Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 238

'Because a Sixpence has been Lost...' The Greatness of Richard Hoggart

A number of famous or notable people died last week, and may they rest in peace. But by far the greatest and most notable of them was Richard Hoggart ( a superb obituary of him, from the Daily Telegraph) can be found here, and I commend it to all my readers. I found it extremely moving.

 

Nearly 50 years ago I read, I read, and was greatly influenced ever afterwards by, his masterwork ‘The Uses of Literacy’.

 

I have delved into it since then, but I doubt if a second reading could ever have the power of a first encounter with this extraordinary and evocative book about a country and a people who were already disappearing when it was published. My long-lost old Pelican edition had on its cover an L.S. Lowry painting, of that magical landscape of industrial Britain,  cold and dirty, yet strangely safe and peaceful.

 

I just caught the end of it. I still remember, a child of Sussex, Hampshire,  Devon and Oxfordshire, gaping in wonder at the power, dirt, fire and clangour of Sheffield on a York-bound train some time in 1969.  I’d seen the more workful parts of Plymouth and Portsmouth, and the rather restrained 20th-century car plants and pressed steel works of Cowley. I’d seen pictures and films of the industrial north, but the real thing surpassed them far beyond expectation. And then in a few years it just vanished. Travel the same way now and it’s all parks and shops. You have to go to the USA or China to see industry of any size any more. I also remember (and I shall be returning to this image in something I plan to write shortly) what was in many ways the moment of its death, which happened in York round about the time they began to abolish English money, sixpences and all (see below). Over a few rather spectacular days and nights, they burned the old town gas out of the mains, to clean them ready for the new North sea Gas that was going to take us into anew, clean modern era.

 

Over countless manholes stood curious tripods, glowing red hot and making a sighing noise as the old fuel was consumed. I was fascinated. Nobody else seemed to care.

 

When the great Ian Jack isn’t writing daft suppositious stuff about climate change, he is very good on the extraordinarily swift and total disappearance of Industrial Britain. But what Hoggart cared about was the society that existed amid the furnaces and the gasworks.

 

And what I like about him is his utter conviction that critical literacy on a large scale was essential to a free society. As the obituary puts it :

 

‘Yet he was also essentially conservative in his dislike of change; hawkish in foreign affairs; and thoroughly elitist in his disdain for modern mass culture. He believed fervently in the value of great literature : “In a democracy which is highly commercialised you have to give people critical literacy. If you don’t do that, you might as well pack it in.”

 

‘He also thoroughly detested the fashion for relativism, which “leads to populism which then leads to levelling and so to reductionism of all kinds, from food to moral judgments". For Hoggart, those who maintained that the Beatles were as good as Beethoven represented a “loony terminus”.’

 

Alas, he did not take the next step of asking what the real foundation for such relativism was, or he might have had to revise some of his other beliefs. For culture, being essentially moral, as beauty is related to truth, and truth is related to goodness, requires an absolute foundation.

 

And he rightly saw, in the 1950s to which I am always falsely accused of wishing to return, the beginnings of a cultural and moral cheapening that has only now reached full speed and full pressure. Imagine if you will ‘Game of Thrones’ being shown to a young man or woman in the working class Leeds of 1954.  Yet their children and grandchildren would do so. As the obituary notes Richard Hoggart said the era was ‘“full of corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions”, tending towards a view of the world “in which progress is conceived as a seeking of material possessions, equality as a moral levelling and freedom as the ground for endless irresponsible pleasure”.’

 

Social conservatism, you see, is by no means confined to the political right. In fact, the political right have largely abandoned that. Nigel Farage is beginning to grasp this, though his atrocious attitude towards cannabis decriminalisation suggests that he still hasn’t thought this through.

 

Funnily enough, nor did Richard Hoggart really think his thoughts through. He should have grasped that the ‘Chatterley’ trial had almost nothing to do with D.H.Lawrence’s not-very-good book (there were no prosecution witnesses, apart from a policeman to confirm that the book had been published and put on sale, an amazing fact revealed in C.H.Rolph’s book on the trial, and dwelt on in my ‘Abolition of Britain’. The other important fact is that all the defence witnesses had managed to obtain and read unexpurgated versions of this supposedly banned book, which was in truth readily available to the educated elite, and not truly banned at all ).

 

It was a conscious test case, designed to give a first outing to the new defence of ‘literary merit’, an attribute so vague that anything can be said to have it. And its main effect  has been to license the publication of almost anything, often with the assistance of John Mortimer.

 

Richard Hoggart  (whose whole career was the result of enlightened selection) also supported comprehensive schooling, which just shows how wrong intelligent people can be when they let their faith interfere with their appreciation of the facts.  

 

By the way, in the newspaper itself, Richard Hoggart’s obituary took second place to that of the author of ‘The Secret Diaries of Adrian Mole’.  How strange. You either like ‘Adrian Mole’ or you do not. I don’t. But Richard Hoggart was so important that it didn’t matter whether you liked him or not. And it should not be forgotten that as John Ezard recalled in his fine Guardian obituary of the great professor, he wrote what must be one of the most moving passages of autobiography I have ever read, thus…

 

‘”When I see – or see film of – a driven bird flying to its nest and anxiously, earnestly feeding the open mouths, the image of our mother comes to mind," Hoggart wrote. "When you have seen a woman standing frozen, while tears start slowly down her cheeks because a sixpence has been lost ... you do not easily forget.”’

 

I should think not.

 

Did Bashar Assad Gas His 'Own People'?

I mentioned on Saturday an astonishing article by the American reporter Seymour Hersh. This article, if correct, blows apart most of the assumptions ‘everyone’ (except this columnist and a very few others), was making during the Syrian crisis of August 2013. It was taken as proven by most media and politicians that Bashar Assad, the Syrian leader,  had used Sarin gas on ‘his own people’, so providing the USA with the pretext it had long sought to use military force directly against the Syrian state.  

 

It was my view at the time that, whatever one might think of the Assad state, and I have myself many times attacked it for its behaviour at home and abroad, it would have been howling madness for it to have done any such thing. American, British and French military action against the Syrian state would have made it more or less certain that Assad, who was struggling quite hard against rebels but by no means on the ropes, would have been beaten.  Vast quantities of powerful and accurate munitions would have been dropped on to his arsenals, bases, aircraft and command centres.

 

Why risk such a  thing? Why risk it when the military advantages to Assad of using poison gas would be so small and short-lived? It didn’t, and still doesn’t, make sense.

 

Some readers may remember that at the time,  I begged you to contact your MPs and ask them to vote against such action. You may remember that to the amazement of us all, the House of Commons actually did reject intervention ( after a debate in which I was personally impugned by a pro-war MP, who wrongly characterised my position as support for Mr Assad, when it was simply a desire to keep my country out of what I thought, and think, was a  foolish and dangerous war in which we had no national interest) .

 

And then, in a second miracle, President Obama suddenly decided to put the issue before Congress, thus ( as it happened) killing off intervention for good. And then a face-saving arrangement was then concocted by Russia, under which Mr Assad gave up his chemical weapons anyway (no great loss to him, I’ve always thought, as like all such weapons they were in reality unusable). The amazing thing is that some people are actually *annoyed* with, and suspicious of Moscow for getting everyone off the hook in this way.

 

It was all a bit dreamlike. Well, Mr Hersh, a journalist of experience and distinction who is very controversial but who simply cannot be ignored because he is so often right about secret matters, has come up with an alternative explanation.

