Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 239

My Evil Glare, the Sin of Laughter, and of course Kiev,

At random:

 

Mr ‘P’ goes on about the Russian ‘land-grab’ in the Crimea. This entirely misses my point that this action was a *response* to Western intervention, using postmodern mob-and media-based destabilisation methods, not a free-standing unilateral action . It must be judged as such.  Of course it greatly suited the Russians, but ‘we’ in the ‘west’ gave them the opportunity.

 

My own guess is that, as well as being a riposte to the Ashton/Nuland/ Westerwelle offensive it also has a lot to do with President Yanukovich’s ruthless use of the Sevastopol naval base to squeeze a very advantageous gas deal out of the Kremlin a few months before, in return for an extension of Russia’s right to stay there.  Such  blackmail simply couldn’t have taken place had Crimea never been included in the independent Ukraine, as it obviously shouldn’t have been under any properly-considered drafting of borders. It’s just that there was no such properly-considered drafting of borders in 1992, just a panic rush to ‘independence’ by several new nations without the means to sustain such independence, morally, politically, militarily or economically.  

 

The idea that Mr Yanukovich was a friend or puppet of Mr Putin, by the way,  simply doesn’t survive knowledge of these acrimonious talks. Note that Russia has now revoked the gas agreement , on the grounds that it now has Sevastopol permanently anyway, thanks a lot. And Moscow is demanding large and increased gas payments from the new Kiev government, which Kiev, being a long way on the bad side of bankrupt already,  cannot possibly meet. Perhaps the ‘EU’, or rather the taxpayers of EU states, will end up pouring their money into this, having sought and now got responsibility for this  failed state.  It will be yet another bottomless chasm. In this case, it is comical to know that most of the money will end up in Moscow, one way or another.

 

‘Tom’ tells me that the Kiev government was corrupt, as if this were a justification for its unconstitutional overthrow.  Tom, *all* Kiev governments are corrupt. But it’s only the ones which don’t befriend the EU that get attacked by mobs. Can ‘Tom’ perhaps see a pattern in this? As for Yanukovich’s laws to ban various forms of protest, these may have been ill-conceived and ill-timed,. And indeed have contained repressive elements. But they were still an attempt to deal *constitutionally* with a violent and lawless threat. The idea that the violence began with the shooting is also absurd. Long before any guns were used, the demonstrators had made generous use of large stones and petrol bombs, along with iron bars. These are not necessarily as bad as bullets, but the sue of them licenses the use of reasonable lawful force in response. I shall be interested to see how #Tom# regards any repressive measures the new government may find itself taking against violent pro-Moscow demonstrators in the Ukrainian east.  He may say (and he may be right) that these are orchestrated by the Kremlin, but then again, the demonstrators he likes have also accused of being orchestrated, and were certainly openly encouraged, by outsiders.

 

It’s just occurred to me that quite a lot of the guiding spirits of the new EU must have been participants in, or enthusiastic spectators of, the May events in Paris in 1968. This could explain their fondness for this form of politics.

 

Mr Courtnadge repeatedly says that Brigadier Ioannidis actually intended to provoke the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. It’s not relevant to the point,  though it is interesting (Nobody’s saying the two events are identical, just that they are parallel). Can he give us references which provide historical warrant for this?

 

Why does anyone who says that Christianity *improves* morals in a society get told that it doesn’t make them perfect, or that Christians sometimes do terrible things? I know. But Christianity has learned from these mistakes and these days is quite well-behaved. Not so atheist idealists:  Political Revolutionaries can be guaranteed to censor, imprison and ultimately kill those who get in the way of their Utopian schemes.

 

The point about ‘Game of Thrones’ (and one thinks particularly about the very early scene where an incestuous couple are disturbed and observed by a child, and the man involved deliberately and casually hurls that child from a high window, intending to kill him but actually crippling him for life) is that conscience and fear of judgement are entirely absent from the lives of all, and that this is most evident in the deeds of the most successful characters. Compare Hamlet’s self-torture over whether he can kill Claudius , when Claudius is at his prayers. Or the genuine horror of the English people at the alleged murder of the Princes in the Tower by Richard III.

 

Yes, I have heard of the Crusades, and the Cathars. I’ve also heard of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, and of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.  

 

I’d also make this simple point. Fictional characters, in prose and even more so in TV and films,  influence the behaviour of those who identify with them , or even those who just watch them. They make actions thinkable which previously were not, and can corrupt the mind. If this were not so, why do advertisers spend billions on their trade, and  millions on placing their products in the hands of fictional characters?

 

The very fact that my brief point was viewed as shocking and laughable by so many people (who felt no need to explain their response)  underlines this point. The most responsive targets of this kind of thing are those who are wholly unaware of the process.

 

I am chided for being ‘unChristian’ for laughing at the cyclist who fell over when I glared at him. Someone will have to explain this to me. The man involved had been ( as I clearly explained) riding at speed towards a pedestrian crossing,  while people were on it, intending to ignore a clear red light (which is just as bad as, if not even worse than, doing the same at a zebra crossing) . All I did was to glare at him. I have to say that the sight of someone , for no apparent reason, slowly toppling sideways on a racing bike, is irresistibly funny. As a cyclist myself, I knew he’d come to no serious harm. I also felt that he’d completely deserved his discomfiture, and that it was entirely his own fault. My purpose had been to get him to stop at the light

 

If there is an obvious explanation for what happened, I suspect that my glare made him panic with guilt, and possibly fear of what would happen if he carried on, and as a result  he forgot to pedal and lost his balance.

 

As for it being unChristian to laugh when a bad action leads to a mild but painful experience, I’d be grateful for any scriptural references on that.

 

Why David Cameron isn't being Hard on Maria Miller

Below is the account I wrote some years ago about David Cameron's extraordinary escape from scrutiny over his very large expenses claims. The strange unwillingness of the media to follow this story is paralleled today by their equal unwillingness to examine Michael Gove's decision to spurn Burlington Danes Academy, a school he has personally loaded with extravagant praise, which is a short walk from his London home,  and instead send his daughter to an elite school some miles from his home. Labour politicians who did this were (rightly) subjected to a good deal of scrutiny. Mr Gove's decision, by contrast,  has been portrayed as a praiseworthy egalitarian move.I mention this to point out that a story needs more than just interesting, even surprising facts to dominate the headlines.

