read and Fisher version, which I was able to get second hand for a ludicrously small price(my copy had been dumped on the market by a public library, alas).  It appeals to the scribbler in me, being full of the sort of detail I want to read about great events, and confirming the story I’d always heard but had never sourced, that when Ribbentrop’s aircraft arrived in Moscow, the Soviet authorities were so short of German flags that they had to get them from the Mosfilm studios, where they had been employed until then in the making of anti-Nazi propaganda films. And Ribbentrop stayed in the old Austrian Embassy (closed after the Anschluss and refurbished for the purpose) in the well-named ‘Death Lane’ . The building is still there and is once more the Austrian Embassy. I do not think there is a plaque.  And I think it’s here that I recently learned that Hitler had wanted to settle the Germans of the South Tirol (which he had ceded to Mussolini as an act of special favour) in the Crimea, long a territory much envied by German expansionists

 

But both are crammed with the sorts of facts that compel the reader to think and re-evaluate. The story is in fact even more outrageous than we thought . If you didn’t know about the friendly exchanges of prisoners between the Gestapo and the GPU, here they are. An entire German warship, almost complete, was handed to the USSR. The German navy was allowed to use Soviet bases. Germany shared designs of its advanced aircraft with the Soviets (who thought they were being palmed off with inferior goods) . Germany did not in fact rely on Soviet oil( a mistake I’ve often made) . Hitler ordered photographs of the signing ceremony to be airbrushed to remove the cigarettes Stalin was smoking, as he thought they made the occasion look frivolous. He also ordered his photographer to ensure that he got good shots of Stalin’s earlobes, as he wanted to know if Stalin was Jewish,  and believed that Jewishness could be detected through an examination of the lobes. He decided Stalin was not Jewish. Luckily for the negotiations, he never discovered that Molotov’s wife *was*Jewish. A German diplomat managed to take an ‘accidental’  sip from Stalin’s vodka glass during an interminable series of devastating toasts – and found it was full of water. The enjoyable story that Molotov, sheltering from British bombs in a  Berlin shelter, was told by the Germans that Britain was defeated and asked ‘then why are we sitting in this shelter, and whose bombs are these which we hear falling?’ was almost certainly invented by Churchill, who attributed it to Stalin. Thus is history made.  

 

Several German soldiers (presumably Communists) courageously swam rivers or otherwise deserted, to warn the Red Army that the July 1941 attack which ended the pact was coming. Stalin ordered that one of them should be shot, but the order, fortunately, arrived after the attack had begun, by which time the man had become a hero.

 

Neither book explains the mystery of Stalin’s disastrous refusal to believe that Hitler’s attack was coming. Both slide delicately over the (to me, entirely plausible) suggestion made later by Khrushchev that Stalin suffered a sort of breakdown in the days immediately after the attack. How could it be checked? Who would have dared say so, at the time,  and lived? I find it plausible because ( and my time on this blog has strengthened this view) I think wilful self-deception makes the world go round. And I think that Stalin needed in his heart to believe that Hitler was trustworthy, for otherwise his pact with him would have been an act of great unwisdom. There has seldom been a better example of ‘none so blind as he that will not see’. And, as it was on record that he had played a prominent personal part in the Pact, which was brought about by a personal correspondence between him and Hitler, he could not really shift the blame on to anyone else.

 

The story, in both versions, is limitlessly fascinating, as are the details they reveal of the Finnish winter war and of the foredoomed Anglo-French mission to Moscow which stalled just as Ribbentrop arrived. My own view is that the Anglo-French mission failed because ( as I think Stalin later said) Russia was not afraid of Britain, and Britain had nothing to trade for an alliance’. Whereas Stalin was definitely afraid of Germany, and Germany had much to trade, in territory and wealth, in return for Soviet help in overcoming the danger of another naval blockade (a hugely important motive for any German leader) , sparing Hitler a second front and expunging Poland from the map. The French tried harder and negotiated more boldly, but shared the same problem. I don’t think it would have made any difference if the Anglo-French mission had got there earlier, or even if it had contained more senior figures. Stalin didn’t much want or need a British alliance – though I don’t doubt he wanted an American one, which he eventually got merely by staying in the same place.

 

‘The Deadly Embrace’ is also enjoyably rude about Colonel Beck, the Polish foreign minister who dragged Britain into war with Germany at the worst possible moment. He appears as a garrulous braggart,  drunk and lecher, chucked out of France for exceeding his diplomatic duties by stealing documents from a French general’s drawer, and taking bribes from the Germans for obtaining French military secrets for them. Beck also developed severe delusions of grandeur. There’s a fine account of Hitler’s efforts to woo Beck at Berchtesgaden in January 1939(with amongst other things, promises of a share in a German-owned Ukraine) which make nonsense of any idea that a German invasion of Poland was inevitable at that stage. It was the Anglo-French guarantee of Polish independence in April that would bring that about, by encouraging Beck’s delusions still more.

 

Even so, Read and Fisher provide a tantalizing account, not known to me until now,  of the last evening of peace in Berlin at the end of August 1939, in which it is clear that the Polish foreign service, directed by Beck, played its own part in helping Hitler slam the door on any last possibility of negotiation.

 

The British ambassador, Nevile Henderson, was still trying to save his failed mission, right to the very end. When Ribbentrop told him a last-minute deal might still be done with a Polish plenipotentiary. Henderson took him seriously (or pretended to do so) and pressed the idea on the Polish ambassador to Germany, Josef Lipski.