 

Washington and London had strong reasons to believe that Assad was not the culprit.

 

He goes further than that.

 

His article relies heavily on some un-named but very highly-placed sources. Well, this is always awkward, but we know he has had such sources in the past, who have told him astonishing things.  It fills in some details of a suggestion he first made some months ago.   I cannot *know* if his account is true, though I would feel vindicated if it were, which I freely admit may well prejudice me.  Some parts of it have been officially denied, but then they would be, even if they were true. To read it in full, you will have to buy ‘The London Review of Books’ for 17 April 2014, or persuade your local public library to obtain it for you.

 

One telling quote from a nameless high intelligence official is this ‘There was no way they (the joint chiefs of staff in Washington)  thought Syria would use nerve gas at that stage(August 2013), because Assad was winning the war’.

 

But there’s much more,  including  a strong suggestion that Britain and the USA *knew* , around the time President Obama called off the war, the Sarin used in Damascus was not likely to have come from Assad’s Russian-supplied arsenal, and some absolutely amazing suggestions about where it may actually have come from.

 

Make what you like of this. Seymour Hersh has not actually produced sworn witnesses to what he says, or hard evidence. I offer the material because it interests me greatly, and because I hope that, the more his article is discussed, the more likely we will be to find out the uncontested truth through open, declared sources.

 

But it might also be wise, for now,  to examine the publicly-accepted version of events in Ukraine, in the knowledge that these things are often much, much more complicated than they look at first sight.

 

Is the EU turning into a Colonial Power? And Other Vital Questions

Long, long ago, not far after the dawn of time ( well, May 2004 actually) , I wrote this article:

 

 

‘ THE worst dungeons in the world are created by people who think they are doing good. Their belief in the holiness of their aims excuses almost anything. From the Spanish Inquisition to the Marxist interrogators in Moscow's Lubyanka, the cruellest torturers have been the ones who thought they were saving souls or building a beautiful new world.

 

Now it is our turn. America and Britain went into the 21st Century torture business when they adopted their new ethical foreign policy, going round the world overthrowing wicked regimes.

 

In the case of Anthony Blair, all this saintly idealism may yet lead him into the dock of one of the international courts he now claims to be so keen on.

 

The people who nearly put General Pinochet on trial may before too long find the power and the will to do the same to a British Prime Minister, especially if the Iraq war turns as rancid as it threatens to do.

 

George W. Bush will not be joining him, since he, with more cunning than his ally, has refused to submit America to any foreign judges. It was a wise choice.

 

This could go very high indeed, now that Mr Blair and people like him have spread the idea that statesmen should answer in court for atrocities done on their watch.

 

But at the moment, everyone is concentrating on the poor bloody infantry of the jails and interrogation suites, the wretched little people who did the kicking and sodomising and other twisted humiliation. They are, as is usual in these cases, disturbingly ordinary.

 

Some of them turn out to have been private contractors, cooks and drivers who just happened to be available, about as far from the hooded, sinister image of the professional tormentor that it is possible to get. And yet they did these things, before clocking off for an ordinary American evening of hamburgers, beer and TV. Sooner or later, we are going to have to find out why they thought they were right to act like this, who wrote their training manuals, and why they believed they would get away with it.

 

They do not even seem to have heard of the Geneva Conventions, hardly surprising given their own Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has bypassed these time-honoured safeguards in his prison-camp at Guantanamo and his still-more-covert, night-and-fog cellblocks at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan.

 

But they probably had heard of the suggestions, seriously made by respectable American lawyers, that torture should be licensed by the state to deal with the menace of terror.

 

Private Lynndie England and her friends, dim, pathetic people in any other circumstances, were transformed into fiends out of hell because they had reason to believe that politicians and their superior officers had in some way given them permission. When they come to trial it will be interesting to see who they try to drag down with them. For it is clear that a great free nation, based upon the rule of law, became convinced it was leading a righteous struggle against total evil and could do what it liked in this cause.

 

Britain, in its turn, led by a man who makes a public fuss of his Christian faith and imagines he can save the world, decided to join in this strange, limitless conflict.

 

AMERICA turned the ruins of the World Trade Centre into the foundation of a wild, uncontrollable conceit - the 'War On Terror'. Actually, and it is now just about possible to say this without being accused of treachery or callousness, September 11 2001 was a serious but highly limited terrorist attack. It did not cripple the economy or the power structures of the US. By the standards of modern warfare, the casualties were mercifully low.

 

But George W. Bush and his closest advisers chose to make it a cause for panic and fake apocalypse. It was they who went into hiding as if America had been invaded from space, they who closed their borders in a pointless spasm of meaningless security, they who inflamed their people into vengeance and a bonfire of many of their own liberties.

 

And it was they who created the conditions under which British soldiers could be plausibly accused of beating and kicking and urinating on hooded, bound prisoners; and the conditions under which Americans indulged in perverted sadistic behaviour and then proudly photographed each other as they did it.

 

We were not saints before this. British treatment of Mau Mau prisoners in Kenya in the Fifties was a lasting disgrace, and our retreat from Empire was nothing like as kind and gentle as we like to claim. But the ideas of European superiority that allowed such barbarity vanished long ago, along with the Empire.

 

All nations do filthy deeds in war -  through desperation, haste, clumsiness, rage, exhaustion or fury. They blow civilians to pieces with bombs and shells, shoot surrendering captives or leave them to drown in freezing seas.

 

Most of us have met the very decent, kindly men who found themselves doing such things between 1939 and 1945, hardened themselves at the time, and have quietly regretted them ever since. We do not wonder often enough why old soldiers are so reluctant to talk about a war we like to think of as glorious. They saw things no man should see and in many cases did things no man should do. They were in danger, fighting an enemy who could do the same to them and often did.

 

BUT the brutal humiliation of helpless, disarmed prisoners, miles from the rage of battle, can never be excused by the ferocity of combat.

 

It is done well away from any fighting front. It requires cold-blooded, calm determination, reflection and decision.

 

The beast within us has to be coaxed out and allowed to feel safe. I do not think there is any evidence that such methods were used by Britain during World War Two, when for many years our entire national survival was in doubt.

 

Nor did the US behave in this way during that war. And, while it was certainly guilty of atrocities in Vietnam, they were the result of pent-up frustration after years of fighting against an unseen enemy who hid himself in the midst of the population. This business of piling naked men into pyramids, or tying dog-leads round their necks, or putting women's knickers over their heads, or sodomising them with broomsticks, is something new.

 

And it is by no means the worst of it. Few now try to deny that in Bagram airbase, much more severe torture and degradation have taken place. And it is pretty much accepted that the CIA has recently subcontracted torture to various Arab regimes, including Syria and Jordan, who are used to the sound of screams coming from dank cellars.

 

Perhaps we shall have to get used to it too. Like the old Soviet regime, we now have clever, charming professional thinkers who take the view that you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.

 

Listen to these words, written in April 2002 by Robert Cooper, a diplomat and foreign policy adviser to Anthony Blair: 'The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open co-operative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era - force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the 19th Century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.'

 

'Whatever is necessary' was always the licence for those who believed the end justified the means. The law of the jungle turns out to be exactly what we have been using in Al Ghraib and probably Basra too. No doubt Mr Cooper, a kindly bicyclist and ballroom dancing-enthusiast, never imagined the squalid end of such thinking, but he should have done. So should Mr Blair.

