Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 234

What Skull Cracker and his pals reveal about our pathetic jails

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

In the black comedy that is modern Britain, one of the best jokes is that crime is supposed to be falling, yet the prisons have never been so full. The Government ceaselessly begs judges and magistrates not to send anyone to jail unless they absolutely have to.

The ‘police’ (a word which can now only be used sarcastically), and the Crown Prosecution Service (whose title is itself a joke) do their best to ignore them, forget them and let  them off.

But things are so bad that, even so, large numbers of people actually are convicted of crimes. And many of them are so nasty, and have been let off so many times before, that judges do actually sentence them to immediate custody.

Alert people have known for years that these sentences are official lies. ‘Six months’ means ‘out in weeks’, free either to commit more crimes or perhaps to write a weekly column for the Guardian.

But it is only thanks to Mr ‘Skull Cracker’, the ‘Scarborough Slasher’ and various other picturesquely horrible criminals that we have now found out that it is even worse than that.

Such people are officially in prison. But in many cases they aren’t really. They are being let out to wander around. Perhaps one of them is sitting near you as you read this.

Perhaps he has official permission. Perhaps he has just decided to stay out a little longer because the weather is nice today (knowing that he will eventually get a free lift back to prison from the police).

In any case, be nice to any angry-looking men with tattoos you come across. They may only be in the ‘police’, but they could be taking a break from penal servitude. Green trousers are a warning sign. If you spoil their awaydays, they might spoil your whole day too.

This is both grim and funny. But it also tells us an important truth. Britain’s governing elite simply do not believe in punishing criminals.

They maintain prisons only because they are afraid we will be angry if they close them down. That is why the prisons are pointless, anarchic, drug-infested warehouses, most of whose inmates arrive through a revolving door and are spat out the same way a few weeks or months later.

If there is such a thing as ‘rehabilitation’, these absurd token detentions don’t offer enough time to attempt it.

As for the liberal myth that prison makes bad people worse, the truth is more or less the opposite. It is weakness that makes bad people worse.

Apart from actual murderers, almost nobody goes to prison for a first offence, or a second, or, in many cases, a tenth. They’re already worse before they get there, and almost wholly unafraid of the law.

In most cases they’ll be out so soon it won’t be worth absconding anyway.

But the cells are so crammed that open prisons are now being used for people who – in a just society – would be detained on an island surrounded by man-eating crocodiles.

Prison doesn’t work, on any level, because those in charge of it – our political class –  don’t care about you. They care about themselves.

Because they do not believe in any absolute idea of right and wrong, they do not believe in punishment. And so they lack the nerve or conviction to lock up Mr Skull Cracker and Mr Slasher somewhere they cannot crack or slash anyone else.

Has 'unbiased' Beeb got it in for me?

Most of what I have written here for the past ten years has been a warning to our elite that they will not get away with their folly for ever.

So I won’t go on at length about the UKIP vote, an electoral earthquake I have long hoped for and which I cautiously welcome.

But some of you may recall that last week I wrote a short item which – while it criticised UKIP – clearly urged a UKIP vote. On Sunday morning, a press review on BBC Radio 4 quoted only the very short passage which attacked UKIP. It also quoted other genuinely anti-UKIP articles, but none  at all in support of Nigel Farage’s party.

I swiftly complained. I was given an apology which was read out on air at 5.40 this morning (exactly a week after the original offence), so you have almost certainly missed it.

But the BBC completely ignored my wider point,  that this was evidence of institutional bias against me, and against UKIP.

This is the third time I have been the victim of what they insist is an isolated mistake. Fiction writer Ken Follett was not challenged or corrected on air when, on the Andrew Marr Show, he misrepresented words I had written in this column on October 24, 2010. The BBC said ‘sorry’, and I was eventually invited on to the programme to correct this.

Then the Leftist journalist Mehdi Hasan edited a quotation from this column  on BBC Radio 4’s What The Papers Say on July 29, 2012,  in a way that changed its meaning. The BBC swiftly broadcast an on-air apology, saying it was an ‘error’. And now this. Three ‘errors’ about one conservative columnist, all on the same supposedly impartial BBC. Three apologies. Is it just me? If so, it is beginning to look like much more than carelessness.

I have repeatedly asked the BBC if it can tell me of anyone else who has been subjected to even one comparable ‘error’, let alone three.

The response is silence. I shall be pursuing this through the BBC’s wondrous complaints system, whose winding corridors I have  come to know rather well.

Will my generation be the last to remember London as a distinctively British city? As I bicycled down Fleet Street towards St Paul’s, after a long absence from that part of the capital, I was shocked by how crowded with towers the eastern sky had become.

