Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 229

Backwards or Forwards? How to do Good

I’m gripped by the revelation from David Blunkett that Prince Charles favours the restoration of Grammar Schools. It’s not the opinion that surprises me – Charles has many good opinions, and quite a few silly ones too. He is at least a thoughtful person who cares hugely about this country and its people, which is more than can be said for a lot of persons who have held his position in the past, or in other countries.

 

I’ve always thought, myself, that Charles should have used all his influence to get his own sons into such a school (yes, I can see the difficulties, but I suspect they could have been overcome). I believe that sending them to Eton wrongly identified the monarchy with a particular class and type, which is quite well-represented enough on the nation’s upper deck. But I had no platform for my views when the Eton decision was first taken.

 

If he’d sent them to state grammars, the republican egalitarians would have found it very hard to attack an heir to the throne sending his children to state schools, and the campaign for the restoration of selection would have been helped at a time when it was very weak. Maybe we would now actually have restored grammars, an aim I think is attainable, but which is still some years away.

 

But that’s by the way. What really gripped me was Mr Blunkett’s description of the encounter.

 

‘He (the Prince) was very keen that we should go back to a different era when youngsters had what he would have seen as the opportunity to escape from the background, whereas I wanted to change their background’.

 

Mr Blunkett is hard to dislike as a person. Anyone who has made so much out of a life blighted form the beginning by multiple Job-like tragedies (his own blindness, his father’s terrible death in an industrial accident) , has to be admired.

 

But I have never thought this should in any way influence my view of his politics, or my judgement of his performance as a politician. And I don’t think Mr Blunkett would want to be shown any mercy on those grounds, either.

 

But he is sensitive to criticism, and once wrote me a personal letter in response to some rude things I had said about his tenure at the Education Department. I was impressed by the attention to detail, but unmoved. I thought then, and think now, that Mr Blunkett did no good to the schools, and served only to give the impression of serious reform, when there was none.

 

Why should it have been otherwise? Mr Blunkett came from one of Labour’s most left-wing nurseries, the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire.  Once upon a time I knew an interesting and perhaps paradoxical story about Mr Blunkett’s involvement with the school uniform issue in Sheffield, but I no longer have access to those files.

 

He was an egalitarian zealot, who viewed comprehensive schooling as a wholly necessary part of a moral social revolution. You’d no more ask such a person to restore rigour, order and authority to English schooling than you’d ask Maximilian Robespierre to return the Church of England to its former glory, or get Ernie Marples and Richard Beeching to form a consortium to rebuild the railways. His heart wouldn’t be in it.

 

The whole point of comprehensive schooling is that it puts politics first, education second. That’s one of two reasons why its total educational failure, which is beyond all denial, has never been enough of a scandal to get the project cancelled.  Imagine an aircraft that failed as often, or any consumer product that was so consistently less successful than the brand it had replaced. They would long ago have been scrapped and replaced, and the original model restored. The other reason is the way in which the elite –above all, politicians - are able to buy or wangle their way out of the comprehensive experiment by the many methods so many times detailed here.

 

So look again at Mr Blunkett’s rather patronising summary of his conversation with the heir and successor of William the Conqueror, Edward III and Good Queen Bess:

 

‘He (the Prince) was very keen that we should go *back* to a different era when youngsters had what he would have seen as the opportunity to escape from the background, whereas I wanted to change their background’.

 

Why *back*? In what way would a such a move be backward? First, such opportunity to escape still exists in the present in a  few of the more enlightened continental countries and in Northern Ireland, where it is successful and popular.  It is a move sideways, into a perfectly attainable alternative present day.

 

But Mr Blunkett, too, wants to go *forward* as he would describe it, though how he is so sure I do not know, into a different era, one where in some strange way, an egalitarian state has succeeded where all such utopias have failed before, and changed the general conditions for the better without bothering with the minute particulars. Who cares if it hasn’t actually happened? Mr Blunkett’s personal progressive benevolence is itself so good that we should support him anyway, apparently.

 

Whereas the Prince (as he has many times proved with his personal involvement in charitable work) just wants to do measurable practicable good to identifiable individuals.

 

William Blake understood all this long ago, when he wrote ‘He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer’.

That's More Like it - a Hostile but Fair Review

Now, that’s more like it. The Guardian’s sister paper, the Observer’ yesterday carried a review of my ’Special Relationship’ programme, which it may just be possible for readers to listen to on iplayer for a short while longer, but hurry. The reviewer, Euan Ferguson, opened with the usual abuse (though I am baffled by the suggestion that I have ever claimed to be brave, and think ‘populism’ a strange accusation to level against a columnist who urges his conservative readers not to vote Tory, or who condemns the bombing of German civilians during World War Two.

