Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 220

Correlation is not Causation. But it's also not not Causation. How today's Dope Apologists are just like Big Tobacco apologists 60 years ago.

You can't blame the Cannabis Comment Warriors for ceaselessly pointing out that 'correlation isn't causation' . They are desperate.  

 

For they are in much the same position that Big Tobacco was in when it first became clear that cigarette smokers were becoming ill in large numbers. The correlation was there. The cause couldn't be proved. So, rather than admitting the risk, they reached for the most complacent possible answer, so delaying the general recognition of the truth for many years.

 

The modern campaigners for Big Dope - tantalisingly close as they are to legalization - fear this topic greatly. They know very well a) that many marijuana users become mentally ill , b) that mental illness itself is extremely hard to categorize objectively and c) that the mechanism by which they become ill is currently impossible to discover, and may remain so for many years. The same was true, for a long time, of the undoubted correlation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, and the same claim was emplyed by Big Tobacco as is now being used by the people who hope to be Big Dope.

 

They are quite right to say that correlation is not necessarily evidence of causation. But they are less keen to admit the corollary.

 

Correlation is not necessarily *not* evidence of causation, and in fact is one of the foundatons of epidemiology.

 

The great Victorian physician, John Snow, traced an outbreak of Cholera in London, in 1854, to a particular water pump,  though correlation. Medical fashion believed that Cholera was passed on through 'bad air' (interestingly, Big Tobacco for many years tried to claim - yes, they really did - that lung cancer was caused by general air pollution).  So they derided his theory.

 

Dr Snow's water sample from the affected pump didn't conclusively prove that it was the source. But when the authorities took the handle off the pump, the epidemic ended.  Now, of course, everyone knows that Snow was right. 

 

But if he had been beaten off by the 'correlation is not causation' merchants, how many more people would have had to die of cholera before he could prove it?

 

And how many more young people and their families will have their lives ruined by irreversible mental illness, while the Cananbis Lobby continues to behave in this unscrupulous and selfish fashion?

 

 

 

Tantric Yoga, Blairism and Nausea

I am grateful to Gyles Brandreth, that often wise and entertaining person,  for immortalizing a moment back in 1997, when , almost alone in British journalism, I was hostile to the Blair creature, and had been identified as an enemy by the Blair machine.

 

He recalls in his diaries, serialized in the Daily Mail here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2755703/The-day-sozzled-Denis-gave-wife-saucy-compliment-collapsing-lunch-table-GYLES-BRANDRETH-recalls-riotously-indiscreet-memoirs.html

…that I used to sit through Mr Blair’s election press conferences (these, once daily during campaigns, have now been all but abolished because they are so hard to control) with my hand permanently raised. The truth was that I knew the future Warlord of Mespotamia didn’t want to take a question from me, and I wanted to underline this fact in a polite but unmistakable fashion. Keeping my hand high was the best way of doing so. It also benefited reporters from the Reykjavik Argus and the Almaty Gazette, who would get called by Mr Blair  if my hand and theirs were up, long after the big beasts of the media had run out of questions.

 

Mr Brandreth records: ‘Tuesday, May 29

“At the Labour press conference, the journalist sitting next to me, Peter Hitchens, has his hand in the air for half-an-hour without being called.

‘Are you ever called?’ I ask. ‘I’m not waiting to ask a question,’ he explains. ‘This is a position in tantric yoga designed to suppress nausea.’ “

 

Gyles did actually write this at the time,  but the newspaper for which he was then scribbling refused to use my name, as I worked for a rival organ and therefore Could Not Be Mentioned. I think it is strong evidence of the well-known fact that I have absolutely no sense of humour.

 

I did eventually get called, a few days but he didn’t answer my question, and got tetchy when I tried to persist, ordering me to sit down and stop being bad.

Those were enjoyable times, in a way.  New Labour was starting to be slick, but nothing like as slick as it would later become.

 

Nobody now believes me when I say (truthfully) that Labour apparatchiks tried to slam the doors of Labour’s 1997 manifesto launch press conference in my face, claiming ludicrously ‘It’s full’. But they did. I pushed past.

 

Nobody now believes me when I recall that a very senior Blair aide promised me an interview with Mr Blair,  purely to get me of the doorstep of a building in which he was cowering, rather than risk me asking him an embarrassing question in front of the TV cameras on the way out.  Perhaps they recalled a certain incident involving me, Neil Kinnock and an attempted question, during the 1992 election campaign. There had been a sort of melee, as I had tried to ask a question (having been ignored at a press conference), and Mr Kinnock's aides had sought to prevent me. In the end, Mr Kinnock rather nobly intervened to rescue me from his would-be guardians. This had been the start of the profoundly obscure 'Jennifer's Ear' affair, which some Labour supporters still believe helped cost Mr Kinnock the election. I don't, but then who would want to be responsible for saving John Major's bacon, which I would be if 'Jennifer's Ear' had had the impact attributed to it. Gosh, it's now 22 years ago. 

 

Idiotically, I did not negotiate any details of the promised interview.  I could see it was a ploy, but thought it was at least a genuine ploy. When I was ushered into the presence, the Blair Creature and Alastair Campbell briefly heckled me, ignored my questions, and then got up to leave as I was checking a reference in the Labour Manifesto. I have a picture of this moment (Mr Blair had a personal photographer on hand), and the smirks on the faces of those two are worth seeing. Well, they got what they wanted so badly, but whether both or either of them are now glad of the way their lives went, others must judge. 

 

What I actually wanted to ask the Blair creature about was his insertion of one his children into a highly selective Roman Catholic state school, of a type wholly unavailable to most people in Britain,  while saying in his manifesto ‘What I want for my own children, I want for yours’.

 

Since Labour’s then policy actually discouraged the establishment and spread of schools such as the one involved, I thought this was a bit of a nerve. It was very similar to the nerve of former Education Secretary Michael Gove, now Britain’s leading Blairite, who spent years going about the wonders of the Church of England Comprehensive a couple of minutes from his home, Burlington Danes at Wormwood Scrubs, and then chose the highly selective Grey Coat Hospital (also C of E), miles from his home,  for his own child.  By the way, I haven’t been in touch with Mr Gove, nor he with me, since I attacked him for this piece of Blairism.

What Should be Worrying us Most in the Middle East?

I very much recommend this article by Patrick Cockburn,

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/islamic-state-us-failure-to-look-into-saudi-role-in-911-has-helped-isis-9731563.html

 

which, as usual with Patrick’s work,  provides a new and refreshing examination, cool and well-informed,  of the questions which should be worrying us.  One part of it which I think is very important concerns the 28 pages excised from the official US inquiry onto the terror outrages of 11th September 2001, and even now unpublished. 

 

He also mentions the excellent, indeed essential book about that event, ‘The Eleventh Day: the Full Story of 9/11’ by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan. I have long urged any seriously interested person to read this superb and carefully-researched account of that extraordinary, much misunderstood event. I would hope that any good library would have it, or be able to obtain it.  Details are viewable here

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Eleventh-Day-Anthony-Summers/dp/0552156183

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What do we threaten the Scots with next? Exploding haggises?

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Actually if I were Scottish, I would be voting ‘Yes’ just to spite all the people who are trying to frighten and browbeat me into voting ‘No’. Anyone with any spirit must surely feel this way.

