Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 240

Beware of the Green Rapture. It May Not Happen.

In the days when belief in God was still pretty universal, cults would arise every few decades which would predict the approaching end of the world and gather on hilltops at the appointed date, expecting to be gathered into some celestial harvest, saved by their faith.

 

Nowadays, these things still happen - but they tend to be small-scale, dispirited affairs. Their followers have to endure a good deal more abuse than they would once have got – especially when, disappointed, they turn for home after the failure of the world to end on the predicted day. 

 

One thinks of those in the (still quite religious ) USA who believe in the ‘Rapture’ , a time when the saved will be carried up to Heaven ,whatever they are doing. I believe some rude people were known to ask believers in this ‘Rapture’ ( who tended to advertise their beliefs on bumper stickers) ‘Can I have your car after you’ve gone’, and other irreverent questions.

 

Now we have the new film Noah, in which the great Ark-builder’s belief in an impending doom is rudely mocked. I believe that Noah, in the form of Russell Crowe in Biblical get-up,  is principally mocked by Ray Winstone in Bronze Age attire, which must be especially hard to take, but I am not sure I can be bothered to go the cinema to see this happen. And many are drawing parallels between Noah and today’s Climate Change zealots. They do this, of course, on the basis that Noah turned out to be right about the deluge, and the mockers wrong. But…

 

That’s the real problem. The Bible doesn’t dwell much on incorrect prophecies (except those by prophets of rival gods) and warns against disrespect to prophets. Pharaoh learned the hard way not to annoy Moses or Aaron, beginning with plagues of frogs and ending with the slaughter of the Firstborn of Egypt and the drowning of his entire army. Elijah received fire from heaven on Mount Carmel, and having thus shown the superiority of Jehovah over the non-existent Baal, promptly ordered the slaughter of 450 prophets of Baal.  The 42 children (interestingly precise number) who jeered at Elijah’s heir Elisha for being bald were torn to pieces by bears which emerged from the woods.

 

Well, these stories stick in the mind.It’s the bloodthirsty bits and the horror stories that remain in mine, especially, for some reason, Jael,  the wife of Heber, driving a tent-peg through the head of Sisera ; and also Gehazi,  Elisha’s servant, trying to profit secretly from his master’s healing powers, punished by being stricken immediately with leprosy ...’and he went out from his presence a leper as white as snow.’  They also remind me of Philip Pullman’s sound judgement that  ‘“once upon a time” is much more persuasive than “thou shalt not”’.

 

Anyway, this brings me at last to my point, which is about modern prophets, the respect they demand, predictions of the end of the world, certainty of rectitude, and the punishments which fall upon those who defy or mock them.

 

 

I personally struggle not to write about ‘climate change’, for it always causes more trouble than it is worth and is about as sensible (for those who enjoy tranquillity) as is throwing stones as a wasps’ nest. Sometimes I’ll be on some panel where the question comes up, and so I’ll be compelled to make a few diffident and cautious remarks, listening out as I do so for the peculiar mixture of howl and rumble which is the sound of the modern bigot realising he is in the presence of an unbeliever. It’s a bit like that scene at the end of the remake of ‘Invasion of the Bodysnatchers’  (the one with Mr Spock in it) where the alien replicas, realising they are in the presence of an actual unreplicated human, turn as one, point and stare and emit high-pitched screams. You know this is going to end badly. And it does, though I have yet to be torn limb from limb.

 

But sometimes it’s just essential. And today is such a time. The House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology has just issued a report called ‘Communicating Climate Science’ (you can find it here http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmsctech/254/254.pdf ). Andrew Miller, the chairman of this body, told ‘the Times’ yesterday ministers who dissent from the government line on this issue should accept collective responsibility or ‘shut up and leave’.

 

Is Mr Miller Elijah? Or Noah? Or he just a Labour MP with an exaggerated idea of his own rightness? You decide. Perhaps a bear will come out of the woods (I mean, where else would they be?) and eat me up for saying this, but I tend towards the explanation that he is just a Labour MP. And that, like most MPs, he is in the firm grip of conventional wisdom.

 

He thinks that appearances on TV by Lord Lawson of Blaby, who is sceptical of the claims of the climate change lobby, should be accompanied by ‘health warnings’ .  He told ‘The Times’ that it might be a good idea to put a caption at the bottom of the screen saying that the views of Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation ‘are not accepted by 97% of scientists’.

 

Hilariously, the report says that BBC should give *less*time to those who doubt the orthodoxy about man-made climate change. They are accused of ‘giving opinions and scientific fact the same weight’.

 

But isn’t the problem here that there are so few scientific facts about the future? And that there are not very many more about determining the causes of the measurable changes in climate which have taken place. The mere fact that the climate zealots are reduced to using formulations such as ‘not accepted by 97% of scientists’ actually establishes that this is a matter of opinion.

 

Numberless scientific discoveries have been made by people prepared to defy orthodoxy, people of whom it could have been said (until they got their Nobel prizes) that ‘99.9999% of scientists did not accept their views’.

 

I suspect that many people feel , as I do, that the climate zealots would be a lot more persuasive if they were a little more modest. It is precisely their angry, bullying, majoritarian intolerance which makes me suspect that they are rather nervous about their beliefs. Their recent utterly unscientific claims that typhoons, hurricanes and wet winters are evidence of general climate change is even more inclined to make me think they are more interested in shouting people down, and stirring the mob, than they are in argument. They have a similar habit of suggesting that various islands are on the verge of being submerged thanks to climate change, when in fact there are other causes of their problems, such as a general tipping of the landmass or the constant erosion and shifting of islands in certain estuaries. Each time I see  such claims, I wonder more about the people who make them.

