Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 235

Don't be put off 'War and Peace' because it is a Great Book

How many times I’ve pulled my huge Folio edition of ‘War and Peace’ from the shelf (two hefty volumes) , begun at the beginning and then laid it aside. I’m full of the feeling that every civilised person should have read Tolstoy’s masterpiece, yet held back because I have no real idea if the translation before me bears much resemblance to what Tolstoy himself intended. And so I have been sadly confessing, when challenged, that I have not read it.

 

This has given me genuine shame. I am not very worried about never having read ‘Pride and Prejudice’. I have tried to do so in the most ideal conditions and found it close to physically impossible, preferring to stare at the wall or read the labels on jam jars than to cope with Miss Austen’s unalluring prose. Threats of violence or enormous bribes might get me to carry on, but otherwise, I can’t see the point. I’m about due for my next dutiful assault on ‘Middlemarch’ (I have never yet got beyond the foothills, though, oddly enough I greatly appreciated ‘Silas Marner’). I once plodded my way through ‘The Red and the Black’, though I can now remember nothing about it at all, as if I were just reading one word after the other without actually putting them together, and also ‘Vanity Fair’, which didn’t even begin to compare with anything by Dickens.

 

So a few months ago, when I saw, on sale in Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford, a boxed set of a 1972 BBC2 dramatisation of ‘War and Peace’ I thought ‘I’m obviously never going to read it now. So I’ll do the next best thing. The BBC in 1972 was still a serious cultural organisation , and this will at least give me an idea of what the book is actually about.’

 

I was right about the BBC in 1972. It was quite startling, watching this measured, thoughtful production (starring, of all people, Anthony Hopkins as Pierre Bezukhov), made and transmitted (and entirely missed by me) when I was a student revolutionary. If only I’d realised, at the time, that I was still living in a cultural paradise compared with what was to follow. In fact, I increasingly feel this not about the 1950s, which always seem largely dark, damp and chilly, and tainted with the stink of tobacco smoke, in my memory, but about the early 1970s,  when we had only just joined the Common Market, when there were still hundreds of grammar schools – from which many of my fellow-students came - when marriage was still strong and most people had jobs if they wanted them.

 

Perhaps I then regarded Tolstoy (rightly) as too counter-revolutionary.  I do recall BBC2’s versions , at the same time, of Sartre’s ‘Roads to Freedom’ and Hardy’s ‘Jude the Obscure’, both of which I watched assiduously, having found an obscure senior common room on the York campus, which I wasn’t really entitled to use but which contained a rare (for those days) colour TV, and which few people knew about, so it wasn’t invariably tuned to sports or ‘Monty Python or guarded by crowds who would watch nothing else.

 

There is no incidental music, just dialogue, carefully and clearly spoken by good, Shakespearean-trained actors with the sort of basic education that such people then had. I know now that the director used some clever devices (particularly by making Bonaparte himself a major character) to advance and compress the story (I’ve heard it said that turning a  book into a film is much like turning a large stone building into an aeroplane). But I also know now that he managed to convey the books pretty faithfully, because the adaptation was so good that I now actively wanted to read the book.

 

And I did so, getting hold of an American paperback translation by the American actress Ann Dunnigan which several people say is the most faithful and fluent version in English (even though it is into American, rather than British, English) .

 

What can I now say? I sat next to someone at a dinner recently who told me that finishing War and Peace had left him bereft, like someone who had lost a limb. I wouldn’t go that far. As with all translations, I don’t just think, but know, that I am seeing the author’s work through  a glass, darkly (or, as the modern Bibles would have it ‘in a dim reflecting mirror’).

 

But I did come to value several of the characters very highly for their real virtues. It is, I think, a very conservative book, in which family and marriage and the military virtues are respected  - though the military virtues are also quite shockingly doubted, in the amazing passage in which Bolkonsky reflects on the way in which all rulers wear military uniform, and war is assumed to be the normal occupation of man despite its horrors. These are intensely and painfully described, without unnecessary detail or gloating,  but quite clearly enough to strike hard at the imagination. Countess Rostova’s collapse into grief and old age after the foolish, selfish death in battle of her beloved youngest son Petya is also unstintingly recounted. All impetuous young men should read it, and be told by someone they trust that this truth applies to them, too.

The book is also deeply Christian though not Orthodox in either sense of the word, and I did wonder at one point if the most important single person in the  narrative might not be Pierre Bezukhov, nor even Prince Bolkonsky or the dangerously passionate Natasha Rostova, but the peasant Platon Karatayev, who sings not like a modern man but naturally, as if he were a bird,  and is wholly at one with nature, who ‘lies down in the evening like a stone, and rises in the morning like new bread’ who stoically accepts all that happens to him, who is naturally generous, never idle, bears no resentments and does not at all fear death, and whose last communication to Pierre is never made, because Pierre is scared to be too near an obviously dying man and so fails to heed his gentle plea to come and listen. What would this final message have been?  Was this a real event in the author’s life which haunted him ever afterwards?Perhaps. Tolstoy experienced war in the Crimea among other places

 

I was reminded of Platon Karatayev by a distressing passage from Ronald Blythe’s marvellous book on English village life,  ‘Akenfield’, recently reprinted in the ‘Independent on Sunday’ . It describes the experiences at the Dardanelles of a Suffolk farm-labourer, Leonard Thompson, full of corpses, flies, filth, dysentery and sudden death, recounted in his own diary . In the midst of all the horrors,  which you must remember are being described by a tough countryman used to privation and pain, there is this : ‘But when we got to the communication trench we found it so full of dead men that we could hardly move. Their faces were quite black and you couldn't tell Turk from English. There was the most terrible stink and for a while there was nothing but the living being sick on to the dead.  I did sentry again that night. It was one-two-sentry, one-two-sentry all along the trench, as before. I knew the next sentry up quite well. I remembered him in Suffolk singing to his horses as he ploughed.

‘Now he fell back with a great scream and a look of surprise - dead. It is quick, anyway, I thought.’

 

It was that part of about ‘singing to his horses as he ploughed’ that made me think of Karatayev.

 

Perhaps his own direct experience of battle explains Tolstoy’s scorn for conventional historical accounts of wars and battles, as if they were ordered, controlled and directed  events rather than the wild surging chaos which experienced soldiers know them to be, and of the whole historical theory he sets out in the book.  Don’t hesitate to read it if you haven’t. You will not regret the time. It is not written in an elevated or inaccessible, or pseudo-intellectual way. Its characters are people that you know.

 

Oh, and there is the sadness of seeing all these people, kind and cultured by their own lights, happy in their homes and families, and knowing (as they do not) that their entire way of life will, in little more than a century, be swept away in a wave of blood, bones and hatred. Don’t bother telling me they were exploiters, and the rest of the Bolshevik defamation of the past. They were kinder by far than the supposedly just men who succeeded them, whose cruelty still marks Russia with deep furrows. 

The Lonesome Death of the British Railway Sandwich

I’ll try to deal here with some of the responses to my plea for British Rail to be recreated, and the privatization of the railways abandoned as a failure.

 

Many of them take a very strange form, denunciations of the alleged ‘British Rail sandwich’, offered as a serious reason for preferring privatized rail operation.

 

But this non-argument stands for a much larger misconception. Many people simply don’t realize how recent privatization was.  They think it happened at the same time as the other spectacular modernizations of our life in the 1960s, the Conranization of design, the Jenkinsization of public morality, the satire boom, Lady Chatterley, the Common Market , decimalization and BBC2, a series of events which spread from the middle-1960s until about 1973. In fact, the revolution in snack catering, the appearance of expensive coffee and sandwich bars in streets, airports and railway stations, postdates privatization and really only got under way in the past 15 years. I’d be interested to see a chart on the number of Starbucks and Pret-a-Mangers in Britain ten years ago, and the number now.