 

 

How to hold an open meeting in private

What follows is an expanded version of an account I wrote (for the Mail on Sunday of 24th May 2009) of David Cameron's supposed open meeting with the voters on the subject of the Commons scandal. I don't live in Mr Cameron's constituency, but I do live close enough to it to have bicycled to his Friday meeting in Witney, which is being portrayed, in my view misleadingly, as David Cameron braving the people on the subject of MPs' expenses.

Here's the article:

‘You might think that David Cameron had subjected himself to the wrath of the voters on Friday and come away unscathed. Reports and pictures have appeared of Mr Cameron facing an allegedly open meeting in the Witney Corn Exchange. The Leader of the Opposition - unlike Andrew MacKay - escaped without any angry heckling.

This is despite the fact that Mr Cameron is far from being in the clear. He admits to having wrongly claimed £680 to clear wisteria from the chimney of his spacious country home. And he got us taxpayers to pay the interest (£1,700 a month for most of the last eight years) on his £350,000 mortgage, a mortgage he may not actually need. But why spend your own money when the public will pay for you to have an interest-free loan?

Well, I was there and I can tell you how Mr Cameron managed to get such a smooth ride. First of all, the meeting was at noon on a Friday, a time when most people with jobs haven't time to go to meetings.

Second, the local Tories did what they could to hold a supposedly public occasion in private. I only knew of it because of a brief mention of it in my local paper, the 'Oxford Mail'. The website of Witney Conservatives seems to be frozen in time, and doesn't deal with any of Mr Cameron's engagements since 24th April.

When I turned up on the doorstep, it was guarded by various apparatchiks sitting at desks with lists, and making it look as if it was in some way a members-only function. An inexperienced person, new to politics, might easily have been put off. The aides gulped visibly when they saw me, but had more sense than to try to keep me out.

A freelance TV truck was parked outside, but nothing from Sky or the BBC. When, I wonder, were the big broadcasters informed of the event? And who decided which clips of the occasion they saw? Mr Cameron had a mike clipped to his tie, so anything he said could be recorded, but questioners were not offered a microphone and any heckling or hostility - had it happened - would have been indistinct on videotape.

Once the meeting started, it was clear that the local loyalists had been summoned to fill most of the 200 seats. The average age was well over 50. Mr Cameron recognised almost every questioner by name, and most of them addressed him familiarly as ‘David’. Every trick in the Tony Blair Fake Sincerity Handbook was used. There was no lectern, so Mr Cameron looked defenceless and vulnerable. He took off his jacket as soon as questions began, and he deployed his (absent) wife as a human shield when awkward questions - about how rich they are - came up. Do we have a £30 million fortune? Chuckle. Samantha must have spent it all, ha ha. No specific answer, though.

Apart from me, the only seriously troublesome questioner was a lone Liberal Democrat. And after Mr Cameron eventually allowed me to ask my question (which he didn't answer), the final say was given to a fervent Cameron fan, who decried any suggestions that Mr Cameron had done anything wrong.

The Tory leader knew he was safe. He was so sure he was among friends that he used a rude word beginning with 'a', and offered, rashly to work for half the pay.

If Mr Cameron really wants to find out what the people of West Oxfordshire think about him, his mortgage and his chimney, I suggest he hires a bigger hall, advertises the event both to local people and the national media, and holds it when normal men and women won't be at work.’

And here are some extracts from what he said, with my thoughts on them. I can't provide a complete transcript and don't claim this is one. But I have selected some parts which I think were specially interesting. He insisted he needed two homes, even though he admitted it was possible to commute the distance (many in his constituency do, and it is about 75 miles each way). He said that his children were educated in London (which is true) and that Parliament still sits late on Monday or Tuesday night. Well, yes, but I would say that a constituency home is a convenience rather than an absolute necessity. If his children are at school in London, then he will in any case be in London on Monday or Tuesday, the only days when the Commons usually sits late. He only really needs to be in his constituency all day on Fridays and perhaps Saturdays - a need that could be met, in my view, by a comfortable bed and breakfast or at most a small house or flat. I am still unconvinced by the idea that MPs with seats outside London need two homes as a matter of course. Members with remote constituencies obviously need a toehold in London, an expensive place to live. MPs with seats in or very close to London obviously don't need two homes at all. I do wonder, if Mr Cameron sat for a less picturesque part of the country (and west Oxfordshire is delightful), around the same distance from Notting Hill, whether he would be so keen to have a weekend home there, and take his family there so often.

I've put in the occasional 'er' or 'erm' where I think it adds to the account, ie in showing hesitation, but not all of them. And I've also mentioned audience laughter, to illustrate the general sympathy of the curiously assembled audience with Mr Cameron, which I believe is explained above. I've also inserted some commentary of my own.

Mr Cameron explained his rules: ‘What I claim for, I always tried to ask myself 'What is it reasonable to claim for ... not what the rules say, but what is reasonable?’

He then set out what he regarded as reasonable. ’From 2001 to 2007 the only thing I really claimed for in respect of my second home was the interest on a mortgage, not the repayments but the interest. It was a very large mortgage, it was £350,000 worth of mortgage, it was about £1,700 a month that I was claiming. That was quite close to the maximum you could claim at the time but I did not at that stage claim for anything else...’

My comment: To me, £350,000 seems to be a colossal mortgage, especially for someone on a Parliamentary salary, as he was when he first took it on, or even the Leader of the Opposition's salary, which he is now drawing. We do not know whether this sum paid in full for the Camerons' country home. I would suspect that it probably didn't, since large properties in pleasant Oxfordshire villages generally went, even eight years ago, for rather more than that. Several questions arise. Could he have paid for the property out of his own resources? Did he need such a large house? Did he, before the current scandal, assume that he was bound to benefit in the long term from the likely increase in the price of the house during what promised to be a long political career? Now, of course, this is ruled out, but was it then? And £1,700 a month, tax free, is a lot of money, more than the total that comes into quite a few households. How urgent would the need be to justify this?

