Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 230
June 23, 2014
The Special Relationship Re-examined - Tonight at 8.00 BBC Radio 4
Tonight at 8 o’clock on BBC Radio 4 you can listen to my programme on the alleged ‘Special Relationship’ between Britain and the USA.
For a full account of its contents, see here
Here are the views of some Fleet Street radio reviewers, previewing the programme:
Catherine Nixey, in The Times, writes: ‘Its 27 minutes are a model of the genre. There is no tedious but fashionable personal anecdote from Hitchens. There is no excitable music. There is no folderol. There are simply words. Carefully chosen, impeccably researched and, for all their calmness, quite shocking’.
Stephanie Billen in the Observer, by contrast, describes it as ‘a strident piece of radio’. She says : ‘The degree of US hostility uncovered by Hitchens is surprising, as evidenced here by some extraordinarily hawkish recordings discovered in the archives’.
The Daily Mail says it is ‘a somewhat jaundiced account of the 'special relationship' between Britain and the U.S. He (PH) argues that the relationship exists only in the heads of our more gullible Prime Ministers.’
Gillian Reynolds in the Daily Telegraph says :’Peter Hitchens, doughty controversialist and radical thinker, challenges the easy assumption that Britain’s relationship with the USA is one of mutual respect and benevolent intent based on shared interests and a common language. It has long been America’s intent to assume the mantle of empire and dominate the world. No one in Washington has even heard of the special relationship, he says. It’s time for us to stop clinging to this dangerous illusion, look at history, examine the facts. Should be a bracing half hour’.
Some Thoughts on German Domination of the European Union
Mr Joseph Clemmow writes (in an interesting contribution to the ‘Grenades and Mortars’ thread, which I urge all readers to study):
‘The most unattractive strain of Euroscepticism is the kind that sees the EU as some sort of German plot. You hear it all over Europe: from Frenchmen, from Dutchmen, from Danes, Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Greeks – even, occasionally, from Britons. Quite apart from being terrifically rude, it couldn't be more mistaken. Far from bidding for mastery of the Continent, Germans suffer from a lack of patriotism that borders on self-abnegation. No country does as badly out of the EU as Germany. It pays more into the system than anyone else, and has the lowest per capita representation in the Brussels institutions.’
First, I am not a ‘Eurosceptic’. The word is a nonsense, used to describe Tories who pretend to be hostile to the EU while in opposition, or on their way up the career staircase, and are submissive to it when they reach office. There is nothing to be sceptical about, the EU exists, and it is beyond doubt that it is what it is. these things may easily be established by objective tests. There is nothing to doubt. Either we should be in it, or we should not. I have no doubt that Britain should leave it. I am not a ‘Eurosceptic’ but a secessionist. It is also important to reiterate that the EU is not the same as ‘Europe’, which Britain couldn’t leave if it wanted to.
Secondly this point has nothing to do with levels of patriotism in Germany, though it does have something to do with how ’well’ Germany does out of the EU.
Thirdly, the silly use of the word ‘plot’ to describe any discreet but concerted attempt by any persons or nations to achieve a desired end is childish. Diplomacy and politics are largely conducted in secret, and as Wikileaks has shown any who doubted it, much of what passes between actors at these levels is in fact conspiratorial and confidential. Those who use expressions such as ‘plot’ and ‘conspiracy theory’ are simply blinding themselves to an important truth about the exercise of power.
Fourthly, the implication that my view of this matter (‘terrifically rude’) is somehow anti-German is wholly mistaken. I like Germany so much that I take holidays there, and have done for many years. I admire many aspects of German society and think it is, on the whole and in many particulars, a better-run country than Britain. Increasingly, I wish that Britain had stayed out of the 1914 war, and that this had resulted in a quick German victory over France in 1914, which would in turn have led to a sustainable settlement between the Russian and German Empires in the east, and the survival of both the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, whose collapse has caused so much misery and continues to do so to this day.
What’s more, I have absolutely no objection to living next-door to a German-dominated Europe, provided that Britain is not required to belong to such an arrangement. And I have never been able to see why Britain should be so required. A German-dominated Europe looks landward and to the east, would always be balanced by Russia (and these days by China, whose influence in Europe is growing very fast) . A maritime Britain would need have no conflict with such a continental system.
AS to whether Germany benefits from the EU, Germany’s benefit is not wholly measurable in money terms, though there seems to me to be no doubt that Germany *does* benefit, currently through the severe devaluation of the Deutschemark achieved by its merger with other EU currencies in the Euro, which hugely benefits German exports. German investors also, I think, have done well out of the reservoir of cheap, skilled labour in the former Warsaw Pact countries. Others may be able to suggest ways in which the structure of the EU (not least the Common Agricultural Policy and the responsibility of France and Britain to do the big military spending) benefit Germany’s pocket in the short and medium term.
A lot of the British Empire was quite costly to the Treasury. I doubt whether most of our African empire ever ran at a profit, for instance, and I suspect a lot of our Middle Eastern activity ( especially post-1918) was a major drain on the Exchequer, endured because of the importance of the Suez Canal. Empires need money to pay for their power, and power to obtain and hold on to their money, so the two aims get tangled up and are sometimes hard to separate into a profit-and-loss account. The main thing our empire gave us was the freedom to live more or less as we wished, without fear of foreign domination, famine or invasion. Our decision to enter the war in August 1914 ended that era, though we still live as if it continued, unaware of how precarious our standard of living is, and of how illusory our independence is.
It is the long-term, and the question of power, that interests me.
I’ve often said the EU propagandists’ repeated claim, that the Union has ‘prevented war in Europe’ does not make sense taken at face value. There has been, since 1945, no specific or general threat of war in Europe which the EU has averted. It’s my view that the EU, through its recognition of Croatia, helped to create a war in former Yugoslavia (and let’s not get on to Ukraine) ,
The war which the EU has prevented is the continuation of the natural struggle which began in 1870, when Germany became the most powerful nation on the continent, and France initially sought to challenge that supremacy. Such struggles happen simply because power, by land or sea, will expand until it meets a force capable of restraining it. Such forces are made up both of objective material, economic strength and military power, plus alliances, and of subjective factors such as will, morale and national coherence.