 

They may also be mixing it up with the long, slow stripping away of lots of juicy bits of the old British Railways estate, from its ponderous but comfortable station hotels to its ferries,  to its wondrous wine-cellar (inherited from the old Big Four railway companies) beneath St Pancras (from which I used to buy nationalized bargains by the case in the late 1970s) and the sad remnant of railway catering known as ‘Travellers’ Fare’ which was privatized, quite separately from the trains and track themselves, in 1988.

 

They are also perhaps mixing privatization up with Dr Beeching’s massacre of railway lines, and with the simultaneous withdrawal of steam locomotives.  The old sort of station buffet, with its alleged curly sandwiches and china cups of stewed tea with the sugar ‘in the spoon’ , as featured in the 1940s film ‘Brief Encounter’,  had vanished long, long before privatization began to take effect in April 1994.

 

In fact the unwrapped sandwich, private or public,  largely disappeared from this country in the early 1970s, thanks (I believe) to Common Market hygiene regulations or something of the kind. Before that era, a wide variety of bad sandwiches were available in many private and public outlets, plus a few good ones (The council-run café in Ruskin Park in South London used to do a particularly good cheese and tomato roll, as did the privately-run cafe next to the Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell Green)  and BR’s were, in my recollection, no worse than many capitalist rivals. 

 

Since then, a law seems to have been passed outlawing good, crusty English white bread (white bread is only allowed if it is allegedly French, or perhaps Sourdough)  and strong tea, and forcing us all to eat soggy brown bread and drink teabag tea (just as some strange force seems to have abolished hens’ eggs with white shells, so universal in my childhood that Sainsbury’s used actually to charge extra for brown ones). 

 

The main thing that happened to BR catering was that the spacious and sociable old buffet cars and restaurant cars disappeared, along with guards’ vans, as they weren’t included in the designs for new rolling stock. This seems to have been designed to solve the big post-Beeching problem that,  try as the railways might (under government pressure)  to drive away passengers with bad ill-timed services and high fares, they insisted on travelling by train anyway. The obvious solution, of reopening closed railways and running more and longer trains, was anathema to the Treasury, which has hated railways for more than half a century.

 

Hardly any proper dining cars, of the kind common until the 1970s, now survive. I glimpsed, yesterday, the surviving restaurant car on the noon Penzance express out of Paddington, but it was confined to half a carriage, and urgent announcements stressed that there would be only one sitting. But the food is still freshly cooked in a tiny galley by dedicated staff, and served by waiters and waitresses who know how to ladle soup on a speeding train (carefully).

 

 

So they resolved to try to cram still more people into each carriage. Rail travellers from the recent past can recall when Inter-city second-class carriages had seats arranged round tables and aligned with the windows, a comfortable and spacious system (though not in my view as good as the old compartments, which can still be found on many German trains).

 

Now the second-class coaches on my line have been rearranged in a  so-called ‘airline’ formation, where there are perhaps two lots of seats grouped round a table and next to a window, but the others are all crammed in nose to back rows. In some of the more modern trains, the windows are so small and infrequent that some seats actually have no access to a window at all. The seats themselves are often considerably smaller than they used to be. On one line known to me, they have actually managed to cram in five seats to a row, on trains supposedly designed for inter-city journeys of more than an hour.

 

It is hard to say how much this has to with privatization, though much of it seems to have followed it. It is possible that BR might have taken this route anyway. If so, it had the excuse of the relentless Treasury squeeze, which kept annual subsidies to around £1.14 billion a year on average.

 

The fact-checking group ‘FullFact’ has this interesting study of the question of subsidy:

 

https://fullfact.org/factchecks/taxpayer_subsidy_train_network_nationalisation-3391

 

 

This clearly shows that in raw figures the state subsidy to the Rail network has gone up considerably since privatisation.

 

But for some reason it chooses to say that the real test is the size of subsidies as a proportion of revenue. I am, not sure why this should be so significant, since it does not alter the size of the subsidy. It just means that passengers are being compelled to pay , directly out of their pockets, a higher proportion of the cost of the railay system. And, as that cost is rising,  they seem to me to be paying more for less, or at least for exactly the same. BR would also have bought new rolling stock, had it been allowed to continue. It might even have made its own, instead of buying them from abroad as privatized rail often does now. It wouldn’t have been made to pay for it over and over again, as are the private train companies which nowadays lease their trains from ‘Roscos’, rolling stock companies, rather than buy them ( let alone build them themselves).

 

As the railways are by their nature unprofitable (their benefits cannot be quantified in accounting terms) whoever decides fare levels decides how much their actual users must subsidize them, and how much taxpayers in general must do so. This is a fascinating political question, and the railway-hating contributors to this blog will doubtless snarl that non-rail users shouldn’t have to keep this antiquated system going (I’ve explained at length in the past why this doesn’t work. Roads, too, are subsidised by those who don’t use them, and as for air travel…

 

What really puzzles me is how the public benefits from the surpluses of the privatized train companies, which are distributed to their shareholders. These don’t seem to me to be real profits, and I can’t see how they would exist without public subsidy and higher-than-necessary train fares. In which case, public subsidy since privatization would seem to me to include direct payments from taxpayers and travellers to shareholders of companies which do exactly what, which BR could not do more cheaply? Can anyone help?

 

Now, it is ceaselessly said that passenger numbers have risen *since* privatization. This is perfectly true. But the supporters of the scheme automatically assume that they rose *because* of privatization. Is there any evidence for this? Or would it have gone up anyway?

As a resident of the South-East England commuter belt, I can say that I have noticed, during the period since 1994, a startling increase in the general density of traffic and of population and housing itself in that part of England. Large areas have been eaten up with car parks. Every available piece of vacant land has been developed for housing. Existing houses have been demolished to make way for higher-density flats. Roads which used to be free-flowing have become permanently congested. Bus services (now running with much higher fares than in the past) have become more frequent, even walking along city pavements has become more laborious and slow because they are more crowded.

 

I haven’t observed many new railway lines being built, or stations opened or reopened (there have been a few, but nothing like enough to explain the increased passenger levels). In fact, I think the final years of BR saw the reopening of some important lines and stations, and a revival of cross-country services destroyed by Beeching.  I have noticed that trains in general are more crowded more of the time, and that the train companies are trying as hard as they can to pack passengers in more tightly. There’s also been a noticeable increase (an entirely good thing) in goods business, but this tends to delay passenger trains, especially when goods are diverted from overused lines on to previously freight-free, or lightly-freighted routes.

 

My belief is that the increase in passenger numbers was a consequence of rising house prices compelling more women to go out to work, and compelling everyone to live further from their places of work,  and so causing more people to travel long distances to work in the crowded South-East, where commuting by road was more or less physically impossible. I think it would have happened under BR, and perhaps BR would have taken the same opportunity to raise fares, though it would have had(in my view) much less reason to do so.  As I understand it, the few large modernization projects which did eventually take place (after the complete refurbishment of the track following the epidemic of crashes ) were paid for by the public, not by private operators.

 

So FullFact’s statement that …. ‘in the last few years of British Rail’s existence, the proportion of government subsidy to passenger revenue was between 40 and 50 per cent. But post-privatisation, it fluctuated greatly between 26.2 per cent in 2000-01 to 55.7 per cent in 2006-07.

However the proportion of rail spending funded by the state did seem to be decline between 1994 and the turn of the millennium, before it began to rise again.

This may in no small part be due to the decision taken to increase funding in the wake of the collapse of Railtrack in 2002, in order to put its successor, Network Rail, on a “secure financial footing” ‘….

 

Simply records the fact that the unconnected rise in passenger numbers allowed the state, for some of the time (but not all) to reduce the proportion of taxpayer subsidy and make up for it through fare revenues.

 

FullFact says : while the proportion of funding provided by the taxpayer has been around or above the level that it was at before the network was privatised, this may have been a temporary blip.’