 

But that did not prevent him from giving a fair-minded review of the programme itself. You can read the whole thing here:

 

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/jun/28/special-relationship-uncovered-charles-paris-jimmy-page-review

 

 

 

But for those who can’t be bothered, it opens thus: ‘I bow to few in my admiration for Peter Hitchens's unerring determination to grasp wrong ends of sticks, too often persuading himself that the end grasped represents the bravely unpopulist when both meanings could better be reversed. But…’

 

But, indeed.

 

 

And then it continues, thus:

‘I have to say he made a wonderful fist of a fierce, lucid, timely programme on US-UK relations. The Special Relationship: Uncovered was scripted and voiced with clarity, the perfect pace for radio, some great interviewees and the minimum of intrusive noise – apart from a bizarre but briefly welcome horned-up version of Funky Nassau.

It told the story – and surely this should have become a series – of the dysfunctional imbalance in each side's perception of this relationship. There were polite voices euphemising, but essentially it came down to this: America, since it grew up and got bigger than us, now "serves" Britain in much the same way as a stallion "serves" a skittish mare. Hitchens traced with style, and not a little indefatigability, various rare records and recordings…’

 

 

 

How to be Tough

The credulity of the remaining Tories about David Cameron never ceases to amaze.  

 

For instance, one contributor wrote : ‘I have a lot of respect for Peter Hitchens, but this time he has got it spectacularly wrong. There seems little doubt that Cameron was betrayed by other gutless EU leaders influenced by Merkel who was running scared of the possible election of a political opponent. This article does little to reduce the danger and disaster of an elected Labour government in 2015.’

 

Nor is it meant to, not that any 'danger' 'or 'disaster' actually exist. The disaster has already happened, thanks to the repeated gullibility of Tory voters.  This cry of ‘Vote Tory or you’ll let Labour back in!’ is the last crumbling sandcastle on the Tory beach.  But millions have now grasped that this is an empty warning, because Labour *are* back in.  Not only has Mr Cameron been adopted by the Blairite press, which is committed to attacking Ed Miliband. There’ s no significant policy difference between the Tories and Labour, except (as I ceaselessly point out) that Labour would never have dared smash up the armed forces as badly as Mr Cameron has done. The utter destruction of the Tory Party is in fact the only hope for conservatism in this country, as it would create the possibility( no more) that a properly patriotic political party would emerge to fill the space left byb a Tory collapse. A nominally Labour government, no different from the actual labour government we now endure,  would be a small price to pay for that, and many who voted UKIP last May will do the same next may because they have made the same simple calculation.

 

My suggestion that Conservatives might consider voting Labour in protest at the infantile personal campaign against Mr Miliband was an expression of disgust at the Stalinizing of our politics and their reduction to a crude, moronic and evil playground game in which someone's personal appearance is more important than his actual political opinions. I was just as furious against the similar dismissals of William Hague because he was bald, but as this nastiness was being done by Labour supporters I could not approach it as I approach the denigration of Mr Miliband.

 

Some may have found it shocking. They should be far more shocked by the techniques against which it was a protest, techniques that will, if not stopped, destroy our free society.

 

But then again, how many actual Tories still survive? Even the strongest and richest Tory associations are now increasingly short of members and money, and the general state of the party is (I am reliably informed) far worse than official figures show. Oddly enough, after all the many insults and splats in the face which the Party leadership had delivered to the membership during the last 40 years, it was the issue of same-sex marriage that proved to be one thing too many.

 

I suppose those who remain in the Tory Party are more or less immune from facts or logic, and are moved by a rather touching loyalty, which is not in any way reciprocated by their leaders. It is a sad thing to see, like a loyal dog which remains at the side of a cruel master.  I do wonder how anyone manages to feel loyalty for a political party. I could no more feel loyalty to a burger bar or a recycling depot, myself. Political parties are by their nature cynical things, involving necessary compromise within the bounds of principle.

 

But as soon as principle is cast aside , they are nothing more than vehicles, and guess who is providing the motive power, and guess who is doing the driving? If people realised how much negative power they actually possessed, by simply withdrawing their endorsement from these people, they would make much more use of it.

 

Anyway, let’s just examine, for a moment, some of the Prime Minister’s claims on his own behalf, that his lone objection to Jean-Claude Juncker as EU Commission President was a principled fight. And also the claims of the lobby, who were all told to write that this battle moved Britain a step closer to leaving the EU, and all duly wrote it as if it were true. There is not one half-ounce of evidence for this claim. 