There is no special malice in these clashes. They arise because nations have yet to develop a system under which territory can be transferred peacefully without a fight, to reflect the real state of power in that region. They smash and kill quite impersonally, though in 1941 the struggle provided the opportunity for millions of very malicious and cruel murder, which many people mistake for the true or main purpose of the conflict. It was not clear in 1914 or 1941, and it is not clear now, exactly how far German influence can spread to the East. In each case, we found out in the end, but then other forces intervened. Thus, power seeks to test its limits.
The 1914 war, which we in Britain tend to see as mainly a Franco-German war was not that at all. It was a Russo-German war, brought into being through Austrian and Serbian proxies. France’s alliance with Russia caused France to be drawn in, likewise Belgium and Britain and Italy. This is why Germany was so irritated that Belgium couldn’t simply let her through in 1914. Germany wasn’t interested in Belgium, Belgium was defending something Germany didn’t even want.
But as in 1939 and 1941, and in 1945, Germany’s contest with Russia lay at the heart of events. It is a German need, economically and diplomatically, to dominate, and set the terms of trade in, the zone from the River Oder to the River Don, and perhaps beyond. To proceed with this, Germany needs a neutralized France, which is one of two central purposes of the EU. The EU institutionalizes and makes bearable France’s defeat in 1940. That defeat was formally reversed in 1945, but not by France herself. The reversal was not real, and could not have been sustained if Europe had been allowed ( as in 1918) to continue to exists as a zone of rival, sovereign nation states. In such a Europe, a resurgent Germany would eventually have come into conflict with France again. The fact that this did not happen is partly because of the Cold War, which froze Western Europe in its 1945 shape, but also because of the EU.
There was a brief and fascinating period, between the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and German reunification, when both Britain and France were extremely nervous about the recreation of a united Germany. Some of these anxious conversations have since become public. A report by Michael Binyon in ‘The Times’ of 11th September 2009 (alas, behind a paywall) uses secret papers from the Kremlin archives to show how serious those concerns were. It was an enormous scoop, which got far less attention than it deserved. Lady Thatcher was particularly worried, but so was Francois Mitterrand, and his aide Jacques Attali. Lady Thatcher told the Soviet leader in 1989 that she did not want German reunification(despite publicly supporting it).
‘We do not want a united Germany,’ she said. ‘This would lead to a change to post-war borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.’
She even asked that her remarks not be recorded(they were, anyway).
Jacques Attali soon afterwards told Vadim Zagladin, a Gorbachev aide that ‘Moscow's refusal to intervene in East Germany had "puzzled the French leadership" and questioned whether "the USSR has made peace with the prospect of a united Germany and will not take any steps to prevent it. This has caused a fear approaching panic." He then stated bluntly, echoing Mrs Thatcher: "France by no means wants German reunification, although it realises that in the end it is inevitable."’
Now, the France of 1914 and the France of 1939 would not have recognized reunification as ‘inevitable’. But the France of Mitterrand was another place, full of ambiguities (Mitterrand symbolized it well, having served the Vichy regime and been decorated by it, but also having managed to support the Resistance).
In the end, the Franco-German pact that lies at the very heart of the EU meant ( and Mitterrand and Attali well knew it) that when the long-anticipated moment for reunification of Germany actually arrived, France could not and would not oppose it, though most Frenchmen and women, in their hearts, would have liked to do so. Thanks to the two great wars, she knew she hadn’t the power to do so. And she had made a rather attractive deal in return for conceding German supremacy. She is allowed to claim victory in 1945. She is allowed her nuclear forces and her relations with her former empire. She is subsidized through the CAP and permitted to protect many of her basic industries. But she will never again challenge Germany for European supremacy, or seek to form an alliance with that aim.
Germany, in return suppresses all open display of national power, which at the moment is not that difficult as it is still burdened by guilt over the Hitler era and does not particularly want to do so (though it will be interesting to see what the next generation, wholly free of Hitler guilt, will make of this). Germany also cannot be particularly sorry to be sparred having to spend a huge chunk of its GDP on weapons. And Germany, which does in fact have strong liberal and democratic traditions of its own, forgotten thanks to its 20th century aberration, now maintains a creditably liberal-minded and free state at home.
But that doesn’t mean it is not powerful, or that does not project its power. Part of that power, as in the case of France, Poland, the Balkans, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania Denmark, Norway and the Low Countries, is based on an unspoken folk-memory. Germany is dangerous and must be placated to keep it safe. (Can anyone locate for me the passage in Tony Benn’s diaries from the late 1970s where he notes that in Common Market meetings, the small countries are afraid of Germany? ). Part of it simply derives from Germany’s sheer size, in acreage, population and economic and industrial strength. Just as Irish Wolfhounds and big, strong men seldom need to assert themselves to get what they want, Germany seldom needs to assert herself to get what she wants. And the fact that the main place in which Germany asserts herself is in the private discreet, dull councils of the EU does not mean that power is not being wielded. Power does not require flames and columns of oily smoke or loud bangs to get its way. On the contrary, it prefers to operate in quiet rooms, with a smile. A well-worded memorandum can be at least as powerful as a division of troops, if not more so.
But occasionally, when Germany is worried that she is not getting her way, she lets out a muted growl, much as a normally peaceable Irish wolfhound might do if anybody forgot for a moment how big and powerful it was, or rashly tweaked its tail. My favourite example of this was Helmut Kohl's Louvain speech in February 1996. I have chosen a report for this event from an impeccably liberal newspaper and indeed an impeccably establishment reporter, the charming Sarah Helm, now married to Jonathan Powell, once Anthony Blair’s chief of staff.