 

But then again, it may not have been.  It’s certainly hard to claim that the increase in passenger numbers, or the revenue squeezed out of them,  is a consequence of privatization. Travellers in the rest of Europe are invariably struck by how much cheaper normal ‘turn up and travel’ rail tickets are on the Continent, even in high-priced countries such as Sweden.

 

Modern British governments have become adept at concealing taxes and spending from the official accountants by various tricks and dodges, from student loans (under which students are forced to borrow to pay for what is in many cases little more than unemployment benefit) to the Private Finance Initiative . They even pretended until recently that Network Rail was not a state enterprise, when it clearly was.

 

This is all very interesting. But it does not show that railway privatization was a success. Nor does it solve the eternal problem that a bad sandwich, whoever makes and sells it, is a bad sandwich.

The Left Weren't Right in 1980. The RIght Were. Rambles Down Memory Lane with Denis MacShane

I have a small riposte to offer to the former Labour MP Denis MacShane, who has (along with a TUC official, writing on Twaddle) challenged my version of the TUC’s response to Polish Solidarity, and its challenge to Communist despotism, in 1980.

 

My original article can be found here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/05/solidarity-forever-the-british-left-and-the-polish-uprising-of-1980.html

 

 

 

Mr MacShane’s retort can be found in full here:

 

http://epi-c.net/?p=210

 

 

Mr MacShane opens:

 

‘For some reason I cannot fathom, Peter Hitchens started Twitter hares running by asserting that the Trades Union Congress failed to support the Polish union, Solidarity, after its creation in August-September 1980.’

 

The reason was an earlier exchange on ‘Twaddle’ between me and the Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, in which I felt it necessary to point out my personal position on the clash between the Polish people and Soviet power in 1980. I thought it was important to show that I had a consistent record of supporting those who stood up against *Soviet* power, something I distinguish sharply from modern Russia. I also thought it worth recalling that much of the mainstream western left of the time was sympathetic to Communism, and hesitated to support Solidarity in Poland.

 

I did not say that the TUC ‘failed to support’ Solidarity. That would have been false. A formula to support Solidarity was eventually arrived at after some delay and dissension at the top of the TUC.  What I actually said is best summed up in this passage.  ‘ …the TUC hesitated and mumbled through its false teeth, taking a fortnight to offer a grudging formula of semi-support’.

 

 

Mr MacShane gave the events a different character, saying: ‘ There was a strong post-1968 anti-Soviet leftism that had considerable presence amongst younger trade union activists many of whom were delegates to the TUC Congress.

‘So they burst out with cheers and applause when the ‘fraternal delegate’ from the AFL-CIO (the American trade union centre whose international activities were accused of being piloted and paid for by the CIA) at the TUC praised the Gdansk strikers. ‘I think that we are on the eve of a small miracle, namely the right of workers to choose unions of their own, uninhibited by the interference of government or government-controlled trade unions,’ the American trade unionist said.’

 

And

 

‘But most British trade unionists realized instinctively that something important and wonderful was happening as the glorious prize of freedom.’ 

and

 

‘From then on despite moans and mumbling from the TUC’s communists and pro-Soviet apologists the official TUC line along with the ICFTU, the AFL-CIO and the trade unions of the democratic world were strongly in favour of Solidarity.’   

 

Mr Macshane also urged me to consult his 1981 book on the subject ‘Solidarity: Poland’s Independent Trade Union’ Spokesman Books, 1981.’

 

And so I have, and what did I find in Chapter 11 ‘Poland and the Workers of the World’ on pages 114 and 115?

Here are some samples: ‘When the thousand delegates assembled in Brighton for the 1980 TUC meeting they found the TUC’s leadership in a thoroughy embarrassing position over Poland. ‘

 

There then follows a description of the foolish mess the TUC had got into over a long-planned visit to Poland’s state-controlled Communist ‘trade unions’.

 

He rightly refers to the official Polish unions as ‘irrelevant and discredited’.  He also describes the intervention of the delegate from the American AFL-CIO (equivalent of our TUC, but, unlike the TUC, pretty much free of Communist penetration and strongly anti-Soviet).  This is quoted above.

Mr MacShane describes the response: ‘There was a burst of applause from delegates seated in different parts of the hall at this condemnation of official trade unions in Poland.’

 

Sherlock Holmes, reading this description, would note that it is a clever way of saying that lot of delegates did *not* in fact applaud, and that the applause was not sustained. The words ‘seated in different parts of the hall’ could not and would not be used if the applause was general. It is a way of saying the applause was scattered. In his 1981 book, more or less contemporary, does not seem to me to mention any cheers. Yet Mr MacShane’s more recent version says: ‘‘So they burst out with cheers and applause when the ‘fraternal delegate’ from the AFL-CIO (the American trade union centre whose international activities were accused of being piloted and paid for by the CIA) at the TUC praised the Gdansk strikers."

 

In his 1981 book, Mr MacShane also contrasts the TUC’s ‘lack of certainty about how to handle the workers’ revolt in Poland’ (his words in the 1981 book, and more or less precisely my accusation) with the responses of other bodies, including the Socialist French union federation CFDT, and the International Metalworkers’ Federation, who sent either money or clear messages of support.

 

Mr MacShane helpfully explains that ‘Western unions that had tried to build relationships with official trade unions in eastern Europe under the détente policies of the 1970s were confused as to how to make contact with the striking workers…’

( Aaah, diddums. Actually, it was quite easy. Go to Warsaw and turn left for Gdansk).

 

‘…and did not know whether the existence of Solidarity meant that all relations with the CRZZ [official] unions in Poland should now be broken off’.

 

(That’s one way of putting it. Another perhaps cruder explanation appears below, in Mr MacShane’s book at the bottom of page 115. I shall come to it).

 

Mr MacShane interestingly continues : ‘Unions that had supported Polish workers, KOR, and efforts by workers in Russia , Rumania and Czechoslovakia to build independent trade unions now felt that support to be fully justified’

 

 (I would really, really like to know which unions he means here. I am guessing that few of the major ones were on the list).

And then he adds: ‘Other unions whose international policy was chiefly conditioned by a fanatical *anti*-communist rather than a *pro*-workers position (Mr MacShane’s emphases) hailed the Gdansk Agreement more as a blow against the Soviet Union than a victory for the Polish working class’.

 

Gosh. This belongs in a museum of leftist language. Wasn’t it possible that a blow against the USSR was automatically a victory for the Polish working class, and all other working classes?  The thinking behind this gymnastic passage, in which the people who are right are wrong because they’re on the right,  is richly funny. I love the use of the word ‘fanatic’ too, remembering as I do the nature and mood of the 1968 student Left from which Mr MacShane springs.

 

I remember those contortions we student revolutionaries used to have to make, to cope with the infuriating fact that actual working-class people in the Labour movement,  such as Frank Chapple,  understood what the Soviet Union was really about, and what Marxism was really about, and loathed us just as much as they loathed the official Communists.

 

What about the non-fanatics? Mr MacShane resumes:

 ‘Well-intentioned pro-détente union leaders from Western Europe who had stayed in the plush Black Sea resorts provided for the favoured guests of east European trade unions, now had to ask themselves some awkward questions about the nature of official trade unionism in those countries, and how far their hosts were genuinely representative of the workers’.

Didn’t you enjoy the phase ‘well-intentioned’?  One sees here that in Mr MacShane’s universe, the ‘fanatics’ were ranged against the ‘well-intentioned’. What a pity for him that the ‘fanatics’ were wholly right, and the ‘well-intentioned’ shamefully wrong.

Anyway, no 'awkward questions' were necessary on this subject, or ever had been. The misnamed ‘Trade Unions’ of the Communist world were wretched tools of the Communist Party and the state, a one-party state which sustained itself through censorship and secret police repression.  

 

Nobody tried to disguise it. Even in the days before Specsavers, the NHS provided TUC leaders with adequate eyewear to correct any myopia or tunnel vision. No great examination or reflection was necessary to discern this.