 

As for their use of the phrase ‘climate change denier’, that is just disreputable. The expression is doubly false. 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. To be a ‘denier’ is a) to be a person who refuses to accept a proven fact, which nobody is doing and b) to be smeared by association with Holocaust deniers, who *do* deny a proven fact, and do so for disgraceful reasons. This, as John Henry Newman once said in another context, is not just the rough and tumble of robust debate. It is poisoning the wells.

 

So I’ll stick to this. I think that those who wish to command vast quantities of public money, who wish to place severe and damaging restrictions on our economy, who in many cases make a great deal of money out of ‘alternative energy’, carbon credits and similar schemes, are the ones who must bear the burden of proof. Those of us who think they may be mistaken are not merely entitled to say so without being smeared or roughly elbowed aside by or elected representatives and by the BBC we help to pay for. We should be welcomed, as being the only force capable of causing these zealots to make their case properly and scientifically. As any scientist knows, no scientific question can be decided by majority vote or popularity test. That is the whole point of science and the reason why we revere it – it seeks the truth,  though the heavens fall ( and also in the face of sneers and derision).   

 

As soon as scientists become lobbyists, politicians and shouters-down of opponents, they lose any right to assert that they have some special advantage in argument. A scientific lab-coat doesn’t make a man or woman automatically right. Political partisanship undermines scientific integrity. Just because these people are in the grip of a Green Rapture, a belief in the coming apocalypse which will punish us for our greedy ways doesn’t mean they are right. History tends to suggest that they may well not be. Though unlike them I am prepared to concede the possibility that they may be right, and to discuss defensive and preparatory measures we might take on the basis that they might be right.

 

I’d just like to add a small point,  that my views on this are influenced by nothing other than observation and judgement. I counted myself an environmentalist before the term was invented. I loathe the pollution and rape of our countryside, and indeed of much of the planet. I wince with something quite like pain whenever a tree is cut down.  I am nobody’s secret lobbyist. I ride a bicycle , and have done so since long before it was modish, because I believe motor cars to be wasteful, dirty and over-used.

(Some) Answers to (some) Correspondents

Just a few points (alas I can’t deal with everything) in response to comments. Mr ‘P’ makes the standard mistake of the ‘anti-appeasement’ faction, by assuming that the very odd and illogical course of events between March and September 1939 was fore-ordained, and would have happened even if Lord Halifax hadn’t pressed for the mad guarantee to Poland, which allowed that country to take complete control of Britain's foreign and defence policies.

 

By the way, I don’t think the hindsight-tinged reminiscences of defeated German generals at Nuremberg give much of a guide as to how Germany would have behaved if opposed in 1938 . Czechoslovakia’s position after the Anschluss was militarily indefensible, as the annexation of Austria had made the Erzegebirge fortifications irrelevant (look at a map).

 

Britain and France were in no position to take any significant action in support of Prague.

 

The whole point is that, without the Polish guarantee, Poland, Germany and the USSR would all have behaved very differently. I should say it is virtually certain that Poland would have conceded German demands over Danzig and the corridor, and renewed her 1934 non-aggression pact with Germany. There would have been no Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, no autumn war, no Blitzkrieg, no May 1940 invasion of the West. I suspect Hitler would have turned his attentions towards Romania (for its oil) and Yugoslavia (for its long-term strategic value in a future attack on the USSR) . This would also have postponed the Holocaust, which did not begin until the invasion of the USSR. While Germany was still at peace with western Europe, Jews in Germany were certainly horribly persecuted, and individually beaten up and killed. But Jews, especially children, were still being allowed to leave the country, and there was no official policy of mass-murder, as there was after the Wannsee conference of early 1942 (though of course deliberate massacres had taken place during the invasion of Russia and the Baltic states) .

 

He also doesn’t seem to see that Britain (and France) would never have been in danger of disadvantageous peace  negotiations with Hitler if they hadn’t declared war on Germany in the first place. The country which declares war and then sues for peace can expect to be humiliated, robbed and stripped by its conqueror, who will naturally ensure that his former foe cannot easily threaten him again.

 

In fact, by declaring war from a position of weakness (as we did)  we gravely endangered our navy, our air force and our gold reserves, all of which Hitler would have demanded had we sued for peace.  He would have taken some parts of our empire, too. (the irony is that it was our allies, the USA, who ended up taking our gold and forcing us to give up our empire and scrap most of our navy).

 

As for the balance of power, had this been our real objective, the only serious step we could have taken would have been the one we eventually adopted far later and in much worse circumstances – an alliance of necessity with Stalin, paid for by giving Stalin a free hand in the Baltics and Eastern Europe (though less free than the one we gave him at Yalta).

 

We wouldn’t do that  because we thought Stalin was horrid (though we were happy to make a pact with anti-Semitic, undemocratic Poland, which had disreputably seized a bleeding chunk of Czechoslovakia after Munich) , so he wouldn’t agree to a deal. Would sucha  deal in 1939 have been so much worse than going to war with Hitler without an army, being swiftly beaten and driven into the sea while losing billions of pounds worth of equipment by today’s values, going bankrupt and nearly getting ourselves occupied? I can’t see why.

 

But if we weren’t prepared to make such an alliance, I can’t see that making one with the broken reed of Poland was preferable to armed and vigilant neutrality. The second policy was adopted by the USA, which came out of the war richer and more powerful than it went in (in many ways at our expense). And nobody of any moment sneers at the USA for doing so. So why would it have been wrong for us?.

 

There’s no parallel with modern Russia’s reasonable desire to protect its sphere of influence after years of provocation. Anyone who really wanted this country to be independent would welcome a counterweight to the EU on the European continent, I should have thought.

 

I am never sure whether people have had sense of humour failures or are trying to be funny, but my mention of Mr Erdogan’s moustache was, of course, a joke. Evil dictators tend to have these odd facial growths. Need I say more? Perhaps.