Once, Sir Christopher Wren’s serene dome ruled the horizon from all directions. Now it is thrust into the background by overbearing imitations of Shanghai or Dubai. Do the planners have any idea what they are doing?

I may in the past have been tempted to mock the philosopher Anthony Grayling because of his hairstyle, apparently modelled on that of William Hartnell, the first Doctor Who, and because of his unjustified certainty that there is no God.

But I would like to praise and congratulate him for standing up for that great principle of liberty and justice, the presumption of innocence. His refusal to take part in the modish boycott of the Oxford Union debating society, because its president has been accused – but not convicted – of rape, is right and brave.

It is shocking to see that a police official and a ‘Human Rights’ campaigner have joined the bleating flock.

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A Treatment for PMS - Perpetual Munich Syndrome

A very common problem in modern Western countries is PMS – Perpetual Munich Syndrome. The sufferer believes that there is only one type of foreign policy crisis, and that there is only one solution to it.

 

In truth, the sufferer has often never heard of any other sort of foreign policy crisis. He thinks that there are good countries and bad countries, that bad countries are led by evil dictators, and that Britain and the USA (both being good countries not led by evil dictators) have a duty to intervene to stop bad countries and evil dictators being bad.

 

Prince Charles, if his private remarks to a Canadian citizen have been correctly reported, is a sufferer from PMS. He believes that Vladimir Putin is in some way like Hitler. Well, I suppose we are all like Hitler in having two legs, two arms, one head etc. (not sure about the rest of him. Is the old song true?).

 

And any head of government is like Hitler, to the extent that he or she is a head of government. And any ruler of a country who seeks to regain lost territory, or to invade his neighbours to gain new territory,is like Hitler, in that he too did these things.

 

But a moment’s thought and a bit of historical knowledge shows that an awful lot of ‘good countries’,  not led by evil dictators, have behaved in this way too. Have these people never heard of the 1848 Mexican war, and do they condemn France for repossessing Alsace and Lorraine in 1918 and again in 1945? 

 

And can they not see that even Vladimir Putin is so unlike Hitler, when it comes to what is really important (I tend to think that racial mass murder is the most important crime that can be attributed to Hitler, and is the reason why he is viewed as being uniquely terrible) , that to compare him with the National Socialist Fuehrer is absurd beyond belief. 

 

So such a comparison seems to me to be no more than a shallow, pointless and unhelpful smear, reducing rather than increasing the sum of human knowledge and understanding, each time it is made.

 

Mr Putin has his faults, some of them very bad indeed. But so does the ‘Free World’ with its extraordinary renditions, its waterboardings, its secret prisons in places such as Bagram and its habit of creating failed states by crass military intervention and destabilisation. One of the reasons why I have more or less given up political allegiance or interest, and fixed on Anglican Christianity as my source of hope and consolation, is the impossibility of finding a country, political party, political figure or institution unspotted by some sort of discreditable crime or misdeed.

 

I don’t defend Mr Putin’s actions in the hope of helping him, but because I am nauseated by the fashionable, thought-free humbug and twaddle emitted by his critics. I am an anti-anti-Putinist, not a pro-Putinist.

 

The fact that I have clearly described him as a sinister tyrant is (as I know from direct experience, as they flatly refuse to talk to me) far more important to his apparatus than the fact that I point out that his behaviour in Ukraine is (by normal international standards) reasonable, proportionate and defensive.

 

By the way, on a related issue, I have been struck by the absence of coverage of the recent (Tuesday May 20th) conviction of five men in Moscow for the murder of the courageous and admirable anti-Putin journalist Anna Politkovskaya.  Delayed and inadequate as this development is, it is surely significant enough to merit more attention than it got (I heard a brief mention on BBC radio. The Daily Telegraph gave it three sentences on page 21, the Guardian three sentences on page 20.  I could find nothing in ‘The Times’ or ‘The Independent’ . Did anyone see any wider coverage?)

 

Let me also explain again about Ukraine. There are undoubted parallels between the 1991 break-up of the USSR and the 1919 dismemberment of Germany at Versailles.

 

But there are also distinct differences.

 

In 1918 Germany was violently defeated at great cost in lives and treasure in a war of conquest she had herself started. Her surrender was unconditional

 

In 1991 the USSR peaceably ceased to exist, after relinquishing control over a foreign Empire acquired after 1945 in what began as a defensive war. The USSR was not defeated in war, nor did it surrender unconditionally to anyone. It did not lose large parts of historic territory because of conquest of physical defeat, but because a constitutional accident and because of the sudden unexpected significance of internal borders which had until then had no political, military, economic or linguistic significance.