As Mr MacShane so rightly says :’Trade union officials who were members of, or close to, Communist Parties, kept their mouths shut at the sight of workers so decisively rejecting communist-run official trade unions’.

He asked me to look up his book. I have done so. It shows that my analysis is right. I have also taken the opportunity to check the archives of ‘The Times’ for the period. The reports of its distinguished and well-informed Labour staff, beginning in late August and continuing to the end of the conference in early September, entirely confirm those from the Daily Mail’s equally reliable industrial reporters which I quoted earlier. The story is consistent – TUC delay and reluctance to give unequivocal support to the Gdansk strike, embarrassment over the planned visit to Poland, the near-total moral superiority of the minority of ‘right-wing’ unions which pressed for clear TUC support for the Gdansk strike.

 

I am amused that I now find so many of the old Left, who used to be at least equivocal about the USSR,  lining up in hostility to Russia. I can think of few better ways of making my repeated point, that Russia is not the USSR.  

Killing Your Own People - a Brief Guide

A few months ago we were being told by supporters of the Kiev putsch that President Viktor Yanukovich had ‘lost the mandate of heaven ‘ by ‘killing his own people’.  This emotive language avoided any discussion of two important facts. The first was that the Kiev mob had contained seriously violent elements, including armed men. The second was that Mr Yanukovich had not been lawfully removed by the impeachment process provided for under the Constitution of Ukraine, and that his unconstitutional deposition had undone a negotiated agreement which would have allowed him to serve out his lawful term.

 

I said at the time,  and have repeated since,  that these facts were awkward for liberal interventionists who sided with the putsch because they a) didn’t like Yanukovich  (nor do I, as it happens, and nor does Vladimir Putin), b) believed that Ukraine should move closer to the EU and NATO and c) confused these objectives with various forms of idealism and utopianism among the Kiev crowd which (like most such crowds) believed it had stormed heaven and could somehow overcome corruption and incompetence by sheer force of will and youth.

 

Of course the history of all revolutions, going back to 1789 and forward to the various ‘People Power’ outbreaks of modern times (starting with the ousting of Ferdinand Marcos by Cory Aquino 1986; the attempt to bring soem sort of liberty to China, bloodily defeated in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in Peking; and resuming in the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Kiev in 2004, until it failed catastrophically in the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2012-13)   is that the early promise is at best disappointed, and at worst descends into greater misery than before. 

 

Corruption is to power as wet is to water, and can only be contained and controlled by very powerful and elaborate means, one of them being very high level of conscientiousness among public servants, another being a real separation of powers allowing the forces of law to operate without fear or favour. Otherwise the best you will get is selective prosecution of the corruption of the weak and the defeated, or of those singled out by (corrupt) power for humiliation and exclusion. How these unusual conditions, rare anywhere on the planet, can be brought about in the former USSR I am really not quite sure. In my limited experience, corruption exists almost everywhere, but in more advanced societies is more cleverly concealed than in the more backward ones. In the aftermath of the USSR, itself one of the most corrupt absolutism in human history, corruption grows like Japanese Knotweed.  

 

I except from this story of revolutions the various uprisings against collapsing Communist regimes in the late 1980s. These grew out of the fatal weakening of those regimes, which one by one realised for themselves that their ultimate guarantee of existence  – Soviet power – had gone. With varying degrees of skill and subtlety, the Communists sought to appease those they had robbed, swindled and oppressed,  and to negotiate an orderly departure. The ‘revolutionaries’ merely had to push, and the whole lot of them surrendered.  Hungary’s Communists departed almost without a tremor. Romania’s bungled their departure and died for it. The others lay somewhere in between. The true story of what happened in the USSR is, in my view, yet to be told – and may never be told.

 

This had emphatically not been the case when the Warsaw Pact regimes were challenged in 1953 in East Berlin, in 1956 in Hungary and Poland or in 1968 in Czechoslovakia (or even in 1991 in Lithuania, where the KGB visited severe violence on the people of Vilnius) . Nor had it been the case when Khrushchev attempted to make deep reforms of the USSR in the early 1960s. The Party and the KGB removed him. Even so,  his denunciation of Stalin should not be forgotten. From what I know, I think this was a very courageous move. I recall, on my very first visit to the USSR in 1984 (20 years after the fall of Khrushchev) , being shown attempts to smuggle Stalin back into respectability. It was also notable that one of the principal officials delegated to meet Neil Kinnock and his party at a British Embassy reception ( I was in the press party accompanying the Labour leader) was Boris Ponomaryov, a gaunt survivor of the Stalin years, who had been protected for much of his life by the appalling old commissar Mikhail Suslov, who had washed up on the Communist Party’s international secretariat. Ponomaryov, born in 1905,  must have witnessed and taken part in some of the more appalling episodes of Soviet power, and – perhaps most amazing of all - survived them to die in his bed in 1995. I still recall his bony figure in the ornate and cosy receptions rooms of our lovely Moscow Embassy (now the ambassador’s residence) on the river opposite the Kremlin. He seemed to give off waves of cold.

 

But I digress.

 

Careful readers of the newspapers, especially the graphic and moving descriptions of events in Mariupol and elsewhere by that fine reporter, Kim Sengupta in ‘The Independent’,  cannot be in much doubt that the armed forces of Ukraine, or at least persons serving with them and with their permission to do so, have lately been ‘killing their own people’. The circumstances of this may be hard to be sure if, much as they are in the case of the Maidan killings.  

 

Please read this despatch: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-crisis-bloody-assault-in-mariupol-dashes-hopes-of-avoiding-civil-war-9347972.html

 

Well, I have long said that any government trying to maintain control over its sovereign territory may sometimes resort to ‘killing its own people’, and this is not, for me, in itself a decisive factor. Sometimes such action might be legitimate. What if, in the final months of the Weimar Republic, a free government’s police and troops had shot down scores of Nazi storm troopers, and by doing so turned the tide? What would we then think of ‘shooting your own people’?

 

 My own opinion is and remains that the EU and the USA provoked this action irresponsibly and without sufficient understanding of politics, history or geography, and so launched a period of dangerous turmoil in which innocents have died and will die. My most fundamental criticism of it is that it was stupid and cruel.  I also think it was plainly wrong, and I lack  sympathy with the objective of bringing Ukraine into the EU or NATO, think this is in itself dangerous, a provocation of Russia which will make Ukraine less stable and prosperous, not more so.

 

 I suppose this makes me a ‘sympathiser’ with Russia, though I have stressed again and again that I have many criticisms of the current Russian state, and I am quite sure it has used its own underhand methods in Ukraine.

 

The point is that these methods were a *response* to a postmodern aggression. They were a response made by a nation which has (thanks to the fact of existing on the soil it occupies) legitimate interests in the future government and alignment of Ukraine. You might as well ignore gravity as ignore such interests. They will exist whatever you do, as long as Russia exists, whatever kind of government it has.

 

It is only countries like ours, dechristianised, depatriotised, robbed of their own self-respect, history, culture, language, literature, laws and institutions,  which can sit fatly watching the TV and guzzling sugar while they are whittled away into rumps and then into provinces of someone else’s empire. Russia, not being anaesthetized by years of unearned prosperity on easy money, and not possessing a large natural moat to keep away her physical enemies, and having been subjected to (and yet survived) a 70-year attempted armed robbery of her past, her faith and culture, is less complacent.

 

Anyway, you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears, bury the rag deep in your face, for now is the time for your tears.

 

Despite the squawks from Washington and Brussels that the separatist referendums are ‘illegal’(which is an interesting question, see below) , the real illegality in Ukraine remains the status of the existing Ukraine government, which came to power on the backs of a mob and has not followed its own constitution, and is now ‘killing its own people’.

 

Where the source of law is itself unlawful, how can challenges to that source be ruled as ‘illegal’. No doubt the votes in Lugansk and Donyetsk leave much to be desired. But they are at least as legitimate an expression of popular opinion as is the Maidan protest, which to my knowledge never held any votes at all, just used the crowd’s traditional prerogative of intimidation by numbers.  