 

What was the principle? Whom did Mr Cameron prefer to Mr Juncker, and why? What matter of principle distinguished this perfectly normal Eurocrat from any of the other possible candidates for the job? If you don't like palm trees, stay away from the South Seas. If you don't ike kangaroos, don't go and live in Australia.   If you don’t like federalism, then don’t belong to the EU. Belonging to the EU and decrying federalism is like not liking Chinese food, and always going to Chinese restaurants to eat. Daft. (The question of whether Mr Cameron really doesn’t like federalism will be dealt with in a moment).

 

The European Union is and always has been committed to ever-closer union. The politicians of EU countries are committed to this too. They have all signed a treaty saying so.  It is the whole point of the EU. Edward Heath may famously have lied to the nation that no sacrifice of sovereignty was involved in joining the Common Market, but that lie has been repeatedly exposed, and even Mr Cameron (who I sometimes suspect of quite severe historical ignorance for one of his education, and who by all appearances pays little attention to public affairs) must be aware of the truth.

 

Why, Britain is even now involved in a tangle over how much of our legal system we will submit to EU direction, a tangle which has put him on the spot about the European Arrest Warrant. This Warrant, whether you like it or not (I don’t),  is a gross interference in our internal affairs. It is also one from which Mr Cameron could, if he wished, now extract us, simply by deciding to do so. This is thanks to a unique episode in which, for the only time in its history, the EU has agreed to cede powers back to nation states which it had previously taken from them.  My understanding, from all reports published of his view,  is that Mr Cameron intends to refuse this opportunity to return significant sovereignty to Britain, and to opt back in. How does this square with his claim to be an opponent of federalism?

 

The answer is that it doesn’t square with it at all.

 

So which is true? The public bluster or the behind the scenes readiness to concede sovereignty even where he has the power to assert it?

 

Anyway, what is the Juncker fuss about?  The Lisbon Treaty (remember, the one Mr Cameron had a cast-iron pledge to hold a referendum on, and then didn’t?) gave the European Assembly the right to approve the European Council’s choice of President. This was expected to be done on the basis of votes for the Assembly. Reporting of the Euro-elections in this country may have given the impression that whole EU was convulsed by an anti-Brussels wave.  It is true that UKIP did well, and so did some rather different movements in other EU countries. But it was not so generally. The Christian Democrats in the EPP alliance remain the largest single grouping. And Mr Juncker was their nominee. Hence the difficulties for Angela Merkel, whose own party belongs to the EPP. 

Mr Cameron miscalculated. Someone had told him (correctly)  that the European Council didn’t like Mr Juncker and might dump him, to assert the power of the Council over the power of the Assembly. This might, at one stage, have been possible.  And so Mr Cameron, by joining in the unhorsing of Mr Juncker, could have appeared (as he always intended) to be ‘tough’, and claimed this as a British victory – by hugely exaggerating the importance of whether the job is held by Mr Juncker, or Herr Buncker, or Mrs Duncker, or Signor Zuncker, or Pan Zhuncker or whoever it happens to be.   

(By the way, if Mr Juncker is so bad, how was Mr Cameron able to say he ‘could work with him’ after it is all over. Wouldn’t it have been more honest, and kinder to the old Luxemburger to agree to his appointment at the meeting? )  

 

But as soon as the supposedly tough Mrs Merkel was confronted with jibes from the German media (and her own party) that she was being weak by dropping Mr Juncker, she rallied round him to prove (as weak people do) that she was strong. At this point Mr Cameron, who had made a small fool of himself in the eyes of the well-informed,  rewrote the entire fairy-tale.

 

Now he would not be (because without Angela at his side he could not be)  the triumphant victor in a fake battle with the Brussels dragon. He would be the heroic loner, making a last stand against the Eurocrats, their interminable meetings, their communiques and their alleged glasses of cognac for breakfast.

 

He would ‘stand firm’ and so transmute himself from a small fool into a giant British hero. The magic potion he needed to achieve this is called ‘The Parliamentary Lobby’, a group of men and women who understand so little about reality outside the bubble of 'managed perceptions' in which they dwell that they are seldom restrained by any need to conform with the laws of physics, arithmetic, geometry or any other hard measure.

 

This wouldn’t matter if these people didn’t have guaranteed access (thanks to belonging to their mystery cult) to every news bulletin and front page in the country. But they do.