Mr Cameron continued: ’....In 2007 I was able to pay down the mortgage a little bit, so it was a £250,000 mortgage, paying about £1,000 in mortgage interest every month, and so I also claimed for what I would call some pretty straightforward household bills, council tax, oil, gas, erm, and other utility type bills and insurance on the property. And that has been the case from the beginning of 2007 right through to now. I now claim less than the maximum allowed, I don't claim all of those utility bills, I claim a percentage of them, because I think that's right and fair.’

My comment: He 'paid down' the mortgage' a 'little bit'. That 'little bit' turns out to be £100,000, once again a very large sum by most people's standards. And also, if you choose to run a second home, shouldn't you accept that it's up to you to insure it, pay the fuel bills and council tax on it? And wouldn't it be prudent to choose such a home on the basis that you would want to keep such bills low, rather than expect others to defray them?

‘But I have claimed one bill that I thought was questionable, and so I decided to pay it back. This is the infamous wisteria bill (laughter) as it will now always be known. It was actually a maintenance bill. It was a bill for £680 and it was a bill I claimed at the time because I judged it was about maintenance not about decoration or improvement. It was to mend a leaky roof, it was to put some outside lights on the property for security and mend some ones that were broken and it was to remove this infamous wisteria which was nothing to do with pruning a plant. It was because I have a chimney with a fan on it to get the smoke out so I can light a fire. It had stopped working and the wisteria needed to be removed from it. I claimed for that bill because I thought it was maintenance not decoration but I think MPs have got to show a lead and have got to show some responsibility and have got to take any bill that is frankly questionable or borderline and pay it back. So that is what I am going to do. I am not aware of any other bill for my second home that is inappropriate or should be paid back but were one to emerge in this great process I will happily do that.‘

My comment: It is not clear from this whether Mr Cameron really thinks he ought to have paid back the wisteria money. It sounds to me as if he thinks he was justified in claiming it but announced he would pay it back for the sake of appearances. Otherwise, why the long, long justification? Why should we worry about whether he can light a fire or not?

He gave a long explanation in defence of MPs' office expenses, and promised to look through his office expenses in case there were any questionable payments, which he promised to pay back.

He made it clear that he had done no 'flipping', switching the designation of his 'second home' so as to maximise claims. And he added:

‘I always try to ask what is reasonable to claim, not what can you claim. I have never claimed for cleaners, gardeners, furniture, food, decorations, duck houses (laughter), moats (laughter), swimming pools or anything like that. I am not putting up my hand and saying I am whiter than white - that didn't get Tony Blair anywhere (laughter) or saying I am better than anybody else but it's just a judgement I took that there were sensible things to claim - that I did claim even though I am relatively well off because the claim was there if you needed to maintain a second home - and I think to do my job properly I need to maintain a second home.’

My comment: How do these rules apply? If this is right for him, what about other MPs, especially Tory frontbenchers, who have claimed for some or all of the things above? Should they go, without exception? If not, what does it mean that Mr Cameron thinks it is wrong to claim these things? Also, his statement that he is ‘relatively well off’ raises the question of how well off he is. He has brushed aside the suggestion, made by the wealth expert Philip Beresford, that Mr and Mrs Cameron together are worth £30 million, and said it was untrue on the Andrew Marr programme. Very well then. I think he's entitled to reasonable privacy on this, and doesn't have to reveal the exact contents of his bank accounts. But can someone please put to him the question in a public place: ’Could you have afforded to pay for your Oxfordshire home yourself?’

Listening to my tape of the Question and Answer session I notice that almost all the questions are general, addressed to Mr Cameron as Opposition Leader or political pundit, not as an individual MP who might himself have gone too far in living on the public payroll. That's not surprising, if my analysis above is right. I've also begun to notice that Mr Cameron now makes much of the fact that Parliament has lost much of its power to ‘Europe’ and the Judges. He speaks as if he plans to correct this. But he knows perfectly well that unless Britain leaves the EU, most of our legislation will be imposed on us by the European Commission. So this seems to me to be just talk. A small digression here. Vikki Boynton posted last week that the Tory position on Lisbon is: ’If the Lisbon Treaty is not yet in force at the time of the next general election, and a Conservative Government is elected, we would put the Treaty to a referendum of the British people, recommending a 'no' vote. If the British people rejected the Treaty, we would withdraw Britain's ratification of it.’ Seems clear.‘

Yes, it does *seem* clear. It is meant to seem clear. But it is not. A British withdrawal of ratification would be followed by immense pressure from the EU to change that position. There is a great appetite in Brussels to get on with ratification. How would a Cameron government respond to that pressure? I believe it would 'negotiate' a 'compromise' that would end with Lisbon coming into force more or less as it is. That is the key question, and one you won't get an answer to. Only a government which clearly wished to leave the EU could possibly escape from this bind.

One other small point about Mr Cameron's performance. At one stage he spoke repeatedly about how many peers (or rather how few) he had 'created'. So far as I know, it is the Queen who creates political peers, on the advice of the Prime Minister. The Leader of the Opposition, by convention, may usually suggest names, but (as happened to William Hague over one controversial nomination) the Prime Minister may decline to take his advice. It passed me by at the time, numbed as I was by the general sycophancy, but the person sitting next to me (a distinguished commentator who shall remain nameless) pointed it out and I thought I would share it with you.

 

Her Majesty's Pleasure?

Perhaps we should have a competition here, for future newspaper headlines we now think crazily unlikely, but which will in time come true.

 

Here’s one which, 20 years ago, would have seemed laughably outrageous

 

MARTIN McGUINNESS TO DINE WITH QUEEN AT WINDSOR

 

 

Well here we are. All wise politicians take note of the fate of poor Henry Hopkinson (later known as 'Never Say Never' Hopkinson) who, as a junior minister of the Crown, was supposed to have declared in 1954 that Cyprus would 'never' become independent (actually, he said 'The question of the abrogation of British sovereignty cannot arise . . . British sovereignty will remain.', which some argue remains correct. I'll stay out of it).