 

But our Premier was already well launched on his romantic quest to save the world with bombs and bayonets. The Prime Minister made an astonishing speech in Chicago in April 1999. It justified intervention in Kosovo - and anywhere else - on the grounds that such interventions would do good.

 

FEW now visit the dismal mess post-war Kosovo has become, but apart from all its other problems of unresolved ethnic hatred and continuing ethnic cleansing, political instability and violent gangsterism, Amnesty International reported this week that the Western occupation there is directly responsible for a huge expansion of sex slavery, engulfing hundreds of women, many under-aged, in torture, rape, abuse and crime. So much for doing good.

 

By October 2001 Mr Blair was pledging to intervene all over Africa. 'The state of Africa,' he thundered, 'is a scar on the conscience of the world. But if the world, as a community, focused on it, we could heal it.'

 

Perhaps fortunately for Africa, he has not yet tried to do this. But in the glow of righteousness provided by September 11, he has joined in a general assault on real human rights unprecedented in modern history. His government was feeble in the face of the gross breach of civilised rules at Guantanamo. It constantly stirs fears of terrorist outrages here, and has for the first time in modern British history imprisoned people secretly and without trial.

 

In this general atmosphere of panic, we have also seen a sad collapse of the normal rules of justice.

 

Every few weeks groups of Middle-Eastern men are rounded up amid off-the-record briefings that a new terrorist outrage has been foiled.

 

Usually, the arrested people are freed without charge, as quietly as possible, a few weeks later.

 

Even if they were charged, it is hard to see how they could get a fair trial after the treatment they have been given. But the messianic struggle against the spectre of Osama bin Laden seems to justify almost anything.

 

If there ever is a serious terrorist attack on the British mainland - and it is pretty likely that there will be -  people and government will demand culprits to be tried and punished.

 

What methods might eventually be used against suspects in our police stations to obtain the necessary confessions, even if they are the wrong people?

 

Can we now be so sure the sort of moral pollution that has gripped western troops in Iraq will not seep back into our state at home?

 

Or that, in many ways, it has not already done so, if only in the form of institutionalised lying?’

 

There’s one major error in it, which I think was pardonable at the time. It’s now pretty much accepted that Britain did use forms of torture on some German captives, in a London building , during the later years of the war(I’ll try to look up references) .

 

But I looked it up because of the mention of Robert Cooper in this article in Friday’s ‘Independent’  by the thoughtful, level-headed and knowledgeable Mary Dejevsky (a former Moscow Correspondent for the Times, who did that job with great distinction): 

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/does-the-eus-involvement-in-ukraine-amount-to-a-form-of-colonialism-9251779.html

 

This article is interestingly distinct from the standard-issue boilerplate of most commentators, in both observing and assessing the current behaviour of the ‘West’ in Ukraine, which I think should be called ‘soft aggression’. It also points out that EU membership, for East European nations,  is far from being a guarantee of economic growth and prosperity, as so many media figures and politicians assert. And Mrs Dejevsky dares to use the term ’colonial power’ in reference to the EU, a truth which I think has been waiting to be expressed, but which I preferred not to use explicitly because it would be dismissed as ‘extremism’ , and so not thought about.

 

But there’s also a gripping detail. I should have known, but didn’t,  that Robert Cooper had turned up in Catherine Ashton’s office. This is yet more evidence that the EU is an extension of Blair by other means, but it also entertains the possibility that the EU is a sort of colonialist or at least interventionist power, and that those nations which it approaches for ostensibly economic agreements are actually being involved in something much bigger. 

 

Let us re-examine that passage : ‘But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era - force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the 19th Century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.'

 

Is Russia one of those ‘old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent’? Isn’t this just a way of defining any who don’t join the post-Chicago globalist consensus as backward and beyond the pale, not entitled to the normal considerations if diplomacy and law, and always exposed to the possibility of destabilisation?  Is it therefore legitimate use deception and ‘whatever is necessary’ against Moscow? And what, precisely *is* ‘necessary’?  And isn’t it interesting that John Kerry, the American Secretary of State also refers to Russian methods as ‘19th-century’. Actually, Russia tried to use several 21st-century methods to deter the EU’s aggressive grab at Ukraine, including many years of open and explicit protests at NATO’s relentless westward expansion,  its own aid package and the very postmodern gas threat. It was when these didn’t work that it used naked force.

 

By the way, I note that critics of Russia accuse it of ‘expansion’ into Ukraine. This raises an interesting question, one again, of title to territory and where it comes from.  Was French repossession of Alsace-Lorraine after 1918 ‘expansion’. Or was Czechoslovakia’s repossession of the Sudetenland in 1945 ‘expansionism’? Actually, both of these territories contain (or at the time contained)  national minorities who were not necessarily comfortable with the rule of their liberators. Both have complex histories (some might say that Strasbourg is now French because of ‘expansionism’ on the part of Louis XIV.  The main difference is that Ukraine was taken from Russia in 1992 by diplomacy, and by Russia’s absence of power,  rather than by naked force (though of course naked force had been used to take Ukraine from Russia twice in the 20th century, events whichmost certainly influence all involved today).

 

Then there’s this gripping article for the same newspaper by the interesting and original Robert Fisk, which I mention just because it made my jaw drop:

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/turkeys-actions-in-syria-see-pm-recep-tayyip-erdogan-go-from-model-middle-east-strongman-to-tinpot-dictator-9252366.html

 

This is not just a welcome sign that the generally kindly coverage of Mr Erdogan is at last coming to a long-merited end (how lonely it has been, pointing out what he’s really like, though Robert Fisk has always been critical of Turkey) The suggestions it makes, or rather which it says Seymour Hersh makes, about the Sarin episode in Syria (you have to keep reading)  are absolutely devastating if they are true.

The Selfists Strike Back (with a damp sponge)

I was struck by the unusual poverty of the objections to the posting on the family wrecked after a child smoked cannabis, and the problem of ‘anecdotes’.

 

Take for instance the lofty contribution from Colin Walker:

 

‘Anecdotal evidence is never enough to make a case, even with a case by case analysis of anecdotes to discern patterns it would not give you any valid indications on how common, likely and severe the reactions can be.

I always find it amusing that people like Peter will give credence to negative anecdotes. They are seen to have some weight while the anecdotal evidence of millions of users indicating neutral or positive reactions is dismissed.’

 

Wouldn’t that depend on the case being made? Recall what I said ; ‘Beyond asking if any rational, responsible  person would or could  pursue cannabis legalisation or 'regulation' or 'decriminalisation' until such 'anecdotes' could be explained, I make no further comment.’

 

Surely even one such anecdote (let alone the thousands available, among the parents, friends and relatives of these victims) should give pause to anyone campaigning to remove the existing restrictions on the drug concerned?

 

I also have to point out again to those naïve enough to think that research is carried out constantly on a broad front about everything that is interesting, and is disinterestedly directed, that this is not so. I would be overjoyed if the state would pay for a full-scale research project on the effects of cannabis, especially on the young. There is no such project. One has to ask why not.  In its absence, we have to make what warnings we can, with the information we have.

 

Then there’s John Rowe, who asserts :’ I really wish Peter wouldn't bother with these kinds of posts, because they're so intellectually dishonest and have nothing to do with the real reasons he's opposed to cannabis use. It wouldn't influence his opinion one way or the other if it were proven beyond doubt that cannabis never led to mental health issues or if it always did, so there's no point trying to discuss harm issues with him.’