 

 

 

By 2.00 a.m. on the fateful day of 31st August,  Henderson had managed (thanks partly to the intervention of Goering and his Swedish friend Dahlerus) to get a text of Ribbentrop’s proposals, read to him too fast for him to write down at their final meeting earlier, after which Ribbentrop had refused to provide a copy.  Henderson (perhaps hoping to sabotage Ribbentrop’s plan by taking him at his word)  outlined them to Lipski and said they were ‘not unreasonable’ ( which, compared with what was about to happen to Poland, , could perhaps be argued). Lipski said nothing. Henderson pressed on, urging Lipski to call Beck immediately and suggest a meeting with Ribbentrop. Lipski said ‘Not tonight. It is too late’.

 

Was it? Probably, but what if it had not been?

Henderson still pressed. He said Poland’s military chief, Marshal Smigly-Ridz, could meet Goering ‘They would get on well together. Something could be arranged’ .

Lipski said he would put the suggestion to Warsaw ‘but not tonight’

By breakfast time on 31st August (8.30) Henderson called Lipski to warn him that war was inevitable within there hours unless Poland acted. Henderson’s ultimate source was von Weizsaecker , in the German foreign ministry who (like Henderson) was trying to sabotage Ribbentrop’s rush to war). But Lipski was ‘unavailable’. Henderson called Coulondre, the French Ambassador, who went round in person to see Lipski and tell him to call Beck for authority to approach Ribbentrop.  (Please recall, as you read this story, that Britain and France had recently guaranteed Poland’s independence and were now its principal allies. Yet this was how Poland’s ambassador treated his most valuable friends).

 

Eventually Henderson reached Lipski who was ‘too busy’ to come and collect a copy of the Ribbentrop proposals, which Dahlerus had by this time brought from Goering to the British Embassy. Henderson then asked Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes, first secretary at the embassy, to drive Dahlerus round to see Lipski, with the document.

 

The Polish embassy was (unsurprisingly) in a state of chaos, being packed up. Lipski claimed he couldn’t read the handwritten document, and said ‘even a Poland abandoned by her allies is ready to fight and die alone’.

 

He then told Ogilvie-Forbes : ‘I have no interest whatsoever in notes or any other kind of proposals from the Germans. I have a very clear understanding of the situation in Germany after five years as ambassador. I know Goering intimately and all the other leading Nazis and I am sure of one thing: in the event of war there will be uprisings and rebellion in Germany and the Polish army will march in triumph into Berlin’.

 

He cannot really have believed this, though it is interesting that he had already concluded (rightly as it turned out) that Poland had been ‘abandoned by her allies’.  The efforts of Henderson and Coulondre to get him to talk to Ribbentrop were, obviously, a sign that they did not want to be forced to abide by their treaty obligations.

 

As it happens, long after it was far too late, Beck did instruct Lipski to seek a meeting , but forbad him to make or accept any proposals, so rendering any meeting pointless. German signal intelligence intercepted it (they may have been meant to) . Hitler was said to have been ‘delighted’ that Warsaw had not taken up his proposals But by then it was certainly too late. As Beck sent his message, at 12.40 pm Berlin time, Hitler ordered that the attack on Poland should begin at 4.45 the next morning. The order went out to troops at 4.00 pm, when it became irrevocable in effect.

 

A futile meeting between Lipski and Ribbentrop did in fact take place at 6.30 (Ribbentrop, who presumably knew what had been in Beck’s telegram To Lipski, and that Lipski could not negotiate, had kept him waiting five hours). Could a quicker response by Lipski, with genuine intent to negotiate, have halted war at that stage? I doubt it very much, though Lipski’s attitude and general non co-operation makes one wonder. But I don’t think there is much doubt that Beck would have behaved very differently during summer 1939,without the Halifax guarantee. Had he done so, it is by no means certain that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact would have been signed that year, or ever. Then what?

Stephen Fry Unintentionally Backs my Argument on Drug Law Enforcement

Now I have to thank Stephen Fry for helping me to make my case for the proper enforcement of our laws against drugs.

 

Mr Fry’s latest book of memoirs has just been published. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s a rather sad and attention-seeking volume, full of name-dropping, and a great reassurance to anyone who thinks he or she has been missing something important by never belonging to the Groucho Club, or never spending an evening with the Young British Artists, or the cultural elite in general. It isn’t exactly a Kingdom of the Mind out there.

 

The book also suffers from the Will Self problem – a belief that long words are better and cleverer than short ones, and curly sentences better than straight ones. Take for instance the words on page 96  ‘that first intranasal introduction of cocaine into my system’. This is surely better rendered as ‘the first time I snorted cocaine’?

 

Fry, who calls explicitly for drug legalization (and taxation) on p.133 of his book (he doesn’t specify which drugs) , says he was (but is no longer) a heavy user of the Class ‘A’ drug cocaine (possession of which can, supposedly, be punished by a seven year prison term and/or an unlimited fine) and publishes a list (see below) of the places where he used to take it.

 

There’s a sort of apology for this. ‘I take this opportunity to apologise unreservedly, to the owners, managers or representatives of the noble and ignoble premises and to the hundreds of private homes, offices, car dashboards, tables, mantelpieces and available polished services that could so easily have been added to this list of shame.