 

The wind-up of the USSR was achieved by several series of high-level negotiations , in which its leader believed he had been given promises about the eastward expansion of NATO, promises which were promptly broken.

 

Hitler was by no means the first German politician of significance to be discontented about the Versailles settlement. It was seen as foolish and unjust outside and inside Germany by many intelligent and thoughtful people including Maynard Keynes. A person could in those days be sympathetic to Germany without being accused of being a Nazi sympathiser or a defeatist. Indeed, as Graham Greene recalls (I think it’s in ‘A Sort of Life’) sympathy for Germany in the 1920s was a left-wing cause. Almost everyone in 1920s Austria yearned for unification with Germany.  

 

Democratic, civilized figures such as Gustav Stresemann viewed Versailles as wrong and oppressive. Liberal and left-wing opinion in 1920s Britain was broadly sympathetic to Germany, especially after the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Rhineland which was very unpopular in Britain. Had the European powers negotiated a compromise with Weimar Germany, Germans might well, have believed that democratic , liberal leadership was capable of restoring national pride and standing, and National Socialism might never have become significant. I might add that Czechoslovakia was far from saintly in its handling of its large German-speaking minority, much of which was at that time socialist by politics.  

 

I won’t continue these lines of thought any further.All I want to do is to stimulate thought in  to those who come to this matter with conventional wisdom and received opinion.

 

They should consider the possibility that Russia, and Russians, might have a case about the eastward expansion of NATO and the EU. They should recognise that the EU is, by any objective definition, a large territorial empire in a strongly expansionist and aggressive phase, which uses crowd politics and media propaganda as modern aggressive weapons, as well as currency and customs union and abolition of internal frontiers.

 

The EU is not some sort of benevolent fund or friendly society, or charity or a fun run,  and nor is the Russian Federation. Both of them are major regional powers. But I don’t see why a rational, informed person should view one of them as a sort of Narnia, the enlightened bringer of Love, the Beloved Republic, Peace, Joy , Purity,  Justice, Honesty and Liberty,  and the other as a sort of Mordor, an unrelieved tyranny of evil, corruption, oligarchs and oppression. The world was never like that, and it certainly isn’t now.

 

**By the way, I should note here that I have no objection to Prince Charles having and expressing opinions, whether I agree with them or not. But it always helps if they are (as in fact they often are, as over architecture) intelligent and informed ones.

 

 

Rejoice! But Not Too Much - a first response to the elections

I think that by Sunday night it will be even clearer that the discredited old parties of British politics are in serious trouble. They are paying for nearly 50 years of treachery and lies.

 

They lied about the real nature of the Common Market and its successor, the European Union.

 

They lied about immigration. They lied about the economy, they lied about schools, they lied about crime and justice. They lied about unemployment and they lied about global warming. They are still lying about all of them, aided by great battalions of professional liars, hired by them but paid for by you and me.

 

I have been saying all these things for years, and derided for it by the 'mainstream opinion' which is now utterly puzzled by an unprecedented bvoters' revolt. They maunder about what the existing parties can do to head this off, or contain it, or defeat it, not realizing that the whole point of it is that these parties have themsleves been rejected by legions who once supported them. and in many cases will never do so again.

They see the voters' revolt as a problem to be managed not a reason for change. They are too used to lying, and they lie too instinctively,  to turn for honesty when it is the only possible remedy. 

 

As so often I am reminded of Rudyard Kipling’s bitter jibe in another circumstance, summarising the secret motto of the politician as

 

‘I would not dig, I dared not rob - and so I lied to please the mob’.

 

These parties, their spokesmen and the supposedly independent commentators who have been in their pockets and at their lunch tables for so long have no idea what has hit them. How funny that the Republic of London, which is barely part of Britain any more, was the only major part of England where UKIP’s surge was weak. But London is where all these people live, who do not understand their own country because they never visit it, except for swift and insulated photo-opportunities.

 

On Friday morning they floundered to explain the UKIP vote, which they had all hoped to destroy with a tornado of smears. Well, the smears failed. The collusion between media and political parties failed. The BBC’s blatant bias failed. If they can fail once, can they fail again? Will they keep on failing? That is one of the things I am not sure of.  

 

Listen. Millions of people really are sick of the unwanted changes forced on them by European Union government. They are tired above all of the mass immigration which they were never asked about and which has changed their lives.

 

Will this now turn into a real political change? That is very doubtful. The major parties still have huge resources, especially access to millionaire donors, to state aid and to the special treatment which the BBC gives them under broadcasting rules (not to mention the even more special, but less helpful, treatment it gives UKIP).