 

I use the arguments that come to hand. In a world that doesn’t believe in sin, let alone that it is bad,  there’s little point in telling people not to commit it. In a world given over to self-indulgence which doesn’t believe in the immortal soul, it is not going to be very effective to tell people that it is morally wrong and may have eternal consequences. It happens to be the case (and this is itself interesting) that moral wrongs pretty much invariably lead to various forms of temporal, material damage as well as to those deeper consequences. If this is what I must stress to keep people away from folly, then I will do so. Personally, I have no doubt that the ‘anecdotal’ link would, if subjected to proper research and testing, be shown to be real. As I’ve said before, it is hardly a surprise that a mind-altering drug of some power has a long-lasting effect on the brain .

 

As for ‘complete dominion’ over ‘someone’s flesh’, only one authority has that, and the user of the phrase does not, I think, accept that authority. The law, on the other hand , can – even in the secular moral system -  concern itself with actions which harm others. I have many times explained here why self-destruction is not and cannot be a victimless crime. Indeed, the post to which I linked showed quite clearly who the victims are, and how they suffer, how deeply and how long. It would take a head of concrete and a heart of plywood to fail to see this.

 

Mr Knight’s posting, incoherent, clichéd, self-serving (How does he know it hasn’t done him any harm? How can he know what he might have been and done otherwise?) and rambling as it is, undermines his own case brilliantly.

 

Then there is :’ The millions of anecdotes from addicts of various substances mean nothing to you so I assume this anecdotal evidence means nothing either. Afterall I would hate you to be inconsistent in your views Peter.’

 

That is because a moral concept cannot be transformed into a material illness (the heart of the ‘addiction’ argument)  by any number of anecdotes. It is precisely because lobbyists for ‘addiction’ make such an extravagant claim that they must be subject to such severe tests, which of course they cannot pass, but they get terribly cross when told so. They wish to use pseudoscience to shut up anyone who refuses to accept their (rather squalid) moral position. Any informed person can see that it *is* pseudoscience.

, but of course many gullible peopel are fooled by pseudoscience and Graeco-Latin expressions, , so any dissentient vocie must be furiously attacked lest the truth get out

My claim ( see above) is far more modest. There is enough anecdote to discourage any irreversible change in the laws controlling the suspect drugs, and to justify the extensive, expensive research needed to establish whether there is in fact a danger.

 

And finally, from another lobby wounded by me: ‘In response to Mr. Hitchens's piece some weeks ago on dyslexia, a significant number of people posted comments outlining their personal experiences of suffering from dyslexic symptoms despite the majority having had perfectly good educations. In the interests of consistency, is Mr. Hitchens planning to take those anecdotes on board and re-consider his view that dyslexia doesn't exist?’

 

The question with ‘dyslexia’ is not whether people have trouble with reading, which is beyond doubt, but why they do, and whether this is caused by a complaint in their physical bodies called ‘dyslexia’. Therefore a million anecdotes, or indeed a million peer-reviewed accounts of people describing their own reading problems, would not resolve the issue. What would resolve it would be controlled tests, in which those claiming to be ‘dyslexic’ were taught to read using Synthetic Phonics. When, after a few months ( as would certainly be the case) , they could all read, we could all go home, and the people in the control groups, who were being ‘treated’ for dyslexia could be given SP lessons too.

 

The question here is whether there is enough of a reason to launch a major research project into the effects of cannabis, and  enough of a reason to hesitate before irreversibly abandoning existing laws against cannabis.

 

Only a dogged, dogmatic, and unreasoning adherence to a cause could make anyone confuse the two.

 

Oddly enough, that cause is always the same, whether it be cannabis, ‘dyslexia’ , ‘addiction’ or, ‘ADHD’  - it is the cause that demands absolute personal autonomy, and the cause which denies personal responsibility for actions and failures. It is the most powerful cause in modern civilisation, and it is so intertwined with selfish personal desires that it hates with a passion any voice which suggests it may be wrong. It hates, especially, the idea that there may be a God and any absolute source of law or goodness. I call it ‘Selfism’.

 

Oh, by the way, if the incidence of the problems apparently connected with cannabis was random and unpredictable, the number of those not suffering (or claiming not to suffer) problems from using this drug would have little bearing on the question at issue, which is, simply, whether we should show natural caution and exercise natural curiosity. 

White Tie and Terror - Proof that we Gave in to the IRA

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

 

So this is what it is like to live in a defeated country. Your Head of State has to consort with one of the leaders of the most successful terror gang in the world, and pretend she likes it.

 

This grisly person sits at dinner in Windsor castle, nodding and smiling at the great and the good. How witty it was of somebody to seat him next to Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty, so opposed to the death penalty when it is carried out by lawful states. 

 

And hardly anyone says anything, except two dignified figures, standing outside the Castle, one robbed of a son and the other of a sister,  who will be unable to forget the IRA’s views on the ‘Right to Life’ until they die, just as many others will never be able to forget their views on torture, habeas corpus and free speech.

 

Bitter, wasn’t it, that the day (stolen by McGuinness from the peaceable Irish President Michael D. Higgins), also featured military bandsmen, like those blown to pieces by the IRA in Regent’s Park, and Household Cavalry, like those blown to pieces, with their horses, in Hyde Park (a crime for which nobody has been punished, or ever will be now)?

 

Nobody ever imagined that President Higgins, or the huge majority of good and honourable Irish men and women, ever supported or endorsed the IRA murder of the Queen’s cousin, Lord Mountbatten. Of course they didn’t.   It was Martin  McGuinness who should have been laying a wreath on the Mountbatten tomb. That will be the day.

 

By the way, since this misery was so typical of the IRA’s ruthless disregard for life, we should never forget the other victims of that crime, casually erased from the earth by people who believed their cause was so noble that other people’s sons and mothers should die horribly in the process  - Paul Maxwell, a 15-year old boy from Fermanagh, Nicholas Knatchbull, the Earl’s 14-year-old grandson, and the 83-year old Dowager Lady Brabourne. Three others were terribly injured.

 

At the time Gerry Adams (McGuinness’s close ally and now a frequent guest at the White House) called the outrage an ‘execution’ (Shami Chakrabarti please note) in a creepy statement, while the IRA itself willingly took responsibility for it.

 

There is a silly myth that we somehow ‘defeated’ the IRA. Oh, really. Do the victors withdraw their troops? Do the victors dismantle their surveillance systems and haul down their flags? Do the victors release from just imprisonment scores of the enemy’s worst and most cunning killers and bombers? Do the defeated keep their arms and bombs, and receive what amounts to immunity from future prosecution?  Do the victors install the vanquished in well-paid ministerial jobs? Do the victors entertain the defeated enemy at dinner in Windsor Castle?  Don’t be silly.

 

The whole event gives a strange new meaning to the phrase ‘Her Majesty’s Pleasure’.  Once the whole country would have been enraged by this immoral, humiliating spectacle. It is a measure of what has happened to us that almost all of us just sat and took it. And we still dare to sneer at the French for the way they behaved when they were beaten by a much bigger foe.

 

*************

 

My view of Maria Miller is that what she needed above all was a train timetable and a road map. Both would have showed that the journey from Wimbledon to Basingstoke is so brief that she didn’t need a house in both places. The same is true of the journey between David Cameron’s London home and Witney. By the way, is it true he is now renting out that London home? If so, perhaps he could help reduce the deficit by paying back some of the vast housing claims he made in the old days.