 

Thus they can convert dross into gold, and almost anything into a triumph for the politicians they have chosen (for the moment) to serve and adore. The process by which all this takes place is described in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’, originally published as ‘The Broken Compass’ and unavailable in all leading bookshops.

 

But was Mr Cameron’s stand especially brave or principled? Standing up against things or people on principle is unpleasant and often frightening precisely because of the danger (and sometimes the certainty) that it will cost you something important. What (apart from some petty bureaucratic revenge in the final months of his premiership) did Mr Cameron risk? He was a hero in safety.

 

Now, I’ve mentioned the Prime Minister’s strange lack of enthusiasm for grabbing back British sovereignty when he can do so by simply acting, no negotiation required.

 

All of us can remember how he used (back in 2006)  to take standard pro-EU view, that nobody was really interested in the issue (

'Instead of talking about the things that most people care about, we talked about
what we cared about most. While parents worried about childcare, getting the
kids to school, balancing work and family life - we were banging on about
Europe.'

- David Cameron, Party Conference Speech, 2006

And (from the same era)

'The Conservative Party is back in the centre ground, that doesn't mean some sort
of geographical point on the map, it means talking about the things people care
about: the NHS, schools, police and crime. That's what we did all week and I think
people really got that: that we're not banging on about Europe, we're actually
where people are.' 

– David Cameron, Statement on ‘webcameron’

and that those who 'banged on' about it were fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists.

 

http://www.lbc.co.uk/david-cameron-ukip-fruitcakes-and-loonies-63456

 

But he is also a sort of Europatriot, as evidenced by his trip to Kazakhstan  nearly a year ago – a trip in itself hilarious, given the Premier’s other great pose as the armed foe of despotism. Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev, about whom I have written at length, is a regular contestant in the ‘Despot of the Year’ competition.

 

But at a question and answer session at the modestly-named Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan’s weird, vainglorious capital, Astana, Mr Cameron said ; ‘Britain has always supported the widening of the EU. Our vision of the EU is that it should be a large trading and co-operating organisation that effectively stretches, as it were, from the Atlantic to the Urals. We have a wide vision of Europe and we have always encouraged countries that want to join.’

 

Not only is he not even a ‘Eurosceptic’ , wretched and meaningless as that non-position is. Mr Cameron is nd always has been an open partisan of the EU and of its aggressive march eastwards into the lands of the former USSR.

 

The Guardian’s Nicholas Watt reported him as saying ‘We recognise there is a problem in the EU right now that needs to be solved.’

Cameron said the EU needed to be more flexible to accommodate euro and non-euro members.

‘We have to make this organisation flexible enough to include both sorts of country. In my view the euro countries clearly need to integrate more. If you have a single currency you need to have an integrated banking system, you need to have an integrated fiscal system. You need to make sure you have quite a lot of rules. You need solidarity.

‘So you need change in the single currency. And then you need to make the EU more flexible so that it can include countries like Britain or other countries that want to be in this trading, co-operating partnership but don't want the currency.

 

‘That is why I have argued for a renegotiation of the rules of the EU between now and 2017. I have said that, if re-elected, I will hold a referendum by the end of 2017 to give the British people a choice about whether they want to stay in this organisation, which would be changed by then, or to leave this organisation.’

 

This statement contains absolutely not one grain of hostility to the organisation itself, its purpose or its nature, only a plea for it to be more accommodating to its subject provinces.

 

Assuming (which is rash) that Mr Cameron is in any position to hold a referendum on anything much more ambitious  than what he has for breakfast by 2017 (not Cognac, obviously),  who’d like to place a substantial bet that he will then recommend a British exit? Should he by some bizarre concatenation of events be in any position to hold this plebiscite, we will hear a lot of about how ‘tough’ he has been (there may have been be some ‘walk-outs’ faithfully reported by the parliamentary lobby) and that he has, by dint of this ‘toughness’, won a deal  he can confidently recommend to the British people (if there *is* a British people by then). The other Euro-leaders will of course tactfully join in the pretence. They don’t want to lose our huge net contribution, or our fisheries, nor to deny themselves the pleasure of seeing a once-independent, once-free nation chained to the wall and submissively eating its prison fare. 

Can you spot the difference between these two men? No, me neither

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Do you remember when the Blair creature was still worshipped and glorified? When he smiled his way through elections we all now know he should have lost?

I do. It was very lonely. Now that he has become a swearword, and everyone despises him, I am often tempted to remind these people how they used to fawn on him.

But why waste time on him? His life is now one of deepening sadness as he sits among his huge and useless riches and yet is despised by those whose approval he yearns for.