 

 Perhaps Mr McGuinness will wittily accessorize his white tie and tails with clever cufflinks ( several amusing motifs suggest themselves), or perhaps we shall finally discover what the full-dress uniform of a (retired, obviously, in 1974 by his own account) senior officer of a certain very successful armed organisation looks like. What fun if Mr McGuinness turned up in grandiose full fig, with plenty of gold braid, brilliantly-polished shoes, green stripes down the sides of his crisply-pressed trouserings,  rows of hitherto-unseen medals for acts of Republican valour, and dangling aiguillettes.

 

But I am daydreaming. To me, the event is in fact very funny, because if what everyone believes is the case is true, it cannot be happening. Yet it is.

I got over my outrage years ago, because, unlike everyone else in the British media, I recognised immediately that the Belfast Agreement of 1998 (blasphemously known as the ‘Good Friday Agreement’ by the sort of people who think Sinn Fein signed it, which they didn’t) was an instrument of surrender. I have got used to this fact, and to the puce-faced, shocked and righteous outrage of the surrender’s defenders each time its true provisions are revealed in all their disgusting, lawless detail. Really, they ought to welcome these things. they are the pruice of what they got for the thing they urged, and they shoudl d****d well like it.

 

I was first exasperated and then amused by these people’s repeated insistence that the agreement, forced on Britain by the steely resolve of our special friends in the White House, was in fact a victory. The IRA, we were told, were on their last legs. They recognised they were beaten. It was all up with them.

 

(Warning: This item may contain sarcasm)

 

That, of course, was why the IRA were forced to accept the immediate release from prison of all their members who had been locked up for long periods for grisly crimes, and the cessation of any serious attempts to prosecute any who were still on the run, not to mention a great reluctance to investigate or prosecute any subsequent crimes involving IRA members, whether bank-raids or murders  It was why the IRA had grudgingly to accept the removal of British armed forces and surveillance systems from Northern Ireland. It was why they had to swallow (this must have been especially hard) the disbanding of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the closure of its Special Branch.  It was why the hopelessly-beaten IRA was allowed to claim it had dismantled or ‘put beyond use’ its huge stocks of guns,  ammunition and explosives, without having to show any evidence that it had actually done so. It was why all subsequent IRA atrocities, including Omagh, were unquestioningly accepted as being the work of persons quite beyond the control or discipline of Sinn Fein.  Even tougher for the IRA must have been the removal of the British Crown from police badges, the strict limitation on flying of the British flag in Northern Ireland ( accompanied by a total abandonment of attempts to restrict the flying of the Irish tricolour) , and the transfer of the province from full British sovereignty to provisional sovereignty (‘Provisional’, geddit?), dissoluble by a single irreversible referendum at any time.

 

And how the Sinn Fein representatives must have wept with chagrin and humiliation as they learned that their leaders would only be able to aspire to the post of *Deputy* Prime Minister in the new devolved government of Northern Ireland, plus a few equally humiliating Cabinet posts. Sinn Fein were also cruelly punished by being made the only UK political party permitted to raise funds abroad. So harsh. All those visits to the White House must be hard to take, as well.

 

Vae Victis!  Such is defeat. Beside this crushing, all-embracing, inescapable defeat, the capitulation of Sinn Fein to supreme, victorious British power at Belfast in 1998  makes Hitler’s haughty treatment of France in 1940 look magnanimous.

 

And now poor old Martin McGuinness is being paraded, in white tie and tails, at Windsor Castle, another obvious sign of his movement’s utter defeat and marginalisation.

 

 (Sarcasm warning terminates here)

 

Whether this is at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, I am not sure. One never knows.

 

I should add here that I was both very much in favour of, and very much moved by Her Majesty’s 2011 visit to Dublin (in which Mr McGuinness played no part, though he did later meet Her Majesty on another occasion).  Decent Irish patriots have far more in common with decent British patriots than either do with the IRA, or with the equivalent gangsters of the ill-named ‘Loyalist’ groups. And Her Majesty’s visit was a proper, thoughtful and plainly heartfelt act of atonement and friendship, aimed at ending the needless quarrel which came between Britain and Ireland in 1916. In the same spirit I very much welcome the visit of President Michael O’Higgins to this country. It’s about time we became firm friends again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Calls begin for the Break-up of the Coalition before the Election

Lost amid the (justified) fuss about Mrs Miller’s Elite Housing Benefit (or Barn Benefit, as it became in the end) was a very interesting document published by the Bow Group, a Tory discussion group whose members assure me it is no longer the flabby Butlerite organisation it used to be.

 

They wrote and told me about it, quoting a number of people including no less a person than Lord Tebbit, urging the break-up of the Coalition before the election (an event I have many times predicted, and which, if it comes, must come soon after the Euro and local government elections in May. Let us see how bad these are for both Tories and Liberal Democrats).

 

Personally, I don't think anything can now save the Tory Party as an actual organisation, thought its image may be bought and sustained by British oligarchs, and maintained by state subsidies and by BBC rules on airtime which inevitably favour established, dying parties against new, lively ones.  But the mere expression of the sentiment is interesting, as is David Davis's long-awaited (and in my view far too late) declaration on quitting the EU in this week's Mail on Sunday.

 

This is one of those moments when the old incantations of loyalty and conventional wisdom just don't work as well as they used to. Let's quote some Bob Dylan, from his Suze Rotolo phase: 'The words that are used to get the ship confused, will not be understood when they're spoken - for the chains of the sea will have busted in the night, and be buried at the bottom of the ocean'. (Actually, Dylan says 'barried', but I'm sure he means 'buried').

The document was timed for the Tory Spring Conference, but may seem more pressing about a month from now when we finally disciver just what the Farage effect is (quite big, but not quite big enough, is my guess).

By the way, have Nick Clegg’s chances of remaining leader of his party into the election been increased or reduced by his performance against Nigel Farage, do you think? 

 

Here’s what the Bow Group said

: ‘It is time to return to conservative principles and dissolve the coalition

 

On the day of the Conservative Party's Spring Conference a host of Conservative MPs, Lords, journalists and activists call for the dissolution of the Coalition and a return to freedom and democracy in the Conservative Party"

 

On the need for the coalition to breakup, there are a number of supportive figures within the party calling for the Conservative party to ‘go it alone’ to propose conservative legislation as a minority administration. This would not only go some way to winning back lost core supporters, but would also allow the Conservative party to make the tough decisions necessary to restore our economy back to full health.