 

***************

The jail book ban that's just fiction

 

In this age of teenage juries, majority verdicts, feeble judges and liberal bigotry, I’m increasingly worried that my enemies will one day manage to lock me up in prison.

 

Reading will be a useful way of getting through that, so I was personally interested in the noisy campaign claiming that prisoners are being deprived of books by the supposedly cruel and ruthless Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling. Should I join the protest?

 

Well, no. I’ve checked the facts and the claim just isn’t true. There’s a new restriction on parcels, which seems to me to be reasonably justified by worries about weapons and drugs. I really can’t see what interest Mr Grayling would have in stopping prisoners getting books. I wonder how many actually want books. 

 

The parcels rule may incidentally prevent the delivery of some books, but it simply isn’t a book ban. If it were, I repeat, I’d protest against it.

 

Prisoners can still get books. Not as easily as you or I can, but they can. The measure isn’t intended to stop them getting books, or having books, or reading books.

 

Heaven knows, I wish we could return to the sort of ordered, disciplined prisons where inmates at least had the peace and solitude to read. The reality, as I’ve seen for myself, isn’t much like that now. Those who claim to be concerned about prisoners should look into that instead.

**********

 

Well, now we’ve found out that Tamiflu was more or less useless, does it cross anyone’s mind to wonder if all those expensive much-hyped ‘antidepressants’ do what it says on the box? Given the drug companies’ efforts to hide their own research, it might be wise to be suspicious.

 

*********

And still people swallow the claim that crime is falling. This week, Parliament’s Public Administration Committee actually produced a report called ‘Caught red-handed: why we can’t count on police recorded crime statistics’ Readers of this column will already know most of what’s in it. 

 

But there’s one new thing. The ‘Crime Survey for England and Wales’, a glorified opinion poll generally treated as little short of holy writ, has quietly cut its sample from 46,000 adults to 35,000 adults, and from 4,000 children to 3,000 children.

 

Hitchens’s Law states that: ‘All politically important statistics will be fiddled’. Crime figures started dropping because they became politically important, so crime was redefined to exclude millions of crimes. The same thing, we now see, is happening with immigration figures where thousands of arrivals were simply ignored altogether. We didn’t log them, so they aren’t here. The Big Society in action.

 

**********

Heard for the first time, ‘partner’ as a verb. An expert on housing, on the radio, explaining why people were buying houses later in life, because they were ‘partnering’ later, Not long ago, they would have said ‘marrying’. Not long in the future, nobody will say ‘marrying’. It matters.

 

 

 

 

 

How Many Anecdotes add up to Evidence?

Here's another 'anecdote' about what happened to a family after one of its members smoked cannabis. It's on the 'CONSERVATIVE WOMAN' site I've mentioned here before.

 

 

http://conservativewoman.co.uk/drugs-wrecked-my-sons-life-legalisation-would-be-a-disaster/

 

Beyond asking if any rational, responsible  person would or could  pursue cananbis legalisation or 'regulation' or 'decrminalisation' until such 'anecdotes' could be explained, I make no further comment.

 

Why Ideas Matter

This posting is aimed at showing how wild, fringe ideas, which hardly anyone notices at the time they are first set out,  turn into British government policy. I must express my gratitude to the estimable and courageous Erin Pizzey, for kindly lending me her copy of ‘The Family Way’, a pamphlet written by that Terrifying Trinity of Harriet Harman, Anna Coote and Patricia Hewitt, and published by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), at the end of September 1990. The excellent People’s History Museum in Manchester (famous for its prize exhibit, Michael Foot’s alleged donkey jacket) were, unusually, unable to find it in their archives).  

 

I was in Moscow at the time it came out, barely aware of the tunnelling and burrowing which the radical left were already doing beneath the apparently solid structure of British family life. I also had no idea that the reliably conservative newspaper for which I then worked would, within a few years, come into the ownership of a company whose chief was a keen supporter of the IPPR, and would support New Labour at the 1997 election. Thus is the astonishing future hidden from us in a fog of unknowing. All one can learn from this is that there are some surprises coming, and that normality is an illusion.

 

Even so, some changes can be observed as they gestate and form. I think the state’s increasingly keen  support for the unmarried family is such a  change.

 

In fact, before I spent my two and a bit years in Moscow, I was pitifully unaware of the nature, power, extent and speed of social, cultural and political change which was already changing this country. Although I was myself an ex-Marxist, I did not properly understand the extent and nature of my own abandoned beliefs, though by then I almost instinctively knew them to be dangerous and bad.  I still by and large accepted the clichés in thought which most people accepted, bowed to conventional wisdom on most matters, regarded the ‘West’ as a solid bloc of virtue and believed that the Conservative Party was still a reliable defender of institutions, morals and traditions. I thought that the defining issues between left and right were ownership of the means of production, trade union power and which side you took in the Cold War.

 

My education had been wholly inadequate until I went, as it were, out into the cold and dark and saw the bones and guts of the wounded world, exposed as they then were in that history-haunted, semi-devastated landscape.

 

So if I had seen ‘The Family Way – a new approach to policy-making’, in its dull pink-and white cover on the day it was published (a day when I was in fact moving into my sinister, magnificent Moscow flat overlooking the river) , I would probably have dismissed it as just another display of  utopian fantasy by a discredited and marginalised left.

 

I can find almost no reference to it in the newspaper files of the time. Robin Oakley, then political editor of the Daily Mail, was among the few who noticed it.

 

He wrote on 27th September 1990, under the headline ‘Parties urged to abandon “cosy family”’     

 

‘A LEFT-of-centre think-tank urged yesterday that parties should abandon the Victorian concept of the family as a private self-contained unit with a breadwinning father married to a non-employed caring mother. Politicians should accept instead that fewer people will marry and a greater proportion will divorce. Policies were needed to improve the working prospects of women and to encourage men to be more active parents. The Institute for Public Policy Research paper, The Family Way, by Anna Coote, Patricia Hewitt, Neil Kinnock's former policy co-ordinator, and Harriet Harman, Labour's health spokesman, called for men and women to be free to combine parenthood and paid work on an equal footing. More child-care facilities should be provided to help women to work and become financially independent. Paternity leave and other measures were demanded to encourage fathers not to be ``the Sunday male'', insulated from their children by working life. The report said that in families in which fathers had played an active role with the children, there were better prospects of a child maintaining a good relationship with both parents after a divorce.

 

At the Westminster launch of the document, Ms Harman accused the government of stigmatising 2.4 million children who did not live in traditional families with two married parents. ``The government is badly wrong on the family. Instead of a sensible public policy, it is whipping up public anxiety about the changes in family life. It is standing on the sidelines wringing its hands and saying `We wish these changes were not happening','' she said.

 

The document suggested that family structures were reacting to the shift to a service economy, the new phase of information technology, the declining birthrate, the expansion of higher education and the modern expectations of women. With marriage changing ``from social institution to private relationship'', couples placed more emphasis on the personal qualities of their partners, seeking companionship, communication and sexual compatibility. Women's lives were altering but there were few signs of men's lives undergoing compatible changes.

 

There was little evidence to support the idea that lone parenthood was a direct cause of children's under-achievement, or of juvenile delinquency. There was, however, ample evidence that lone parenthood was associated with poverty which hindered children's development emotionally and educationally. Public policy should encourage rather than coerce. The report put the emphasis on making men more responsible, changing their role in the household, encouraging women to work and forming strong bonds with their children.