'You may wish to have me struck off, banned, black balled or in any other way punished for past crimes; surely now is the time to reach for the phone, the police or the club secretary.'

But it somehow doesn’t sound that apologetic to me.

 

Now, did Mr Fry really believe that any such law existed or operated, when he behaved as he now says he did from 1986 to 2001? For in the book he says he took cocaine in many London clubs, Buckingham Palace, the Palace of Westminster, the BBC TV centre and the offices of several newspapers (not this one).

 

On one occasion he was actually in police custody (thanks to being caught on his motorbike when he had been drinking)  with some cocaine, but the police didn’t find it. He was worried chiefly (p.125) that he had enough of the drug to be charged with intent to supply it. “It was generally understood in the druggy world that one or two grams would be taken to be ‘personal use’ but that much more might be construed by a bolshy or ill-disposed policeman to be ‘intent to supply’. The first might result in confiscation or a warning. ; the second would certainly, if the judge was in accord, lead to a prison sentence". Mr Fry by his own account had three grams (roughly one ninth of an ounce) in his possession.

 

I am struck that he was so minutely aware of this difference, between possessing two and three grams, a difference of about one twenty-eighth part of an ounce.  Who had told him this? How had they known? How was it ‘generally understood’? And this was not yesterday, but some years ago.

 

And yet I am constantly told of the savage and draconian drug laws which cruelly criminalize the one-time user. These are the laws which Mr Fry presumably wishes to have repealed. Yet he *knows* they are not applied. This is what I keep saying, what my book was about, the one everyone said was rubbish. Britain has in fact engaged in a vast unofficial decriminalization of drugs, well-known to metropolitan drug takers while hoping that suburban provincial voters won’t notice.

 

This is bad enough in itself. But the way in which the metropolitan drug liberalizers then pretend that these dead-letter laws are in fact fiercely enforced, so as to weaken them still further, really, really gets my goat. And my habit of pointing out the truth really, really gets their goat.

 

Mr Fry also writes interestingly on the subject of ‘addiction’. On page 72 he seems to come close to at least grasping  my view: he describes with reasonable fairness those who ‘repudiate the premise that addiction is a disease’ and who consider that drug taking is a matter of ‘weakness, lack of grit, absence of will-power and feeble self-justifying excuses’.

 

“They (people like me) hear, most especially, figures in the public eye talking of ‘pressure’ and ‘stress’ and they want to puke up. Here are rich overpaid, over-praised,  over-pampered, overindulged ‘celebrities’ who scrabble and snuffle and snort like rootling truffle pigs at the first bump of naughty powder and then….after years of careless abuse…”  … “they bleat ‘But I’ve got a disease! I’m an addictive personality! Help!’”

 

But then , on page 73, he cites more approvingly the view that “addiction is indeed a condition, often inherited or congenital, and that the only way to defeat it even if it is not a ‘real ‘ disease is *to treat it as if it is*.”(Mr Fry's emphasis)

 

Given the colossal failure of this approach, followed by a huge increase in drug abuse, and given the total absence of any evidence that ‘addiction’ has any objective existence or is a disease, this is a wobbly platform on which to stand. But Mr Fry does not seem (I have not read the whole book) to go beyond asserting it.  

 

So I think we can assume that this is his view. He does at one stage (p.125) use the expression 'my, poor, stupid addicted mind'. And yet I don’t think (again I must point out I haven't read the whole book) that he actually describes himself as an ‘addict’ - and he also says   'I didn't take coke because I was depressed or under pressure. I didn't take it because I was unhappy (at least I don't think so). I took it because I really, really liked it.'

 

Well, quite.  I applaud his honesty.

Fear and Lothian in Westminster

For many years now it’s been thought clever to go on about the ‘West Lothian’ question when the issue of Scottish devolution is discussed. First asked by Enoch Powell and Tam Dalyell (both clever men, both dedicated troublemakers),  it boils down to:

 

‘How can Scottish MPs at Westminster vote on purely English issues when MPs from England have lost their powers to take decisions about parallel Scottish matters?’

 

I used to be entranced by this clever-clogs stuff, and I can still see some strength in it. But I have been forced into a rethink by David Cameron’s decision to pretend he is under pressure on this from his backbenchers (whom he royally ignores when it suits him, on every subject there is).

 

He’s plainly playing a little game of ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’. Having come within inches of saying goodbye to the Scottish contingent of Labour MPs, thanks to the near-success of the campaign for Scottish independence, he has taken a strong liking to the idea. And, despite the referendum result, he wants to find a way of getting rid of the Scots anyway.

 

For, as we all know, he has no chance of a Westminster majority as long as there is a Scottish contingent there.

 

So, let’s make a matter of party advantage into a matter of principle. But is it actually?  If it is, it’s funny that it’s been allowed to lie untended on the shelf for so many long decades.  And which principle is it? Let us turn to the wisdom of Edmund Burke, whose 1774 address to the voters of Bristol (read it here http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch13s7.html ) is thought by many to be the last word on the proper role of an MP.

 

His constituents wanted Burke to be a kind of delegate from Bristol, representing the interests of Bristol in the national Parliament. Burke, in my view quite rightly, thought them mistaken. He believed that he was above all a member of the national legislature, sent there from Bristol, to use his own judgement and good sense as long as he was their MP. He was bound to listen to them, but not to take their advice.  If they didn’t like the way he spoke and voted they could get rid of him, but he was not simply their mouthpiece.