 

Ben Harris-Quinney, Chairman of the Bow Group: “Despite progress on the economy, genuine popular opinion and the sense of being the force behind a national movement have been lost by the Conservative Party, and at the current rate UKIP will overtake the Conservative Party as a membership organisation within 7 years. At least to the country at large, it will be impossible to define our own ideology as a party whilst in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, and if we can't do that before the next election, it will be impossible to win a clear and Conservative majority. That is why we call for the dissolution of the Coalition Government, to allow the Conservative Party a year to set out its stall to the country as a party of solid conservative ideology. A party of competence and long-term vision as well as short-term pragmatism.”

 

Lord Tebbit: “The coalition is “beginning to smell past its sell by date, and the sooner it is broken up the better, never to be returned to. What’s more, there really were no excuses for David Cameron's failure to win enough support from the electorate (in the last election). His attempt to win Lib Dem support by moving across towards the Lib Dems ideologically meant that he reinforced the conviction of Lib Dem voters that the Lib Dems were right, but left many of our own voters feeling lost.”’

 

 

 

Get ready to go to jail - your children will denounce you!

I told you that David Cameron was a continuation of Blairism by other means. Along with all his other mimicry of the Blair creature, his most striking policy is his determination to continue New Labour’s revolutionary plan to destroy the married family, drive women out of their homes into wage-slavery and abolish the whole concept of the father and husband.

This scheme is always disguised as something else. It always means more State meddling in family life. Usually it is called ‘Equality’. But sometimes it is called ‘Children’s Rights’.

Both these expressions are lies. Women are not more equal, but far worse off thanks to the anti-marriage revolution, as they are increasingly finding.

They must work inside and outside the home, spend endless hours driving from home to day-orphanage to work to hypermarket, and then back again, and see less and less of their children

As for children, their supposed ‘rights’ actually mean ever-increasing power for the State to intervene in their lives. Oddly enough, this never seems to diminish or prevent horrible abuse.

The emotional reaction to the ghastly death of Maria Colwell – a little girl beaten and starved by her stepfather – in 1973 led to the vast increase in State power over the family in the Children Act of 1989.

Yet in 2000 we saw the very similar case of Victoria Climbie, pictured below, and in 2007 that of Peter Connelly (Baby P). There will, I fear, be another such horror before long.

Most of these cases have two effects: calls for ‘something to be done’, and personal attacks on the social workers involved. Both reactions are stupid.

The State is no good at childcare, and nothing will ever make it any good at it. Power and bureaucracy cannot create an ounce of love.

The State’s own care homes are notorious scenes of abuse and chaos, from which many children emerge with their lives already ruined, destined for prison or mental hospital.

We need to accept that we simply cannot make society perfect by passing laws, that people who choose to be evil are skilled at concealing their crimes and scaring away social workers and even the police.

It is time MPs realised that these crimes will happen again, whatever they do.

These schemes sold as safeguards for children are in fact power grabs by the State. Yet we are now told that the Queen’s Speech will contain proposals for a ‘Cinderella Law’ under which parents can be imprisoned for ‘emotional cruelty’.

The chief booster of this Bill is a supposedly Conservative MP called Robert Buckland. When I discussed his plan with him on Radio 2 on Monday, I was amazed at his naivety. As a lawyer and part-time judge, he really should know that vague, subjective laws are the tools of tyrants.

Under such legislation, nobody can ever be sure if he is breaking the law or not. No jury could ever be sure who was telling the truth. But the resulting inquisitions into families – the well-publicised dawn raids, the search and seizure of private possessions, the smears in court that will never wash out – will ruin the lives of any who are arrested, even if they are eventually acquitted. In the old communist countries, the regimes also encouraged denunciations by children, who usually had little idea what would follow.

In Soviet cities, until 1991, there were statues of a little monster called Pavlik Morozov, who turned his own parents in to the secret police for hoarding grain. Schoolchildren would be marched to these shrines of evil and told to revere his memory.

And yet the ‘Conservative’ Party is proposing to write childish denunciation of parents into the law of the land this summer, and the poor Queen will have to recommend this ghastly measure to MPs in her speech in June.

When the Tories said ‘New Labour – New Danger’ back in 1997, they did not know how right they were.

Nor did they, or we, know they would be part of the danger.

Playing a dangerous Game

I am worried by the TV popularity of George R.R. Martin’s clever fantasy Game Of Thrones.

Mr Martin’s imaginary world is frighteningly cruel. The society it describes is far worse than the Middle Ages, because its characters are entirely unrestrained by Christian belief. There’s a lifeless, despised religion but nobody takes it seriously.

I fear it will make those who watch it worse people than they were before.

» I often wish I possessed superpowers, which might allow me to help the people who write to me to recount the horrible things that can so easily happen to you at the hands of authority in modern Britain.

Well, I don’t. But perhaps I am developing them. I was crossing the road on foot at a pelican crossing, protected by a red light, when I saw a cyclist, kitted out for the Tour de France, approaching at speed and plainly not planning to stop. I glared at him from a range of about 20 feet. To my amazement, he immediately toppled over on to his side, hitting the road amid the crunch and tinkle of damaged accessories. I was laughing so much, I had to turn away.

By the time I was able to look back, he was up and moving again, fast enough to catch up with me and call me a rude name. I replied that I hadn’t actually done anything to him and that, while he might be right about how horrible I am, people who ride through pedestrian crossings are even worse. Evildoers beware. I might be nearby.

Nigel the peacemaker

Interesting that Nigel Farage, pictured right, easily won the EU debate against Nick Clegg, despite several attempts to smear him.

I’m familiar with most of these smears, especially the ‘living in the past’ one, always used by people who have run out of arguments.

But in many ways the most interesting thing was that Mr Farage’s opposition to foreign wars didn’t cost him any support, and may have gained him some.

What a good thing that patriotism is no longer linked with mindless support for the drums of war.  

It’s the liberals who do that now.

» Why is David Cameron standing by Maria Miller, the pathetic, over-promoted Minister censured for her expenses? Some say it’s because he hasn’t enough women in his Cabinet (enough for what?).

But I think it’s because the Premier is still guilty about his own entirely legal claims for Elite Housing Benefit. Most people still don’t realise how greedily this already rich man milked the system.