 

The point about shoving the clocks forward is one of 'who whom'? Ahd also one of trading standards. I like to get up early and to go to bed early. So that is what I do. I have no desire to impose my habits on anyone else. I adapt to the world as it is. But I resist the attempts of others to impose their different choices on me.

 

By shifting time away a full hour (or more if they could get away with it) from its true natural position, they make it less pleasant and convenient for me to live my life as I wish.

 

Try it this way. If people like me had somehow managed to bamboozle politicians into believing that ‘daylight-saving’ could be achieved by jamming the clocks one (or more ) hours *back* from their true natural position, then those who are now clock-changers would object that they were being forced to endure light mornings they did not want, and dark evenings they disliked.  

 

But here’s the difference. I would side with them. I don’t believe there’s a true majority for this meddling, in either direction. Some would be suited by one, and some by the other. But since time is not arbitrary, but depends on noon coinciding (reasonably closely) with the sun being at its zenith, the default should surely be nature. As I’ve said before, altering any other measure of objective reality to give a false reading would vary between being mad (thermometers and barometers) inconvenient, dangerous  and damaging (speedometers) to being an actual crime (weights and measures) .

 

I am sure it’s only because most people don’t really understand the clock-shifting procedure and its effects (most are clueless about whether the clocks should go forwards or backwards on any given occasion, until they are told by the media) , and naturally assume that authority knows what it is doing (one of outr biggest mistakes), that this crazy performance continues unchallenged.

In the course of arguing against Berlin Time, I at last understood what was actually involved.  And I am completely convinced that shifting the clocks is useless at best, harmless at most.

 

I would note that this morning, when I had an unmissable appointment in London, I got up at my normal time (by the clock) which was 4.45 by GMT. And so, for the first time in many weeks, I got up in pitch darkness. I have felt bleary, tired and jetlagged all day, and I have no doubt this will persist for some days, as it always does. I can see no good reason why this was inflicted on me. If others want more daylight when they’re awake, I suggest they get up earlier. They’ll be amazed at how many establishments from shops to stations to swimming pools are open early already, and perhaps they might campaign for some of them to open earlier, if they think it so important, rather than inflict their wishes on millions of others who are inconvenienced by them.

 

Defenders of abortion try to equate it with miscarriage and still-birth. These are not the consequences of deliberate human acts, and cannot be treated in the same way.

 

My parallel between Crimea and North Cyprus is not intended as a condemnation of Turkey’s behaviour in 1974. As I’ve written here before, I sympathise with Turkey’s action in many ways. Like Moscow, Ankara was provoked.  I’m just saying that those who condemn one must condemn the other. And, as NATO plainly doesn’t do this, its inconsistency reveals that its real hostility to Russian action is not principled, but has another cause.

The Invisible Woman

‘Really cruel men cry in the dark in the cinema’, Graham Greene is supposed to have once said. One assumes that he knew a thing or two about this, and who would be surprised to learn that Graham Greene , or Ian Fleming, or a number of other writers, were capable of a bit of cruelty themselves? In my sad view almost all of us are, and we are lucky if we are deprived of the opportunity, and so never find out.

 

The true moral savagery of modern man, even in the most outwardly civilised societies,  is easily shown by his behaviour in a car towards those weaker and less well-protected than he is. Behind the wheel, we become our true selves, accelerating towards Gomorrah.

 

But the real surprise in literature and history is Charles Dickens, a poet in prose as much as a novelist, a seething, unequalled imagination and a terrific moral force, who exposed cruelty in many forms, experienced it in many forms and obviously hated it.

 

And yet, in the story of his life, there is one known, certain incident of appalling cruelty by him, towards Catherine, his wife and the mother of his many children.  Having made use of her, and relied upon her, and indeed put her through the repeated pains of childbed in an age when it was always as dangerous as it was painful,  he simply grew tired of her, and cast her aside like an apple-core.

 

Did he (whose books contain severe moral condemnation of such behaviour) also betray her with a mistress, the actress Ellen Ternan? The circumstantial evidence that he did so is extremely strong, and there are powerful, though unprovable suggestions, apparently voiced by Dickens’s own children in later life, that there was a child of this illicit union, though the child seems to have died in infancy.  We do not know and now cannot know, in the absence of diaries, letters or other documents which may even now be mouldering in an old house somewhere, awaiting their finder.  Some experts on Dickens are absolutely convinced that he did not. My opinion on the matter would be worth nothing at all, so I won’t even try to have one.

 

Even so, the callousness towards his wife is proved beyond doubt, and shocking almost beyond belief. Imagine how the younger Dickens might have portrayed his own actions? Yet the inventor of the Murdstones, and of Quilp, of Madame Defarge and of Uriah Heep, who so searingly portrayed all kinds of human nastiness, could not see his own for what it was.

 

Actually, I suspect he probably could. I think those who hate cruelty very often do so because they hate it most of all in themselves, and are aware of their own capacity for it. (C.P.Snow mentions this, I think , in more than one of his ‘Strangers and Brothers’ books, and he more than once makes special efforts to portray kindness, as well – there’s a notable episode in the engrossing novel ‘The Affair’ , when a smooth and expensive London lawyer misses his dinner and endures a miserable evening rather than offend a vain, bombastic but ultimately rather pathetic and very lonely old man).

 

Anyway, these thoughts are a prelude to mentioning a worthwhile new film which has (of course) slipped between the cracks of the commercial cinemas. It is called ‘The Invisible Woman’ , and is an account, beautifully filmed and powerfully quiet, of the alleged Dickens-Ternan affair. It is based on Claire Tomalin’s book of the same name, and pretty much assumes that her deductions are correct (we actually see the alleged baby, and other evidence, though Ellen Ternan is also shown being highly resistant to Dickens’s immoral importunings, walking out of a house in which Wilkie Collins is living with a woman to whom he is not married).