 

And UKIP itself is a formless thing, a mixture of exiled Thatcherites, golf-club nostalgists and now of Labour defectors who might not feel much in common with their fellow-voters. It has no coherent position beyond departure from the EU, no real answer to the Left’s cultural and moral revolution, only one significant or persuasive figure (and dozens of very unpersuasive ones).

 

The Conservative Party, which ought years ago to have been closed down for multiple fraud, may yet survive,  especially if David Cameron’s luck holds and Scotland votes to leave the United Kingdom. That would give him the real chance of a Westminster majority, an aim which would otherwise be laughable.

 

So today I delight in the discomfiture of the enemies of Britain, and in the defeat of a nauseating and inexcusable alliance between politicians and media against the people.

 

But I still see no clear way out of the deep steep-sided pit into which this country has been led by its political class. All that is happened is that we now know that we are *in* such a pit. 

 

BBC To Apologize on Air

The BBC now tells me that it plans to apologize on air for its treatment of me, during next Sunday morning's 'News Briefing'.

 

The Corporation's e-mail reads as follows : '

'I have been discussing this matter with the relevant editorial staff at BBC News since you alerted us to the mistake. We would like to inform you that we will be apologising for this error during the equivalent slot of ‘News Briefing’ on Sunday 25 May 2014. Additionally, we will publish an entry on the BBC’s Corrections and Clarifications page explaining our actions.

 

We regard this as an editorial error; however we don’t agree that it represented wider or electoral bias against UKIP as you suggest.'

 

Of course it is an error. But why does this particular error keep on being made again and again? It is a particular kind of error, in which the published view of a prominent conservative columnist has been misrepresented (in this case by omission) , and listeners exposed to a one-sided selection of newspaper comments on a major political party in the midst of an election campaign. Has there been any parallel error, in which a prominent left-wing columnist has had his or her work misrepresented on air, or in which the impression has been given on air that there is near-unanimous press hostility to any of the establishment parties?

 

Indeed, has there been any other error of this kind *at all*, ever, on News Briefing or any other Radio 4 news programme, or other BBC news programme, which reviews the press? Or is this error as unique as the 'error' which caused me to be misrepresented on the same radio station's 'What the Papers Say' (29th July 2012)

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.u...

 And as unique as the 'error' in which Ken Follett, gave an inaccurate version of words I had written about Keith Richards on the Andrew Marr programme, and was not corrected at the time by the presenter?

See

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics...

 

In this case, also, the programme admitted it was at fault, and I was invited on to a subsequent programme to put the matter right.  But the problem still arose in the first place. The Marr programe is of course a live programme with non-BBC guests.  In my experience, press quotations on the Andrew Marr programme are discussed in advance, and there was ample opportunity to prevent or correct any misquotation at the time. 

 

So it is of course not unique. There are now three such instances, two of them on Radio 4.  Is it not passing strange that I have twice had my writing misrepresented on air by the same Radio Station? And thrice by the BBC as a whole? Has it happened to anyone else, ever? Even once? Radio 4 is a not unbureaucratic organisation. Why have its checks and balances failed so completely on two occasions, both involving me? 

 

It then explains to me that I can take the matter to the Editorial Complaints Unit if I am dissatisfied. I shall.  I am dissatisfied, not least because the apology will not be broadcast until after the polls have been closed, polls which may have been affected by the bias I believe was displayed on this occasion. I have written to the ECU. 

 

Then of course there is the problem of the biased selection of comments about UKIP, at a key stage on the election. I must stress again, this is a grave breach of due impartiality on matters of public controversy,  made worse by the fact that it took place soon before the poll and while postal votes were actually being cast.  It needs to be investigated as such. Since almost all the press have been hostile to UKIP during this campaign, I believe the BBC rules would require *either* that they found enough comments on either side to provide balance, or that they did not recount the comments at all. If Fleet Street is biased, the BBC has no duty to repeat that bias, but on the contrary has a duty *not* to repeat  it.

 

What is certainly not satisfactory is to parade a selection of anti-UKIP comments, and to quote so selectively from one of the pro-UKIP comments (there were, in fact, others  - notably from Christopher Booker in the Sunday Telegraph) that it appeared to be a condemnation. 

 

 

 

An Interview about Drugs with a Canadian Radio Station

Here is an interview I recently gave to a Canadian radio station about drugs (the destruction of the anti-drug laws is very advanced in Canada).