 

A Debate in London on the Ukraine Crisis

Some of you may be interested in this debate, organised by the excellent (if excecessively neo-conservative) Standpoint Magazine, on the Ukraine crisis. It will be in London on the evening of Thursday 1st May and I plan to take part.

 

 

http://standpointmag.co.uk/in-hock-to-the-oligarchs-standpoint-debate

You don't have to be like Harriet Harman to be a politically-conscious woman

I’d like to draw the attention of my readers to another blog,  ‘CONSERVATIVE WOMAN’ (I’ve done it in block capitals, as they do,  because I suspect they are trying to avoid calling it ‘Conservative Woman’ in case they put off too many conservatives, whereas ‘conservative woman’ would just look odd).

 

As always, this recommendation doesn’t imply total agreement – for instance,  this interesting piece http://conservativewoman.co.uk/2014/04/drugs-are-illegal-because-they-are-dangerous-not-dangerous-because-they-are-illegal/ about the effects of soft drug laws in the ‘draconian’ USA relies too heavily on the British Crime Survey,  and seems to assume that the drug laws in this country are in fact more effective than they are.

 

But the interesting group of women who are writing and editing this blog have set out to demonstrate a very important thing, that to be female, and interested in politics, is not automatically to be a social revolutionary.

 

Those who campaign for ‘more women in politics/the law/ boardrooms/the media etc. etc.’ don’t actually mean what they say. They only want the sort of woman who believes in the social, moral and cultural revolution. And of course socially conservative women tend to stay off the career ladder because, by their nature, they prefer using their education to perform that crucial and much-despised task, the raising of the next generation.

 

And while they weren’t looking even formerly conservative bodies which used to defend that position have been quietly taken over by the ultra-feminists.

 

Who did What to Whom in Kiev? Reflections on the Elusiveness of Truth

Burned deep in my memory are a few days I spent in Romania before and during Christmas 1989. I learned so many things in those few days that I have still not completely absorbed them. But one of the most important things I learned was how, in times of chaos, the whole truth is almost impossible to discern.

 

How could one check?

Asked by my office to forego Christmas and head off into the newly-opened borders of Ceausescu’s prison state, I very reluctantly girded my loins and climbed aboard the Bucharest express at Arad station. I’d spent the night before in a mad hotel just inside the Romanian frontier, its pillowcases folded like napkins in a nouvelle-cuisine restaurant, the whole building canted over at a worrying angle. I had no money except a wad of the softest currency I had ever encountered – Romanian lei, circulated so much that they were, literally, soft and absorbent and almost totally illegible. I had been forced to change my few remaining Hungarian and German notes into this joke money, when I crossed the border. Luckily, the soft lei were enough for a single ticket to Bucharest. I just hoped that some way would be found to survive once I got there (which turned out, as it so often does, to be true, though I’m not quite sure how or why. I eventually left Bucharest by hopping on the first train I could find that looked likely to leave, which took me, ticketless, to Sofia. My only destination was ‘Anywhere but Bucharest’ and I wouldn’t have minded where it went, as long as it went).

 

I spoke a few syllables of German and no Romanian. I knew nobody. I had originally set out, two weeks before, to cover an event in east Germany and was wholly unresearched and unequipped for my task. In this, I was much like most reporters who are suddenly dropped into such places.

 

I resolved that all I could honestly do would be to describe what I saw and heard and felt. As I and some colleagues (who decided, quite reasonably,  not to join me on the train) drove through Arad to the station, we heard shooting, though who was shooting what I do not know to this day.  At the hotel, a wailing woman had warned us in the lobby of massacres everywhere, of Securitate secret police in helicopters strafing the roads, of vast piles of dead. And so it went on, rumour, panic, wild report, uncheckable, unchecked. Mind you, in Romania everything had been wholly closed before, and after Ceausescu had gone, it suited whoever was pulling the strings to make it look as if nobody was in charge.

 

I heard a lot of gunfire in Bucharest, and saw quite a lot of wounded people in a  disgusting hospital  - which is why, ever afterwards, I have been the first round the corner, under the car, under the bed,  flat on his face, at the slightest sound of a bullet.  You don’t want to be shot at the best of times, but being shot in a crumbling east European city is even worse, because of what will happen to you if you live on and the boozy stretcher-bearers get you to the filthy ambulance for the long jolting ride to the People’s Infirmary.

 

There was no doubt they were wounded, but I had no reliable way of knowing who had wounded them or why.

 

Reporters in Kiev during the recent trouble had great advantages, by comparison.  Many modern Ukrainians speak English. Ukraine has been a semi-open society for some time and has independent newspapers which can expose official lies. Politicians make statements which they know will be checked by their opponents. Hospitals, even police officials, are independent of government. A western reporter can engage translators and local journalists to check facts. But during the chaos of a putsch, and the immediate aftermath when everyone is busy changing sides to keep his job, some facts may be given more prominence than others.

 

Even so, I think a fair-minded person must accept that both sides used lethal force, the demonstrators initially using rocks, petrol bombs, clubs and boots, and later using guns. The exact moment at which the authorities began to use guns, and the true identity of the ‘snipers’ may take a long time to establish. It is by no means impossible that the snipers were deployed by the Ukrainian state, and I certainly don’t rule out that possibility, not being in any way a defender of that state or its methods, as such. I just can’t help pointing out that it was a legitimate government, and was overthrown by non-constitutional methods. If such things aren’t important to you, you can’t really claim to be enlightened.

 

My position, simply summed up, is that the ‘West’, by openly and actively supporting  a mob whose aim was to remove a legitimate president, chose the path of lawlessness and so made it easy for Russia to do the same. That’s why I don’t join in the attacks on Russia, but instead attack those who provoked Russia. Russia’s actions were a *response*to aggression and should be understood as such. Russia’s actions were no more lawless than was the open support of internal chaos by meddling Western politicians. (Just as Turkey’s seizure of North Cyprus in 1974 was no more lawless than Greece’s stupid promotion of the Sampson putsch in Nicosia).