 

Many of the scenes resemble the paintings of the time, sometimes Holman Hunt, sometimes W.P. Frith. It is a pleasure to watch . Personally, I think that Joanna Scanlan, in portraying the awful loss, humiliation and grief of Mrs Dickens with great restraint and immense power, acts everyone else off the screen in a few very brief appearances. Oddly enough, the big-name stars, Ralph Fiennes as Dickens himself, and the wonderful Kristin Scott-Thomas as Ellen’s mother, rather fade into the background.  

 

Felicity Jones, as Ellen Ternan, is very much an oil-painting. The curious fact that she pretended to be 14 years younger than she really was (or 10 years younger than she truly was in some versions) , and that she had known Dickens only as a child,  does seem to suggest something very strange. But we are in an utterly different world. Dickens bought her a little cottage so that she could be both secluded and available to him. It was, of all places, in Slough, visible to the Old Queen as she looked down from her widowed seclusion in Windsor castle)  That is itself an illustration of how the world of the Victorian occupied the same physical space which ours occupies but was unrecognisably different in the way in which it did things, and in which it thought. Maybe their relationship was strange in a way we cannot now guess at.

 

Since Ellen is supposed to have been in some ways the basis for Estella in ‘Great Expectations’, and Pip’s love for Estella was endlessly, cruelly rejected and never came to fruition, what should we make of that?  

 

Well, I don’t know. The mystery of Charles Dickens remain a mystery, and the core of it is not just that a bad man could have done such good things, but that how any man, bad or good, could have produced from his head such a complete and moving world, which once formed part of the personal character of almost every English man and woman, and still lives in our minds and imaginations long after the life which he portrayed was swept away by bombs,  bulldozers and electricity. 

Can you have a Moral Foreign Policy?

In answer to various comments, I am quite aware that Russia has been a predatory power in the past - and indeed fear that if we are stupid enough in our approach to it, it will become one again.

 

But then so were we, and so was France, and so was Germany, and so was the USA, and so is China. This is the nature of real life. The intelligent thing to do is not to moralise about it, but to reach intelligent, cynical compromises about it that will not lead to war. Hence Versailles was very moral, and killed millions, whereas the treaties that ended the Napoleonic wars were not moral, and endured peacefully for a century . The Cold War settlement , under which we left the Warsaw Pact countries in Russian chains, was also not moral, but it was realistic.  

 

The 1992 borders imposed on Russia may be moral (I’m not qualified to judge) but even without the Baltics joining NATO (let alone Ukraine and Georgia) they were unrealistic and will not last. You might as well claim to have invented an anti-gravity machine, or to have cured death, as to imagine that such things can be achieved.  Do we want to rearrange them in a wise manner, or do we actually want to make them even more unrealistic, so ensuring future conflict? What we can really learn from the inter-war treatment of Germany is that if you don’t make concessions to reasonably civilised governments, you aid their downfall, and so end up making much bigger concessions to uncivilised governments which have replaced them.

 

In my view, Germany, like Russia, simply exists and its existence (and therefore its basic needs) must be acknowledged. The comment from ‘Jack’ that ‘The root of the problem is that Germany was insufficiently weakened by WWI’ is a great illustration of this absurd view, that you can wish countries out of existence. From 1870 onwards, the rest of Europe should have realised that a united Germany must be accommodated. Silly efforts to resist this inevitability destroyed European civilisation and Christendom in 1914,  created the catastrophe of the Russian Revolution, and led directly to the horrors of 1939-45. A similar unwillingness to accept that Russia exists and reasonably desires a cordon sanitaire of non-threatening nations on its borders is equally unrealistic. As I’ve said before, you might as well try to move the Himalayas with a teaspoon as try to create a Europe without German and Russian power.

 

Mr ‘P’ says that Czechoslovakia wasn’t the point, nor was Poland. This at least removes the sentimentality from the case for war. But what precisely was the ‘principle’ which we would have defended by making Prague a cause of war, and so woefully failed to defend by making Poland a cause of war?   

 

I cannot see it. Imagining that the frontiers of Eastern Europe are a major interest of Britain’s is grossly to exaggerate our importance in Europe (as we tend to do). To the extent that we had any interest at all, I should have thought it lay in hoping Germany would turn East rather than West, which was in any case likely. 

We lap up TV violence - then hide from the real massacre in our midst

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

It is what doesn’t shock us that is now so shocking. Not all that long ago, news that aborted babies were being burned in furnaces to heat hospitals would have caused a major national storm.

But in our callous, distracted and unimaginative society, it passed by like a momentary gust of cold wind on a warm day, faintly disturbing but swiftly forgotten.

We’re told it’s been stopped. But the supply of human fuel has not halted.

What has happened to us that we no longer really care, either about the massacre of the innocents that goes on day and night in our midst, or about the disposal of human remains as if they were rubbish?

Lots of people must have known, and found it convenient. But in this matter we are really a bit like the respectable inhabitants of Hitler’s Germany, who vaguely noticed that people were loaded on to eastbound trains and didn’t come back, were concerned for a moment and then returned to their  normal lives.

I wouldn’t mind it so much myself if those responsible would at least have the decency to be ashamed.

But the campaigners for the killing of unborn babies are proud and assertive. Their horrid deeds are, to them, a ‘right’ and a ‘choice’.

None of this evil drivel could even be expressed if we admitted that the babies involved were fellow humans. But that’s the key to the whole thing.  Whoever sets out to destroy any class of humanity will always begin by claiming that his victims aren’t really human.