 

It was done over the telephone and is quite scratchy in places, but some may find it interesting:

http://www.unmaskingchoice.ca/sites/default/files/the_bridgehead2014-05-01_1.mp3

 

Begging, the Guardian, UKIP and Car Crashes

Some general correspondence. First, an admission. Mr ‘B’ is correct in saying that I once ‘begged’ readers to vote UKIP. I got carried away. I was genuinely livid, as I pounded my keyboard that Friday, with the gross dishonesty of the government’s poster vans, then being driven round a few suburbs giving a false impression that our borders were being enforced.I was appalled at the possibility that such crudity might work.  Few things make me angrier than this sort of dishonesty.

 

How can I beg people to do a thing I won’t do myself? Well, I suppose because I have learned over the years that most people regard voting as a duty or a moral act of some kind ( as I most definitely do not). So pleas to them to abstain fall on stony ground and are not heeded.  By all means don’t vote UKIP. Just don’t, whatever you do, vote for the Tory Party, the Guardian’s friend. But I suspect that most of those who want to get their own back on David Cameron’s party will see a UKIP vote on Thursday as the best way to do so, and I will not be sorry if lots of them do it.  This is not, oddly enough, because I particularly want to increase UKIP’s contingent in the European ‘Parliament’( a body so unloved that even the ‘Economist’ has been expressing doubts about it recently).

 

 

I’m puzzled by some of the oblique (verging on the obtuse) responses to my story about the Guardian and the Tories. Let me explain how journalism works. ‘Private Eye’ will often print things that others won’t, because, while it knows them to be true thanks to undisclosable sources, it cannot prove them if challenged. Other publications sometimes use insider columns (usually by-lined with a pseudonym)  for the same purpose, to hint at what they know without saying it outright. This is why astute readers pay a great deal attention to such columns,  which can be an ‘alternative front page’ of major stories which simply cannot be substantiated with on-the-record quotes or documents. It is also why Fleet Street newsdesks carefully scan ‘Private Eye’, which can be obtained in London on the Tuesday of the weeks in which it is published, if you know where to look.

 

Next, many stories are never confirmed, but the responses of those involved are even so a clue to the truth. A straightforwardly untrue story will be vigorously denied and will generally collapse very quickly, as the rivals of the paper which ran it will gleefully tear it to pieces. But a true story will not necessarily be confirmed. The targets of such stories will sometimes issue what are called ‘non-denial denials’, using terms such as ‘nonsense’ which appear to the naïve to be denials,  but are not.

 

The Guardian’s response to the ‘Private Eye’ story, which (as far as I know) was followed up by nobody but me, was not even a non-denial denial. It was a claim (I’ll come to this in a minute)  that the Guardian did not disclose its sources. It wasn’t even an attempt at denial. Do readers here really not see what that means? I will not spell it out. I will just ask them to think for a second.

 

Then there’s the point about Sarah Tisdall, who was found to be the leaker of a state document, and sent to prison, after the Guardian complied with a court order and supplied the document to the government. Various heavyweight epistles were addressed to me asking if I believed in the rule of law, etc, etc. Well of course I do. I was simply stating a fact. It is not true that the Guardian never discloses its sources. It’s a very poor answer to the allegation in ‘Private Eye’, that they have a deal with the Tories to print lots of anti-UKIP stories while seeking to conceal that they get them from the Tory Party. I suspect whoever wrote and authorised the response was unaware of the paper’s own history and didn’t know about the Tisdall case, now 30 years ago. But it’s part of my job as an old codger to remember what others have forgotten or never knew.

 

I also know that Guardian veterans are still anguished about it, as well they might be. They were much-mocked and condemned for it at the time, by the sort of people who generally like The Guardian.  It’s also something of a journey from the campaigning leftist Guardian of the 1980s, forced by a Tory government to cough up a leaked document, to a paper which can now be credibly accused of collaborating with the Tory Party, and which doesn’t deny the accusation when made.

 

But if the story is true, it also confirms something I have been saying ( and to which the rest of my trade have been stopping their ears) for many frustrating years – that the Tories are now a party of the Left, the continuation of Blairism by other means and actually preferred by many Blairites to Gordon Brown and to Ed Miliband. (By the way, I should commend today’s column in the ‘Guardian’ by Owen Jones, in which he speculates rather cleverly about what might have happened to the labour party had the supposedly wondrous David Miliband won the leadership).

 

If I were wrong about this, the accusation could not even have been made.

 

I am urged to complain about the way in which I was misrepresented by the BBC on Radio 4 on Sunday morning. Do such correspondents really think I have not done so already? My complaint (submitted simply through the BBC website) went in at lunchtime on Sunday and has been acknowledged.  I now fully expect a response telling me that nobody did anything wrong,  in my experience the invariable first reaction of the BBC complaints department. But,  being versed in such things, if I do receive such a response,  I will then complain further that my complaint has not been adequately dealt with. This should eventually bring it before the Editorial Complaints Unit, the point at which complaints actually begin to be seriously considered by BBC executives, and the destination  which all complainants to the BBC should strive to reach as an absolute minimum. Beyond the ECU  lie the BBC Trust and (possibly) Ofcom. But persistence is all.