If ever we do get the much-promised vote on EU membership, the anti-British side will use just the same tricks and smears to scare us into staying in this miserable liberal German empire. I only hope that, if so, we will have the backbone to ignore them and vote for our independence.

Listen to it – the poor Scots are threatened with currency collapse, bankruptcy, irrelevance and isolation. There’ll even be a frontier, doubtless with barking dogs, searchlights and minefields planted with exploding haggises.

Well, what do you think we’re all going to get if we stay in the EU? The real scare story is that 40 years of EU membership and wild overspending have brought the whole UK to ruin.

The current strength of sterling is an absurdity and can’t last. George Osborne’s boom is the most irresponsible bubble since the 1970s, based entirely on ludicrously cheap housing credit.

 Roughly half the containers that leave our main port at Felixstowe contain nothing  but air, and quite a few of  the rest are crammed with  rubbish for recycling, because our real export trade has  collapsed, much of it throttled by EU membership.

The incoming containers are full, of course, of cars, clothes, gadgets and food – but how are we to pay for them?

As usual, the biggest story of the week was buried – the rise in our monthly trade deficit during July to £3.3 billion. That includes the famous ‘services’ which are supposed to make  up for the fact that we don’t manufacture much any more.

It is impossible to see how we can live so far beyond our means for much longer. Both Government and people are deeper in debt than ever.

So forgive me if I point out that it’s quite scary enough staying in the UK. The trouble with the ‘Better Together’ lot is that scares are all they’ve got.

None of the three party leaders – supposedly rivals, actually accomplices – truly loves the Union.

They all view it as an outdated, conservative idea and they much prefer the glinting Teutonic rule of Brussels  and Berlin.

They’ve been working night and day for decades to destroy British patriotism, culture  and history, and replace them with a tasteless, pasteurised multiculturalism.

Who can blame the Scots for wanting to stay Scottish rather than be processed into the  same greyish puree?

But David Cameron and Nick Clegg both correctly fear a ‘Yes’ vote will cost them their jobs, which they should by rights have lost after their dire results in the Euro elections  in May.

And Ed Miliband fears that  a ‘Yes’ vote will destroy his party’s chances of ever winning  a Westminster majority.  That’s all they’re fighting  for – themselves.

Having got used to the idea that Scotland may say goodbye, I’ve been thinking about possible good consequences. Setting aside the puncturing of David Cameron, one of the most over-rated figures ever to become Premier, there’s the strong possibility that, without Scotland, we will actually leave the EU.

I don’t presume to speak for the Welsh, but I  am quite confident that England on her own  can, if she wishes, be a happy and successful civilisation. In fact it might do us no end of good to rediscover ourselves.

But one thing we must stop doing – in fact it would be a good idea to stop it now. A nation  that has trouble keeping itself together has no business bombing other nations or peoples  to try to force them to do our will.

A peek at out leaders' secret past

I am pleased that a film – The Riot Club – has been made about spoiled young men who spend their time at Oxford getting drunk  and wrecking things.

Three of our most senior Tory figures belonged to such a club, and don’t seem to  me to have been either frank or especially apologetic about their behaviour.

On the contrary, very serious (and I would think expensive) attempts have been made  by unknown persons to prevent the publication  of pictures showing these future grandees in their drinking suits. One such picture has been mysteriously, if clumsily, doctored, presumably to conceal something important.

Given that the Tory Party has made such an effort to attack Ed Miliband for his inability to eat a sandwich, I think we are entitled to dwell on its leaders’ ability to get hog-whimperingly drunk in tailcoats.

Cameron's 'triumph' is Libya's disaster

More news of Mr Cameron’s  neglected triumph in Libya. As he prepares to dispatch RAF jets to pound yet another desert, our modern Churchill really should boast more about the outcome of his brilliantly directed overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi.

For instance, did you know that the Libyan parliament, keystone of the ‘democracy’ Mr Cameron created  in Tripoli with British rockets and bombs, is now meeting in a requisitioned  Greek car ferry, moored to a dockside  in Tobruk? Tobruk, as some of you will remember from history, is the last stop in Libya before you get to Egypt.

It cannot, alas, meet anywhere else  in Libya because the rest of the country is under the control of rampaging Islamist gangsters, and people-smugglers who daily send hundreds more refugees in leaking boats towards Italy and, eventually, Calais. The mood on board the car ferry is said to be ‘sombre’. I should think so.

If the entire Libyan parliament turns up at Tilbury on the good ship Elyros,  I suggest that immigration officers direct them to the hills outside Witney, where Mr Cameron has a nice weekend home, paid for by you and me.

There, he and the Libyan MPs can wonder together where they went wrong.

A new study shows that teenagers who smoke cannabis are 60 per cent less likely to finish school or get a degree, compared with those who never touch it.

Daily users of the drug are also seven times more likely to attempt suicide than non-users.

These important facts could explain several worrying trends in our country. Yet the report was barely mentioned by most media – especially those who relentlessly plug irresponsible and wicked campaigns to destroy what’s left  of our drug laws.

A survey into the past and present drug use of Left-wing media executives might explain this strange reticence.  Time it was done.

If you wish to comment, please scroll down

What Causes a Fuss, and What Doesn't

Curious that a new study of cannabis effects on the young, which looks impeccable to me, has attracted so little attention, whereas the Liberal Democrats’ increasingly desperate flirtation with the destroyers of the drug laws always gets endless publicity, as does any new propaganda body purporting to be a ‘commission’ and so purporting to be impartial, which just so happens to oppose the alleged ‘prohibition’ of drugs, and the phantasmal  ‘war on drugs’ which are supposed to be making so many lives a misery, and flinging so many first-time users of drugs into prison.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/heavy-cannabis-use-makes-teenagers-more-likely-to-quit-school-9721694.html?origin=internalSearch

 

Yet here we are, with a clear correlation between cannabis use and bad school performance, plus suicide attempts and the use of other dangerous drugs, and you’d barely know the study had happened.

 

None of these correlations is really surprising, when you consider what cannabis is and does, and I believe it is only lack of research (caused by lack of political and commercial interest in such research, and not just negative lack, but actual positive unwillingness in a culture increasingly dominated by the pro-drug lobby) that prevents us finding correlations between cannabis and violent crime, cannabis and homelessness, cannabis and unemployment,  cannabis and long-term mental illness etc.

 

Yet I could find only two references to this study in British national newspapers (there may have been more, but my search engines and electronic libraries have not uncovered them).

 

No doubt the pro-drug ‘Comment warriors’, whose dreary hunched shapes I can see gathering on the telegraph wires nearby, will flap down here to attack this, as they always do. This is because they are terribly afraid of the truth about the drugs they pretend are harmless, and hope to frighten people such as me into silence.

 

Less neglected, though not as prominent as it should have been, and amazingly unexamined, was a  story ( again based on what appears to be a reputable study) suggesting that use of certain sleeping pills may be linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

 

Six million prescriptions for the types of sleeping pills involved were issued in England alone last year.

 

Yet I have seen no mass panic calls for the immediate banning of these pills (compare this with the effects of the salmonella in eggs scare and the wholly illogical beef and CJD scare), let alone any examination of the possibility that all and any pills of this kind, or of any mind-altering drugs whose operation is poorly understood, might *by their nature* pose risks to the who use them.