Every time you hear an unborn baby described as a ‘foetus’, you’ll see this in action. The cold, rather contemptuous Latin word robs the baby of  its humanity.

The lie has to be sustained by hiding the truth. British TV will show almost any act of violence, but it is hugely reluctant to screen pictures of what an aborted baby actually looks like. If it did so, everyone would know what the words ‘foetus’ and ‘termination’ really meant.

But we have now pretended so hard and so long that it isn’t so, that people, who no doubt viewed themselves as kind and decent, were able to shovel  violently abused human remains into a furnace, and then go home happy.

Rev's a brilliant reflection of our laughable church

The BBC drama series Rev is very clever. Wonderfully researched and brilliantly cast, it realistically portrays the life of a besieged inner-city parson (played by Tom Hollander) and his disenchanted wife (Olivia Colman).

It’s supposed to be a comedy, but I don’t find it particularly funny. It is one of the tragedies of our age that the Church of England, a rather noble enterprise based upon reasonable religion and some of the world’s greatest poetry, is now a dying husk.

Last week the hero was shown agreeing to a joint project with his neighbouring mosque. The mosque raised thousands of pounds in a matter of days while the poor empty church struggled to collect much more than small change and buttons. Was Islam so much  more successful, the vicar wondered, because it asked so much more of its believers than modern Christianity?

The answer is ‘Yes’.  

Islam demands regular and frequent prayer, knowledge of scripture, active charity, arduous pilgrimages and severe yearly fasting. Muslims are expected to be open and unashamed about their faith.

Christianity used to do all these things. Then it became a lobby for public spending and the voice of social liberalism. And look what happened. I don’t think there will ever be a TV series about an inner-city imam with a tiny congregation and a crumbling mosque.

Why don't we invade Turkey?

Warmongers who’ve failed (so far) to get us to invade Russia really do need to turn their attention to Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

He has all the qualifications for villainy – his jails are crammed with journalists, his opponents are subjected to evidence-free show-trials and locked up for years, and he ‘kills his “own people”’ when they protest against him.

There’s more. The country is fantastically corrupt. He foments strife in neighbouring nations. His troops have illegally occupied Northern Cyprus for 40 years and show no  sign of going.

Last week he tried to shut  down Twitter in an outburst of laughable megalomania. He even  has a moustache.

So why no sanctions, no squeaky, righteous denunciations by William Hague? Er, Turkey is a member of Nato and a fully paid-up member of the Globalist club. So it can do what Russia can’t.

Do you ever wonder why you have to spend half of this morning resetting every electronic device in your home? And why tomorrow you’ll struggle to get to work on time, bleary from dragging yourself out of bed an hour early?

I expect not. If you did, you’d find that the whole thing was invented by a beetle-hunter called George Hudson, who was annoyed that shift-work kept him from pursuing his hobby in the evenings; oh and it was also championed by a property developer called William Willett who was annoyed by the way dusk fell while he was playing golf. The House of Commons repeatedly rejected it as a silly idea. Eventually, in a moment of madness, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany adopted it, and the rest is history.

There’s no such thing as ‘Daylight Saving’. The amount of light stays the same whatever happens. The whole thing is completely pointless, yet  we just keep doing it.

I am pleased to see Charles Sargeant Jagger’s superb Paddington war memorial playing a part in the First World War commemorations. It is one  of the greatest and most moving sculptures of the 20th century, depicting a mud-encrusted Tommy reading a letter from home.

Let’s hope for his sake that the letter wasn’t from that barrage balloon of pretension, Stephen Fry, who has written a soppy, politically correct and embarrassing epistle to an imaginary 1914 soldier, as part of an ‘arts project’ threatened for this summer. Mr Fry, as ever, is funny when he’s trying to be serious, and tragic when he’s trying to be funny.

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The real aim of the cannabis legalisers has been revealed by Baroness Meacher, who looks like a harmless granny but is in fact a ferocious ayatollah of dope decriminalisation. It's all about money. The legalisation of cannabis needs to happen now', she urges. 'At a time of fragile economic recovery...it seems madness to ignore a potential new source of tax revenue.' This explains why so many politicians are soft on this issue. As for 'madness', that's what we will get more of if cannabis goes on legal sale.

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Prague, Putin, Stresemann and the KGB - a response to 'Paul P'

‘Paul P’ writes ‘Mr Hitchens again uses the device of rubbishing associations with Munich in 1938, again intimating that Crimea in 2014 is as meaningless to our interests as was Czechoslovakia in 1938, therefore the expansionism of the respective leaders of 1938 and 2014 can be ignored. I think this is delusional analysis, and possibly as dangerously delusional in 2014 as quite obviously it turned out to be in 1938. We at this distant remove, and on an island to boot, might be understood for regarding Putin's moves in Crimea as too distant to be concerned about or bothered with. But what of the other Balkan and Baltic states which are now wondering (if their TV-polled residents' worries can be taken seriously) if Russia might also be considering their re-entry into the precinct of Russian hegemony? A quick 'referendum' among Russian-speaking ethnic minorities in Estonia, say, might encourage Putin to think about another land-grab, and another, and then another. All he need fear from the West at every 'signature on a piece of paper' is increased travel restriction on his oligarchs. That and a too-late scramble by western governments to find non-Russian sources of energy. Mr Putin must be laughing his former-KGB boots off.’

 

I thought I’d address this as it is such a clear and concise statement of the beliefs being encouraged by almost all media coverage of recent events in Ukraine and Russia.Let us see if I am in fact guilty of 'delusional' thinking.

 

It might first of all be worth addressing the Czechoslovak question. Can any reader explain what Britain’s interest was, in 1938,  in the survival of Czechoslovakia as a state?