From Sarah Helm of the Independent , Brussels, 3rd February 1996:
Brussels:
Chancellor Helmut Kohl yesterday warned in the most strident terms that a retreat from further political integration in Europe could plunge the continent into new "nationalist" wars in the next century.
In language intended to challenge the rise of Euro-scepticism - no longer a merely British phenomenon - the German leader proclaimed: "The policy of European integration is in reality a question of war and peace in the 21st century." Beseeching his European partners to take far-reaching decisions on further EU integration at the Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC) in March, he said: "If we suffer a set-back now on the road to Europe it will take considerably longer than one generation before we are given such an opportunity again." Mr Kohl said he was not advocating a "superstate". But he added: "We have no desire to return to the nation state of old. It cannot solve the great problems of the 21st century. Nationalism has brought great suffering to our continent." Recalling his friendship with Francois Mitterrand, who died last month, he said that the former French president shared his view that "nationalism is war".
Mr Kohl's warnings were clearly directed in part at Britain, where the Government has been fuelling fears of further integration and questioning the timetable for the creation of a European single currency.
"If individual partners are not prepared, or able, to participate in certain steps towards integration," he said, "the others should not be denied the opportunity to move forward and develop increased co-operation in which all partners are welcome to take part." This was a renewed plea for the Franco-German proposals for a "hard-core" Europe of federally- minded countries which would relegate Britain to a Euro-sceptic periphery.
Mr Kohl's speech, delivered at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate, came as doubts about the future course of Europe have reached a new pitch. European politicians have increasingly questioned the timetable for the creation of a single currency by 1999; enthusiasm for enlargement of the EU to the east has waned; and there is growing evidence that the reform process due to start next month will be limited.
Mr Kohl has frequently argued that strengthening the EU is essential if German power is to be contained. His fear is that a dominant Germany, unshackled by common European rules, would fuel nationalism among its neighbours, putting Europe back on the road to the wars which disfigured the first half of this century.
The Chancellor made it clear that, despite warnings of the imminent collapse of the plans for European Monetary Union, he believes that the single currency remains the linchpin of the next phase of European integration. He called for "considerable efforts on everybody's part to achieve a major step forward". He also restated his conviction that enlarging the EU to take in new members from the East was crucial to Europe's future.
Mr Kohl emphasised that the IGC reform process should be used to restructure European institutions for greater power-sharing in the next century. He set out four areas in which Germany wants to see progress: a strengthening of the EU's foreign and security policy; more pooling of powers in criminal justice; greater openness in decision-making and more power for the European Parliament.
Acknowledging that warnings of further war were not popular, the Chancellor said: "My warnings may contain an unpleasant truth. [But] if there is no momentum for continued integration this will not only lead to standstill but also to retrogression.’
I’d call that quite a growl. He got his way, too. Have you noticed, also, that no EU big noise is ever in favour of a superstate in any speech or interview, only in practice?
By the way, I noticed Tim Congdon (I think) pointing out the other day (where was it? Can anyone tell me? I cannot locate it** ) that the simple solution to the EU-Russia conflict would be the entry of Russia into the EU. But because Russia’s population is so large, this would make it immensely powerful in the EU power-structure. He didn’t mention the other aspect of this, which would be the effect on EU labour costs of having millions of Russians free to seek work throughout the EU’s territories. As for getting the Rouble into the Euro….
**I have now received from Mr Congdon a copy of his letter to the Spectator, making this point: It reads:
'Sir: John O'Sullivan ('Moscow's Wizard of Oz', 7 June) overlooks the elephant in the room. Why is Russia not welcome as a member of the European Union?
O'Sullivan sees Russia as somehow different and apart from all other countries in the European orbit. Further, he clearly believes the difference to be an unalterable given of the modern world. It is only because this gulf between Russia and the rest of Europe is fixed by assumption that his conference intellectuals can talk about 'the Eurasian Union', 'the wider geopolitical struggle with the Anglo-Saxons' and 'the "geo-politicians" in Moscow who chill our blood'.
I am not a fan of the EU, but no one conjures up such a vast and malign role for any of its members. These members include Germany, Britain, France and Italy, all of which have larger national outputs than Russia, and in that sense could do just as much geopolitical mischief if they were so minded. If Russia were inside the EU, it seems likely that John O'Sullivan's ruminations would become absurd.
The trouble is that the European Commission top brass do not want Russia in the EU. Nations' vote shares in the Council of Ministers are determined by population, and Russia would therefore have more votes than Germany, France or any other country. The geopolitical purpose of the EU is the redemption of Germany from its past, and the reinstatement to great power roles of Germany and France. Russian membership of the EU would ruin that. So we are condemned to the tragedy of continued tension in Europe between the western states and Russia, even though Russia (with about 10 per cent of wider Europe's output) is now so overshadowed economically that the notion of rivalry between it and the rest of Europe is ludicrous.
Tim Congdon'
From the Valley of the Clueless to The Valley of Unknowing
One of my favourite bookshops in London is a small corner of peaceful civilization close to Gloucester Road tube station, and not far from one of those fascinating old-fashioned hardware stores which stretch into dark back rooms and seem to sell everything. I’m never quite sure how such things survive in central London, which is increasingly a millionaire city, but they do. It is one of those rather smart second-hand shops which are far from cheap and which also sell some new books, but which are far, far more interesting than ordinary shops which sell only new books.
There are three reasons to go to a bookshop. One, to browse for its own sake, a pleasure in itself. Two, to buy a specific book (increasingly difficult, unless the book is very current) . Three, for serendipity, the joy of finding a wholly unexpected volume you didn’t even know you wanted and in some cases didn’t even know existed.