 

I don’t myself urge any such panic. I am against panic. But I do wish people would wonder more about the things they happily inhale, ingest and swallow to influence their brains. We know almost nothing about the long-term effects of these things.

 

Between panic and complacency there must surely be a healthy, science based scepticism which resists calls for the general availability of mind-altering drugs (legal or illegal)  whose use is correlated with quite frightening effects; which demands hard evidence of any alleged good that they do; and which also points out that even if that good is demonstrated (which it often isn’t or cannot be), it has to be weighed against the disadvantages. It may well be that cannabis provides symptomatic relief in some cases to some sufferers. But so did Thalidomide. The risk of long-term and irreversible mental illness seems to me to cancel out any such benefits.  

Could Alex Salmond Accidentally Liberate England?

Before setting out one or two possibly over-optimistic predictions, I thought I would look back at some of the things I’ve said recently about the Scottish issue. Back in April, I wrote : ‘Have we yet even begun to realise what a huge change may overtake us in September if Scotland votes for independence and Britain ceases to exist? Silly threats about the pound, the economy and defence simply don't work. I hope they wouldn't work on us either. They actually increase the pro-independence vote. So why do we keep making them? I for one am sure that the High Command of the Tory Party actively wants Scotland to leave. It is the only way the Conservatives, who like office above all things, will ever get a majority at Westminster again. You don't think they are that cynical? Why ever not?’

 

As far back as February

(you can read it here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/02/we-ask-the-scots-to-be-loyal-but-were-the-ones-betraying-britain-.html )

    I had written : ‘I think we have lost Scotland. I felt it the other day, a disturbing sensation like that moment when the tow-rope parts, the strain too great for its rotten, decayed fibres to bear. The sulky, puzzled feebleness of the London politicians' arguments sounds desperate and defeated. Alex Salmond has already won the September referendum. Tell the Scots they can't keep the pound, and they'll just think quietly: 'Oh, yes, we will. Try and stop us.' And just imagine the reaction in a Scottish home when a friend or a relative phones from south of the border (as urged by David Cameron) to persuade them to vote against independence. Laughter would be the kindest response.

As for the Prime Minister's threat to take the whole Cabinet to Scotland, the actual sight of this squad of third-raters and phonies on the streets of Glasgow or Stirling should make a Nationalist victory certain. What has Scotland to fear by declaring independence from this unprincipled, mumbling shambles? As it happens, I am more grieved about this approaching divorce than most Englishmen will be. My earliest childhood memories are of the lovely coast of Fife, of Scottish voices and Scottish landscapes. I even like the sound of bagpipes.

And I grew up, in a Navy family, in that bleak but cosy era soon after the war, which had brought us all together in a warm Britishness that has now evaporated. I think we belong together, are stronger together and could defy the world together if we wanted.

But this does not stop me seeing what has happened. And I am amazed that so few have noticed the real problem. The leaders of the United Kingdom cannot argue for Scotland to stay in a country they themselves are working so hard to abolish.

Mr Cameron's allegiance to the European Union (which is total and unshakeable) automatically makes him the enemy of the Union of England and Scotland.

Let me explain. The EU's purpose is to abolish the remaining great nation states, carving them up into 'regions' that will increasingly deal direct with the EU's central government in Brussels.

Paris, London, Berlin, Madrid and Rome are allowed to retain the outward signs of power. But it is a gesture. All the real decisions are already taken elsewhere, from foreign policy and trade to the collection of rubbish and the management of rivers. Under this plan, England itself will cease to exist. The European Parliament gave the game away a few years ago by publishing a map of the EU in which all the regional boundaries were shown, but the word 'England' was not mentioned. Meanwhile, the smaller nations of Europe are indulged by the EU, because (unlike the big countries) they are no threat to it. They are happy to be allowed a flag, an anthem, a well-paid political class, a little pomp and circumstance - and no real power.

Like many of the EU's smaller members, Scotland is not big or rich enough to be truly independent. It can never hope to have its own free-floating currency, or its own armed forces capable of projecting power - the true indicators of sovereignty.

In truth, 'independence' will mean that Edinburgh becomes a cold vassal of Brussels, instead of a warm friend of London.

But since London itself has surrendered so much of its power and independence to the EU, this isn't the major change it would once have been. If Scotland is going to be run from Belgium anyway, why let the power and money flow through London, rather than direct to Edinburgh? Britain has given up its own national independence and sovereignty without a struggle. It is not a proper country any more. Having betrayed our own flag, we can hardly ask the Scots to be loyal to it.’

 

The key part of this prophecy , apart from the rather early prediction of a ‘Yes’ vote, was this: ‘The leaders of the United Kingdom cannot argue for Scotland to stay in a country they themselves are working so hard to abolish. Mr Cameron's allegiance to the European Union (which is total and unshakeable) automatically makes him the enemy of the Union of England and Scotland.’

 

I stick with that – though paradoxically the current last-minute melodrama of polls actually makes a ‘Yes’ vote slightly less likely than I thought it back on the 16th  February. When I wrote that, the ‘No’ campaign were serenely confident and relaxed. Now they’re neither. I suppose it’s just possible that they may yet swing it with the argument that independence is irreversible. But then again, that may well be wishful thinking. We'll all know soon enough.

 

Anyway, let’s look at what happens if there actually is a ‘Yes’ vote. For a start, most of the scare stories will turn out to be just that. It’s the same with the scare stories we are fed about what would happen if Britain left the EU. Just as the EU would have no rational interest in fouling up a major market and close neighbour, England would have no interest in causing an economic and political crisis in Scotland.

 

So we would sort out some sort of currency union, make a reasonable agreement on the debt, and use what influence we have in the EU to ensure that Scotland isn’t forced on to the ramp that leads to the Euro, or into Schengen. Since there’s no precedent for a part of an existing EU member separating from that EU member, I expect compromises can and will be found.

 

These - the Euro and Schengen -  are in fact the major dangers, and ones we can do least about. They’ve featured only slightly because the ‘No’ campaign is full of pro-Brussels figures who don’t feel happy drawing attention to the ferocious demands the EU makes on new members. Those demands rather give away the truth about the EU’s real nature, that it is a political superstate which strangles the independence of its members, who have often been inveigled into it 'democratically' with empty and dishonest elite campaigns in which the truth ahs been carefully hidden and denied.

 

In fact, the whole debate about currency union has completely confirmed what I and other anti-Euro campaigners said, to hoots of derision and feigned incomprehension, back at the end of the last century. He who controls the currency controls the country. I suspect Alex Salmond is quite happy with the outward forms of independence for now, while he consolidates his position. As long as Europe remains reasonably peaceful and prosperous, a symbolic toy nation can look and feel exactly like the real thing. Scandinavia proves this all the time, its nations passing in and out of subjugation or domination by nearby powers, as circumstances change - and everyone being too polite to mention this. Even Swedish neutrality in World War Two turns out to have been  a bit dubious, with German troops actually allowed to cross Swedish territory. 