The important thing is to realise we are making a very similar mistake now. The same sort of people who managed the Blair fraud long ago gave up on him, and started work on the Cameron fraud instead.

These people are like advertising men stuck with a product that is no good, a car that breaks down, a soap that crumbles into powdery grease when it touches water, a foodstuff that tastes disgusting and cleaves to the tongue. Yet they have signed a contract to promote it.

At all costs they must keep the consumer from seeing the truth until after he has bought the merchandise. One way of doing this is to spread negative stories about rival products.

The shameful and childish personal abuse directed against Ed Miliband has now reached a point where honourable Conservatives must be tempted to vote Labour in protest against it.

The reason for this Stalinist destruction of personal credit  is simple. There is no political difference of any significance between the two men. So instead we are supposed to make up our minds on the basis of the size of Mr Miliband’s teeth. Heaven itself cannot help a nation which settles its future on this basis.

The utter falsity of  Mr Cameron’s recent play-acting about the EU is astounding. He is now reduced to issuing bombastic threats of future displeasure over a needless defeat which  he himself sought, to try to fool his stupider voters into thinking he is something he is not. It is we who will ‘live to regret’ taking this man seriously.

It is simply not true, as almost every media outlet obediently parroted yesterday, that Britain is now one step closer to leaving the EU. We are as trapped in it as ever. Not one molecule of David Cameron is hostile to British membership of the EU. His godfather and first political mentor was Tim Rathbone, a sopping wet Tory MP eventually expelled from the party for supporting a pro-European breakaway.

Mr Cameron’s fellow Bullingdon Club hearty, Radek Sikorski, now foreign minister of Poland, and keen on all things EU, thinks of his old friend as an enthusiast for Brussels. Tapes of Mr Sikorski’s Warsaw table talk emerged last week.

Every word of it assumes Mr Cameron is really on the side of the EU: ‘He stupidly tries to play the system… his whole strategy of feeding them scraps in order to satisfy them is just as I predicted, turning against him; he should have said, “Bleep off!” tried to convince people and isolate [the sceptics]. But he ceded the field to those that are now embarrassing him.’

He is only wrong in one thing. Mr Cameron’s critics are not turning against him. One supposedly ‘Eurosceptic’ Tory MP publicly licked the Prime Minister’s polished toecaps in the Commons only the other day.

How sad it is that, given the self-censorship  of the entire London political media, we need to turn to bootleg tapes of a Polish politician to read an honest account of Mr Cameron’s tactic – stupid propaganda, feeding his critics scraps.

Mr Cameron’s famous referendum has been set for 2017 because the premier knows he will be out of office by then. It is a post-dated cheque.

His futile battle against Jean-Claude Juncker is accompanied, again, by low personal smears – a former member of the Bullingdon isn’t well-placed to sneer at someone else’s drinking habits. And it is what is called ‘triangulation’. By appearing to fight against something the public dislike, you pretend that you share the public’s views.

David Blunkett, when Education Secretary and making schools even worse, used to do the same by getting barracked at Teachers’ Union conferences. Home Secretary Theresa May does it by rubbing the Police Federation up the wrong way.

Don’t you see the crude tricks they are playing on you? Don’t you see why they need to hire people such as Andy Coulson? Do you, as you did with Blair, have to wait once again until it is far too late, to recognise this swindle for what it is?

'Mighty' America humiliated again

The collapse of American power in the Middle East is astonishing, especially given that they fought so hard to replace us there.

The indefensible jailing, on evidence-free charges,  of three journalists in Egypt came a few hours after Washington’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, had handed the Cairo junta a huge slice of American taxpayers’ money.

This payment can only be made legal in the US by pretending that the Egyptian military putsch was not a putsch. The dictatorship’s response went beyond scorn. They took the money and jailed the journalists anyway, in spite of Mr Kerry’s personal plea to spare them.

No doubt Mr Kerry was scared that, if he refused the cash, Saudi Arabia would have stepped in with its own large chequebook.

But such weakness, and willingness to be humiliated by this appalling despotism, look especially foolish from a government, which repeatedly bombs other countries for not being democratic.

Diversity in what, exactly?

How does the BBC get away with its blatantly racialist plan to ensure that one in every seven actors or presenters is black, Asian or from an ethnic minority within three years?

When are we going to judge people not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character, as Martin Luther King said we should? Anyway, if it’s diversity the BBC wants, it could start by employing any journalists at all who aren’t fanatically Green or Left-wing.
 