 

The crucial passage runs thus : ‘Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament. If the local constituent should have an interest, or should form an hasty opinion, evidently opposite to the real good of the rest of the community, the member for that place ought to be as far, as any other, from any endeavour to give it effect.’

 

So, for instance, say an MP from Scotland is ( for example) a distinguished historian of Russia, an economist with a reputation for wise prediction, a former Army staff officer, a sometime steelworker,  fisherman or train driver, or an experienced mother of children. Will he or she be excluded from any vote on English matters, because he or she is Scottish, even if his or her area of expertise and knowledge is under discussion and being voted upon? Will he or she be allowed to speak, but forbidden to vote? Will he or she be excluded from major ministerial office, because too many of that ministry’s decisions concern England alone?

 

If not, then where will the line be drawn? Any MP, wherever he or she is from, is fundamentally qualified by the fact that he or she has been chosen by electors to go to Parliament and be a member of it. He or she can surely listen with attention to debate, and have his or her mind changed? The real scandal here is not that Scottish MPs vote on English laws, but that the brute power of the whips often compels MPs of all parties and from all parts of the country to vote against their own personal desires and wisdom. That is something I would very gladly see reformed.

 

I might add, will the same rule be applied with equal rigour to MPs from Northern Ireland, which is pretty thoroughly devolved?

 

And what about the European ‘Parliament’?  Since the EU still devolves a few powers to us here in the UK, should Euro-MPs from the UK be debarred from voting on matters that affect any of the other EU member countries? And should they be debarred from voting on our business? And how would we define what was our business.

 

I’d be happy, in a  mischievous sort of way,  with anything that gummed up the works of that horrible body.

 

But it seems to me that if the rule is ‘You can’t vote on matters in other parts of the federation, if your part of the federation has substantial devolved powers’ , then it could turn out to be quite explosive.

 

Put simply, it means that we no longer have a UK Parliament, just a place where all the UK MPs have offices, and are entitled to be, but are increasingly excluded from having anything to do with anything outside their own provinces.

 

That looks to me like a dissolution of the Union, in everything but name. Perhaps that is what we want. For me, I’m content to let Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have significant amounts of self-government if it makes them happy. I have absolutely no desire for an ‘English Parliament’ mainly because we have had such a body since 1265 or so, and it still exists, only with additional members from other parts of the country.

 

The other reason for not wanting such a thing is much like my reason for not wanting a written constitution. Who will design it?

I don’t just mean that the building will be a ghastly modernistic shed in Milton Keynes,  designed by one of those New Labour architects who have done quite enough damage already. I mean that it will be elected according to some rigged system of proportional representation, probably based upon the infernal ‘regions’ which the EU is determined to impose upon us sooner or later.  

 

As for our existing form of government, Scotland and Wales are entitled to some special measure of self-rule because England utterly dominates the UK, in terms of population, tax-base and usable land. Weren’t you shocked by how few people voted in the Scottish referendum (I don’t mean the excellent high turnout, but the actual totals)? There are English counties with more people in them than voted for Scottish independence.

 

Northern Ireland, by contrast, oughtn’t to have such a body, as direct rule from London is the only way of overcoming sectarianism. Some other form of strengthened local power might be designed, but not one that allows either community to lord it over the other, or which allows terrorist gangs significant influence over government and law. Certainly it should be spared somehow from copying mainland Britain’s comprehensive school disaster, but I suppose for that to happen there’d have to be an official recognition that it is a disaster, which some people amazingly still refuse to admit.

 

But I digress. That point, that the outlying parts of the UK are so small in population by comparison with England, is crucial to understanding why  the West Lothian question is silly as well as clever. England dominates the others simply by existing, much as Germany dominates the continent.  It can afford to subsidize its neighbours, and give them a large measure of home rule,  and is wise to do so if it doesn’t want foreign powers meddling in our island, slipping in through an unguarded back door. It doesn’t need any special protection or privileges.

That's Enough Religious Bores

I shall start by simply asking.

 

But I think this blog is being quietly strangled by people who turn every single thread into a theological argument. It doesn't matter what the subject is. These people could turn a discussion of cheese on toast into a row about the Jehovah's Witnesses, Bible literalism or the Koran. In fact I may myself contribute a comment shortly in which I manage to introduce these subjects into a discussion of cheese on toast. It would make a good competition in the 'New Statesman' or 'Spectator' .

 

The rest of us (including me) are just so bored by this incessant( and frankly not very illuminating) theology , and I am sure many people don't comment any more because they quickly get the impression that, unless their comment is theologically tinged, they are not really part of the debate.

 

I used to enjoy reading the comments here. Increasingly, I find my eye sliding over them. Religious comments are of course perfectly acceptable on overtly religious topics. But they get in the way of discussing other matters. If there are contributors here who wnat to argue about these matters, I suggest they set up their own site where they may do so to their heart's content. 

 

To paraphrase Edmund Burke 'This blog cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less there is within, the more there must be without'.

 

I do hope that a word is enough for the wise.

 

 

 

 

All that 'devolved power' will end up in just one place: Brussels

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Defeats are easy to understand. Victories can take decades to reveal their meaning.

The triumph over Soviet Communism in 1989 faded pretty quickly. The Kremlin menace – easily resisted by resolve and deterrence – was gone.