 

As with Ireland, Scotland's crucial point of separation will come much later when the issue of currency does arise – for I am quite sure that, whatever is agreed this year and next, Edinburgh will come under relentless pressure to join the Euro. If ( see below) England leaves the EU, that pressure will be huge. 

 

But that takes us into even more fascinating territory – the future of the former UK (acronym problems will force us to think of another name for what’s left) .

 

And that’s the start.  If Scotland goes, can Wales be far behind? And then what about Northern Ireland, whose principal Unionist connection with the UK has always been with Presbyterian Scotland, not with Anglican England?

 

We shall need to think in a wholly different way. What a good opportunity, by the way, to abandon plans to update the ludicrous and useless Trident ‘deterrent’ (whom does it deter, and from what?) . And to lay aside our delusions of grandeur in the Middle East and North Africa. What is lweft of 'democratic' Libya’s ‘parliament', I see, has now retreated to a Greek car ferry moored (for the moment) at Tobruk. This may soon be the last territory it controls. 

 

WARNING: May contain traces of SARCASM: David Cameron’s genius for nation-building in the Maghreb is, if anything, even greater than his genius for nation-maintenance here at home.

 

England, having rather notably failed to sort out its own internal problems, would for some years to come have a built-in excuse for standing back modestly from the problems of others, and that, to me at least, would be very welcome.  For many years now our pose as a major power has been absurd, even laughable. Might we lose our seat on the UN Security Council? I suspect that was bound to happen anyway. We might have to relearn, instead, the ancient art of alliances, based upon interests rather than airy principles we don’t actually believe in anyway. A tough and cynical foreign office, like those of the First Elizabeth and Queen Victoria, would flourish outside the airy platitudes of the UN.

 

 

I have to confess that, though I have attempted to defend ‘Britishness’ as an idea and a nationality for many years, and remain scornful of St George’s Day celebrations and calls for an ‘English Parliament’ (we have one already, though badly in need of reinvigoration),  a part of me thrills to the return of the word ‘England’ to its old force and power. Queen Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech before the Armada,  ending ‘but I have the heart and stomach of a King ….and of a King of England, too!’ always makes me want to leap to my feet and cheer. I used to know by heart John of Gaunt’s dying speech ‘…this earth, this realm, this England’, and I think I had better get round to learning it again. In recent years I’ve tended to emphasise the bits about ‘pelting farms and rotten parchment bonds’ and ‘shameful conquest of herself’ . It would be nice to have the silver sea back, serving us ‘in the office of a wall. Or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier lands.’

 

For the really exciting possibility of all this is that a newly manoeuvrable, realistic and thoughtful England might just choose the opportunity to abandon the dead political parties which have brought it to this state, and to leave the European Union – not through empty promises of rigged referenda, but through proper debate and Parliamentary majority after an election in which the issue was properly tried between articulate and honest opponents. . This is, after all, the only way we can regain control of our borders, our territorial seas, our economy, our trade, our foreign policy and our law.

 

And if it works (as I think it very much would) it will be very interesting to see how the other former members of the ex-United Kingdom respond to our independence. They might want to come back.

 

Of course it’s much more likely that the dead, nationalized parties will survive, now supported by the EBC ( a set of initials we’ll all be learning, if Mr Salmond gets his ‘Yes’) and our political elite and their tame media will instead inveigle us into balkanizing ourselves into regions, and turning our backs on hope and freedom.

 

But one can sometimes dream.

Some Reflections on Borders, Nations (including Scotland) and the EU

Very well then, let us talk about Scottish Independence.  But please, let us do it thoughtfully. I really do not think than my views on this subject will influence anyone north of the border, and don’t see why they should.

 

Nor am I as distressed as I probably ought to be about the possibility of a Scottish secession. The main thing that annoys me about the prospect is that it might just save the Tory party from what would otherwise be unavoidable and well-deserved slow death.

 

In a parliament from which Scottish MPs had been removed, the Tories could win a majority, not through any merit, but simply because a large number of their opponents had vanished. It is the only way the Tories ever could win a Westminster majority again.

 

One has to wonder if the Tory Party’s notably feeble defence of the Union has something to do with this fact.

 

Anyway, back to the deep subject of the splitting of the United Kingdom:

 

 

Many years ago I was interviewed by Adam Boulton of Sky News about what was then my new (and first) book ‘The Abolition of Britain’, published after some difficulty but attracting a certain amount of attention.

 

Mr Boulton had at first assumed that the theme of the book was devolution, then getting under way thanks to the Blairites’ unprincipled decision to try to head off Welsh and Scottish nationalism ( growing threat to their own party)  by encouraging local parliaments. That went well, didn’t it?

As it happens, I don’t think I did more than touch on the subject (I am currently recording an audio-version of ‘Abolition of Britain’, and have so far not noticed any mention of it at all).

 

Of course it wasn’t about that at all. Those few who have read it (rather than the hostile reviews of it from which most people have formed their opinions) will know that it’s a series of essays about how deep moral and cultural changes in Britain were achieved or came about. The links between these essays are that these changes, added together, amounted to a cultural revolution as devastating as that which convulsed China during the same period – but without the violence, and so largely unnoticed.

 

It is mostly unpolitical, in the party sense,  though it contains some rather tinny reflections on the Euro and the approaching general election in which this was expected to be an important issue( it wasn’t , as it happened) . If I rewrote the book now, I’d remove these, as they subtract from it.

 

But I was reminded of this today by an article by Al Johnson here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/11080893/Scottish-independence-Decapitate-Britain-and-we-kill-off-the-greatest-political-union-ever.html

 

in which he reflects, generously :‘About 15 years ago people such as John Redwood and Peter Hitchens produced books called The End of Britain or The Abolition of Britain. They saw the principal threat as coming from the EU, I think; and though they were obviously right to be concerned about the erosion of sovereignty, I don’t think either of them expected the constitutional annihilation of the country. Now those book titles look prophetic, frankly.’

 

I can’t speak for Mr Redwood, who bafflingly remains in the Tory Party, shunted insultingly into a remote siding and cut off from any position of importance.

 

But I’d say that while I didn’t expect this in detail,  I was pretty much prepared for anything. You see, I’d seen catastrophe in Moscow in the early 1990s, and I knew that countries can fall apart far faster than people think they can, especially countries which are, in essence, federations. Shortly before I went to work in Moscow. Boris Yeltsin began to assert the existence of Russia as distinct from the USSR. I remember talking to British diplomatic experts on the Soviet Union, and asking what the rules permitted, and how far it could go. They were unsure, and reasonably regarded my speculations about frontiers and control of law-making and armed forces as premature. So it seemed then. But not for long.

 

After the 1991 putsch, I watched many of my wildest speculations take solid shape with amazing speed.  I recall a trip in autumn 1991 to the Estonia-Russia border between Narva and Ivangorod, a picturesque setting in which twin castles glare at each other across the water, and being able to cross the bridge between two increasingly separate countries,  with minimal formalities. It seemed  a bit of a joke to me and my Muscovite colleague (though the Estonians gave him – but not me – a bit of trouble on the way back) . Within a few months it had hardened into a proper guarded frontier, as had many others which had for decades been no more than a forgotten line on a map.

 

The departure of Ukraine, within absurd borders, was one of those wild speculations (What, we all wondered, would happen to the Crimea, so very Russian yet ‘given’ to Ukraine by Krushchev in a thoughtless gesture). And we see the consequences to this day.