 

I first heard of Nigel Farage’s alleged ‘car crash’ interview on BBC Friday night, when members of the audience at a school debate , to which I was speaking, had somehow learned that Mr Farage had done something dreadful. They knew it was dreadful,  though they could not tell me what it was.

 

On Saturday I watched the whole thing. I don’t think the interviewer’s technique, of incessant aggression and hostile questions (the answers to which he then talked over) would have damaged Mr Farage with any impartial listener. The whole line of questioning seemed to be based on the idea that it is self-evident  that any distinction between British culture and any other culture must be the act of an evil person. Those who believe that aren’t going to vote UKIP anyway.  The only bad moment for Mr Farage was when his media aide foolishly intervened on air, so making his boss look weak. But the immediate claims all over the media that the interview had *been* a car-crash may have damaged Mr Farage among those who will never listen to it. It is easily found on the Internet. See what you think. 

Mr Leg-Breaker's Day Out

I suppose we must now all take it for granted that many of the people walking past us on the street, or sitting near us on the bus or train, are convicted  murderers, armed robbers and burglars who are officially serving long prison sentences but are in fact on various forms of day-release from prison. Some of them will be there with official permission. Others (an increasing number, it seems) will have decided to stay out a bit longer, especially in this warm sunny weather.

 

The sensible thing to do is to be even more polite to strangers than you are already . As a lot of these people have nicknames such as ‘Thigh-Crusher’ and ‘Head-Kicker’, and by definition are skilled at killing and injuring their fellow-creatures, and uninhibited about it, you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of them. Since the police have more or less vanished from the streets (except the ones with the sub-machine guns who  go around in twos warring on terror, and obviously don’t want us interrupting their chats and bothering them with our trivial problems) , there’s not much help coming from that direction.

 

So be unctuous, humble and subservient to rough-looking men with shaved heads. Stand aside on the pavement. Don’t complain when someone barges in front of you on the queue or grabs your seat. It might be Mr Jaw-Smasher on an officially-sanctioned Awayday, re-acclimatising himself to life as a free man (so important!).  It’ll be even worse if he’s unilaterally extended it, as he’ll probably be extra-nervous and sensitive.

 

Recent events involving prisoners who have not escaped but been officially let out during their ‘sentences’ , and then just not come back, have rather drawn attention to this problem (just as a fire a couple of years ago at Ford Open Prison alerted us to the fact that such places are almost completely unstaffed outside normal working hours).

 

For me this is all more evidence that we are living in a sort of black comedy, the final years of a once-great country which has now become a bitter street theatre of tragi-comedy, as if someone has decided to demonstrate in detail just why all modern ideas on the running of society are mad, and has chosen to hold his demonstration here.

 

It is when the money turns funny that things will get really serious, and George Osborne and the Bank of England are working hard to bring that about.

 

But I digress. The hilarious thing is that, while it is quite obvious from such events that our prison system is a cardboard pretence, nobody outside or inside the establishment seems able to see it, let alone do anything about it. When the current frenzy over awaydays has quietened down, it will be back to normal.

 

Why is this? The usual answer is the right one. Nobody wants to see it.

 

The elite do not see it because they hate prisons. They lack the self-confidence to punish wrong-doing because their tortured consciences do not allow them to declare any action absolutely wrong. But they also have no real alternative to punishment, pretending to believe in a ‘rehabilitation’ which has never been demonstrated in action anywhere, certainly is not being seriously attempted here (most sentences are so short in practice that officers barely have time to get to know their charges' names, let alone reform their characters) and is in any case totalitarian. Rather than assuming that a free man has done wrong and should be punished, the state seeks to reach into his mind and soul and change them to conform with its wishes (whatever those wishes are).

 

We, the public, do not see it because we do not want to see it. We want to be reassured.  The public want to believe that prison sentences are factual, rather than the gross, fraudulent functions they are. The public want to believe that prisons are places of punishment, rather than warehouses run by the inmates. Look at the continued portrayal of prisons and prisoners in newspaper cartoons, quite out of touch with reality.

 

And the elite, which hates the very idea of punishment and does not believe in free will or human responsibility, encourages the illusion by ordering judges to hand down fictional sentences, most of which they know will not be served. It leaves prison exteriors much as they have always been, giving an impression of grim orderliness and authority which vanishes the moment you get inside the walls and find instead a sinister semi-anarchy.