But in its place were subtler threats from Berlin and Brussels, the unwanted revolution of mass immigration from the old Soviet Empire, the sinister rise of China and the deep, menacing clouds of Islamic militancy.

So I see the Scottish referendum as the start of something, not the end.

Alex Salmond never wanted to have his vote so soon. If it hadn’t been for the solid old-fashioned common sense of the over-60s, he would have won on Thursday night.

In any case, he has won in many important ways. The Westminster panic in the last week was a huge victory for the SNP.

The pledge of maximum devolution was a giant retreat. David Cameron refused to have this option on the ballot paper at the start of the campaign.

Fearing he would lose all, including his own job, he conceded it after the voting had actually begun (so proving that it was done out of frenzied fear, not a long-term plan)

It will now be redeemed right down to the last inch of power and the last penny of cash.

And so what was left of the United Kingdom – which is not that much – will be even more threadbare than before.

The old magic of shared flags, shared wars and shared adversity looks pretty thin after this ruthless examination of the leases, bank accounts and family secrets which actually hold us together.

The general feebleness of the ‘No’ campaign was not the fault of those who ran it. They just didn’t have much to say. They haven’t really believed in the Union for years.

Much of what they said was arrant rubbish. There is no such thing as a ‘British passport’. They would be illegal under EU law.

The same establishment which urged Eternal Union on the Scots urged the opposite on the Protestants of Northern Ireland in the shameful, dishonest surrender referendum of 1998, whose bitter implications few in mainland Britain will admit.

And – in the key betrayal of all – that establishment supported the end of our Protestant, independent, offshore Union in the Common Market referendum of 1975. Now what are we to do?

Well, I urge you all to be extremely suspicious of any attempts to offer the people of England ‘devolved’ regions, which are designed to Balkanise England and make her more easily swallowed into the EU.

Such things are the opposite of what we need – the return of our lost power to make our own laws and govern our own borders.

It was exactly that aim which many Scots quite reasonably sought – which is why part of my sympathies will always lie with them in this cause.

I wish we in England had one tenth of their spirit and determination.

Let Putin enjoy his Ukraine victory

Last week the ‘West’ was roundly beaten by Vladimir Putin in the First Ukrainian War. The EU not only delayed a crucial part of its imperial deal with Kiev. It openly admitted that this was a concession to Moscow.

The resulting compromise could have been had last winter, before the EU and Washington mounted their violent mob putsch against the elected President of Ukraine, ludicrously claiming they did this in the name of democracy and good government. All the thousands of lives lost since that putsch were needlessly sacrificed. There is no magic formula which says that Ukraine, under Western domination, will cease to be grossly corrupt, lawless, bankrupt and unfree.

Russia has shown quite clearly that it means what it has patiently said for years, and will fight against any further Western expansion of the EU.

Yet intelligent friends of mine, influential among policy-makers, are urging that we refuse to accept this verdict, and prepare for another, similar conflict a few years from now by arming and training Ukraine’s feeble armed forces. Why? How is this in Britain’s interest, or the interest of the human race in general?

Our history is more than cigarettes and miniskirts

Sheridan Smith is astonishingly good as the young Cilla Black in ITV’s Cilla. But as always in recreating the past, this programme can’t quite face the truth. They don’t mind dwelling on the old religious divide, largely gone. But was 1960s Liverpool really as racially tolerant as shown? Old cars, old clothes and lots of smoking aren’t enough to recreate the day before yesterday, the trickiest bit of history.

The war against the machines

How I sympathise with the 76-year-old woman who, driven to rage by the needless complexity of her new mobile phone, lost her patience and swore at the device. How I also sympathise with her horror and amazement when the thing replied in a voice of maddening electronic calm: ‘Have I done something wrong?’ She was alone in the house at the time, late at night. Her daughter says she has yet to recover. I’m not surprised.

Gordon's predictable rehabilitation

I long ago predicted last week’s rehabilitation of Gordon Brown, similar to what happened to John Major. It was just a matter of when and how it came about.

Mr Brown could never possibly have been as bad as his propaganda foes claimed. The same is true now of Ed Miliband. Perhaps we could grow up a bit, and judge people by their actions rather than by reputations which are often false?

Why won't liberals kill to defend the good and gentle? They have nothing against death as such

One of the strongest arguments for hanging heinous murderers is that it is more humane than locking them up till they die. Anyone who has seen inside a prison would much prefer a quick death to wearing out his days in such a place.

I know that some people actively argue that notorious convicted killers should live in fear of attacks and perhaps a violent death at the hands of their fellow inmates.

I pity anyone with such a shrivelled conscience. The expression ‘Hanging is too good for him’ was first uttered by Mr Cruelty, an unlovely character in John Bunyan’s (alas) neglected masterpiece The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Now I read that a Belgian serial killer, Frank van den Bleeken, has won the ‘right to die’ under that country’s laws, which I suspect we will soon adopt. I don’t think he’ll be the last.

I find this quite funny. Modern liberals lack the moral courage to defend the gentle with strong laws, so won’t directly kill even the worst criminals.

But the ludicrous twaddle of ‘Human Rights’, with which they try to replace Christian morals, allows them to euthanise the people they won’t execute.

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

 

Some Thoughts on Scotland After the Referendum

The following is a slightly longer version of an article pubished in today's Mail on Sunday:

 

Unlike most Englishmen , I am lucky enough to have lived in Scotland. Better still, I did so as a small and impressionable child who has ever afterwards been comforted and reassured by Scottish voices, and moved by Scottish landscapes.