 

As usual, in the Cassandra zone of combined prophecy and powerlessness in which I live and move and have my being, I sometimes fall victim to the desire to pronounce on what should be done about current events, and set out manifestoes and prescriptions despite having no power or influence, and no means at all to insert my ideas into the sprockets, chains and cogwheels of power.

 

This, I suspect, is because I resent being no more than a safety valve for other disenfranchised people, whose frustration and rage are assuaged because I express them on public platforms, and yearn to have some actual effect.

 

But – as I now openly recognize - all reliable indicators suggest that I am on the losing side in all major moral, cultural and political battles, and am likely to remain there until I die. My books and articles may sometimes call faintly for action, but in general they are just the last rites pronounced over the corpse of my country, muttered mainly as an act of commemoration.

 

If I could find a publisher now, I would try to combine all my books so far into one, under the title ‘The Obituary of Britain’.

 

I admit I didn’t think devolution would lead so rapidly to what we see now. It was only later that I grasped the key thing about it – that it is an aspect of the EU threat, rightly mentioned by Mr Johnson.

 

It was Ireland that first made me aware of the EU’s involvement in the break-up of the United Kingdom. I recall during an Irish general election in the 1980s suddenly realising that the EU provided a flag under which Dublin could become genuinely independent of London, and a flag under which a deal might be done over Northern Ireland, a deal which somehow bypassed the great wall of Unionism. But it was only a foggy apprehension. The later creation of the Euro, and all that has followed, seem to me to have made it seem sharper and more real.

 

About the same time, I became aware that the European Parliament had published a map (I still have a copy somewhere) of the whole EU, showing regional boundaries in every country. It had two key points of interest.

 

One was that, of all the countries of the UK, England was the only one subdivided into ‘regions’ with romantic, faraway names rooted in our history, such as ‘South East’.  In fact, the map of England showed only these regions, though most English residents are unaware of their existence, and have the vaguest idea of which one they inhabit. The counties were of course unmentioned. The word ‘England’ did not appear anywhere on it. This truthful expression of the EU’s real attitude was later ‘corrected’ after protests. The correction was less honest than the original. Modern EU maps carry the word  ‘England’, though there is in fact no such political unit, nor does the EU (or anyone else in power) ever intend there to be.

 

Scotland and Wales, meanwhile, were not cut up into regions at all, though in fact there are very distinct regional differences within both of them

 

The other was the EU recognized two separate sets of borders in Ireland. It marked the frontier between Northern Ireland and the Republic, but it also marked (just as clearly) the four historic provinces, of Ulster, Leinster, Munster and Connaught. I don’t think there was anything comparable on the map, outside the British Isles

 

This, taken together, looked to me like a challenge. The EU was saying that its idea of federation on this patch of soil was different from the UK’s idea. It envisaged Ireland as an island in the EU, destined to become four regions under Brussels, in which Dublin would fade into mere symbolism, a sentimental capital rather than a real one;  whereas we envisaged Ireland as an island containing two distinct entities - a UK province called ‘Northern Ireland’ and an independent sovereign state called ‘the Irish Republic’.

 

The EU, as Sinn Fein alone has recognized, was therefore as much of a threat to genuine Irish independence as Britain.

 

On John Bull’s other Island, Scotland and Wales would be permitted to have sentimental symbols of nationalism – they would be called ‘Scotland’ and ‘Wales’, have capitals and flags, maybe even token armed forces and national assemblies with limited powers,  and governments ( after all, Luxembourg has all these things) . But their true unsentimental status would be as regions of the EU, the equivalents of the French Aquitaine or the German Brandenburg, again owing ultimate fealty to Brussels.

 

When the EU used to end at the river Oder, on the bridge between Slubice and Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, I recall the interesting signage as one drove Westwards. First, I think, there was blue and yellow sign saying ‘Welcome to the EU’. Then you saw a rather grand one saying ‘Welcome to Brandenburg’, and eventually a tiny little blink-and-you’ve-missed-it thing in the bushes saying rather squeakily ’Welcome to Germany’. The EU and regional signs may have been the other way round, but it doesn’t matter.   It was the insignificance of the ‘Germany’ sign that I thought most interesting.  The nation I was entering (using my EU passport, as the British one had been abolished) was not Germany but the EU. The province was Brandenburg.  Germany was a memory, an interlude between 1870 and 1989, to be allowed to fade away in time. The sense that the end of the Cold War meant the triumph of the EU was also very strong. I think that understanding is essential to grasping recent developments in Ukraine.

 

By the way, mention of the Ukraine affair reminds me to express my gratitude here to Pavel Stroilov, in the current London ‘Spectator’ (6th September 2014, p. 14 , here  http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9304652/russias-nato-myth/ )

for providing useful notes on US Secretary of State James Baker’s own accounts of his 1990 conversation with Mikhail Gorbachev, in which he wrote :’NATO, whose juris[diction] would not move eastward’, plus an account of a letter Baker wrote at the time to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, also saying he had offered the USSR ‘ assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its current jurisdiction’.

 

I have never doubted that such assurances were given. Mr Stroilov, in an effort of journalistic stretching so great it almost qualifies as Pilates Yoga,  says that this can’t be right, as he cannot find any Russian records of such assurances in the Soviet records he has seen. One might suggest that perhaps they are somewhere in records he has not seen, that Mr baker would have been unlikely to have made this up and that Mikhail Gorbachev was far from the only Soviet official dealing with the USA at the time, though he may have been among the more naïve of them, as his general record shows. Mr Stroilov also manages to take seriously what is obviously a provocative Gorbachev speculation about Russia itself joining NATO, a self-evidently absurd idea which has never been remotely likely.

 

I am not digressing here, though I know it looks like it. The re-ordering of European frontiers is what we are talking about, and even the fate of Scotland is bound up in the same story as the Ukraine crisis, the Georgian and Moldovan border disputes,  the Kosovo secession, the Cyprus partition, the splitting of the Czech republic and Slovakia and perhaps above all the break-up of what was once Yugoslavia.

 

Even Vladimir Putin’s attempt to impose a different federal structure on Ukraine is a sort of mirror of EU tactics. If he can make the Ukrainian provinces more autonomous and less dependent on Kiev, he can also make borders between the east and the centre more significant, so increasing Moscow’s power over the east, and over the whole of Ukraine. If he does this, which is plainly his aim, he wins twice. Not only does he enable open Russian influence in the Don basin.

 

He can count on such an arrangement accentuating the borders between Kiev and the far West, and so promoting strife there. This will not necessarily be hard, as the nationalist militias, now well-armed and battle-hardened,  will not take kindly to being stood down by President Poroshenko, and his own official forces are weak and demoralized. There could be trouble  between Kiev liberals and the (armed and angry) ultra-nationalists who trace their ancestry to Stepan Bandera and the days before 1939 when a large chunk of Ukraine was under Polish rule.  

 

Then there’s the Yugoslav lesson. Another former federation, Yugoslavia was not very like the UK. But it had one similarity. It was a federal state on territory coveted by the EU, but a federation of a very different kind from the EU, centred on Belgrade and with some lingering connections to Moscow. If its orientation was to be changed, and a century-old German/Austrian policy desired that end, then Belgrade had to be nullified. Hence the concentration upon (undoubted) Serb atrocities and the general willingness to forget (equally undoubted) Croatian ones.