Anyway, my visit to this shop (I hadn’t been for some months) was of the third kind. And it was a bookshop encounter of the third kind, almost as if the book had been quietly calling me from a mile away. I had somehow never even heard of ‘The Valley of Unknowing’ by Philip Sington. But as soon as I saw it I knew it was for me. The cover shows a black and white photograph of tramlines curving down a bald, harsh-street – suggesting immediately a scene from Communist Eastern Europe, as I still recall it.
And then there was the title, which also awoke a memory of the old East German expression ‘Valley of the Clueless’ (Tal der Ahnungslosen) used by those within easy range of West German TV transmitters, to refer to (and mock)the residents of Dresden and the Elbe valley who could only receive the lies and propaganda of East German TV. Actually, this is one of the most interesting and paradoxical sidelights of Communist history because ( as I heard at the time and as is recorded on page 499 of Tony Judt’s book ‘Postwar’ , so it must be true), the East German state eventually ran a cable down to Dresden to pipe West German TV to the residents there. They did this because they had long ago given up trying to stop their citizens watching Western TV , and because it was getting harder and harder to get well-qualified and educated citizens to take up posts in Dresden, because it would mean living in the Valley of the Clueless.
Anyway, Dresden is the setting for this extraordinary, sometimes very funny, and extremely evocative book, which is also so powerfully captivating that I managed to read it on a train so badly delayed that I would normally have been fuming and spluttering with rage. The story is so good that I forgot that I was an hour late. The central character is simultaneously a plumber and a decorated author of a socialist-realist popular classic which has given him protected status in the East, and enough of an income from Western sales to sweeten his life in the German Democratic Republic (or 'Workers’ and Peasants’ State', as he usually refers to it, also ‘Actually Existing Socialism’, both terms used by the government of that country, which grow funnier the more they are repeated).
For good reasons (which you will find out if you read the book) Mr Sington has a feel for the absurdities and the sour, yet invigorating flavour of life in a Communist state, where even the passage of the seasons is different from the West , no transaction is simple, no event safe from fears of betrayal or mistrust or subtle pressure.
It is odd that I found this book just as a new book is published about the Zhivago affair (‘The Zhivago Affair: the Kremlin, the CIA and the battle over a Forbidden Book by Peter Finn and Petra Couvee’) , the horrible and stupid Soviet persecution of Boris Pasternak after the western publication of his novel ‘Dr Zhivago’. For the core of Philip Sington’s story is the publication, in West Germany, of a book written in the East. And what a book it is. I am frightened here of giving too much away about a very cunning and absorbing plot,, so I can’t and won’t explain much more. Fundamentally it is a novel (love story included, with a bit of thriller too) about the corrosion and misery of mistrust, especially the mistrust engendered by a police state. I think it’s the most telling thing published about East Germany since that great film ‘The Lives of Others’ which, while tremendously good, was utterly unrealistic about the likely behaviour of any secret policeman.
But in these de-cultured times, there is something almost nostalgic about stories of regimes which genuinely feared the power of words, and which also gave privileges and special status to authors. The old Communist World was a sort of morality play, and those who experienced it know important things about human beings , about power , courage, loyalty and truth which are more or less denied to those who never saw it. Those of us who did see it were, I hope, able to feel sympathy with those who suffered under it, while observing the riddles and cruel obstacles that beset them. One does not have to be cold and dispassionate to learn from what one sees. Nor do I think it wrong to accept that, in a very complicated way, some important goodness came out of all that evil. But if you want to have some idea of what it was like, and to trouble yourself with how you might have behaved if you were trapped in such a world, read this book. It is even (rather wittily and touchingly) printed in an East German typeface.
June 21, 2014
Why do we grovel to China's tyrants? Because bankrupts can't be choosers
This was the week we kow-towed to China, bowing low to the new masters of the world. The poor Queen was compelled to receive Peking’s Premier, Li Keqiang, below, who was not on a state visit and was not entitled to such a meeting.
This miserable moment had to happen, as we are more or less bankrupt and we have to take money and investment from anyone who will give it to us, at any price.
I have visited China many times. It is an exciting and energetic place. But it is also an unpleasant, corrupt, cruel police state, in which people fear to speak their minds and opponents of the regime disappear. All media are harshly censored and punished when they rebel.
The Communist Party, responsible for countless murders and one of the worst man-made famines in human history, still dominates the government, and its officials deal brutally with those who stand in their way.
I know personally of one woman whose house was demolished around her because she defied the one-child policy. Others have been forced to have abortions.
China ruthlessly colonises its neighbours. Most people know about Tibet – and I wonder how long it will be before the exiled Dalai Lama is welcomed at a high level in London again. Something tells me it will be the far side of never. Money talks.
But fewer are aware of events in Sinkiang. There, China is busily overwhelming the Turkic, Muslim people who have lived there for thousands of years, by organised and state-sponsored mass immigration.
Well, bankrupts can’t be choosers. But the Cabinet that smarmily welcomed Comrade Li Keqiang is the same one that is always hot to intervene against tyranny and misgovernment in Iraq, Libya and Syria, and which haughtily condemns Russia for annexing Crimea.
Let’s not have any more of this. It’s obvious that we don’t really care about human rights or aggression. We just like to think we do. Principle is principle, and if you won’t stand up to the big bullies, then you shouldn’t try to cover up your poverty and cowardice by hounding the small ones.
Tom may learn, but Cameron never will
The new film Edge Of Tomorrow, starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, both above in a scene from the movie, allows the main character to live the same events over and over again until he gets them right.
But would this work on politicians? They never seem to learn anything from their own experience, or from history. Take our Prime Minister and his nutty, pointless battle to block the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker as Supreme Smoothie of the EU. I carry no torch for Mr Juncker, but why bother?
The European Union has cupboards and attics crammed with grey, discreet men and women who would readily step in if Mr Juncker were rejected. Within a week, you couldn’t tell the difference.
To object to him because he is a ‘federalist’ is like objecting to a bicycle because it has wheels. Of course he is a ‘federalist’. The entire EU is federalist. That is what it is for. Come to that, Mr Cameron – who supports the EU – is a federalist, and the whole Tory Party is federalist.