 

And now this lawless regime in Kiev has authorised the killing of its own people. So where are the condemnations of those who said that such an action destroyed the legitimacy of the previous government? Nowhere. They are invisible and inaudible, because they have not been uttered and do not exist.

 

 

 

Increasingly I think the ‘West’ has lost this battle, and has wounded itself severely for some years in the future. For what it has shown is that it is very willing to use militant and unequivocal *language* in this part of the world. But that it has no power to enforce its word (Does this remind regular readers of anything? It should).  Its nuclear umbrella seems to be (theoretically) available to almost anyone who asks for the right to shelter beneath it. Credits and subsidies (somehow found in the EU’s empty bank vaults, stripped by the Irish, Greek and Cyprus crises) are also – allegedly - there for all who will leave Russia’s sphere of influence.

 

But when Russia plays the same game for keeps, the ‘West’ shouts louder as its actions grow feebler and its position more inconsistent. Who really believes that the USA would sacrifice a single soldier for Kramatorsk, or the EU endanger the Euro for Gorlovka?  In which case, what of the other countries which have accepted such guarantees so far?  Are they now safer, or less safe?

 Alas, in the midst of this, we find men such as Arsen Avakov, Ukraine’s acting Interior Minister in the post-putsch government, and a keen  user of Facebook.  He believes the promises and rhetoric of the ‘West’, and acts accordingly.  He denounces the pro-Russians of the South-east of his country as ‘terrorists’.

 

And so, it seems do those who have launched or taken part in Ukrainian military operations in Mariupol and elsewhere. The increasing numbers of deaths among Ukrainian civilians removes completely the assumed ( and always dubious) moral superiority of the EU enthusiasts.

 

Of course, such actions are easy to undertake in isolation, when you have the guns and the APCs and the light tanks.  But the damage they have already done to the future unity of Ukraine is enormous (though I think the tragedy of Odessa was even more effective in destroying consent to Kiev rule among Russian speakers) .

 

I have no idea what the solution to this mess is, apart from a readiness to compromise, sooner rather than later  - a readiness, I might add,  shown by Vladimir Putin, who denounced the planned referendums and endorsed the coming Ukrainian elections on May 25, which are supposed to create a new legitimate government in Kiev. How cynical this retreat was, I am not sure. Quite cynical, for certain, but still genuine in its way, is my guess. He may well have sought to demonstrate that he has, in fact, no control over such things and no wish to take matters much further, provided that the daft scheme to make Ukraine part of Brussels’s sphere of influence is no gone for good.

 

I have never myself believed that Mr Putin wanted South-East Ukraine. His prize and aim is long-term neutralisation of Ukraine as a whole, pending its possible membership in the distant future, of some future Eurasian Union.

 

Crimea is simply a  fait accompli which he thinks it well worth a few sanctions to retain. It has saved Russia billions in future rents for Sevastopol, and made him about as popular in Russia as Margaret Thatcher was in Britain after the Navy retook the Falklands.

 

But however cynical it is, his readiness to compromise has not been matched by any words or action from the ‘West’ which continues, as its clients entangle themselves in stupid unpopular violence, to act as if it possesses the high ground.

 

Personally, I think the whole episode demonstrates the simple truth of my original proposition, that Russia, simply by existing,  has permanent indisputable  legitimate interests in Ukraine which any realistic statesman must learn to accept. I have been pointing this out for years. So, more to the point, has Mr Putin in speech after speech after speech.. It is a pity that it has taken so many human screams, broken minds and bodies,  coffins and ruined homes and lives,  for the slow learners to get the message. 

Orwell Banned in Putin's Russia Shock? Or not? We Seek the Truth

 Many of you will, like me, have been enjoying the contributions here of Mark or (Marc) Jaremko, a strong supporter of the Kiev Maidan movement.  Some of you may like me, have wondered where he gets the facts , or alleged facts, with which he so confidently packs and peppers his comments.

 

It’s hard to say. But the other day he made a claim that made me stand bolt upright at my desk. The works of George Orwell are, he says, banned in Russia. Here is the sequence which followed

 

 May 9th:

 

Mr Jaremko :

‘Orwell (whom incidentally, is still banned in Russia, but not 'fascist Ukraine).’

 

Me : ‘Mr Jaremko says that 'Orwell' (not naming any particular works) is 'still banned in Russia'. Can he please provide a reference for this assertion? Which works are banned? By what means?

 

May 10th

 

Peter, You ask what my source is for 'Orwell being banned in Russia'. My answer is very simple -- your brother. Now granted, maybe things have changed during the enlightened rule of Putin since your brother published the statement.’

 

Me: Mark Jaremko now attributes the suggestion that 'Orwell' is 'banned' in Russia to my late brother, Christopher. Where and when did Christopher say this?

 

And then Mr jaremko's msot recent traceable reponse at ther time of writing (4.00 pm GMT Monday 12th May) :

 

Mr Jaremko: 'Peter, If I am falsely attributing something to your brother, I'll take it back but as far as I see right now, I don't think I am. Currently, I don't have the exact quote at my disposal. I have read and listened to much of both of you, bought both of your books, but I do not have an archive of everything you as journalists and authors have ever said. However, if for example, I said that 'Peter thinks SSRIs are dangerous', I would not be way off. As far as I can recall, you have never said those exact words, or perhaps you have, but in general I think it is fair to say 'Peter Hitchens has asserted that anti-depressants have many negative consequences' -- anyone roughly familiar with your work knows were you stand on this issue (and one that I fully agree with you on). Christopher wrote and spoke a great deal about Orwell, as well as his opposition to totalitarianism. My recollection is that he made the attribution to certain authorities around the world continuing to stymie and suppress Orwell publications, teachings, and discussions in one of two possible places: 1) his frequent discussions on Animal Farm, or 2) his early warnings of the growing totalitarian tendencies of Vladimir Putin (and how we in the West were perhaps not paying enough attention). What I think is relevant though, is whether or not Russian authorities suppress Orwell's work and whether or not Christopher was aware of it. The answer is that they did, relaxed a bit during Perestroika, Yeltsin, and early Putin, and then started suppressing again. That being said, I think its fair to say your brother was aware of it.’

 

And my most recent reply: ‘Mr Jaremko should realise that the problem is quite simple. The claim that 'Orwell is banned in Russia', is, if true, of immense importance and indicates a very serious level of repressive stupidity in that country. It must therefore be taken seriously. It must therefore be *made* seriously that is to say, the person who introduces it must be able to provide evidence for it. The same would be true of my brother, had he said this. All Mr Jaremko has to do is produce his evidence, or say he was wrong. Mr Jaremko makes many assertions here. Some are hard to test. This one is easy. If a government bans books, it cannot escape doing so publicly and there will be evidence. Several international organisations, such as PEN and Amnesty will certainly have protested and drawn attention to it. Let us please test it. Mr Jaremko, having made the statement, is the one who must do the work.’

 

I have to say I’m really keen to get to the bottom of this. Can anyone else help?

A TV discussion of humour and modern political satire

Some of you may be interested in this brief appearance by me I which I discuss (with the comedian Matt Forde and the BBC’s Jo Coburn) the problems of charisma and the low level of political discourse (I’m always on! Or so they tell me) on the BBC’s ‘Daily Politics’

 

http://www.live.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-27373762

Bring back British Rail! Privatisation was an act of political madness and a huge con that left us with delays, antique trains and a vast bill

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

What on earth is the point of the Labour Party if it cannot even oppose the mad disaster of railway privatisation? Well, there was a feeble flicker of hope at the weekend that some of its would-be MPs have realised this, and we should all be glad.

For, once Labour actively opposes this costly, tragicomic failure, everyone else will  have to recognise the truth and we can go back to good old  British Railways.
Like comprehensive schools, EU membership, windmill electricity, equality and diversity and multiculturalism, privatisation was imposed on us against our will by inmates of the political asylum.