 

There was also the accelerated recognition of Slovenia, so as to return it to its pre-1918 German/Austrian orbit. And there was the 1992 EU recognition of independent Croatia, Roman Catholic and Romanised in faith and alphabet, loyal Habsburg subject until 1918, client of Berlin in 1941-45,  invariable foe and rival of  Serbia, by contrast Orthodox and Cyrillic in faith and alphabet, ally of Russia, ferocious foe of Vienna in 1914, and of Germany in 1941-45.

 

None of this outside interference in a former sovereign state ever seems to be counted as an attempt to alter the borders of Europe (though it certainly did) , the thing for which Russia gets into trouble in Crimea and elsewhere. For some reason abolishing  borders (normally a sign of conquest) doesn’t seem to get you into the same sort of trouble as shifting them. But of course the EU, as well as advancing (democratically, of course) into many countries where it previously did not rule and abolishing the borders of all Schengen members, has also created borders between the Czech Republic and Slovakia (promptly nullified by Schengen) and between former members of the Yugoslav Federation.

 

Confronted with people who don’t see how important all this is, or who argue that because the local elites were bounced into rapid support of it, it’s not actually an expansion or a border revision, one is reminded of poor, dim Jemima Puddleduck, who does not suspect the Fox’s intentions towards her even when he mentions his pressing need for Sage and Onion. Those who have not read Beatrix Potter’s powerful fable of naivety versus realism are strongly advised to do so. Charm is all very well,  but in the end it can be just as dangerous as naked force.

 

Anyway, the EU’s intentions towards the United Kingdom are, it seems to me to, encourage the secession of Scotland and Wales, and to encourage the incorporation of Northern Ireland into a four-region, EU dependent Ireland,  so diminishing Great Britain and the UK, and then to (how shall I put this?) Balkanize England into ‘Regions’ which will increasingly be oriented towards Brussels and Frankfurt. The recent quiet transformation of London into a sort of presidential republic, multicultural and very separate from England, seems to me to be a key step towards this.

 

When the process is over,  England and Britain will be no more, having no political, legal or economic significance, remembered only in Shakespeare festivals and Morris-dancing.

 

Without the EU’s enormous challenge to the pre-existing nations of Europe, none of this would be feasible. Alex Salmond would never have been heard of, the SNP still an eccentric gaggle of Gaelic-speaking fanatics, and there would be no referendum approaching. Without the collapse of British patriotism, Protestant, maritime, monarchist, liberty-loving in its bones, a collapse which I documented in 1999,  none of this would have been even thinkable. Following that collapse, what force or ideas is there to stop it? Please don’t anybody mention an ‘English Parliament’. The worst thing about this terrible idea is that it might actually come about -  some modern-architecture shed in Milton Keynes, in which the ‘regions’ of England are represented by party apparatchiks chosen from closed lists, and are allowed to debate the drainage budget and the number of windmills per hectare.

 As it is, the threat of a victory for the ‘yes’ campaign may for the first time alert the people of England and Scotland to the immense scale and importance of the political revolution which has been storming and stamping across Europe from the Atlantic to the River Bug for 50 years now, and shows no sign of ending.

Summer Timetable Has Ended - but do Americans Know What a Fortnight is?

I just thought I'd announce formally that my summer timetable is now over and that this blog is back to normal, though that seems obvious to me given the large number of posts I've placed here in the last few days.

 

I was worried because of one irritated post, when I announced the summer arrangements, complaining that I was planning to take four weeks off, which of course I wasn't.

 

I feared ( and fear) that this was a misunderstanding of the word 'fortnight', which , like the letter 'zed' (as opposed to 'zee'),  and the expression 'I'll give you a ring' (as opposed to 'I'll call you') is not in common use in the USA. 

 

Let me explain. 'Fortnight' is a corruption of 'Fourteen nights', just as the obsolete 'Sennight', which you will sometimes find in Shakespeare, is a corruption of 'seven nights'. It means 'two weeks'. So,  'I'll give you a ring in a fortnight' does not mean that I plan to give you an item of jewellery four weeks from now. It means that I will telephone you after two weeks. 

 

It is a constant puzzle and fascination to me that some English expressions have not stayed current in the USA, whereas some that were English (such as 'gotten', and not pronouncing the 'h' in 'herb') have died out in England and survived in the USA.

 

Is it because these things were regional in England and English-Americans came predominantly from certain parts of the country? Or is there some other explanation? 

 

 

I never dreamed I would say this... Stop being mean to Tony Blair!

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Let me put in a word for Anthony Blair. I despise the Blair creature so much that words long ago failed me, and I have even run out of scornful facial expressions and rude noises to use when his name is mentioned.

I long for the day when the mystery of his rise to the highest office in British politics can be documented and explained, with all the culprits exposed.

But this week I must rally to his defence. It has now become fashionable to deride him (which it certainly wasn’t in the old days) and he got a nasty reception when he was given some award at a London dinner.

Yet the people who despise him mostly continue to support the policies that destroyed him – the babyish, grandiose warmongering and demands to impose ‘democracy’ on all corners of the world.

What a burden it is these  days to be well informed, well travelled and to know a little history.

It is almost physically painful to listen to our political leaders as they jut their chins, do their Churchill imitations, and march towards yet another disaster.

And it is nearly as bad to listen to weighty commentators demanding that other people’s sons, brothers and fathers go  to war.

It is even worse to watch chirpy, dim TV war reporters exulting on screen at the latest fashionable insurgency and chumming up with gangs of smiling murderers, whose cause we have thoughtlessly chosen to back.

I ask all these people to see  if they can arrange a weekend break in Libya, the country they ‘liberated’ a couple of years ago. The Tripoli airport, alas, long ago closed and seems to have been burned down.

But perhaps they can hitch a ride on one of the pirate boats that criss-cross the Mediterranean, bringing uncontrollable legions of migrants to Italy, bound for Calais.

That filthy business, too, is the fault of our Prime Minister and those who supported his Libya adventure. Gaddafi, whose murder by brigands caused Hillary Clinton to cackle, prevented that.

The disturbing scenes at Calais, as migrants battle to board British-bound ships, are David Cameron’s direct responsibility, and the responsibility of all those who uncritically backed his adventure. We hear quite a lot about the horrors of the Islamic State, and rightly so. Brave reporters have ventured into the zones where it is taking power, though it may soon be unwise for them to do so.

But nobody goes to Libya,  now a cauldron of blood and screams where no sane person will venture, a horror caused entirely by us.

And I read very little from Donetsk and Lugansk, the Ukrainian cities which have  for months been indiscriminately shelled by the Kiev  junta whose violent, lawless seizure of power we so stupidly backed last winter.

The Kiev regime has been ‘killing its own people’ in their hundreds, and sad columns of refugees are fleeing from its guns and rockets, and from the cruel ultra-nationalist militias which fight alongside it.

But the sort of people who normally complain about such horrors, and demand the overthrow of those who do them, are silent.