 

Of course it would have been pleasanter if it had survived. With all its many faults, the Czechoslovak state of 1938 was a relatively free and rather prosperous country. I feel this very strongly having visited Prague many times (long before it was fashionable or even much known about), and having a strong emotional sympathy for the Czechs, having seen them under the Soviet heel and having watched them being liberated in the winter of 1989.  It was certainly much preferable to the other countries created or shaped by the Versailles Treaty, using leftover bits of the old Austro-Hungarian , Russian and German Empires - despotic Hungary, anti-Semitic undemocratic Poland, the mess of Yugoslavia.   But self-indulgent sentimentality about other countries is no more than that,  unless it is matched by armed force and the willingness and ability to use it.  Britain has never had either that force or that readiness.

 

But multi-national states are tricky things to manage. Belgium remains a hopeless failure, Switzerland is a rare success.  Almost a quarter of the inter-war Czechoslovakia’s population were German, and the Czechs and Slovaks who formed a sort of Slavic bloc partly to outnumber the Germans more effectively, were not that harmonious. Poland coveted one piece of her territory, Hungary a much larger one ( and both cruelly and selfishly took what they wanted in 1938 after Munich). Opinions differ as to how well it worked. A revisionist history ‘Czechoslovakia: the State that failed’, by Elizabeth Neimann, has been much criticised for alleged unfairness and inaccuracy, and I’m not competent to judge. But the history of post-war Czechoslovakia, with the violent ethnic cleansing of the German population, and the eventual split between Czechs and Slovaks into two separate EU provinces, makes it difficult to work out how things might have continued if (by some miracle) the inter-war republic had survived.

 

I tend to suspect that, even without outside interference, Czechoslovakia would have ended up being dissolved, as it has been, though in a peaceful world without Hitler some humane way might have been found of returning its German speakers to German government, rather than the shameful expulsion and brutalities which actually happened, inflicted as they were largely on women and children. . I tend to think (contrary to current wisdom) that moving borders to suit people is usually a lot more sensible and humane than moving people to suit borders.

 

But Woodrow Wilson’s plan for Europe,  which replaced the old multi-ethnic empires with not-very-mono-ethnic new nations, created too many complex and insoluble border questions, within and without the new states. An intended liberation ended up as an explosive mess, one which led directly to war in 1939 and which has now quietly been expunged by the Schengen agreement. It wasn’t just Germans in the wrong place, though there were a lot of them. It was Romanians in the wrong place, Poles in the wrong place, Ukrainians in the wrong place.

 

Under the old empires, this had been unpleasant for many smaller peoples. Under Versailles, it became a prelude to war, as there were now so many more disputed borders, and France, which had been at the height of its power in 1918, had rapidly sunk back into itself, denuded of young men, anxious for peace, without the will or the means to sustain the anti-German alliances it had gaily set up in the early 1920s. As for the USA, it had simply disappeared. Washington’s puniness as a land power was astonishing, with an army(in 1939) about the same size as Portugal’s, poorly equipped and trained, and a pitiful air force. Only the US Navy could be said to be a serious and well-trained modern military formation and that (of course) was of little use on Continental Europe. The same could be said of Britain, which had chosen in 1936 to develop a strengthened Navy, to guard the Empire, and a much-enlarged Air Force, to defend the home islands against what many then believed was the principal danger, aerial bombing . This, by the way, explains Churchill’s very wise refusal to throw the RAF into the Battle of France in 1940. That wasn’t what it was for.

 

So what we had in 1938 was a whole lot of unsustainable borders, most of them designed to cramp and limit Germany, unaddressed during the years when Germany had been a law-governed free country, and now festering badly just as Germany acquired an aggressive despotism. (By the way, those who compare Vladimir Putin with Hitler really should be careful. Domestically, Putin is repressive in an old-fashioned pre-Communist way, but his repression is simply not comparable even with that under Brezhnev, let alone the Stalinist system. Nor is he a Nordic racialist maniac).

 

The Sudetenland, by the way, had never been *German* , despite being just down the road, and along the Elbe valley, from Dresden and Saxony.  But it had been *Austrian*,  or rather Austro-Hungarian, and once Germany had swallowed Austria (which many democratic Austrians had wanted it to do in the 1920s, not least because this truncated remnant was just as devastated by hyper-inflation as Germany, but lacked the means of recovery ) the distinction wasn’t particularly important.

 

As I never tire of pointing out, the expansionist policies associated with Hitler were not his idea, or specifically National Socialist. They were German. The idea of a German-dominated ‘Mitteleuropa’, part political and part economic, stretching eastward across Poland and Ukraine, into the Baltic states in the North, and into the edge of the Caucasus in the South, originated with Friedrich Naumann in the middle of the Great War.  It was largely put into effect at the 1918 Peace of Brest-Litovsk, but did not endure because Germany was soon afterwards defeated in the West. Naumann was not a militarist or a nationalist, but a civilised liberal still revered by the Modern Free Democrat Party. When he first set out his plan, Austria-Hungary still existed, which he considered part of Mitteleuropa,  and he presumed it would continue to do so, so it would have included the territory which became Czechoslovakia, and which became independent Hungary, and which became inter-war Poland.  Things, as always grew more complicated at the edges, in the Balkans and in Ukraine.

 

But one would have to be a convinced coincidence theorist to look at the recent eastward expansion of the EU and not see some congruence between Naumann’s scheme and the EU’s desired sphere of influence.

When you put that alongside the USA’s longstanding and enthusiastic support for the creation of a United States of Europe  (papers making this absolutely clear were deposited by accident in the Georgetown University library a few years ago, and I have seen some of them myself. Much of the detail is to be found in Richard Aldrich’s interesting book ‘The Hidden Hand’), you can perhaps wonder about the origins of the current clash of interests in Kiev. Few things make me laugh more than British conservatives who think that the USA is on the side of ‘Euroscepticism’ and would welcome the recreation of an independent Britain.  Nope.