Politics is a mild form of mental illness in all cases, but in recent years it has become more virulent. Much of this is the fault of the think-tanks in which political careerists can shelter from reality.

Alas, most modern politicians have no ideas or convictions of their own and, needing to do things they can be remembered for, they are easy victims of these gabbling charlatans.

The privatisation of the railways was done against the advice of everyone who knew anything about the subject. Quite predictably, it cost far more in subsidies than the old nationalised system. In a few years it destroyed more than a century of experience in safety and track maintenance. It finished off most of what was left of our train manufacture.

All the claims made for it are bogus. Passenger numbers increased not because of privatisation but in spite of it, as more and more people were forced by unhinged house prices to commute vast distances to work – and could only do so by train.
Punctuality has improved because the timetables were padded to avoid penalties from the ‘Passenger’s Charter’. The trains take just as long if not longer, and break down just as much, but are not officially late. 

For many years, investment in such things as electrification almost ceased. The trains I ride daily are 1970s antiques that ought to be in the National Railway Museum at York.
It is bitterly funny to record that Network Rail, successor to the disastrous Railtrack (or ‘Failcrack’ as it should have been called), is now officially classified as a ‘government body’ and its debts of £30 billion are part of the national debt. Meanwhile, one of the most successful ‘privatised’ train companies, East Coast, is currently publicly owned, and many of the others are owned by foreign state railways. And all of them are being subsidised by you and me, thanks to artificially low track charges levied by Network Rail.

The truth will out. It was always better for the railways to be nationalised and subsidised. What a pity it took us  so many years, so many needless deaths and so many billions of wasted money to find out what we already knew. Bring back BR.

Gunned down - by 'good' Ukrainians

The absurd bias of most coverage of the Ukraine crisis is best shown in what it does not say. It never mentions that the USA and EU started the whole thing by trying to bribe Ukraine into joining their gang, and by sending leading politicians to egg  on the Kiev mob.
And it never gives a fair deal to the Russian case.

Here’s proof, if you like. Yulia Izotova, a 21-year-old nurse, was shot dead while carrying sandwiches to a checkpoint manned by Russian separatists in Kramatorsk. All the evidence suggests her killer was a Ukrainian soldier.

Had it been the other way round, you would have seen a lot of her pretty face, and of her bitter funeral. But you haven’t.  

The same is true of the Russians, at least 40 of them, burned to death in Odessa after being besieged in a blazing building by a pro-Kiev mob. Imagine the headlines and the coverage if it had been pro-Putin marchers doing the besieging.

But this horrible event is barely mentioned in the West. You’re being manipulated by people who want your support for a stupid war. Resist.

Why not have an A-level in Russell Brand studies? Mr Brand is the true face of modern British thought and politics. His language – at the same time florid, pompous and crude – is pretty much the way most people under 35 argue these days.

Why carry on pretending that we are the land of Shakespeare and Milton, when we are really the nation of Sid Vicious, Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross?

Free trade will make slaves of us all

I have stopped believing in free trade. I have been told for decades now that it is good for everyone, that we cannot protect our own jobs or industries or even our borders.
This may have been true when we were the workshop of the world, flooding the planet with the products of our ingenious new industries.

But it’s not true now. If we cannot keep out goods produced by sweatshops in Canton (and I have seen these awful places) how long before we, too, are reduced to the same living standards? We cannot afford our present welfare state, and, when it collapses, how exactly do you think your sons and daughters are going to live? By eating their first-class social science degrees?

When I was a child there was almost nothing we used that wasn’t made here, from the cutlery in the kitchen and the tools in the shed to my third-hand bicycle, not to mention all our food (apart from the New Zealand lamb and butter) and clothes. When we spent our money, most of it went to our fellow Britons. Then, in a few years, it all went. I still recall my father’s shame and misery at even contemplating buying a foreign car. He gave in in the end, but never really got used to it. The ironmongers still tried to sell solid British tools, but they were ludicrously costly compared to the foreign imports beside them.

Why was the old arrangement wrong, and the new one better? Is protection really so wicked? No doubt it would make life more expensive, but for a good purpose. As people who barely make anything but buy a  great deal, can we expect  our current standard of living to last? We are visibly becoming a land of cheap labour, debt, insecure jobs  and overcrowded housing.

Oddly enough, we have managed to preserve two major industries – defence and pharmaceuticals. Both have been saved – so far – by covert protection. Nobody will admit it, but the Ministry of Defence and the NHS have kept them going. Now even that is coming to an end, what is left?

If you wish to comment, please scroll down

Is This the Most Dangerous Author in Britain? Philip Pullman Revisited

Long years ago I wrote a critical article about Philip Pullman and his anti-religious children’s books, suspecting ( as I still do) that many parents, aunts, uncles,  grannies,  grandpas and godparents were buying these books for children without knowing that their author had a strong anti-Christian point of view.

 

The headline on the article, as I recall, was ‘Is this the most dangerous author in Britain?’. But either my memory is wrong (I haven’t the hard copy to hand) or it has somehow changed over time, on the Internet and elsewhere, into a positive declaration ‘This is the most dangerous author in Britain’ . Headlines, as most readers here will have realised, are not usually written by the author of the article, but of course the author often can (and sometimes does) object to headlines he thinks are misleading, so he is at least partly responsible for them.

 

I don’t really mind, either way. I woudln't at all mind being described as 'dangerous' by a critic, and woud take it as a compliment.  I think that children’s authors are tremendously influential, and that stories change minds much more than sermons do. And I know Philip Pullman thinks the same, as he has said, eloquently, that ‘Once upon a time’ is more influential than ‘Thou Shalt Not’.

 

He has been hugely successful, in terms of sales of books (and has had an unsuccessful film made of one of them)  and I do worry that children may be influenced by his books into an atheistical state of mind. That would be dangerous to the foundations of civilisation, in my view, though of course not in his.

 

I find it interesting, by the way, and indicative,  that his other works of fiction, which are not specific attacks on religion, attract less attention and sell less well than the ‘Dark Materials’ trilogy.

 

There have been several legacies from this article (reproduced in full below).

 

One was that my late brother soon afterwards (coincidence, obviously)went to interview Mr Pullman in his comfortable home just outside Oxford. It was a meeting of minds, both men being well-educated atheists . The resulting article, published in ‘Vanity Fair’ , was illustrated with a photograph of Mr Pullman in his work-room. The photograph showed, stuck to Mr Pullman’s wall, my 'most dangerous author' article, its headline clearly legible, though the byline identifying me as its author was less readable.

 

Later Mr Pullman started boasting in public places (at least once on BBC Radio) that he had asked his publishers to quote this headline on the cover of the paperback editions of ‘His Dark Materials. I never found it there, on any edition, and eventually wrote to him to ask which edition it was on. He wrote back confirming that actually it wasn’t on any of them, and has since stopped saying this.

 

The other legacy was that, every few weeks I would receive a stern missive from someone (often of school age) purporting to be affronted by my desire to censor Mr Pullman. Since I have no such desire, and haven’t expressed any such desire, I wrote back explaining that this was so. They often didn’t seem to believe me, but such is life.

 

I have now been assailed on ‘Twaddle’ by someone who says ‘You seem to think that Pullman is wrong to put his philosophy in his fiction, but not [C.S.]Lewis.’ I responded by saying that I thought Lewis’s Christian advocacy was well-known to those who bought his books, whereas Pullman’s wasn’t so well-known. But that in any case I was quite happy for others to point out Lewis’s stance.    

 

He also says I have ‘condemned’ Mr Pullman. The word is, in my view, misleading. I have criticised Mr Pullman, from an openly Christian point of view, because I personally worry that his books may undermine the faith of some of the children who read them, and I would find that regrettable. In a free society, I think I am entitled to say so. If I were to call for Mr Pullman’s books to be banned, or for him to be silenced, the word ‘condemned’ would perhaps be justified. As it is, I think it’s going a bit far.