Shock news! Divorce and drugs are bad
When the Pope speaks out for Christianity, it’s to be expected, and in the way of business. The statements you want to watch out for are the ones which come from people who criticise their own side.

There have been two this week – Penelope Leach, the liberals’ favourite child-care expert, says there’s no  doubt that divorce damages children. And Professor Sir Simon Wessely, the new head of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, warns against the medicalisation (and drugging) of normal children. If they say so, it  must be bad.

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Pick of the Week

For those who are interested, my 'Special Relationship' programme will feature on BBC Radio 4's 'Pick of the Week', to be transmitted on Sunday at 6.15 p.m.

Why Reviews Matter

Every few months I have to make the same point. When I criticize reviews such as Priya Elan’s, ad hominem attack on me his Guardian review of my radio programme on the ‘Special Relationship’, my automatic critics immediately accuse me of bristling oversensitivity, having a ‘thin skin’, not being able to take criticism, etc.

 

The best answer to this is that anyone who does what I do knowingly volunteers for public criticism. And anyone who continues, long after he has begun to receive that criticism, has accepted it as a price that must be paid, as I do.  There’s a famous misquotation from the Bible (Job,31:35 ‘O that mine adversary had written a book’) , which now is taken to mean something quite different from what was intended in that great parable. It is usually rendered as  ‘Oh, that mine enemy would write a book!’. To write a book (or to make a programme) is to give your enemies a great opportunity.  If anyone exposes his flank by giving so much of himself to public view, he can rely on his foes to give that book a public pasting, which will generally involve a fair amount of personal reflection on the author himself, not all of it kindly.

 

So if I really didn’t like it or was intimidated by it in my soul , I wouldn’t take the risk of exposing myself.

 

But that doesn't mean I am debarred from myself criticising reviews which Ielieve to be unjust. 

 

No, what I object to in reviews such as Mr Elan’s and two of the reviews of my last ink-and-paper three dimensional book , ‘The War we Never Fought’, is when the reviewer doesn’t even try to be fair, or to pay proper attention to the work. Mr Elan’s attack on the programme is actually an attack on me. He can’t find any errors of judgement, serious omission or wrong emphasis, or any technical or journalistic faults. He doesn't even disagree with my argument. So he assails me in person, in a way which I doubt he would do to my face. And I have cast doubt on *his* judgement by pointing out that other reviewers, more dispassionate and perhaps more experienced than he, had not agreed. This is one of the great things about the internet. The reviewed can respond to their reviewers.

 

Does it matter? Yes, it does. Reviews, or the lack of them, influence publishers and those who commission programmes. 'Olav from Oslo' is one of several readers who have asked if ‘Short Breaks in Mordor’ will be available in paper format because they don't like, or perhaps can't get hold of) e-books. The answer is, almost certainly never. And one of the reasons for that is the critical reception (or lack of it) given to ‘The War We Never Fought’, a book of which I am still rather proud, and which all those who have ignored it would benefit from reading. Such treatment makes any publisher less keen to take on new works by authors who get this treatment. Reviewers, and those who commission them,  must surely know this. So theirs is a responsible job, and I think they should be open to criticism themselves.

 

I am, by the way,  continuing to try to see how to get my audio-books more readily available on this side of of the Atlantic. I am baffled by the problem. 

You Can't Win Them All - The Guardian can't resist the chance to have a go at me

When I first embarked on the Special Relationship programme recently broadcast on Radio 4 (I should say that I wrote the script it in its entirety, personally suggested most of the interviewees, and identified and pursued the Arleigh Burke recording from the start), I wondered how my left-wing automatic critics would respond. They, for quite different reasons from me, disapprove of the Anglo-American alliance.  Many are actively anti-American, in a hangover from the Cold War (mirrored on the ‘right’ by the weird continuing anti-Russian view common among neo-conservatives). Also, the cold facts are undeniable.

 

Well, now I’ve found out. Plainly, I think the programme was the best possible within the time limits available. I had the assistance of a highly skilled and experienced producer, Kati Whitaker, whom I cannot thank enough for her wisdom and her personal enthusiasm for the project .

 

And I think I can say that some professional radio critics have been reasonably complimentary about it.  (Not all. The Daily Mail called it ‘jaundiced’. A reviewer in the ‘Observer’ bafflingly called it ‘strident’, which I think is just plain wrong) . Catherine Nixey in ‘The Times’ (whom I have never knowingly met and who owes me no favours, and writes for a paper that is not especially fond of me) concluded that ‘its 27 minutes are a model of the genre’. Gillian Reynolds, who many years ago savaged my double-headed weekly live programme (with Derek Draper) on the then ‘Talk Radio’, said the programme was ‘Quietly but firmly argued, producing new evidence (from hitherto secret CIA files and little-known voice recordings) it exposed delusions, remembered humiliations and provided a formidable argument for allowing independent producers, Kati Whitaker of Juniper here, into BBC current affairs.’