 

I love the seriousness of the place. You can keep your Golden Gate and your Sydney Harbour Bridge – no prospect gives a more powerful demonstration of man’s heroic triumph over gravity than the original Forth Bridge, and the setting - stern and wild - is matchless. Though, like many such imperial prospects, it would look even better with a few huge grey warships nearby.

 

I wept when I left – for an England I didn’t know at all - on a steam-hauled southbound sleeper, and still remember looking longingly from the train through the flashing diagonals of the great bridge, wishing I wasn’t going.

 

To this day I’m thrilled whenever I return. I love the exhilarating difference between us and them, and have enjoyed most of the growing assertion of Scottishness in recent years – though I can manage without Gaelic signs on railway stations, which I suspect are as baffling to most Scots as they are to me.

 

So I could never really join in what I saw as a shallow English resentment at the Scottish aspiration for independence. The Scots are a people, Scotland is a country, and the demand for self-rule is reasonable. We wasted many years, and made enemies out of friends, by refusing Home Rule to Ireland. Why make the same mistake again?

 

I couldn’t be romantic about it because I understand – as most in Britain do not – that there is no true independence for any territory ruled by the EU. But I could see why Scots got cross when they were told separation from England would make them poorer.  So what? The power to rule yourself is priceless. Isn’t our history full of people who put liberty above money?

 

So I set out for my old home in Rosyth, and my favourite place in Scotland, the lovely ancient capital in Dunfermline, in two minds.

 

I didn’t fit neatly into anyone’s preconceptions, and nor did the Scots I spoke to. It was easy to fall into conversation with people, easier than it would have been in England.  Once I promised anonymity, they were very happy to chat.

 

There was the quietly humorous shopkeeper who gave me a quick run-down on Dunfermline’s modern political geography – still very much a matter of Catholic and Protestant, whatever anyone may tell you. It wasn’t all that different from what you might have heard in Armagh City in Northern Ireland.

 

He was keener on the Union than I was, one of the lost legion who once made the Tory Party the biggest political force in Scotland, most of them now well over 50. They are not making them like that any more, and when they are gone the ‘yes’ vote will be far more powerful.

 

His Scotland was the country I remembered, the smell of coal smoke on the sharp winds, the mines and heavy industry, the blackened, austere stone buildings and the thin-faced serious people educated in stern and rigorous schools.

 

That’s all gone. The schools these days are as soppy and comprehensive as ours, and outside one of them – being used as a referendum polling station - I encountered another feature of the new Scotland. I was chatting to a teller from the ‘No’ campaign when we were approached by a man who could barely speak English and who looked to me as if he might well be Burmese.

 

Touchingly, he had no idea how to vote, and wanted to have it explained to him. We sent him inside for official advice, but I had two sharp opposite thoughts. The first was a sort of joy at a fellow-creature having his first taste of democracy; the other was to wonder why such a person should have more power than I did to change the face of my country.

 

The next person I met was a cheerful citizen who had decided that very morning to vote ‘Yes’. It was a pure gamble on his part, a gesture of revolt against a life that hadn’t offered him much, and now offered him even less – he hated above all the absence of any work except on miserable wages.

 

Independence (as I think he knew perfectly well) wouldn’t change that one bit. He just wanted to show he was alive, and relished the power to hurt those who had done nothing for him.

 

Then I took the train to Cowdenbeath, once a coalmining town, deep in Gordon Brown territory, its wonderfully bleak name best known from the weekly recitation of the football results.

 

Now it’s a town of people who used to work, their occupations gone – though it has somehow managed to acquire a sizeable Polish population and even a small Turkish community. 

 

You could see what a cheerful, close-knit place it must have been in the days when the men all worked, the mixed curse of de-industrialisation which has left so many people with clean air, less danger and dirt, and more leisure than they know what to do with.

 

 

A magnificent, upright old lady with an umbrella, walking stoutly to the polls through the drizzle, filled me with guilt by denouncing , in beautiful, grammatical and clearly enunciated English, the silly delusions of the ‘Yes’ campaign, who were promising to spend money they hadn’t got on things they couldn’t afford. She wouldn’t say how she was voting –like a lot of ‘No’voters – partly because she had been brought up to believe in the secret ballot. But it wasn’t hard to guess.

 

Yet the young woman with the two children, one in a pushchair, made an equally moving case for ‘Yes’, deserted by her husband, stricken early in life with cancer, anxious to work but compelled to travel miles to do so, she truly believed that an independent Scotland would treat her better than the decayed and patchy welfare state she now relied on.

 

Plunging into a chemist for some headache pills, I noticed that by far the biggest part of the shop’s business was prescriptions, the little bags and envelopes piled up in their hundreds waiting for collection.

 

Back in Dunfermline, a woman from England – who had moved to Scotland because she liked it so much – told me a worrying story about a neighbour who had tried to put a ‘Yes’ poster on their shared lawn. When she had asked him politely not to, he unleashed a torrent of filthy insults, so menacing that she called the police (who to their credit came quickly and put him in his place).

 

Yet a few miles down the road a young mother complained to me about a ‘Yes’ canvasser who had ludicrously told her a ‘No’ vote would leave Scotland undefended from the terrorists of the Islamic State, who could then come and cut her head off. It wasn’t clear what would bring the Islamists to Fife at all.