 

Oddly enough, a lot of people who like Pullman’s books are surprised by the passion and force of his anti-Christian views. On page one of Section ‘C’ of the Washington Post. On 19th February 2001, Mr Pullman was quoted by his interviewer Alona Wartofsky  as having said ‘I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief’.

 

I noticed that a report in a  British newspaper had qualified this direct quotation, reproduced in an on-the-record interview with one of the world’s most reputable newspapers and never to my knowledge disputed by Mr Pullman in the 13-odd years since it was published, , with the word ‘reportedly’.( As in, ‘Mr Pullman has reportedly said…’ – a device normally used when you’re unsure of the source and fear it may be unreliable) . I can see why someone might do this. The statement is shockingly blunt. It was made before Mr Pullman achieved the authorial superstardom he has since attained.  But he said it, and it might just put granny off buying his books for little Barney and little Olivia.

 

Here is the article (first published on 27th January 2002, just after Mr Pullman had collected a major literary prize)  which has led to the accusations that I wish to censor Mr Pullman. I think it used to be findable on the internet, but seems to have faded out of sight.  See what you think:

 

 

IS THIS THE MOST DANGEROUS AUTHOR IN BRITAIN?

 

Philip Pullman is being hailed as the new C. S.Lewis after being awarded the Whitbread Book of the Year prize for his latest novel aimed at children: The Amber Spyglass. The judges described it as visionary, but PETER HITCHENS reveals that the author appears to have his own sinister agenda . . .

 

 

‘The atheists have driven God out of the classroom and off the TV and the radio, and done a pretty good job of expelling him from the churches as well. But one stubborn and important pocket of Christianity survives, in the Narnia stories of C.S. Lewis. Now here comes an opportunity to dethrone him and supplant his books with others which proclaim the death of God to the young.

 

If you are wondering why the children's author Philip Pullman has collected a major prize and why such a huge fuss is being made of him, now you know. He is the anti-Lewis, the one the atheists would have been praying for, if atheists prayed.

 

Children instinctively like Lewis's enthralling stories and often do not even notice their religious message, though it frequently goes deep into their minds and emerges later. How infuriating this is for liberal but literate parents, the sort of people who work for the BBC and want all the advantages of a Christian culture without the tiresome bother of having to worship a God they think they are too smart to believe in. Spotting this trend, Lewis's publishers last year toyed with producing 'sequels' without any Christian references, but retreated under a barrage of thunderbolts from Lewis supporters.

 

Until now, liberal, atheist parents have had to buy the Narnia books, reading them out loud to their young between clenched teeth, hoping the messages of faith, forgiveness, grace and resurrection do not get through.

 

Now at last they have an alternative and an antidote, the supposedly brilliant Pullman, who - according to the reviewers - is a new Lewis and a new Chekhov rolled into one.

 

Of his three famous children's books, the first two, Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife, are captivating and clever, but the third, which took the Whitbread prize, is a disappointing clunker with some gruesome and needlessly nasty scenes. This is probably because The Amber Spyglass  - in which God dies - is too loaded down with propaganda to leave enough room for the story.

 

None of the trilogy is a patch on any of the Narnia chronicles. You can't help wondering if the praise and the prizes, handed out by reliable, liberal establishment sorts such as Channel 4 News's Jon Snow, are because of Pullman's views as much as his writing. For Pullman has said: 'I hate the Narnia books, and I hate them with deep and bitter passion, with their view of childhood as a golden age from which sexuality and adulthood are a falling-away.'

 

He knows perfectly well what he is  doing. He openly and rightly believes storytelling can be a form of moral propaganda: 'All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions . . . We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time and silence. "Thou shalt not" is soon forgotten.' Pullman has said many times that he thinks God is dead. Since he cannot know if this is true, it raises the question of whether he also hopes that God is dead.

 

He told an Oxford literary conference in August 2000: 'We're used to the Kingdom of Heaven; but you can tell from the general thrust of the book that I'm of the devil's party, like Milton.

 

'And I think it's time we thought about a republic of Heaven instead of the Kingdom of Heaven. The King is dead. That's to say I believe the King is dead. I'm an atheist. But we need Heaven nonetheless, we need all the things that Heaven meant, we need joy, we need a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives, we need a connection with the universe, we need all the things the Kingdom of Heaven used to promise us but failed to deliver.'

 

None of this makes sense. If there is no God, then who makes the rules of the supernatural world which Pullman creates, in which people have visible souls called daemons; magic knives cut holes between the worlds and spectres devour life?

 

How is it that the dead live on in a ghastly underworld of unending misery and torment, yet there is no Heaven?

 

In his worlds, the Church is wicked, cruel and child-hating; priests are sinister, murderous or drunk. Political correctness creeps in leadenly. There is a brave African king and a pair of apparently homosexual angels. The one religious character who turns out to be benevolent is that liberal favourite, an ex-nun who has renounced her vows and lost her faith. Even so, she sets out on a perilous journey when ordered to do so by angels, who speak to her through a computer.

 

Pullman, like Lewis, lives in Oxford, though a long way from the outlying suburb where the creator of Narnia once dwelt and is now buried.

 

A good thing, probably. The sound of Lewis chuckling from his grave at the idea of angels speaking to a renegade nun through a computer might get on Pullman's nerves.’ 

More details of Michael Gove's attitude towards Grammar Schools

Further facts on Michael Gove’s attitude towards grammar schools:

I am grateful to Geoffrey Warner for providing this extract from the Financial Times, a November 2010 interview of Michael Gove(MG) by the Financial Times (FT) :

 

‘FT:..One of the other obligations on Local Authorities at the moment is the 1998 standards act, obligations on selection. Would you approve a free school that allowed selection? MG: No.

FT: Will you allow areas that don’t have selection at the moment to select?

MG: No.

FT: And will you allow the share of pupils within selective schools in selective education areas to increase?

MG: No.

FT: So you will not undo any of the 1998 provisions? MG: It’s not my intention to."

 

And I am equally grateful to Matthew Symington, of the East Anglian Daily Times, who has shared with me this part of an interview he conducted with the Education Secretary in December:

 

‘Question: John Major recently said that there was a lack of social mobility in this country, given that, and other people have said similar things, is it time to repeal the ban on opening up new grammar schools?

 

Gove: (Laughter) No, is the short answer. I mean you can have lots and lots of social mobility in a society without having to have selection at 11. There’s nothing wrong with grammar schools, and there’s a lot to celebrate in the existing grammar schools that we have, but it’s also the case that comprehensive schools can do a fantastic job, if they have the high aspirations that I’ve seen for example here in this primary school.

 

Question: Well why not allow them to be set up? Why not give people the opportunity if they want to, rather than even encouraging it, just letting it happen?

 

Gove: One of the difficulties is that in a county like Kent where you do have grammar schools, there’s been a sort of consensus for a while now, that you have some grammar schools and you have high schools or secondary moderns. If you set up a new grammar school in an area where it’s predominantly comprehensive provision then what you’re doing is saying there is one school or two schools here where some children can get in and others can’t, but the other schools remain comprehensive, you create within a county a dynamic which hadn’t existed beforehand, which won’t necessarily work in everyone’s interests. I think it’s also a distraction from the most important thing that we need to do, which is to concentrate on ensuring that all schools; comprehensive and primary, academy and maintained, do the very best job for all children.’

 

 

Solidarity Forever? The British Left and the Polish Uprising of 1980

A disagreement on ‘Twaddle’ with Denis MacShane prompts me to look up the archives on a forgotten moment in the history of the British Labour movement. This was the reaction of the then-potent Trade Union Congress to the great Gdansk shipyard strike in Poland, which began in the middle of August 1980 and launched the movement called ‘Solidarity’ which eventually overturned Communist rule in Poland. Mr MacShane maintains that the British trade union movement happily welcomed this development. (‘Huge cheers for Sol[idarity] in 1980 TUC Congress’, he writes, merrily). I have a different recollection. I'd be glad of any others.