This has been obvious to anyone at all observant for years and years, as has the fact that the EU, like a monster in a swamp, cannot be defeated by anyone in that swamp. The moment you think you have outwitted the monster, as poor Mrs Thatcher did, it will rise from the slime behind you and gobble you up.
The EU is, as I keep pointing out, the continuation of Germany by other means – though, unlike in 1914 and 1939, this time it is Germany with full American backing.
Why don’t our conventional politicians learn from years of repeated experience on these lines? Because they don’t want to.
Far too little fuss has been made this week about the brilliant and perceptive remarks of Dominic Cummings, a former government apparatchik now on the loose. If he’d been Ed Miliband’s ex-aide, the row would still be going on.
As well as pointing out that politicians are in fact as dim as you think they are, and there is no secret room containing smart people who actually know what they are doing, he said this of the Tory Party and its attitude towards the EU.
It is ‘whining, rude, dishonest, unpleasant, childishly belligerent in public while pathetically craven in private, and overall hollow’.
A bit mild for me, but unusually close to the truth for a political operator.
Bennett rewrites history for the boys
The BBC favourite Alan Bennett, right, has grown soft with too much flattery. He is even praised for making a paedophile teacher the hero of The History Boys, a bad, crude, ignorant play and a worse film.
Now he has delivered a silly class-war sermon attacking private schools. Doesn’t he realise that many snob-free homes make huge sacrifices to buy their children out of the comprehensive school disaster?
Probably not. He appears to know nothing of Britain since about 1964, which is probably the last time anyone dared criticise him. He said in his sermon that he had once expected grammar schools to ‘gradually overtake’ public schools in getting their pupils into Oxford and Cambridge. Then he vaguely mused that it ‘didn’t happen’.
He is utterly, spectacularly, hog-whimperingly opposite-of-the truth wrong about this. It did happen. By 1965, grammar and direct grant schools got 57 per cent of Oxford places, and public schools 41 per cent. The state school share was rising every year.
But then Mr Bennett’s Left-wing friends smashed up the grammar schools, and abolished the direct grants, and it all went backwards, as it has ever since. It is them he should be attacking, not independent schools, which often strain themselves to offer free places to poor children, but cannot replace the grammars that Mr Bennett’s comrades smilingly, hatefully destroyed.
►► I actually shook with rage listening to Richard Hawkes of Scope on Radio 4 last Tuesday, blandly defending his charity’s plan to shut down its larger old-fashioned homes where some people have lived happily for 30 years or more.
He had just listened to a recording of several such residents, saying quite clearly that they were happy as they were and did not want to move. But he then declared that ‘disabled people’ were ‘telling us’ that they did not want to live in such places.
I am used to big organisations claiming to know what I want better than I do. ‘There’s no call for it,’ they say, as they stop providing something I like, from thick-cut marmalade to quiet carriages.
But that’s just stupid. Turning these people out of their happy home is cruel as well as stupid. If you give to Scope, tell them to drop this unkind policy.
June 20, 2014
Grenades and Mortars used to Defend a Cannabis Farm in Albania. Why?
My view is that the EU is a land empire rather than a comity of free nations. It allows Germany’s original 1915 Mitteleuropa plan for economic and political domination of central and eastern Europe to be pursued without war, while preserving the dignity and feelings of the nations which must lose sovereignty and independence as a result.
It also allows the USA to engage diplomatically on the side of this plan, which Washington believes preserves stability on the European continent.
France especially is consoled by a seat on the UN Security Council, a nuclear deterrent and other baubles. Each nation has its own different reasons for having gone into the EU, France’s and Germany’s being the most interesting and the most sharply contrasting. But it’s very unlike the original union of the American 13 colonies.
Since the absorption of the Warsaw Pact states, and the Baltic countries, whose feelings needed to be soothed because of their many decades as prisoners of Moscow, the EU has begun to move into zones (or think of moving into zones) which are really much more like colonies than countries. Of course some were more equal than others. No open distinction was made between Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania and Bulgaria (though their people’s right to work in other EU countries were differentiated).
The bits and pieces of Yugoslavia, and perhaps some of the Caucasus states, fall into a category quite different from these. They are in the end too poor and too small to be real equals of the original EU members. So, in my view, is Ukraine, whose status as a proper nation is questionable.
But now here comes Albania. According the Financial Times of London, this very troubled and very poor country, which had a special isolated status in the Cold War, closer to China than to the USSR, is now seeking ‘candidate status’ . It is said that Britain, the Netherlands, Greece and Germany are all in favour, as is Italy, which is so keen on Albania that Mussolini invaded it. Paris and Prague may be against it.
In any case, one effect of these manoeuvres has been an amazing battle in the village of Lazarat, with Albanian armed police fighting equally well-armed drug barons (using grenades and mortars) over a huge cannabis plantation. Who knows how long this has been going on? The Lazarat dope farms are said to be earning $6 billion a year, about half of Albania’s GDP (even Britain’s flourishing tax-free cannabis farms aren’t that big). Albania is, obviously, intending to show that its law-enforcement is up to EU standards, whatever that means.
Experience shows that, when the EU wants someone to join, they are found to be up to the required standard ( so Greece was allowed into the Euro, and ‘transparency’ was said to be fine in the far south-east). So prepare for Albanian membership and what that will mean. One of the things it surely means is that some people, at least, will begin to realise that the EU is a post-modern empire without an emperor, not a collaboration of equal nations for a bit of free trade. And that it is territorially ambitious.
June 19, 2014
The World Cup - Peter Hitchens Speaks
Some of you may be interested in this recorded interview with me. The sound quality’s not great, but I suppose it’s a rare opportunity to hear me discussing the World Cup
http://vocaroo.com/i/s1iWh3wSFrkh
The Night Ted Heath Came to Power
Today is Edward Heath Day, the 44th anniversary of that strange man’s unexpected election victory in 1970, which I remember as if it were yesterday. It was, much like now, a lovely English June with soft winds and sunny skies, not the sticky humidity that’s become more common in recent years.