 

By this time I was back in my old home town of Rosyth, where there are still 1940s Naval married quarters (including the one where I lived, instantly recognisable after nearly 60 years) amid the modern housing. 

 

The Rosyth dockyard, built to calm an Edwardian panic about the German naval threat, is a solid symbol of the Union, overshadowed by the enormous crane used to build the giant new ‘Queen Elizabeth’ class aircraft carriers. It is also a solid symbol of the present day.

 

The carriers will have no aircraft for years, and look increasingly like seagoing white elephants. The yard is a sort of mortuary for the decommissioned Polaris submarines from the Cold War which nobody really knows what to do with. And it has of course been privatised.

 

I found plenty of obvious ‘No’ voters at Rosyth’s polling stations, some of them clearly English and linked with the dockyard. But the surprising thing was the number of ‘Yes’ supporters in a place so heavily dependent on the Ministry of Defence.

 

The following day, this being reserved Fife rather than rebellious Glasgow, there was little desire to over the battle again. I got the impression from the disappointed ‘Yes’ voters I spoke to that they do not think that the issue is closed, and believe that – perhaps ten years hence – their day will come.

 

English politicians, toying with fudging the promises they made in the last days of the campaign, should beware. From all my conversations, I am fairly sure that Gordon Brown’s intervention swung many thousands of Labour votes from ‘Yes’ to ‘No’. Mr brown and those voters will punish us terribly if they think we have bilked them.

 

One disappointed supporter of independence was plainly sick of being characterized as some sort of mindless anti-English bigot. He took me aside and said very seriously ‘Please tell your readers this. I am not voting “Yes” because I am anti-English. You would be utterly wrong to think that this is what motivates me or most of us.’ He was not the only one to say to me that it seemed to him that most English people know very little about Scotland and its people.  

 

I think this battle will be fought again (most Scottish battles are). But need we be so sad and bitter if it is, and if it goes the other way (as I suspect it will)?

 

One young couple, he a determined ‘Yes’, she a severe ‘No’, gave a little hope to all of us. They disagreed utterly on the best future for Scotland, but with laughter rather than venom, and went off happily holding hands into the windy dusk.

 

Why ever not? Nobody was suggesting that we went to war with each other.  I never saw why we in England should make such a fierce business of this, saying that a ‘Yes’ would be forever.

 

Ours is a willing Union, not a forced marriage, like those that imprison Flanders in Belgium, and Catalonia in Spain. The door is not locked against those who would leave. Why then should it be locked against them returning? 

 

Alex Salmond asked, powerfully, ‘If not now, when?’, and I think the answer may well be ‘Ten years hence, when the older generation is gone’.

 

If the Scots want to go, as they may well, then I think we should make it clear that they would always be welcome back, and leave a light burning in the window. We will never have better friends, and you don’t keep friends by threatening them. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who Smashed the Union? It wasn't me

Here and elsewhere some people have attacked my position on Scotland as some sort of betrayal. I can’t really see why. I am not the one who has hollowed out the Union over many decades.

 

Others must take the responsibility for the major changes which have pretty much destroyed Scottish Unionism (once a very powerful force, and the most powerful political trend in Scotland until the 1970s).

 

I would list these changes as follows:

 

The more or less total collapse of Calvinist Christianity is Scotland’s dominant belief.

 

Britain’s decision, if such it was, to abandon its post-Reformation isolation from the Roman Catholic and statist European continent – this is doubly significant, as Scotland had always (until Union) been viewed as the Continent’s easiest back door into England, a door which was bolted and barred by Union.

 

The demolition of Scotland’s mining and manufacturing industries ( again, in my view, a consequence of the European Union, which stopped Britain from protecting its own industries against continental competition, and which inaugurated a general slide of economic power in a Southerly and easterly direction).

 

Anyone who knew pre-1970 Scotland would be astonished by the place as it is now, transformed utterly from the stern, dark, workful and (very well-educated place) it was. (The destruction of the Academies -the Scottish equivalent of Grammar Schools) came at about the same time.

 

The loss of these facts and ideas left a great gap, and Nationalism has filled it. There are interesting reasons for that, one of them being the special fury with which deindustrialisation was visited on Scotland, the other being the attractive success of several smaller European nations especially since 1989 – when the end of the Cold War meant we no longer had to huddle together for warmth.

 

By the way, before we move on from this part of the argument, I’d like to mention a curious anomaly that has never caused any trouble up till now. We’re told that the Queen would have difficulty being Queen of a separate Scotland. I’m, not sure why this should be. If you look carefully at the symbols of national authority in Scotland, such as police badges and postboxes, you’ll find they have long featured the Crown of Scotland, distinctly different from the Crown of St Edward which occupies the same places in England and Wales. What’s more, when the Queen goes to church in Crathie, she is a Calvinist Presbyterian, like the rest of the Church of Scotland. When she does so at Sandringham, she is an Anglican, who is a good deal vaguer about the doctrines of predestination and the rest on which the Scottish Kirk is admirably, if sternly clear. It would be rude to as Her Majesty *how* she copes with this shifting allegiance, but she seems to manage quite well.