 

The TUC, official headquarters of British trade unionism,  might have (or so you would have thought) offered its instant support to the modern Tolpuddle martyrs, who had set themselves against an inflexible and autocratic government, by demanding the freedom to strike and organise. But it wasn't quite like that.   I rather like Denis MacShane, despite the fact that he is a tediously orthodox post-1968 left-winger, can be utterly exasperating and ended up as a loyal servant of the Blair machine and enthusiastic propagandist for Britain’s absorption into the EU.

 

It is quite seldom that one encounters somebody who recognises, in such detail,  that the EU is very much a product of the 1968 cultural revolution, and is a fundamentally leftist project. I did not rejoice when his political career ended in personal disgrace, not being an enthusiast for selective justice or for the intervention of the police in politics. The most interesting thing about him is that he was born (the son of a Polish father and a Scottish mother) Denis Matyjaszek, the name under which he was involved in interesting escapades when he was a prominent student journalist at Oxford (I recently read of these while going through old archives of ‘Cherwell’, the Oxford student newspaper, and the ‘Oxford Mail’ for the fateful year of 1968, researching for a contemplated novel that may never be written). Plainly, such an ancestry gave him an individual and different perspective on the Britain of those times.

 

I don’t have a similar fondness for the TUC, which when I was a labour correspondent seemed unduly open to the influence of the Communist Party and its fellow-travellers. The trick was worked in this way. The CP was free to operate in the unions, where its really rather small number of well-organised and well-directed members could exercise a great influence by attending meetings assiduously, pursuing co-ordinated policy objective. Thus a union with a large block vote in Labour Party decisions and elections could be largely controlled by a small group of CP activists. They coudl also give union support the many acts of destabilisation of our economy, in the form of futile, self-damaging strikes,  which Moscow no doubt favoured in those days.

 

They could not do this in the Labour Party itself, where open CP membership was not allowed. But because the TUC had a powerful voice of its own, because its annual conference preceded Labour’s by a few weeks each year and it could therefore be used to rehearse battles and soften up the press and public,  and because senior Labour politicians would invariably attend and usually speak at its conference, it was the point at which the apparently tiny and significant CP could gain social, personal and political access to the topmost parts of the Labour power machine. Declared Communists, such as the Draughtsmen’s Union leader Ken Gill, actually sat on its General Council. Some people wonder why Britain, unlike France and Italy, never had a major working-class Communist movement. The truth is that Britain did, but that movement was half-in, half-out of the Labour Party and the TUC, and reached remarkably high, especially through secret membership

 

So, when the Gdansk strike became a major issue, the TUC hesitated. Its trade union duties conflicted with its fellow-travelling inclinations. Yes, it was a strike, which it might normally have supported.  But it was also a strike against what many TUC figures regarded as a ‘fraternal’ government. But some others in the TUC were keen to support Lech Walesa’s strike. The most prominent of these was Frank Chapple, an ex-Communist electrician who had (alongside Les Cannon) exposed and defeated ballot-rigging by Communists in his own union in 1961, a scandal now almost totally forgotten. He then became the principal voice of old-fashioned British trade unionism, doggedly devoted to preserving his members’ pay and conditions, suspicious of all leftist politics.  He ended up backing the SDP.

 

As the TUC hesitated and mumbled through its false teeth, taking a fortnight to offer a grudguing formula of semi-support, Chapple demanded a clear, unequivocal  statement of support for what was, after all, one of the most emotionally inspiring acts of courage in modern history, a genuine and peaceful popular uprising by industrial workers against the state which falsely claimed to be their servant and was in fact their master. From scrappy archives, I think I have established that Mr Chapple particularly wanted support for free trade unions in Poland, a demand which implied that the official unions were not free, as indeed they weren't.  As far as I can make out from these archives,  he was first asked to withdraw it, and then defeated.

 

I remember the episode with what seems like clarity. But at a range of almost 34 years, what I recall is of course days of episodes concentrated by my memory into a single drama: The ugly, crowded conference hall, the brownish-grey figures of the then TUC leadership sitting in untelegenic rows as they were made to feel very awkward indeed (nobody in the Labour movement had any presentational skills in those days), Frank Chapple’s brave, heedless East-end pugnaciousness (how amusing to think that he had grown up in Hoxton, now a funky district of Tate Modern hopefuls and poseurs, then a particularly rough classroom in the school of hard knocks) , TUC ‘moderate’ David Basnett’s weary, baffled attempt to compromise (the story of his life –it was always hard to believe he’d been a wartime RAF pilot, but he had. Many of that generation of Labour had good war records) , the ever-present temptations of the outside world, with the English Channel shining just beyond the entrance doors in all its late-summer loveliness, and what had by then become for me the ceaseless desire to abandon this narrow world, cross that Channel and be abroad.  

 

But then there was this drama. I have before me a front page of the Daily Mail for one of those momentous days in early September 1980. ‘POLE-AXED!’ it shouts. Then it quotes Frank Chapple in huge letters ‘The Polish government is treating the TUC with the contempt it feels they deserve’.

 

The story had by then degenerated into absurdity. The TUC leadership had planned to go on a delegation to meet the official (that is to say, tethered and muzzled and state-controlled) Polish ‘unions’ with which they had shamefully maintained relations. They were  horribly happy to shake hands with these ghastly people, wherever they could find them,  and I have never quite got over being stuck in a tram in Prague in 1978, while we were made to wait for a police-escorted official car containing the (then)  instantly-recognisable figure of Ray Buckton, leader of the train drivers’ union ASLEF, in whose handsome headquarters I used to attend meetings of the Hampstead Labour Party.  

 

Anyway, the Poles, having offered a visit in which there had been no guarantee that the TUC delegation would meet anyone from the Gdansk strike, or indeed any genuine trade unionists. As Mr Chapple said ‘there was never any intention on behalf of the Polish authorities of allowing meetings with genuine representatives of the workers’.

 

All this  had happened after the TUC had *defeated* an attempt by Frank Chapple to call off the visit. This was the great difficulty faced by the TUC. They really, really wanted to maintain their relationship with the Communist fake trade unions. I and others had the impression this was more important to them than the Gdansk strike.

 

A few weeks later, Frank Chapple was, in a rare treat for coincidence theorists, chucked off a key committee of the TUC. As a leader in ‘The Times’ (then rather more conservative than it is now)  put it :' It was not really Mr Frank Chapple’s fault that free trade unionism broke out in Poland last month . It was not even his fault that the official Polish trade union organization subsequently withdrew an invitation to a TUC delegation to visit the country, in circumstances acutely embarrassing to the TUC leadership. ‘

 

The leader says cheekily that Mr Chapple was ‘tactless enough to be right about Poland’, notes the ‘chagrin’ of the mainstream TUC leadership about Poland and recalls (correctly) that ‘there is a strand of opinion in the [trades union] movement for whom socialism matters more than freedom’.

 

As they come from the great, deep memory hole of ‘Before the Internet Was Invented’,  these archives are harder to get hold of than they ought to be, and I’m grateful to colleagues in the Associated Newspapers Library for helping me to refresh my memory. When time permits, I’ll dig a bit deeper. But I still think Denis is wrong about those ‘huge cheers’. I’d be prepared to compromise on ‘modest cheers’ from some of those present.  

 

My other memory is quite clear. It is of walking into the bare, glum Hotel Morski in Gdansk two months later, having persuaded my then editor that the Gdansk strike was the biggest industrial story of the age, and meeting Lech Walesa himself, with a young Polish English student acting as my translator. The mere mention of the British TUC provoked an explosion of contempt in Walesa which came so fast and was so emphatic it was hard to get a shorthand note. But he certainly wasn’t responding to ‘huge cheers’. He could tell a hawk from a handsaw.