 

This system fulfils no real purpose at all. It does not punish. It does not rehabilitate. Most criminals only experience it long after they have already become habitual offenders. The Michael Howard argument , that it protects the public from the worst criminals, would only be true if violent crooks were all locked up until they were old and weak. This is not the case. They are out, often very quickly indeed,  because of the pressure on space.

 

Above all, it does not deter. Much of the (enormous) increase in prisoner numbers in the past half-century is made up of people who would have been deterred from crime by the old, punitive prisons, but who now are not. They meet the criminal justice system, find it is made of mush, and continue to break the law for years without real penalty until eventually the exasperated courts finally send them to prison.  By this time it holds no fears for them at all, and in any case they will be out soon. And the more of them there are (as we see),  the less possible it is to build enough prisons to hold them. So they are let out even sooner, deterrence is weakened still further, and there are more criminals.

 

It’s all a bit like that old song ‘There’s a hole in my bucket’.

 

The end of it, like the end of most of our modern sagas of folly and error, will be our full entry into the Third World, with chaotic, savage prisons crammed beyond bursting, occasionally relieved by indiscriminate amnesties, bloody riots or  mass breakouts. And this will be combined, as it is in South American countries, with wild, unrestrained crime in the poorer parts of our cities. No doubt, as all this proceeds, the crime figures will continue to fall year by year.

The BBC Says Sorry

Tedious technical problems have prevented me from posting news of an extraordinary development in my latest tussle with the BBC.

 

They have, promptly and apparently without reservations, apologised for misrepresenting me in 'News Briefing' on Radio 4 on Sunday morning.

 

The apology runs thus :' We acknowledge that the quote used in the paper review did not accurately reflect the full nature of your article. We apologise, and would like to assure you that your concerns were raised with the relevant editorial staff at BBC News.'

 

Obviously, this can only be the start. The clear and swift admission of fault by the BBC only strengthens my desire to pursue the matter, since the action has much wider significance than my annoyance at being misrepresented.

How did this happen? How was it a) done and b) approved for transmission?

What about the context? Why were the articles selected for the press review all hostile to UKIP (except mine, which was made to seem so)?

 

And what about the breach of due impartiality, enjoined on the BBC in its Charter and especially important in the days immediately before an election?

I have submitted a further complaint, pointing out that these matters have not been dealt with. I will let readers know what happens.

 

Fair taxes? They're as likely as Osborne joining Take That...

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

 

Tax is a necessary nuisance, not a moral duty. It is not, as the Leftists chant, ‘the price we pay for a civilised society’. It is the price we pay for handing over too many of our responsibilities to the State.

A huge amount of it is wasted. Tremendous sums are simply squandered on debt interest,  in many cases paying for  failed or useless schemes of long ago.

It does terrible damage to  the economy, shrivelling the rewards for hard work and diverting wealth into the  wrong hands.

It falls very heavily on the poor, especially in the form of indirect taxes such as VAT.

In my view, our whole attitude to it is wrong, and well summed up by the fact that  Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs seldom if ever say ‘please’ when they demand our money and never say ‘thank you’ when they get it.

I am told by people who  have paid too much tax that HMRC can even be aggressive about telling them that. And now there is this plan to let them seize money from private bank accounts without a court hearing.

These are the methods and attitudes of a haughty autocracy, not those of a public service in a free country. The current frenzy against ‘Tax Avoidance’ is churned up by a government that cannot control its spending or its borrowing and so is frantic to grab all the money it can get, without worrying too much about how.

It is sad to see people joining in a campaign that will eventually hurt them too. We should remember that our money belongs to us, not to the State.

I barely know who Gary Barlow is and care less. I cannot imagine that he really deserves to be as rich as he  is. Nobody does.

But the people who choose to buy his music intend their hard-earned money to go to Gary Barlow, not to George Osborne.

Think about it. If George Osborne went on a national tour and sold copies of his speeches, he would be hard put to make  a hundred pounds.

Only one thing allows him to seize Gary Barlow’s money. It  is the law. And Mr Barlow is quite entitled to use the law to hang on to as much of his money as he can.

If the courts decide that  his investment scheme isn’t allowed, then the law says he must pay up.

But there is no shame in trying to keep his tax as low as possible (in fact I’ve yet to meet a well-off media Left-winger who wasn’t doing his utmost to keep his own tax bill down).

And the idea that he should  be stripped of his OBE, as if  he were a criminal, is a grave misunderstanding of what a free country is, and of what the law is for.

Here is the best reason for voting UKIP

I don't like UKIP or its leader, Nigel Farage. They are the Dad’s Army of British politics, doddery, farcical  and very unclear about what they are actually for.