 

Among measures suggested were tax relief or credits on child-care expenses, a local tax on businesses for councils to spend on child care, making planning approval conditional on the provision of nurseries, and creating consortia of businesses, local authorities and child-care companies to run nurseries.

 

On health, the report urged a choice of contraceptive services with a special focus on teenagers. Employed women should have the right to six weeks' paid maternity leave and men to ten days' paternity leave. Parental leave of a minimum three months was demanded, with an allowance paid out of public funds, possibly financed by contributions from employers. Workers should be allowed to return to work part-time for up to five years after parental leave.

 

The report urged quicker ``fault-free'' divorces without partners having to attribute blame for the breakdown. It also supported a comprehensive non-adversarial family court system.

 

Calls were rejected for the replacement of child benefit with tax allowances. Those would go in most cases to fathers who would not necessarily spend them on the children, the report said. Income tax should be increased to pay for much higher child benefit.’

 

This is , typically of Robin, a good, clear, concise account. But that is the limitation of news. What Erin Pizzey spotted, and has since drawn to our attention, is that the document was not just a series of policy suggestions made by marginal members of a beaten and powerless party. It contained a strong ideological current, to which we should have paid far more attention.

 

The paragraph to which Erin Pizzey draws attention is on page 26 . It comes after a lengthy passage on how mean are pretty dreadful. E.g.: ‘most domestic violence and child sexual abuse is perpetrated by married men against their own wives and children’. Can this still be true? The assertion is based on a study made between 1977 and 1982 by ‘Cleveland Refuge and Aid for Women and Children’ , studying 393 women who sought refuge to escape domestic violence, plus some ‘unpublished figures’ supplied to London Women’s Aid by the Metropolitan Police, plus a 1984 Journal study on the prevalence of abuse by stepfathers as opposed to natural fathers. My guess is that in the pre-1985 period most women with children were still married as a matter of course. What would be more interesting, now that cohabitation and non-marriage have become much more common, would be to survey this problem in comparable households among the married and the unmarried.

 

Then there’s ‘the great majority (84 per cent) of adults convicted of criminal offences are male, and men account for an even higher proportion(91 per cent) of those convicted of violent crimes. Many of these male convicted criminals are married men and it is undoubtedly the case that many boys larn to be violent and/or criminal by following the example of their own fathers’ etc etc etc.

 

‘Moreover, as we have noted, women do almost all the work involved in bringing up their children, whether or not they are living with the children’s father; this has remained unchanged for generations.’

 

In short, men are a thoroughly bad lot. And so we come to the key sentence:

‘It cannot therefore be assumed that men are bound to be an asset to family life, or that the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social harmony or cohesion’.

 

This last bit is not just a description of existing circumstances. It is an actual battle-cry for the positive virtues of the fatherless family, though I doubt whether Ms Harman (married to a trades union official)  or Ms Hewitt  (married to a left-wing judge) would have said it as clearly and openly as they approached Cabinet office seven years later.

 

The figures in the report, written in the deepening twilight of the dying Thatcher period, are startling.

 

‘Between 1971 and 1987, lone parents as a proportion of all families with dependent children , rose from 8% to 14%’ though the figures were far higher for central London (26.6%) and other major cities such as Liverpool, Glasgow and Birmingham ( roughly 20% in each).

 

They had no idea how lucky they were. The *national* average of such families is now about to reach 24%, and they are almost universal in some of the harsher areas of our big cities, while cohabiting households (affecting one adult in six) have doubled in number since 1996 and are the fastest-growing type of family arrangement in the UK.

 

What’s also clear from the report is that much of this social change has been driven by the needs of business, which in the early 1990s began actively to want married women to go out to work (the authors correctly note this is a dilemma for Conservatives who seek to be pro-family and pro-business at the same time).

 

They note that, under external pressures ‘the traditional, Victorian model of family life is becoming a minority pursuit’.

 

How many of these pressures might have been avoided or mitigated by genuinely conservative social policies is hard to say.  Clearly these three authors are not social conservatives, and are far from dismayed by the developments they report. But the package outlined in Robin Oakley’s report is surely aimed at making it easier for the world to rub along *without* the Victorian model. And so it has.

 

Was this inevitable? Or was it just possible, and encouraged? Could we in fact have chosen another direction, had conservative thinkers been alert to the danger? I suspect so (Germany, for instance, has taken a very different path, as has Japan).

 

In any case, it is a warning to us all, to take seriously those tiny, diligent pressure groups and think tanks, and their worthy pamphlets.

Oh no, not that again

‘Steven’ says : ‘The flaw in Mr. Hitchens's analysis of the Irish question is that he consistently speaks of "Northern Ireland" as if it were a viable political entity worthy of preservation. In reality, it is a wholly artificial statelet created on the basis of a sectarian head-count designed to manufacture a Protestant majority and ensure the latter's political supremacy. As Mr. Hitchens grudgingly acknowledged, it doesn't even correspond to the historical province of Ulster. Is that not a crucial fact?’

 

Oh dear. I think I have dealt with this wholly erroneous claim more than twice before, but let’s try again in the hope that it will stick this time. If he would make the small mental effort to understand what I mean by ‘[enlightened] direct rule’, and what I mean by my repeated statements that I would never have set up the Stormont Parliament, regard it as a mistake and would have wanted to dispense with it, then he will see that ‘Northern Ireland’, under my (now, alas, wholly fanciful and anachronistic) plan would not have made any pretence to being a viable political entity. It would have been a wholly absorbed part of Great Britain, which until recently was a viable entity (alas it is so no more).

 

Of course, this idea pre-dates the current accelerating break-up of Great Britain, created largely by the EU’s desire to Balkanise and demoralise its vassals and the Blairite error of combating Scottish and Welsh Nationalism by feeding it. It also assumes the reassertion of British national integrity by leaving the EU.

 

As I said clearly, the only local government in such a Northern Ireland would have been at County (and city and borough) level. In all respects, it would have been governed from Westminster just as much as Derbyshire or Lancashire or Devon are.

 

Some people even seem to have utterly misunderstood my liking for enlightened direct rule of Northern Ireland as a proposal for re-annexing the 26-counties of the Irish Republic. I have no such proposals, though of course I would be delighted if at any time the Republic chose of its own will to return to the British Crown, instead of subjecting itself to the EU empire, which has no sympathy with Ireland’s character and history.  No, my idea was for Northern Ireland only, or the ‘Six Counties’ or whatever he wants to call it.

 

My statement that Ulster has nine counties was not an ‘acknowledgement’. I need nobody to tell me what I already know. Nor was it ‘grudging’.

 

It is a simple fact which everyone should know. Likewise, any wise person should know that the term ‘Ulster’ is often used in normal discourse to refer to Northern Ireland, and that to fuss too much about it denotes pedantry. Sometimes, it is true, persons use this in ignorance of the difficulty, and it is permissible gently to correct them. But I am obviously not such a person, and it is just silly to write as ‘Steven’ does. If he wants to demonstrate that he knows more than I do about this (which he may well do, as it is a huge and difficult subject) I am sure he can find a better way of doing so.

 

P.S. Anyone who thinks I am a supporter of the free market plainly has no idea of what I think or say. Do please try to pay attention, at the back.

Further Thoughts on the Irish Question

I’m asked why it was all right for the Queen to visit memorials to Irish rebels in Dublin, but wrong for her to have Martin McGuinness at Windsor Castle. I’m also told that her visit to Dublin would have been impossible without the 1998 surrender. These are good points to which the answers must remain matters of opinion and contention.