 

Anyway, had we really wanted to preserve the anti-German states to the east and north of post-Anschluss Germany, our only conceivable ally would have been Stalin’s USSR.  But Poland and Romania did not trust Stalin, and so there was no possibility of them allowing the Soviet Army across their territory to help the Czechs. Moscow was therefore able to posture as Prague’s friend, without having to do anything about it.  Later, when we sent a delegation to Moscow in 1939, Stalin made it clear that he wanted a very free hand in Eastern Europe and the Baltics in return for any sort of anti-Hitler alliance. And we declined to give him this, which was why he turned instead to Hitler (who readily gave him half of Poland and the Baltic states) . This may well have seemed clever and principled at the time, but we later had to give far, far more away in return for Stalin’s involuntary alliance with us, after 1941.

 

My own view is that everyone under the ‘Habsburg Yoke’ in 1914 (right down to Gavril Princip) would have begged the Habsburgs to rule them forever and a day, if they had known what would come soon after their ‘liberation’ from Vienna in 1918. This is why I am so against attempts to reorder Europe radically. 1992 seems to me to have been a new Versailles, unreasonable, unsustainable and unrealistic, and the harder we stick to it, the more tragic and violent will be the end.

 

New Cold Warriors often warn of the threat to the three Baltic states. No doubt there is one, though I think it takes the form of internal destabilisation and installation of Moscow-leaning governments at some stage in the middle distance, rather than outright invasion. I hope not, but I suspect so. That threat would be incomparably smaller if they had stayed out of NATO and the EU. Moscow could tolerate the three countries indefinitely as neutral neighbours, but as forward bases for an expansionist alliance, they increase the risk of trouble, and especially of destabilisation, rather than decreasing it.   Even Mikhail Gorbachev, about the soberest, most rational and open-minded Russian leader of modern times, was almost livid with fury over the Baltics’ demands for full independence.  I don’t say this to endorse his feelings, though I think I understand them. I just say it to point out that it is a fact, and that it is only Russian weakness that has – up till now – prevented trouble over this.

 

I’m not sure where the Balkans come into this.

 

But I fear that some future Russian state, which might make Vladimir Putin look like Jimmy Carter, will indeed do the dreadful things the New Cold Warriors warn of. But if it does it will be because we didn’t have the sense to reach a reasonable compromise with Russia under its present government, so helping to bring about the elevation of a truly monstrous autocrat, as bad as we wrongly imagine Vladimir Putin to be. The more we slight and provoke Russia, the more aggressive and resentful Russia will become.  So why do this?

 

This is in fact the *true* parallel between now and the pre-1939 world. We are in the late 1920s rather than in the late 1930s. The country which has been foolishly humiliated in defeat, and driven back behind unsustainable borders,  is still open to reason and compromise  and still part of the international diplomatic system. Vladimir Putin may not be Gustav Stresemann (who was a liberal democrat (not a Liberal Democrat) but more or less shared Hitler’s views on Germany’s lost eastern territory). But he is also emphatically not Adolf Hitler.

 

My other point about standing up for Czechoslovakia is that we haven’t done so even in this free, safe modern Hitler-Free, Stalin-free, unmilitarised world. Germany, in Europe’s name, has dissolved Czechoslovakia and nobody cares.  It has no borders.  It has been cut into two (or rather three, with the removal of sub-Carpathian Ukraine).  Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist . And nobody minds or notices, because power-grabs through supranational bodies (which tactfully allow the conquered to fly their flags and pretend to be countries) are all right whereas power-grabs using naked armed force are not.  

 

There’s a lot of sense in that. Naked armed force is horrible. But let’s not pretend that the abolition of European borders, and the imposition of a single currency, and the single market, are not a power grab. I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. The EU has finally taken Clausewitz into the post-modern world. The EU is the continuation of war by other means.

 

Don’t then act shocked if the other fellow responds in the same way. Moscow’s first response to the EU/NAT0 push to the west was the Eurasian Union, a sort of mirror to the EU. It didn’t work for various reasons. Next came gas politics, and next came the aid package.

 

And then, in response to Western media propaganda, western political interference, western street demonstrations, western  exaggerations of the danger from the other side, came their more or less mirror image in Crimea and (to a much lesser extent) in the Russian-speaking east of Ukraine. The most reliable reports suggest that this policy was arrived at quite late on, after the collapse of the (EU-brokered) deal that had been supposed to save Yanukovich, and that pro-Moscow figures in Crimea insisted on full incorporation in Russia because they feared ending up in the sort of nowhere limbo endured by Moscow’s allies in South Ossetia and Transnistria .

 

People do go on about Vladimir Putin’s KGB past as if it automatically damned him . All accounts suggest that his role was very minor. Also most don’t understand that the KGB,  especially its foreign intelligence branch, was the best-informed and most intelligent organ of the Soviet state.  Its officers often spoke foreign languages and had lived abroad (as did and had Putin), and knew exactly how bad things were and how far the country had fallen behind. Mikhail Gorbachev himself was sponsored by the KGB chief Yuri Andropov, and I have often suspected that his project was, essentially, a KGB one which got out of hand. The 1991 putsch was a failed attempt to get things back under control. Vladimir Putin is a more successful attempt to do the same thing. But it is absurd to imagine that he wants the old USSR back. I think the collapse of the British empire was a global tragedy, just as he thinks the collapse of the USSR was one. But I don’t for a moment imagine it can be recreated, and I strongly suspect he doesn’t either. Also, like all sensible Russians,  he knows that Soviet communism was stupid, wasteful and doomed, as was the USSR’s contest with the USA for global power. He wouldn’t want it, or the Cold War, back.