I was an 18-year-old, waiting for A-level results, living in Oxford, hanging about on the fringe of the university student left and signed up already in a formal revolutionary grouplet, the International Socialists. We used to gather at the Jet garage near the Cowley works, amid the early-morning smell of swarf and burnt electricity which hung about that part of Oxford in those days, and hand out our leaflets to bemused proletarians before going on to the lamented Johnson’s café for chewy bacon sandwiches made of proper thick white bread, and very brown tea. It was all quite old-fashioned. One of the factory chimneys still bore the faded camouflage paint it had been given during World War Two, when it was an aircraft repair shop. On Sundays we’d trudge round the council estates in the late mornings, delivering the ‘Socialist Worker’ to embarrassed people who’d once ordered it and were now too polite to tell us to get lost.
As far as I recall, our slogan for that election was ‘Vote Labour Without Illusions’ , as if anybody ever voted Labour *with* illusions.
Did I vote? Harold Wilson, confident that the youth of the nation were with him, had made it legal for me to do so (incidentally lowering the age of majority from 21 to 18) , but I genuinely can’t recall whether I did or not. I can’t recall quite a few details of the early part of that evening, not through drink (even then I never drank much, and became ill if I did) but – I suspect – because of what happened later. It took me weeks, for instance, to remember where I had left my bicycle. The polls closed earlier in those days and so the count was quicker and the results declared earlier, even though many more people voted.
I remember sitting around the (black-and-white) TV in one of the needlessly squalid houses the comrades inhabited in those days, in a side street east of the River Cherwell, as the results programme began. I was puzzled then, and am puzzled now, that the music chosen to introduce the programme ( can we Marxists have been watching commercial TV? I think we were) was from a song called ‘Young, Gifted and Black’ then high in the charts. The phrase did not apply in any way to Harold Wilson, the incumbent Labour prime minister, or to Ted Heath, his Conservative challenger, or to anyone else playing a prominent part in these democratic revels. Ah, well. Perhaps they just thought it was a nice tune, which it is.
Soon all such quibbles were forgotten. Everyone in the room had come to maturity (or what we then mistakenly thought was maturity) under Labour governments. Since October 1964, and especially since their decisive victory of March 1966, Labour had come to seem the natural party of government. We had no idea at the time just how left-wing and radical a government it was (much as the left of the Blair era never understood how radical that government was) and tended to despise Wilson and his unglamorous circle as sell-outs and covert Tories. And we believed, as did everyone else who read the newspapers, that Labour would win comfortably (polls had given Labour a lead of up to 12%).
And then the results began to come in. In those days I think Billericay was the first to declare, and we went through that initial phase of wilful disbelief that accompanies a hard blow to cherished assumptions. The sharp rise in the Tory vote was a fluke, and would not be repeated. And then it was, again and again. The realisation that a Conservative Party ( we had no idea then that it was no such thing) could actually command a majority of votes in the country after an entire decade of cultural revolution was a big, unpleasant shock. What might happen now? This was a clear end to the Sixties, at least as a period of uninterrupted ‘progress’ towards whatever it was we wanted (mainly more selfish pleasure, I think, though the cleverer comrades also wanted power over others). Worse, it might even mean things would start go backwards.
Of course this was absurd. But it was what we thought, and it was the spirit in which we abandoned the TV and set out for the Town Hall half a mile away, for the Oxford declaration. In those days, Oxford, like most medium-sized cites, was a single constituency, and it swung from party to party (now it’s been cut into two, neither truly marginal) and had been the scene of repeated duels between two rather interesting men, Labour’s Evan Luard, and the Tory C.M. ‘Monty’ Woodhouse. Luard was a serious academic, a Chinese-speaking former diplomat who had quit the Foreign office in protest at the Suez adventure. Many years later he joined the SDP. Woodhouse was even more distinguished, having been a guerrilla fighter in German-occupied Greece, and then MI6’s man in Teheran during the Anglo-American coup against Mohammed Mossadeq, which he co-organised alongside the CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt.
We didn’t know this last bit at the time. To us he was just an upper-class twit with a doubly Wodehousian name. Monty indeed. And that night he had had the brass nerve to win the election. How we howled and screamed as the result was announced. I never pass the building and its tiny balcony, to this day, without blushing faintly at the memory.
And little did we (or the country) know that Monty Woodhouse would help sustain in office Ted Heath, one of the most revolutionary men ever to occupy 10 Downing Street, the man who would end a thousand years of British history by ceding our independence to the European Union, and ( I might add) the man who would destroy the English counties, so helping to make the country not just a foreign-ruled province, but a place increasingly unrecognizable to those who had grown up in it.
June 18, 2014
Short Breaks in Mordor now available as an e-book
I’d like to announce the publication by Amazon of my first e-book, a compilation of foreign reports from Iraq, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Egypt, Gaza, the Congo, and other parts of Africa, not to mention Israel and the USA.
It’s called ‘Short Breaks in Mordor’ and opens with an essay on the joys of borders.
You can find it here
Amazon.co.uk: http://amzn.to/1lCF9OM
Or, if you are in the USA, here
Amazon.com: http://amzn.to/T6wyZJ
(Yes, I know this is the second notification. The first did not contain complete details)
Russian Tanks in Ukraine?
Some days ago I asked if anyone had seen any conclusive proof that the ‘Russian tanks’ seen in Ukraine had actually crossed the border.
I have to say this claim seemed tenuous and unlikely to me. Why would Russia take such a large risk for so little? Much more effective, and much less traceable weapons than tanks can be ( and in my view are being) taken across the border by covert means, as can people. But actual tanks? The destroyed Russian-made tanks I saw in Baghdad after the invasion in 2003 were easily identifiable by make and model, and no doubt, even after being knocked out (in most cases the entire turret had been blown off). They contained equipment and serial numbers which would have allowed any competent intelligence service to determine where they had come from. Why would Moscow, which has been so careful to stay deniable, take such a risk . Why have deniable operations, if you’re going to do undeniable things?