 

 The ’West’ chose to take the lawless path, and so cannot complain when Russia follows its example, using more traditional and blatant methods, perhaps, but that is all.  He who first uses lawless methods licences his opponent to do the same, and must not whine and grizzle if he gets hit in the face after starting a fight. The paradox is that Russia’s action, openly using armed forces to seize territory, cost many fewer lives than the EU’s postmodern, electronic cyber-aggression, which covertly used mobs to try to wrest Ukraine into its sphere of influence.

 

It really is time that people began to see ‘People Power’ revolutions for what they are. They are aggressive interventions in sovereign countries by outside forces, at least as offensive as parking an aircraft carrier off someone else’s coast and overflying his airspace, and in my view rather more so, because they have the potential to start violence inside the threatened country. They are in many cases  designed to provoke responses by the existing government which can be characterised as ‘killing their own people’, an act which has recently become an accepted argument for de-legitimising any government. As it happens, most governments have done this at one time or another, and until recently most people would have said they were entitled to do so when faced with a violent challenge to their authority.

 

 I’d add that this sort of covert destabilisation, whose origins are hard to trace, can lead to terrible tragedy. I continue to believe that Syria’s current nightmare was caused by outside intervention of this sort, and ask those  who rail about how repressive the Assad state is  (which is beyond doubt) whether they honestly believe this justified the horrors which have now been visited on this country. Or whether those horrors would be greater or less if we had succeeded in removing Bashar Assad,  as we succeeded in removing Muammar Gadaffi. Libya’s present plight suggests that this is at least an open question – as does the awful and worsening condition of Iraq.

 

‘Killing your own people’ obviously isn’t a universal disqualifier.  Like all the rest of this fake moralising, this charge is not based on principle but on expediency, and is not made against governments that the new World Order favours. Once again we must look at Turkey. Turkey’s premier, Recep Tayyip Erdogan ‘killed his own people’ during the Taksim Square/Gezi Park disturbances last year, and Egypt’s military Junta has killed so many of its own people that the mind recoils in horror. But both remain un-assailed by the stage army of the good, and nobody says they have cancelled their right to rule. As for the Chinese People’s Republic, our friend and trading partner….

 

Likewise, there seems to me to be little doubt that the violence in Kiev came from both sides. The demonstrators shot and killed several policemen, and wounded many others.  The peaceful people among them were unable (or unwilling) to prevent their allies from behaving in this way, which raises the interesting question of how responsible you are for the actions of your allies.

 

The mob also captured quite a few police officers, and I am not sure if we know the ultimate fate of all of those captured.

 

One of the things about stories covered by visiting corps of foreign journalists is that events are very closely covered for a few days, and then hardly at all. The fate of the Ukrainian officer , Yuliy Mamchur, who stood up against Russian troops in Crimea, is a case in point. Many western outlets covered his admirably brave actions, and his being taken away by the Russians. Few bothered to mention his release unharmed, shortly afterwards.

 

Very few British outlets even mentioned the violent assault by Ukrainian putschists (some of whom were parliamentary deputies of the ‘Svoboda’ (Freedom)  party whose leader is an open anti-Semite, and one of whom was head of a parliamentary commission on freedom of speech)  on Oleksandr Panteleymonov, head of Ukraine’s main TV station.  I have been unable to find any reports on the supposed investigation of this behaviour which the post-putsch Ukrainian regime is supposed to be conducting, though senior figures in the Ukraine regime accepted that they would be judged by their response to this behaviour by senior members of ‘Svoboda’.

 

 

 

So I was always careful to be sceptical of reports from Kiev when the Ukraine crisis came to the boil around the 19th, 20th and 21st February, whether it suited me to believe them or not. .

 

One of the things which struck me was that I had heard on several broadcasting sources ( and read, as I had remembered, in many print media) reports of several deaths among the Kiev police. I had also seen film, and heard and read reports, of demonstrators being armed with guns (such clips are still easily found on the Internet) . there were also mysterious reports of unidentified snipers (oddly reminiscent of similar reports during various episodes in the ‘Arab Spasm’ , notably in Yemen and Egypt.

 

I’ve here tried to assemble all the contemporary mentions I can find of police being killed or wounded. I’d be glad of any others:

 

 

Daily Telegraph,  P.3 21/02/2014 in a story in which police were reported to have been taken hostage by demonstrators.

 

‘The interior ministry issued a decree granting police officers the right to use live ammunition and warned Kiev residents to limit their movements because of the "armed and aggressive mood of the people." The ministry admitted deploying snipers, saying they were providing covering fire for officers who came under fire from armed protesters. It said 410 officers had been admitted to hospital and 13 killed since fighting started on Tuesday(18th Feb).’

 

The Times 21/02/2014, page 10

 

‘…masked protesters marched 23 frightened-looking captured riot policemen in black fur-lined bomber jackets through into a secure pen.

 

‘Street commanders in military fatigues confiscated their personal documents but said that they would send them home later. Priests with crosses blessed the men, who were all from the Internal Troops, a paramilitary police force that has done the bulk of the policing during the protests.

 

‘One of the prisoners, Yaroslav, 23, said that they were military reserves from Lugansk, in the Russian speaking far east of the country. He said that they had been taken prisoner after finding themselves marooned behind protester lines in the International Centre of Culture and Arts, a large neo-baroque building known by its earlier name the October Palace.

 

‘"It's awful what's happening, first of all to me now but also to the country," he said. "I don't like Yanukovych and I don't want to kill people, but they say Maidan [the protest movement] is a peaceful action and it's not. They brought stones and petrol bombs.

 

‘"Please", he begged, "ask them not to cripple me and not to kill us." ‘

 

Reuters Archive 21st February 4.21 a.m. EST

‘ Ukrainian police shot back when protesters opened fire on officers between the main protest square in Kiev and the parliament building, a police statement said.

 

‘The statement did not say whether there had been any casualties. It said the police had sent in armed reinforcements to enable the officers to retreat when they came under fire.

 

‘The protesters did not immediately comment on the police statement.

 

(Reporting by Natalia Zinets, Editing by Timothy Heritage)’

 

BBC website, Thursday 20th February : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26269221

 

 

‘12:38: 

In a televised statement Interior Ministry spokesman Valeri Mazan denounces the protesters: "Today, despite it being the day of mourning, despite the truce, they fire at riot police and internal military forces, targeting them with weapons since the early morning on Instytutska street. At this moment there are more than 20 injured police officers who have been taken to hospital for medical treatment."