They prefer to say lofty and noble things about wicked Vladimir Putin and the nasty Russians – who did not start this war and who warned for years that they had had enough of EU and Nato expansion into neutral territory.

No doubt, if Mr Blair had  not gone off to spend more  time with his money, he would be taking all the same wrong sides as Mr Cameron is taking now. But so are most of the people who now affect to despise Mr Blair.

It’s no good damning the  man, and continuing to support the policies.

No Ransom for terrorists (unless they are the IRA)

The Prime Minister says very emphatically that this country does not pay ransom to terrorists. I am very sorry, but this is not true.

Our leaders somehow forget  that they paid, and continue to  pay to this day, a huge ransom to the Provisional IRA.

It doesn’t just take the form of money, though many former terrorist killers now live at ease on the British public payroll.

It takes the shape of power, privilege and acceptance, a vast, lawless amnesty for convicted criminals – and in allowing them to keep a huge and menacing arsenal while pretending to have got rid of it.

Once, long ago, I was rather proud of our policy of never  paying ransom.

Now I think it’s dishonest and inconsistent, and if it affected  me personally I would despise  it utterly.

Are the lights about to go out once more?

The threat of severe power cuts is now even worse than I have long feared and warned. EDF has unexpectedly shut down four nuclear reactors because of cracks in key parts of their structure. One of our remaining coal-fired stations has been damaged by a fire. A key gas-fired station is threatened with shutdown because of high gas prices.

A serious country would have planned for  such contingencies. Mad, Soviet Britain, where  swivel-headed Green fanatics rule and their opponents are shouted down, has not.

On the contrary, we recently blew up the cooling towers of Didcot ‘A’ power station, and will soon demolish its perfectly good generating hall, in obedience to mad Green diktats.

I recommend panic-buying candles now. If you don’t, you will find out in detail how useless wind-power is when the wind isn’t blowing.

The treatment of Ashya King’s parents proves once again that the modern police do not enforce the law – they enforce state power.

Ashya’s parents committed no crime. But they defied  the state, which retaliated by arranging to have them flung into jail. The same state, we learn from HM Inspector of Constabulary, responds to many crime complaints by telling the victim to investigate it himself. I am not joking when I  say it is time to disband the police and start again.

Is he stupid or just Selfish

No surprise that Will Self, former druggie, liberal  bigot and BBC favourite, has attacked George Orwell.

Mr Self, whose twirling, pretentious sentences are like a tangle of wiring in a dusty drawer, calls the author of Animal Farm a ‘mediocrity’. Well, if Orwell was a ‘mediocrity’, I don’t know where that leaves Mr Self.

Orwell was a patriotic, liberty-loving socialist who learned to loathe most of  his Leftist comrades. His writing – unlike theirs – was as clear as a newly cleaned windowpane. That is because he, unlike them, refused to lie for the cause, and admitted its faults. They loathed him for it when he was alive, and they always will loathe him for it.

I am ashamed to admit that I was selfishly resentful when I heard that William Pooley, the courageous British nurse, was being flown home to be treated for ebola.

I grumbled to myself that it was stupid to risk others in this country in this way, though I lacked the courage to say so publicly.   I was completely wrong. 

Not only that, Mr Pooley’s cheerful bravery, and the cool competence of those who have successfully restored him to health,  have been a bright light in otherwise dark times. I was very wrong. I am very sorry.

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'The Bombing War' - Richard Overy's History

And so the anniversary season continues, with the 75th anniversary of the day Britain and France fell into the trap they thought they had set for Hitler, and declared war on Germany for the sake of Poland. A year later France was an occupied vassal of Germany, and Britain a bankrupt subordinate of the USA. 75 years later both France and Britain are provinces in a German-dominated European Union. And yet it's still not done to wonder if our 1939 declaration of war might have been mistimed. 

 

Of course, in the fine old tradition of British bluster, we didn’t actually do anything to help Poland as it was invaded, bombed, partitioned and abolished. But we did make some speeches, drop bundles of leaflets on German cows in the dark (sometimes the aircrews didn’t bother to undo the bundles, which could then be quite lethal) and move British troops on to the continent, where they could more easily be captured by the Germans.  

 

But that’s another story. The contrast between the myth of 1939-45 and the reality of history is so huge that most people, confronted with any part of the truth, just goggle, gibber and angrily refuse to believe demonstrable facts.

 

Even 75 years later, it’s risky to examine those facts. I hope soon to take a look at Leo McKinstry’s new book on Operation Sealion, the German invasion that never was , and almost certainly never could have been. Mr McKinstry, as far as I can judge from a quick glance, has portrayed the rapid abandonment of this sketchy and undeveloped invasion plan as mainly a triumph of British resolve, organisation, courage, etc.  In my view it was largely called off because of Hitler’s severe lack of interest in such an incredibly risky operation against a country he didn’t much care about, and which posed no significant threat to him. (Compare the colossal resources he deployed against Russia a year later). It was also caused by the reluctance of his own generals and admirals to get involved in such an obvious mare’s nest.

 

It is true that Britain, far from ‘standing alone’ in 1940, had all the resources of the Empire behind her, possessed efficient war industries, had a strong scientific sector and had, thanks to Chamberlain, rearmed quite efficiently for the purposes of home defence (though not for a continental land war).  That is why the RAF was able to defeat the Luftwaffe over Southern England, though things might have been very different , and much worse, if we had committed the RAF to the defence of France a few months earlier.

 

The problem was that, having declared war on Germany in 1939 and promptly been defeated and expelled from the continent in 1940, Britain would have been in a very awkward position if Hitler had defeated the USSR.  At that stage, all realistic hopes of a German defeat would ahve evaporated, and Britain would have had to sue for peace, with no need for an invasion by Germany. As long as Russia remained undefeated, there was still a choice between fighting on and capitulation, and the option of capitulation was rejected in 1940 by Churchill, to his eternal credit. A country which has declared war and failed to win it will not get good or generous terms if it then goes to its rival and asks for peace.

 

If we and France had left Poland to its own devices in April and May 1939, we would not have been in this very tricky position. Non-combatant neutrals have no need to make peace, or seek terms for it.  Hitler would probably have inveigled Poland into an anti-Soviet alliance, with a chunk of Ukraine (yes, Ukraine again - it always comes into these things) as Poland’s prize for joining the attack on Stalin. Records show that Hitler and Ribbentrop did put such a  scheme to Colonel Josef Beck, the thirsty Polish foreign minister, in early 1939. 

 

And perhaps that development might have brought about renewed and serious talks between Britain, France and the USSR. These might have been more successful than the discussions aborted in summer 1939 when it was clear Hitler was willing to offer more to Stalin than we were. Given that we eventually gave Stalin  a free hand over the whole of Central Europe, our gentlemanly hesitancy in 1939 looks rather unwise, but such is history, crammed with the monuments of unpleasant surprises. In any casen entry into the war in alliance with Russia would certainly have had a better chance of success than one in alliance with Colonel Beck. 

 

Anyway, this brings me to my main summer reading project, Richard Overy’s ‘The Bombing War' , now available in a reasonably portable Penguin paperback (though I wish it was easier to navigate the footnotes).