 

But my responses are these . The two conflicts, from 1916 until 1921 and from 1969 to 1998 (its official end, though in fact it continues) , are very different. It is true that, in bald terms, the British government was entitled to use considerable force to repress the Easter 1916 rising in Dublin, coming (as it did) at the height of the Great War, and being (as it was) aided and abetted by Imperial Germany.

 

I have often stated here that legitimate authority is entitled to use violence to defend itself against violent attack, and that is why I am so suspicious of the term ‘killing his own people’, used of a ruler who is said to have lost his right to rule by doing so. This means that any rebellion merely has to provoke the government into the use of lethal violence, and ‘ world opinion’ will then condemn that government as too barbaric to stay in power, and begin calling it a ‘regime’.

 

As the Irish government which took over after the 1921 Treaty swiftly found, it could not have long survived had it not ‘killed its own people’ in quite large numbers. And the emergency measures taken in the late 1930 and early 1940s by the De Valera state against its IRA enemies were extremely ruthless, and pretty much put paid to IRA activity in the Free State from then on (I am told there have been one or two small exceptions. I don’t doubt it). The point is that the Dublin state, by legitimate force, repressed a violent threat to its internal sovereignty.

 

Why was that state legitimate? Because, in the 1921 Treaty, the British government, formerly the sovereign power, handed over that power to the new Free State, and to the Republic which succeeded it, by incremental steps asserting greater and greater independence from the British Crown until the formal departure from the Commonwealth in 1948-9. Interestingly, on that day, King George VI sent the following message to Sean O’Kelly, then President of the Republic of Ireland : ‘I send you my sincere good wishes on this day, being well aware of the neighbourly links which hold the people of the Republic of Ireland in close association with my subjects of the United Kingdom. I hold in most grateful memory the services and sacrifices of the men and women of your country who rendered gallant assistance to our cause in the recent war and who made a notable contribution to our victories. I pray that every blessing may be with you today and in the future.’, which seems quite a pleasant, good-natured farewell to me.

 

It was followed by swift legislation cementing the absolute right of Irish men and women to live, work and vote anywhere in the UK, which was hardly an act of spite. And of course the mysterious an elusive ‘common travel area’ by which one is supposed to be able to travel between the two countries without a passport (though in my own personal experience arrivals from London at Dublin airport cannot rely on this being the case any more, though it still seems to work the other way round).  

 

Before and since, the official name of the country whose capital is Dublin ( or Baile atha Cliath for those who think that Peking is called ‘Beijing’ and Kiev ‘Kyiv’) has been a point of contention between London and Dublin, Britain always having been unwilling to use the name ‘Ireland’ because that would imply Dublin sovereignty over the whole island of Ireland, as claimed in the 1937 constitution and now sort of not claimed any more. So we have said either ‘Eire’, in Free State days, or ‘The Republic of Ireland’ since then.

 

And did I hear President Higgins, in his speech on Tuesday, referring to ‘the relationship between our two islands’ ? I did .Three times. (http://www.newstalk.ie/Full-speech-by-Michael-D-Higgins-to-UK-Houses-of-Parliament ).

 

It’s the sort of thing only detail-hunters such as I would notice, but I enjoyed the gentle teasing implied, in a speech whose spirit was rather fine. I particularly treasured the quotation I had not heard before,  from someone I am ashamed not to have heard of before, Tom Kettle : ’Free, we are free to be your friend’.

 

You’ll find similar enjoyable little tweaks of the British nose in the new series of Irish ordnance survey maps, jointly numbered in an act of wise co-operaton, which have (inevitably) an overlap which causes parts of the Republic to be included in ‘Northern’ maps, and parts of the ‘North’ to be included in ‘Southern’ maps (memo to pedants, yes, I do know that Donegal lies to the North of the Six Counties, that Ulster has nine counties etc etc etc). There are some interesting contortions in the Republic's maps, to avoid dwelling more than is strictly necessary on the existence of Northern Ireland,  but without having one to hand I can’t recall them for sure. I believe it is possible for a very patriotic citizen of the Republic to avoid using a Northern Map at all, for the South takes care to have maps covering every inch of its territory, even if they duplicate large swathes of the Northern ones. I’m not absolutely sure it works the other way. I think it’s possible that a militant Protestant ‘loyalist’ might just have to use what he’d call a Fenian map.

 

Anyway, the point about the 1916-22 conflict was that it was largely based on a very bad mistake by us, Britain - the executions of the leaders of the Easter Rising. It was perfectly reasonable (and mostly applauded by Dubliners) that we put down the rising itself with all necessary force. But the executions were  (as Talleyrand said of Napoleon’s execution of the Duc D’Enghien in 1804) ‘ worse than a crime. They were a mistake’.

 

Patriotic Irish men and women, from that moment, could envisage no future under the British Crown. They felt that they had been treated as enemies. They regarded many of the executed men (with reason) as innocent or victims of vindictive fury. All that followed, in my opinion, up to the atrocities of the Auxiliaries and the disgraceful massacre at Croke Park, was a product of that mistake. 

 

I think it was the descendants of those gentle, honourable Irish patriots who quietly took down their portraits of the King in May 1916, who were won over to a new friendship by the visit of his granddaughter 95 years later. And I think that, by visiting the sites she visited, she made it plain that this was what she intended. So it seemed to me, anyway.

 

 

Martin McGuinness represents a strand of militant republicanism far beyond that part of Ireland which the Queen hoped to reach in 2011 (a fact he acknowledged by playing no part in that visit, though I believe he had the chance to do so) . Those who might say that Bloody Sunday in 1972 played the same part in the modern troubles as 1916 did in the former ones do have a general point. But remember that Martin McGuinness was already committed to his cause well before Bloody Sunday, and needed no such event to harden his heart against the Crown.

 

AS to whether the visit could have taken place without the 1998 agreement, I know that I can say this five million times and some people will never hear me, but John Hume’s ‘Irish Dimension’, by which reconciliation could be achieved by moving towards reunification, was neither the only route towards justice for Northern Ireland’s Roman Catholic minority, nor was it the best.

I still say that more justice, and more lasting happiness, could have been achieved through the (now utterly lost and gone) path of enlightened direct rule, which removed forever any ability of the majority to bully or discriminate against the minority, and which removed the issue of sovereignty from the argument

 

Thus, under a UK parliament and normal county councils, all discrimination in housing,  employment, law and justice, policing and education could have been removed, while the only ‘power-sharing’ would have been at local levels where it is in fact most important. Above all, this would have preserved the democratic, tolerant and non-violent political leaderships of both communities, instead of enthroning and rewarding men of violence or intolerant views. ‘Loyalists’ would have had nothing real to fear, and might have had to address the real problems of their communities. And the border would have gradually become a ghost, symbolically present for those who needed it for reassurance, actually absent for any practical purposes.  I do not myself think the future of Ireland will be as kind as this. We have bought a present ‘peace’ of sorts, in return for strife in times to come.

A Postmodern Idea of 'Freedom'

It hasn’t gone away, you know. The Ukraine crisis, set off by aggressive ‘western’ intervention in that cockpit region, is still churning away, just below the surface.