But they have Captain Mainwaring’s virtues too.  They are absolutely certain about what they are against, in this case an aloof political establishment that despises the concerns of normal  human beings.

They are also indomitable when under attack. And they need to be. I have taken a close interest in British politics since I was a schoolboy, and I have never seen a more disgraceful alliance between politicians and their media toadies than the one that has been secretly made to do down UKIP.

On one day last week, almost every unpopular newspaper carried a cartoon portraying Nigel Farage as ugly, stupid or embattled, or all three.

Last Wednesday, the insider magazine Private Eye also claimed that the Leftist  daily The Guardian had  made a secret deal with the Tory Party, which claims to  be conservative.

The Tories, it was alleged, had promised the favourite newspaper of the liberal elite a steady supply of damaging stories about UKIP candidates saying daft things (Tories, of course, never say daft things). In return, the newspaper had promised to avoid identifying the source.

Such stories are immediately picked up by BBC radio and TV news channels, which view The Guardian as sacred text. Asked about the allegation,  The Guardian drew itself up  to its full height and snapped: ‘The Guardian does not disclose its sources.’ (A  certain Sarah Tisdall, who went to prison 30 years ago after The Guardian handed over documents that disclosed her as its source, might disagree.)

Well, there you have it. The Tory Party and The Guardian (and the BBC) are all united against UKIP. That would seem the best possible reason to vote UKIP. It also tells you who and what the Conservative Party really is.

The Prime Minister keeps saying he wants the Chilcot Report into the Iraq fiasco to be published. I can’t believe that the head of the British Government cannot force the publication of this document if he really wants to. There is no acceptable excuse for any further delay, and if it isn’t released soon we’ll have to assume that Mr Cameron is pretending and doesn’t really mean what he says.

What a mess we are in about the ‘N’ word. Of course some people still use it to insult and demean. There are not many of them, but they are cruel and wicked.

Others, still bigoted in their hearts, take an unpleasant joy in its rare survival in our  culture (as the name of a dog) in The Dam Busters. It is because of such people that I sympathise with TV stations that cut the word out of reruns of that film.

The ugly syllables have such a power to  shock that I can even (just) see why a city hall employee in Washington DC was forced out of his job (and later rehired after a scandal) for quite innocently using the word ‘niggardly’, which has no racial meaning at all. This  really happened, in 1999. The man’s name was David Howard.

Knowing what I know of the bitter racial  past and present of America’s unofficially  but sharply segregated capital city, I think  he would have been wiser and more tactful to say ‘miserly’.

This is because we have all made this word into a sort of boundary marker between our ignorant past and our more enlightened present.

But the word itself is not the offence. It is the intention behind it that we should judge. Those who speak crude words with no other aim than to wound and insult should face strong disapproval. Now, perhaps we could apply the same rule to the ‘F’ word and the ‘C’ word,  which you can use on the BBC without getting into any trouble at all these days.

Is This Impartiality? The BBC, UKIP and Me

Some readers may, like me, wake early on these lovely late spring mornings, full as they are of birdsong. If you do, you may have roamed in the shadowy borderlands between the BBC World Service (or what’s left of that once-majestic institution) and BBC Radio 4. There’s a handover at about 5.15 a.m., when the Shipping Forecast and the Inshore Waters Forecast are broadcast. And, despite a modern policy of giving the job to people who have no poetry at all in their voices and delivery, the recitation of the lovely, evocative names of all these headlands, capes and bays can be a thing of beauty in itself. It’s followed by a neat little package called ‘News Briefing’, which a few years ago replaced the ‘Radio Four UK Theme’, an unacceptably patriotic medley (presumably the reason for its abolition), made up of the tunes of traditional songs from all over our islands.

 

Anyway, ‘News Briefing’ has a concise summary of the main news stories, a weather forecast and a quick review of the morning’s newspapers. This is, of necessity, highly selective. But should it be as selective as it was this morning?

 

I invite readers to follow the link (below) to today’s news Briefing’. At about 5.40 a.m., it quotes from my column item about UKIP, which (as you can see from the blog posting immediately before this) concerned the ganging up of the Tories and the left-wing media to attack UKIP in an unprecedented fashion, and whose headline pretty much urges people to vote UKIP.

 

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007rhyn

 

Now, please listen to the extract from my article which was broadcast, and ask yourselves if this is in any way an accurate reflection of what I wrote or (in the context of the other extracts from other newspapers broadcast alongside it) a proper exercise of the BBC’s absolute duty of impartiality (specifically required by the Royal Charter which establishes the BBC and allows it to levy the licence fee) in matters of current controversy, and especially in party political matters, and even more especially party political matters during the weeks immediately before an election.