 

Longstanding readers will recall my accounts of Anthony Grayling’s devastating account of the British bombing of Germany ‘Among the Dead Cities’, and of Sir Max Hastings’s excellent ‘Bomber Command’ . Others will,  I hope, recall my championing, on Radio 4 and elsewhere, of Bishop George Bell (who lost two brothers in the Great War) and Major Richard Stokes MC MP (a highly-decorated Great War artillery offficer) , non-pacifist objectors to the deliberate bombing of German civilians. Also some may remember a discussion of the criticisms of the effectiveness of the bombing campaign levelled by Sir Henry Tizard, as described in an interesting series of lectures by C.P.Snow.

 

I get into no end of trouble for my position on this. I am told that I am unpatriotic, even now, for discussing it or for being distressed by the extreme and horrible cruelties inflicted by our bombs on innocent women and children, who could not conceivably be held responsible for Hitler’s crimes. On the contrary, I believe it is the duty of a proper patriot to criticize his country where he believes it to have done wrong.

 

I am told I am defaming the memory of the bomber crews. I have never done so, and never will. They had little idea of what they were doing, died terrible deaths in terrible numbers thanks to the ruthless squandering of life by their commanders, and showed immense personal courage. It is those who, knowing what was being done, ordered them into battle that I blame.

 

I am told that I am equating our bombing of Germany with the German mass murder of the Jews, when I would not dream of making such a comparison,  never have done so and never will. I am told that I am excusing the mass murder of the Jews, when nothing could ever excuse it and I should certainly never attempt to do so. Is it still necessary to say that two wrongs do not make a right, and that one horribly wrong thing may be worse than another horribly wrong thing, and yet they may both still be horribly wrong, examined by themselves as actions?

 

I am told that I wasn’t there. This is true, but Bell, Stokes and Tizard were, and protested,  much as I do and for the same reasons, moral in two cases, practical in one. I hope I should have had their courage. I think I can say that I am sometimes prepared to espouse unpopular causes.

 

I am told that the bombing was necessary because our survival was at stake. It quite simply wasn’t – Hitler had been irreversibly defeated at Stalingrad, and the USA were in the war, long before the mass bombing got under way.

 

I am also told that it was not our policy to kill civilians, and that they died accidentally as a result of attacks on military targets. This is flatly untrue, as I shall shortly show .

 

I am also told that the bombing was justified by its military effect upon Germany, and that it advanced Germany’s defeat. This is , to put it mildly, highly questionable.

 

In the following review (there will be two parts of which this is the first) of Professor Overy’s book, I shall adduce evidence which seems to me to devastate the case of those who continue to claim that the deliberate bombing of German civilians in their homes was militarily or morally justified. I would urge any who wish to attack this view to obtain and read the book before doing so. It is a formidable work of research and marshalled scholarship, dispassionate and carefully referenced:

 

The book ranges over much more than the British bombing of Germany. Did you know, for instance, that the Italian Air Force once bombed Tel Aviv?  Details of German bombing of  the USSR, and accurate accounts of the German bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam in 1939 and 1940, are well worth reading, not least because of the large myths which have grown up around both of these events, quite horrible enough unadorned. The descriptions of the very heavy Allied bombing of German-occupied countries, and the strains this caused to their powerless populations, are particularly painful.

 

But these are things I must urge the reader of Professor Overy’s book to examine for himself or herself.

 

It is the British Empire’s bombing of Germany, and to some extent the parallel American bombing of Germany, which I wish to examine on the grounds of both military effectiveness and morality.

 

It is my view that the facts form a great cloud of witness against this form of warfare, which we must hope is never again adopted by any civilized nation, or indeed by any nation. I used to hold another view. Let us see if I, helped by Richard Overy, can persuade you.

 

On page 243 we learn that the deliberate bombing of cities in World War Two was not a retaliation against Hunnish barbarism, but definitely begun by the RAF, on 11th May 1940, long before the Blitz,  with a  raid on what was then known as Muenchen Gladbach (it is now, for tedious reasons,  known as Moenchengladbach) in western Germany. This was not, as some claim, a response to Germany’s bombing of Rotterdam, because Rotterdam was not bombed  till 14th May. The main reason for the attack seems to have been that Winston Churchill, who favoured bombing in general and had always suported the idea of a separate Air Force,  had taken over from Neville Chamberlain, who opposed the bombing of cities on principle. The town was defined as a military-economic target and the attack was supposed to be in response to Germany’s invasion of the Low Countries, just begun.  

 

The extent of the damage was slight. As discussed here, and particularly dealt with by Max Hastings,  the RAF missed most of its targets hopelessly badly, and its inadequate bombing planes, mostly poorly designed and using outdated tactics, were blasted from the sky by the Luftwaffe in terrible numbers during the early part of combat.

 

On page 254, the language of British leaders began to take on a rather fearsome tone. Winston Churchill speculates in a letter (8th July 1940)  to his friend and Aircraft Production Minister Lord (Max) Beaverbrook that an ‘absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland’ would help to Bring Hitler down. Arthur Harris kept a copy of this letter and told Andrew Boyle in 1979 ‘That was the RAF mandate’.

 

The killing of workers was an explicit policy. In June 1941 (p.257) we find an Air Ministry draft directive saying that ‘Continuous and relentless bombing of these workers and their utility services, over a period of time, will inevitably lower their morale, kill a number of them and thus appreciably reduce their industrial output.

 

In April of the same year (p.258) a policy review urged attacks on ‘working-class ‘ areas. In November that year (also p.258) a memorandum almost certainly written by Harris was asking if the time had not come to strike ‘against the people themselves’.  In May (p.259), the Director of Air Intelligence welcomed an attack on the ‘the livelihood, the homes, the cooking heating, lighting and family life of…the working class’ (they were the lost mobile and most vulnerable to such an attack).

 

In November 1941, Sir Richard Peirse, then Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, told ‘the Thirty Club’ that his planes had nearly a  year been attacking ‘the people themselves’, intentionally.(p.259)

 

‘I mention this because for a long time the Government for excellent reasons has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call Military Targets. …I can assure you, gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples.’  

On the same page it is shown that senior officials knew of the policy but preferred the truth of it not to be widely known in case ‘false and misleading deductions’ were made.

 

A profoundly disturbing Air Staff memorandum(p.265) explicitly desires that towns should me made ‘physically uninhabitable’ and the people in them must be ‘conscious of constant personal danger’. The aim was to produce ‘destruction’ and ‘the fear of death’.

 

Harris himself wrote in April 1942 (p.287)’We have got to kill a lot of Boche before we win this war’. Harris, paradoxically to his credit, never lied to himself or anyone else about what he was doing. He never shied away from his purpose of killing Germans and wanted it acknowledged publicly. Perhaps he suspected that Churchill and others would seek to disavow the policy later.

 

On p.288 you will find details of Lord Cherwell’s famous minute calling for the de-housing of a third of Germany’s population (an aim based on totally wrong and exaggerated ideas of the power of bombing, as it turned out). ‘Investigation seems to show that having one’s house demolished is most damaging to morale’, it said, airily. You might say. You might also say that it would be hard to destroy that many houses intentionally without , equally intentionally, destroying many of their occupants.

 

There is plenty more of this in Professor Overy’s account.  I’ll turn to the effectiveness, or otherwise, of the bombing in a future posting.