 

But ‘the Guardian’ concludes today (in the shape of Priya Elan, whose toe I have never, so far as I know, run over on my bike), that I spoiled the whole thing by being in it.  Priya Elan pretty much accepts the programme’s argument (hard not to)  but concludes : ’Hitchens is the weak link in the show. Sounding like a cross between Jeremy Paxman, Jim Corr and Newman and Baddiel's old fogey ("That's you, that is") history professors, every sentence is laced with a retrospective suspicion. When a talking head says much of the US's help to Britain is hidden he adds: "hidden … and grudging". He labels the Star-Spangled Banner an "anti-British outburst" (which it is). It is hard to listen to some of his analysis and not feel like you are humouring a conspiracy theorist, surrounded by piles of old newspapers in his basement.’

 

I'm not clear what he objects to, about the use of the word 'grudging', which is apparently said in italics,  or about my description of the 'Star-Spangled Banner', which he agrees with but somehow also seems to see as evidence that I am a conspiracy nut in a basement. Beats me. Some of this (the stuff about Paxman etc)  is missing from the printed version and appears only on line, but as it’s all abusive, and doesn’t praise my intellect, as Melissa Kite once unwisely did in an article for the same paper  ( see : http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/01/intellectually-brilliant-and-impossible-to-dislike-what-the-guardian-thinks-about-me-or-does-it.html ),  that’s probably just because they ran out of space in G2.

 

The whole thing is here:

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/jun/26/special-relationship-uncovered-radio-review

 

You can still listen to the programme itself for the next few days. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0477nrw

 

 

 

 

More on the 'Special Relationship'

Some readers may like to read this article which I wrote for the ‘Radio Times’ about the ‘Special Relationship’

 

 

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2014-06-23/lets-bury-the-special-relationship-myth-says-peter-hitchens

 

And to read this review of the programme by Gillian Reynolds in the Daily Telegraph (scroll down)

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/tv-and-radio-reviews/10923725/You-cant-reproduce-Renoir-on-the-radio.html

 

 

The programme can still be heard (for five more days)

 

Here

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0477nrw

 

 

The Cameron Delusion now available as an audio-book

It can be found here:

http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B00L5HYIAK&source_code=AUDGBWS03191498YY

 

China, Russia, Germany, Marx and the Struggle for World Power

How strange and amusing to see so many readers telling me sternly that there is no continuity between Mao-tse-Tung’s China and today’s China. There is complete continuity. In fact there is no breach at all, a total continuity which even involves the continuing reverence for Mao himself, still on the banknotes and at the last count '70% good and 30% bad'. You won’t find Stalin or Lenin on any Russian rouble notes. I wonder if the same people would also insist there *is* continuity between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Communist USSR (when there isn’t).

 

The difference is striking.  I can, for instance, clearly recall the grim winter afternoon when stone-faced apparatchiks were being driven out of the Kremlin’s Spassky (Saviour’s) Gate into Red Square, having been told by Mikhail Gorbachev that the ‘leading role’ of the Communist Party was at an end. This was the vital moment in the Gorbachev revolution the point at which irreversible change was assured, short of a violent putsch. The violent putsch duly came, but failed, and the Communist Party, at that moment, dissolved forever as a force, and all its members threw away or burned their party cards.

 

Russia since 1991 has been many things, and will be many more. But the absolute power of a single political party, deriving its legitimacy from a violent coup d’etat, and from its public assent to a set of dogmatic assertions about the cosmos,  is gone for good.  

 

Some may say that the Chinese CP has ceased to be Communist. But has it? The failure of Soviet Communism never persuaded any on the left to stop being Utopian, to stop loathing frontiers and nations, to cease to despise religion, to cease believing in the right of the enlightened to wield unrestrained power and so dispense with tedious brakes on its authority such as habeas corpus, independent courts, separation of power, freedom from surveillance,  restraints on the police etc.

 

I rather think the average Thatcherite, the average Blairite and the average Chinese CP cadre all have much the same view on these matters.