 

14:37: 

Police say that the decision to use live fire was taken in self-defence. "For the purpose of preserving the lives and wellbeing of law enforcement officials, a decision was taken... To use weapons in self defence," the interior ministry is quoted by AFP as saying.

 

14:54: 

The interior ministry says that 67 police have been captured by protesters in Kiev and to free them police "have the right to use all means allowed by law including weapons" - via BBC Monitoring.

 

17:09: 

The interior ministry says that 13 police have been killed since 18 February, with 565 needing medical attention including 410 admitted to hospital - Interfax news agency via BBC Monitoring.

 

Euronews reports : The death toll of today's clashes rises to at least 67 dead, more than 550 injured, 332 at hospital, according medical sources. The Interior Ministry said earlier that at least 410 police officers were injured and at least 13 died in the last two days.

 

Christopher Miller (Editor Kyiv Post)  Tweets (4.52 pm, 20th February) ‘Interior Ministry: Since Feb. 18, 565 Interior officers sought medical, of whom 410 hospitalized, 130 w/ gunshots. 13 officers dead, 3 today’

 

 

Emily Magdij, Ukraine Live Blog Friday February 21st

 

‘10:08 – INTERIOR MINISTER RELEASES KILLED FIGURES

Total number of police killed has gone up to 16, with 410 injured, says the Interior Minister in a statement on their website.’

 

And then this, which I think must have originated with the state Russian agency RIA, so must be treated with the caution reserved for all official media, but does not differ significantly from the others:

 

Friday 21st February, CIHAN Newsagency (Turkish)  reported ; ‘Opposition figures accuse security forces of firing on protesters, while the authorities maintain the increasingly well-armed and aggressive anti-government movement attempted to mount a violent seizure of power.

At least 13 police officers have been killed in the fighting. By the latest Health Ministry estimates, 577 people have sought medical aid, although the actual number of people injured is believed to be much greater.(Cihan/Ria)’

 

Can anyone, having followed these events, seriously doubt that there was severe homicidal violence on both sides? I don’t. As to who is ultimately to blame, and if any of this was justified, I would want to know a good deal more about what actually happened, beginning with the origins of the demonstrations and the influence, or lack of it, which outside forces and bodies had upon them. For that we will need the sort of impartial inquiry which is hard to imagine in today's Ukraine.

 

 And yet supporters of the Kiev putsch, who pester me on Twitter, seem to be persuading themselves that armed violence was only on one side. I am at a loss as to know what to say to such people. 

The Sunny Side of the Tweet

One or two of you might be amused by this article, which concentrates on my contributions to Twitter.

 

 

http://xcity-magazine.com/why-columnist-peter-hitchens-wins-at-twitter/

 

A Deeply Disappointing Response

Mr Weldon comments: ‘I feel Mr Hitchens is rather stubborn, if not to say obtuse, on the issue. Would he like to venture a serious and sober response to the recent UN report? Or even if he remains unconvinced on the 'man-made' arguments, is he still maintaining nothing is happening? And nothing needs to be done?’.

 

This is typical of the zealots. They pay no attention to what their opponents actually say. Take, for instance ‘is he (me) still maintaining nothing is happening? ‘

 

And then look at what I wrote: ‘Nobody denies that the climate changes. It’s a proven fact that it has done many times. The question is whether it is changing as dramatically as the zealots predict, and whether this is caused by human activity.’

 

Had he read the article, he would know the answer to the question he asks. In what way am I being 'stubborn' or 'obtuse'? Am I refusing to accept or act on demonstrable facts, or changing the subject to avoid engaging with it? Absolutely not. That is the whole point of the discussion.

 

I’d add that there is nothing unserious or unsober about my response to all these many reports, which are distinguished more for quantity than for quality, and substitute noisy assertion and alarmist predictions for careful testable science. I insist on proof from those who make such claims, and I do not find it . When, or rather if,  I do, then I shall change my view, as one must. But I, and an increasing number of others, will not be bullied into changing our minds by electronic mob rule. An ounce, nay a grain, of testable, objective proof is worth a thousand tons (and who knows how many decibels) of assertions that ‘the majority is against you’.

 

The majority has been against me over and over again. The majority jeered at me in the 1970s when I took up bicycling as a means of transport. Now I can hardly move on the streets of London for the thousands of cyclists. The majority jeered at me when I favoured railways over roads and said the Beeching report was a mistake. Now everyone recognises that it was. Almost everyone I knew told me I was wrong to oppose railway privatisation. Now hardly any informed person defends it.  My whole milieu was against nuclear deterrence and NATO in the days when the USSR was an evil empire – I was for them. After we won the Cold WAr, my view became conventional wisdom. Everyone told me that Anthony Blair was wonderful, I disagreed. Now look at him. The majority favoured the Iraq, Afghan and Libyan interventions. I was against them. Now they're all against them. People who now complain about the release of alleged IRA bombers angrily derided me for opposing the agreement which led to this. I was similarly derided for opposing the Euro by people who now act as if they never favoured it, and for saying that the Tory Party had betrayed its supporters, was finished and could not win the 2010 election.  Well?

On the other hand I unreservedly admit that I was wholly wrong during the many years when I accepted the arguments of the Marxist, atheist left, and I regret and apologise for the many wicked things I did and said under the influence of those opinions.

I could go on. But I won’t. I have learned that it is never morally or intellectually safe to swim with the stream, and try not to do so unless I have found good reasons of my own for being on that side. Doing something only because everyone else does it is always a foolish thing to do.

 

As to whether anything ‘needs to be done’ about any changes in the climate, Lord Lawson is quite eloquent on this, and says that practical measures to deal with the effects are more rational than doomed attempts to prevent it from happening, which may be based on serious misreadings anyway. I’m inclined to agree with him. Nobody opposes rational measures to deal with measurable threats.  But Mr Weldon somehow manages to suggest that I do this.

 

If this is his attitude to evidence, I am not surprised that he is on the other side. It was to try to lift the discussion above this dismal level that I wrote my article. It is dispiriting to receive such a lame, ungenerous and unresponsive response.