 

As I was born in Malta GC, when it was part of the Empire, first came to this country as a squalling baby, and was soon afterwards carted off to a Naval married quarter in Rosyth, near Dunfermline in Fife,  my first conscious memories of these islands are very Scottish – the lovely coast of Fife, the steepled steel-grey skyline of Dunfermline itself,  the ruins of the Abbey, distant prospects of the Dollar Mountains and of what I think were then the ruins of Fordell Castle against the sunset, the glories of Edinburgh,  the thrilling cold of the winters, the milk frozen so hard on the doorstep that it had pushed its way out of the bottle, with the foil cap sitting on top, and the Scottish voices that to this day seem to speak of reassurance and quiet competence.

 

I wept when we had to leave, peering out of the sleeper at the Firth of Forth at dusk, as our southbound sleeper steamed across the great bridge which still thrills me every time I see it. There was no horrible road bridge alongside it in those days. Queensferry still *was* a ferry. I pestered my parents (who had no power over the matter, which was firmly decided by the Lords of the Admiralty) to take us back, and it took me quite a while to appreciate the different beauties of Dartmoor and the South Downs. A few years ago I was haranguing a literary festival in Edinburgh and had time to take a train across the Firth to Dunfermline and Rosyth.

 

Without a map, using a cat-like instinct I didn’t know I possessed,  I managed to find my way to the road I had left more than 50 years before, aged four, and to the small recreation ground from which you can still see the enormous cranes of Rosyth dockyard. I felt, as one does on such journey, like a ghost.

 

So I might just care about it more than a lot of English people. But so what?

 

Well, all I ask is that those who want to contest my position accept that it is genuine. I had felt increasingly furious at the scaremongering of the ‘Yes’ campaign for some months. It seemed to me to be embarrassingly similar to the sort of tripe that I recalled from the contest over Britain joining the Euro. All that was lacking was the usual letter in the FT from some Japanese car manufacturers saying that we would all be doomed if we didn’t vote ‘yes’, but that, presumably, is because there are no Japanese car factories in Scotland.

 

Now, I’m well aware ( and have written here very recently (http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/09/could-alex-salmond-accidentally-liberate-england-.html ) that the option of complete independence is simply not available to Scots. I do wish people would check the archives a bit before offering me finger-wagging lectures about what I haven’t said or don’t grasp.

 

And if this is so, then surely there is a strong argument for England taking advantage of the unintended consequence of this –namely the departure from the UK of a large chunk of the pro-EU vote. If I’m right about how well England would do outside the EU, it’s possible to envisage an Act of Reunion, perhaps 50 years hence, when Scotland tires of being a province in Germany’s liberal empire, and sees who was really to blame for so many of its post-1970 woes.

 

I am also pretty sure that the Tory High Command want Scotland to leave, so as to save themselves, but also know they must never admit it.  I was struck that Mr Cameron said during his recent lachrymose and profane visit to Scotland that he put country before party.  It would be pretty much the first time he had done this, if so  - but who had accused him of doing the opposite?  Oddly enough, nobody had (unless you count me), so what voice was he seeking to still by making this declaration?

 

I was also struck by the hilarious statement by Ruth Davidson, the interesting leader of the Scottish Tories (a hopeless rump which survives at Holyrood despite having no visible purpose, a bit as if there were a small party of Unionists in the Dublin Dail). She said that her party was most unlikely to win the next election, which is perfectly true, and what I have been saying for years. But she said it to discouraging people from voting ‘Yes’ on the grounds that voting ‘No’ might expose Scotland to another Tory government.

 

I cannot think of any party leader who has ever made a virtue out of the fact that her own party is unlikely to win the next general election. But full marks for candour.

Mr McMullen asks why the political class are defending the Union if they don’t love it. My article explains this quite clearly They fear that Scottish independence threatens them personally, or their parties. In fact, with  bit more space, I would go further. They fear that a Scottish secession from England might finally upset the thought-free inertia which has kept these dead parties in being long after they ceased to have any real purpose.  A ‘Yes’ vote on Thursday could have incalculable consequences for many settled institutions.  When what seem to be settled facts turn out to be unsettled after all, even the thoughtless must think. As the Foreign office spokesman said on the day of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ‘All the isms are now wasms’.

 

I thought the comment which shone out in its clarity of understanding came from ‘Jonathan’. I know he took issue with me on some other aspects of the question but he grasps why scare stories won’t do as a counter to a desire for national self-determination.

 

What many Scots want (and, as I note and understand, what they will not get) is a goal which is so desirable that they would willingly make actual material sacrifices for it. To oppose such a cause, you must have true passions of your own, desires and beliefs for which you too might be willing to make sacrifices. The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.  

 

He wrote: ‘As an Israeli, I am baffled by the whole discussion surrounding this referendum. It seems to revolve almost exclusively around finances. I always thought that independence is about, well, being independent. If I were employing the same reasoning voters in this referendum are supposed to employ, I would have never left the spacious apartment of my parents and gone off to live on my own (in a much less nice abode).

 

Mr Hayes suggests ‘Perhaps the Hated Peter Hitchens is using his unpopularity with socialists to canvas for a no vote?’ He voices a thought which had certainly crossed my mind. My own purely material interest in the vote is centred on the fact that a ‘yes’ verdict might save the Tory Party, a result I’d hate, as an Englishman, a Cornishman and a British subject, in fact as a human being.   But such Machiavellian ploys seldom work. One thing I am sure of, that the pleadings of English conservatives will have little effect on the decisions of Scots.