 

Why on earth did Marxism ever declare war on the market, or on riches?  If world power and incessant progress, supervised by the benevolent state, are what you want, then this is plain silly.  Why own what you can more easily regulate and tax? Are there still people here who think that the Blairite Labour Party was conservative - when it was in fact Euro-Communist, the practical expression of the ideas promoted by the cleverer CP members and their sympathizers in the journal ‘Marxism Today’. As for the Thatcher Tory Party, it likewise was not conservative (what did it conserve, anyone?).

 

It simply lit the fuse of unregulated markets, so fulfilling that passage in the Communist Manifesto (that hymn of praise to the revolutionary power of the market). For example: ‘The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.…'

 

Likewise Karl Marx writes : ‘The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.  It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment."  It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.  It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless and indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom--Free Trade.  In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.’

 

This wonderful Sado-masochistic prose always struggled to conceal its enthusiasm with prim disapproval. But you can tell what he really thought. What revolutionary could not rejoice at all this change?

 

Here we go again. : ‘Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.’

 

It’s like one of those commercials for some horrible fast food, sold to people who pretend to be appalled by their enjoyment of it, but who actually wolf it down with joy.

 

Why should the 21st-century descendants of such a movement object to globalization, so long as they hold on their power? Does Mikhail Gorbachev secretly wish he had done as the Chinese Communists did? Whether he does or not, many of his colleagues at the top of the CPSU must surely do so.

 

A couple of points on the Special Relationship and Germany. I feel it necessary to repeat that Arleigh Burke’s words ‘Blast the hell out of them!’ have been known to scholars and specialist readers for some time. But they have never, in my view, been given the prominence they deserve. I have never previously seen them in a newspaper,  and they have certainly not been broadcast. The actual tapes on which they were originally recorded have not (thanks to complex legal requirements which it took us many weeks to negotiate) been played since they were made in 1966. I do not know if the transcripts available were made at the time Admiral Burke recorded his testimony, or taken from the tape. But his words have never previously been broadcast. I still think this is a notable first.

 

On Germany, various contributors still claim to be baffled at the idea that the EU is a German-dominated post-modern Empire. One cannot seen what the EU has to do with the fact that modern Germany has a low defence spend (answer – France and Britain are the EU’s conventional and nuclear powers, under a clear and understood division of labour. He who gets the status also pays the bill).

 

Sometimes I think I am completely wasting my time. ‘Libertarian Socialist’ posted : ‘So, if I understand correctly, Mr Hitchens states that Germany dominates the EU politically and industrially (so far, I agree); however, Germany also has the long-term aim to seize and usurp large parts of Western Russia? It is this second part of the theory which I don’t understand. Mr Hitchens, despite wishing to praise current German institutions and today’s German liberalism, is at the same time rather coy in defining which covert German groups (presumably such groups are already in existence; or is it the entire German psyche) that will, in say 50 years’ time, mount military (?) operations against Russia. Presumably, by that date, German military power will be sufficiently bolstered by having the entire EU standing obediently behind her. But even if we are not talking hostile war and violent conflict - rather perhaps Russia is a very weak country in 50 years’ time and simply wishes to join with the EU. The question still remains, what is this singularly German ‘ticking time-bomb’ - which repeatedly instructs German generations to ‘go east’?’

 

Why are 'covert groups' necessary when eastward EU expansion (German expansion by other means) is open,  and German national policy? I don’t recall using the cliché ‘ticking time-bomb’ and hope I didn’t. I have repeatedly written here of the concept of ‘Mitteleuropa’ set out in 1915 by the German liberal Friedrich Naumann, a perfectly reasonable and attainable plan (if you don’t happen to be in the way of it) by Germany to dominate, economically, militarily and diplomatically, the centre of Europe, which would have solved many of the economic, demographic and agricultural problems of the newly-unified Germany.  These were then and to a great extent are now that Germany, in terms of agriculture, space and energy is not big enough to support or contain the population or the industrial economy which it has developed since unification.   It is a natural impulse of power, and will continue as long as Germany exists at all. the difference is that it is now expressed, and pursued, through the EU rather than as a specifically German policy. 

 

And I have used this simple understanding to explain German Foreign policy ever since, up to and above all including the advance of the European Union into eastern Europe, The Balkans, Ukraine and (putatively) the Caucasus. It’s not dissimilar from the USA’s continental expansion under ‘manifest destiny’ . No ‘military operations against Russia’ are contemplated or necessary.  The expansion is happening *now*, in Ukraine (the spark for this whole discussion).  That is my whole point. When I say that the EU is the continuation of Germany by other means, I mean just that. What would once have taken the form of invasion now takes the form of expansion, through NGOs, people power revolutions etc. Violence only happens, in this process, if anyone is rash enough to resist. QED.