 

But how should we read it? I think most recent developments confirm my view that Ukraine is an invented state, which came into existence because of the temporary (and predictably temporary) absence of Russian power rather than because it had the real components of a country – a common unifying language and culture (definitely absent) an economy ( never present in the first place) , viable defensible frontiers bearing some relation to its physical existence (not so much absent as actually negative) , the rule of law (absent) , the ability to defend itself against internal and external physical threats (absent) . Ukraine is a sort of John Major among countries. Just as Mr Major became Prime Minister because he wasn’t Margaret Thatcher, and stayed Prime Minister because he wasn’t Neil Kinnock, Ukraine became and remained a country not because of any positive qualities of its own, but because of the negative qualities of others. (For US readers, think of Gerald R. Ford, who became Vice-President because he was not Spiro T. Agnew, and President because he was not Richard M.Nixon) . In both cases, it was found that *not* being someone was not an adequate qualification for being somebody. And *not* being stifled by a feeble Russia in 1991-2 was not a sufficient qualification for sustaining an independent existence in 2014.

 

Had Ukraine been a true sovereign state, the removal of Crimea by Russia would have been inconceivable. The danger of war would have been far too great for Russia to have risked it.  As it was, the action was completed with amazing ease, speed and efficiency, and those who claim they disapproved of it have implicitly admitted that it is irreversible.  If they really believed that Crimea belonged in Ukraine, or that Ukraine exercised real sovereignty, they would not have behaved in this way. As it is, they plainly regard Ukraine as a playground, in which they can intervene at will. They only become sensitive about its supposed inviolability when a bigger boy turns up in the sandpit, knocks over their sandcastles, and kicks sand in their faces.  

 

(**By the way, when I asked for historical references from a  reader, to justify his remarkable claim about the Greek Junta’s true aims in Cyprus (where the world has also accepted that Turkey’s similar 1974 actions were justified) I meant references to reputable  historical works which confirm his thesis).

 

In fact, if they really believed that Ukraine was a proper country, the ‘West’   would never have intervened in it in the first place. I’ve tried by various analogues (mainly directed at Americans)to explain why the behaviour of the ‘West’ was so astonishing and outrageous. But various literal-minded people, seeking an exact similarity, and indeed a direct connection with today’s reality ( I *know* Quebec isn’t really planning a treaty with Moscow. I *know* Britain has made it clear it is ready to accept Scottish independence)rather than the rough parallel I was trying to make, missed the point.

 

Let me now try again.

 

Say (for the sake of argument) that the EU underwent in the medium term future a major political and economic crisis, during which Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Portugal, Spain, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania,  Greece and Cyprus all seized the chance to leave it, mainly to avoid the increasingly disastrous effects of the Euro, the mismanagement of the economy by the ECB and the unwanted free movement of labour imposed by Schengen.  US forces finally left the European continent and the NATO alliance was dissolved. Say that Russia, immune from this crisis, took the opportunity to reabsorb Belarus and Ukraine into a customs union and political co-operation alliance (this, by the way, is intended to be a parallel to the break-up of the Soviet Union, the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact and the reunification of Germany which came after the collapse of the USSR). Say that Moscow sent envoys to Brussels to say that, in return for being allowed to ‘reunify’ with Belarus and Ukraine, it absolutely promised not to expand any of its alliances any further westwards.

 

And then say that within ten years, it had offered ‘Eurasian Union’ membership to (and been accepted by)  Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia (for which read the recruitment of the Baltic States, Poland etc to NATO, . And that Moscow had offered military co-operation and training (with the possibility of a future full alliance)  to Portugal, where a pro-Russian government had been installed after huge street demonstrations in Lisbon ( allegedly co-ordinated by outsiders) had chased out the old pro-Brussels government - for which read, the ‘Rose Revolution’ and NATO intervention in Georgia) .

 

And then imagine that the EU had regained much of its strength in this time, and that Russia then offered a partnership deal to Poland, and that Poland’s government , having initially welcomed the idea, was then made a counter-offer by the EU, and rejected the Russian proposal. And that huge demonstrations then engulfed the centre of Warsaw, against the alleged corruption of the government, and the lack of jobs for the young, and that Russian, (and other Eurasian Union) politicians appeared among the demonstrators in Warsaw, smiling and handing out blinis and red caviar….

 

Well, if you haven’t got it by now, you never will, so I won’t spell out the rest.

 

But back to what’s actually going on, have you noticed that claims that Russia is behind the anti-Kiev demonstrations in eastern Ukraine are being widely and thoroughly reported, though so far, I’ve not seen any proof that this is so.  Now, I strongly suspect that Russia *is* behind these demonstrations, and think it is perfectly proper for these suggestions to be reported. It’s quite right to alert the public to this very real possibility

 

But weren’t there similar claims, from Russia, about the pro-EU demonstrations in Kiev that turned into the February Putsch? But were these claims reported as widely and as thoroughly? I think not. And that’s despite the fact that something equally shocking was happening *in plain sight*,  perfectly substantiated, undeniable and undenied. That is, and I can’t stop making this point, the open identification of foreign politicians with an anti-government mob in the centre of a supposedly sovereign capital. And one of these was actually exposed, through a leaked phone-call speculating about her preferred figures in a future sovereign government.

 

I’ve been asked what I mean by a ‘postmodern putsch’ . the term was actually invented to describe one of the more recent military overthrows of Turkish governments by the army, which used to be a regular event in that country.

 

But what I mean is the use of modern methods – social media, TV, mobile phones, (and, by my guess, ‘NGOs’ and similar groups) to create, sustain and direct revolutionary mobs large and organised enough to become self-sustaining, having to be covered by the media simply because they exist, and growing thanks to the power of electronic media to create mass mimicry of mass events.   Within these bodies, serious, conscious and informed political activists, with coherent if undeclared objectives,  can swim like fish in the human sea, and direct the mob to fulfil their aims.

 

Now, I noted some time ago the absence of mainstream coverage of the public (and indeed televised) beating and intimidation (by members of the ‘Svoboda’ (Freedom) Party of the head of a major Ukrainian TV station, Oleksandr Panteleymonov. We were promised, at the time, some sort of investigation into this shameful event, but if there’s been one, I’ve heard nothing of it.

 

Now, some of you may have seen TV or newspaper reports of a brawl in the Kiev Parliament on Tuesday. That's probably all you were told, that there was a brawl.  But how many of you know what it is about? I’ve been able to find  extracts from AFP and Reuters reports which appear to explain how and why it began.

 

Petro Symonenko, a Communist deputy, accused his opponents of helping create the Crimea crisis by using ‘extreme tactics’ to oust President Yanukovich.

 

According to Reuters: ‘Symonenko stirred nationalist anger when, referring to pro-Russian protesters who seized buildings in eastern Ukraine, he said nationalists had set a precedent earlier this year by seizing public buildings in protest at the rule of ousted President Viktor Yanukovich. Now, he said, armed groups were attacking people who wanted to defend their rights by peaceful means. "You are today doing everything to intimidate people. You arrest people, start fighting people who have a different point of view," he said, before being pulled away from the rostrum by the Svoboda deputies.’

 

Read that carefully. And note that it is our old friends ‘Svoboda’ who actually object so much to the accusation being made that they rush the podium ans attack the accuser physically. This is the same party that beat up the TV chief. This is the same party whose leader was expelled from the Parliament for making anti-Semitic remarks, some years ago.  These are the friends of the ‘West’. And they obviously have a radically postmodern idea of what ‘freedom’ means.

 

I have been accused of following some sort of Kremlin agenda in these articles. No , I am not. I regard the Russian government as self-evidently corrupt and squalid, and will repeat this readily at any time.  I am simply telling what seems to me to be the sober truth, because others will not do so. It is why they will not do so that is interesting, as always.