A contributor referred to a BBC news account of the ‘Russian tanks’ seen in the Ukraine being supposedly identified by NATO satellite. He appeared to believe this settled the matter.
I have no doubt that the BBC reported this with its usual impartiality, care and attention to detail. But I have to say I find the connection inconclusive. Satellites are very good at spotting things in general, but (at least in any satellite pictures I have ever seen released by any major military power - perhaps they have better ones they keep secret) they are weak on conclusive detail.
I have looked at one reasonably dispassionate account of the matter (see link below), and the yawning gap in the middle of it is any demonstrable connection between the three tanks loaded on to a transporter (a not uncommon procedure) in Rostov-on-Don and the three tanks seen in Ukraine. About 13,000 T-64s were built, though it is a very old tank, superseded by the T72 and the T80 in the 1970s. According to Wikipedia, Russia still has about 4,000 but they are out of service and awaiting the scrapyard. Ukraine, by contrast, still has about 2,000 in service. Do the satellite pictures even show that the tanks in Rostov are T-64s? Isn’t it more likely that rebels managed to capture a few Ukrainian T-64s from some poorly-guarded depot? The former Soviet Union is full of middle-aged men who have been taught how to drive a tank.
Amazing Scandal Erupts - Nobody Notices
Readers here will know that I have quite a lot of time for Mr Speaker, John Bercow, not because I agree with him about politics (I don’t) but because he has used his office to make Parliament important again. Again and again he has made senior Ministers go to the House of Commons and face (as they should) questioning from MPs about major live issues. This used to be very rare. Now it is pretty much universal, and even after Mr Bercow leaves, his successor, be he or she ever so toadying, will not easily be able to give the practice up.
That’s all very well. But the MPs themselves aren’t always up to the opportunity this gives. Ministers don’t always get the harsh grilling they deserve. Asking truly difficult questions is a great skill (I am fumbling towards knowing how to do it after many years of ministerial press conferences, and I still smart and wince over the opportunities I have muffed, especially over David Cameron’s expenses) . One sign that I may be getting there is the reluctance of some politicians to take questions from me at all, which I regard as a badge of some honour.
And even if you succeed, you can’t in any way rely on your colleagues and rivals (this is as true of journalists as it is of MPs) to notice your triumph, let alone follow it up.
But the problem is even more profound. Parliament and the political media now seem to lack any kind of true questioning spirit. In an astonishing article in ‘The Times’ which lies behind a paywall, it was revealed earlier this week that Dominic Cummings, a former aide and close adviser (he left official employment in January, but is still said to drop in from time to time) to Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, had let fly some wonderful, true and enjoyable attacks upon politicians and civil servants (and by implication on political journalists, who have by and large not noticed what Mr Cummings is pointing out, and obediently pump out the bland official line on everything, even the official rows that they are carefully briefed on, so as to give the illusion to them and others that they are ‘insiders’) .
Here is a selection . Of the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn, he said this person was a ‘classic third-rate suck-up-kick-down sycophant presiding over a shambolic court’: ‘MPs have no real knowledge of how to function other than via gimmick and briefings. That's also how No 10 works. It's how all of them are incentivised to operate. You get ahead by avoiding cock-ups and coming up with tactical wins, you don't get ahead by solving very hard problems.’
Then he spoke of '…politicians running around who don't really know what they're doing all day or what the purpose of their being in power is.'
My absolute favourite : 'Everyone thinks there's some moment, like in a James Bond movie, where you open the door and that's where the really good people are, but there is no door.'
There is no door! Those four words are almost literature.
Or my second favourite 'As Bismarck said about Napoleon III, Cameron is a sphinx without a riddle — he bumbles from one shambles to another without the slightest sense of purpose.'
'Everyone is trying to find the secret of David Cameron, but he is what he appears to be. He had a picture of Macmillan on his wall — that's all you need to know.'
Now, Mr Cummings’s long and close connections with Michael Gove are very well-known, though a sort of arm’s length arrangement has been reached in recent months. You might say that Mr Cummings was a deniable operation - ‘The Continuity Michael Gove’ or ‘The Real Michael Gove’. Or the ‘I can’t believe it’s Not Michael Gove’.
By the way, Mr Cummings later went on to describe the Conservative approach to the EU as ‘whining, rude, dishonest, unpleasant, childishly belligerent in public while pathetically craven in private, and overall hollow’, which is about as true a statement as I have heard in London on this subject in many a long year.
And he added: ‘As the black flags of Isis fly and Putin seeks to break Nato, William Hague poses for the cameras with Angelina [Jolie] and Cameron's closest two advisers stick with the only thing they know – a 10-day planning horizon (at best) of feeding the lobby (badly) and changing tack to fit the babbling commentariat (while blaming juniors for their own failings).’
I like that ‘babbling commentariat’ phrase myself.
Does Mr Gove think this? Or anything like it? It’s far from impossible to believe so.
So, when his former aide deliberately says these things on the record, it would be perfectly reasonable for everyone in Westminster to conclude that Michael Gove’s private mind is being opened unto us, or at least to speculate productively along those lines and see what Mr Gove says.
Indeed, I have to say that if any aide to a senior Shadow cabinet member in the Labour camp had said anything comparable, the entire mediasphere would have been full of raging speculation about a death-blow to Red Ed. Tory MPs would have been whipped out of their somnolence by Downing Street’s loyal thugs and bullies at Westminster, and made to bray and howl and heckle until it looked like a real crisis.
And, within hours of the Cummings outburst being published, there was a wonderful opportunity for Labour MPs to do this to the Tories. It is called ‘Education Questions’, and it fell due on Monday in the Commons, just after prayers at half past two of the clock.
You can look at it here
Of course, there were the usual hors d’oeuvres to get through, as the Junior Ministers (and what a lot of them there are) did their bit.
But there was no main course.
The Cummings outburst, which must surely have been on everyone’s mind, repeatedly did not come up, until, to his great credit, the Labour MP for Cardiff West, Kevin Brennan, rose to his feet. This is what happened:
‘Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab): Can the Secretary of State confirm that the architect of the free schools policy, Dominic Cummings, was in the Department last week, despite the Under-Secretary of State, the hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) saying in a written parliamentary answer to me that there was no record of his visit? Could that be because he wrote last week, in typically bad taste, that he always signs into Government Departments, including No. 10, under the name of Osama bin Laden? What on earth is the Secretary of State doing still relying on this man’s advice?
Michael Gove: The architect of the free schools programme was actually Andrew Adonis, not Dominic Cummings, as he himself has said. Free schools were a Labour invention—a point that was repeated by the former Prime Minister Tony Blair when speaking to The Times today. As for the hon. Gentleman’s points about former special advisers, all sorts of people from time to time seek to visit the Department for Education to exchange ideas with old friends and colleagues.’
And with that (not particularly elegant) evasion, that was it. Nobody followed it up. The supposedly golden boy, Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary, Tristram Hunt, later wasted his opportunity on a weary and repeated question about the exhausted Birmingham schools controversy.
Labour’s Lisa Nandy made a bold late stab , thus : ‘Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab): Will the Secretary of State tell the House exactly when Dominic Cummings ceased to hold the pass that allowed him access to the Department for Education?’
Which would actually have been a rather good question, except that it was fatally too long. It needed one slight adjustment, to leave out the detailed stuff about the pass, and stick to asking when exactly Mr Cummings last spoke to Mr Gove, no matter where or how. For, as we see, the irrelevant technical detail always provides an escape for the skilled evasion merchant. As we now see:
‘Michael Gove: I think it was Jimmy Carter who was once attacked by critics for worrying about exactly who was using the tennis courts at the White House. I am not responsible for the allocation of passes to the Department for Education, but I am always happy to welcome constructive critics such as the hon. Lady for an enjoyable discussion over a cup of tea whenever she wants to come to the Department.’
Surely this was just a failure of preparation by Labour? So I actually turned down what would have been an enjoyable and educational broadcasting appearance at lunchtime today, so that I could watch, live, Prime Minister’s Questions. Silly me. I was (foolishly) sure that the Cummings revelations would play a large part in the events. My hopes rose when the first MP up to ask a question was Kevin Brennan, who had done so well on Monday.
Mr Cameron was vulnerable from many directions. Had Mr Cameron rebuked Mr Gove for the behaviour of his aide. Is he a sphinx without a riddle? Does he bumble from one scandal to another without the slightest sense of purpose? Is his chief of staff a sycophant?
Nothing. No hint that anyone had even read these devastating criticisms from a man who was for years smack in the middle of government and (as far as we know) is still welcome in Mr Gove’s private office and his private world.
But no, Mr Brennan asked about passports, last week's issue, and that, I think, was that. As so often during PMQs, my vital signs gradually shut down as it deteriorated from fake combat into a parade of sycophancy and camera-catching.
When is a scandal not a scandal? When it’s not in the interests of the establishment (which includes the media) for there to be one.
Baffling. But here’s an interesting thing. Listeners to my recent ‘What the Papers say’, will know that I am always fascinated by headlines that aren’t justified by the words beneath them (remember ‘Labour admits defeat’ from the Daily Telegraph after the local elections, when Labour hadn’t even been defeated, let alone admitted it?).
Now I draw your attention to this story in ‘The Guardian’ of Tuesday 17th June, under the headline ‘Gove forced to disown senior adviser after attack on Cameron’, and with the by-line of that veteran political reporter Patrick Wintour.
It is to be found here:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jun/16/michael-gove-dominic-cummings-david-cameron
The subject of the verb in the headline is ‘Michael Gove’. He’s in the story, and the opening paragraph repeats the headline.
‘The education secretary, Michael Gove, was forced to disown his most senior aide after his former special adviser described David Cameron as bumbling, the No 10 chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn, as a sycophant presiding over a shambolic court, and the direct of communications, Craig Oliver, as clueless.’
Wow! Forced to disown it, was he? That sounds pretty rough. Who did it? Let’s have the details. But there are none. And let’s read the words in which he did the forced disowning. But there are no such words. Maybe the sub-editors cut them out. But it seems unlikely.
So, a) where and when did he ‘disown’ him, and at whose behest and b) where’s the description of this ‘forcing’ ? I agree it’s in the passive, but who did it and how? And where’s the evidence for it?
Why in any case should he have been forced to do anything of the kind after (as the Guardian story says):
Number 10 ‘brushed aside the attacks, saying Cameron was not interested in such stories.’
Oh, well, if he is 'not interested' in a close Cabinet colleague's aide publicly attacking his government as an aimless disaster populated by sycophants and vacuums, why shoudk anyone else be?
All I can find is this reference to ‘aides’:
‘The education secretary's current aides said Gove had not known about Cummings's planned attack on No 10 and did not agree with his views.’
And then ‘In the Commons, Gove sidestepped questions about whether Cummings had been in the Department for Education last week.’
So, if an unnamed ‘aide’ or even 'aides' (whom we can’t question and who can’t be made to take responsibility for what they have anonymously said) says Mr Gove didn’t know about it, that cancels out the fact that a named aide, closely associated with and recently employed by Mr Gove has publicly said all the things he’s said? Not really.
Interesting, isn’t it?
But there’s still no door. They’re just as bad as you always thought they were. And there’s no Norland nanny, holding their hands or cleaning up after them when they have had too much power, got over-excited, and been sick on the Downing Street floor. This is indeed the Children’s Hour.
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