Some Thoughts on the 'Great Debate' - Clegg vs Farage

The most enjoyable thing about the Nigel-Farage vs Nick Clegg debate was the difference between the reaction to it by the ‘mainstream’ pundits, and the reaction of the public.

As the Guardian’s Rowena Mason reports here http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/mar/26/nigel-farage-victory-snap-poll-surprises-political-insiders , these insiders were surprisedto find that a snap poll handed the debate to Mr Farage by 57% to 36%.

 

I’m not amazed at all. Nor am I amazed that ‘insiders’ have such a poor grasp of the general direction of public opinion. If you want to know what’s going on in the country, the inhabitants of the Westminster Aquarium are the last people to ask. (‘Westminster Bubble’ is too kind. They peer out, goggling at puzzled, at the real cold world from their warm, dim depths, they are regularly and generously fed from above by a  mysterious hand which they rely on but never question, and they fly about in shoals, dashing this way and that, bereft of any individuality). They are, a strange and increasingly interchangeable collection of outwardly variegated professional politicians, some MPs, some ‘Special Advisers’ or ‘SPADS’  (spin doctors to you), some supposed journalists.

 

One of those, I noticed, in a recent Radio 4 ‘What the Papers Say’, approvingly quoted an article praising Michael Gove for being (as in fact he isn’t) the ‘First Tory Education Secretary to send a child to a state secondary’,  without deigning to notice any dissent (full disclosure: most of the dissent came from me) from this spin, or to note the fact that the state secondary involved is a hard-to-get-into elite school.

 

Nor was there any criticism of Mr Gove’s decision to bypass his local comprehensive, even though he has repeatedly praised it and its head, in favour of an elite school miles from his home, during Education Questions in the Commons on Monday.  Don’t they know how remote they are from real life? No.  Are they all doing the same, or trying to? Don't know.

 

And that’s why the Farage-Clegg debate was so significant in itself, even if the actual exchanges were (to any informed person) pretty dull and routine.

 

I sat through the whole thing on Sky News. I’m afraid I didn’t think Nick Ferrari, whom I like, really got a grip on the two combatants. It seemed to me that Mr Clegg was called to answer first on almost every question, especially towards the end. And at several moments at which Mr Farage was clearly entitled to a comeback, after some dubious claims by Mr Clegg, we moved on briskly to the next question.

 

I know that genuine questions from a genuine audience are a problem, as they seldom ask what TV producers want them to ask, in the way they want it asked, but I was a bit mystified about some of those that were selected. Most absurd was a question which appeared to be about same sex marriage and human rights,  neither of which have anything to do with the EU itself. I know there’s now a complex new relationship between the Strasbourg Human Rights Court and the EU, but basically Strasbourg is a Council of Europe body,  and ‘Human Rights’, though they remain nonsense on stilts, cannot really be blamed on the EU. (The Equality Directives, on the other hand, can be).

 

Also, I thought the question in which Mr Farage was asked about paying his wife, and Mr Clegg about his broken promise on Tuition Fees, was out of place in this debate. In a general election, perhaps it would have worked. But in Britain’s first proper televised debate about the EU between major figures for nearly 40 years, it was a waste of time.

 

I also wanted to know more about Mr Clegg’s contention that, according to the House of Commons Library, only a very small percentage of British legislation originated in the EU. I really wanted to see the workings. If this is true, then it very much changes the debate.

 

Mr Farage was all right, though he never rose above that. I was disappointed that he did not try harder at the end to counter the idea that those who oppose British absorption in a foreign empire are somehow ‘Little Englanders’ . I have never understood why any intelligent person uses, or accepts,  this empty jibe, which bears no relation to any truth at all. Why is a country made ‘little’ by being independent? How does independence alter its size? Whereas handing over your frontier, your foreign negotiating rights and increasing amounts of your domestic law to a supranational power surely *do* diminish you.  

 

But the main thing was that the event took place at all. For years, establishment thought has derided the idea that there is a large and unhappy group of voters who feel betrayed and ignored and misunderstood by an out-of-touch establishment. Mr Farage, for all his many faults, as shown definitively that such a group exists, and Mr Clegg, by agreeing to debate with him on a public platform, has acknowledged that it is so.

 

Let us hope that Mr Farage will be cleverer than Pauline Hanson in Australia, or Preston Manning in Canada, who led similar revolts and were in the end either absorbed or crushed or both by the establishment. With a bit of luck, our establishment will turn out to be as stupid as it looks, and not appreciate the danger until it is too late. The shock of the ‘insiders’ at Mr Farage’s poll victory suggests that may be so. They still don’t know what has hit them, or grasp how much they are despised.

How much British law is made in Brussels?

That valuable organisation Full Fact has kindly contacted me to answer my question about Nick Clegg's claim(during Thursday night's debate) that a very small part of our legislation originated in the EU.

 

They said:

'We were working with LBC last night live-factchecking the debate. I came across your blog post where you wrote about Nick Clegg's statement that only a small percentage of legislation originates in the EU.

 

The House of Commons Library concluded that “it is possible to justify any measure between 15% and 50% or thereabouts”. We agree — the range depending on whether you only count Acts of Parliament or include regulations and EU regulations too.

 

Our spotlight on EU influence on UK law gives full details of the research, sources, etc. https://fullfact.org/europe/eu_make_uk_law-29587 '

My thanks to them.

 

 

On Freedom of Speech and Thought

I notice that the Deputy Prime Minister is attacking Nigel Farage for daring to differ from the consensus view of the Ukraine crisis, as he did at the very end of their debate. Is this proper behaviour for a minister in the government of a free country, let alone for the leader of a party which styles itself both 'Liberal' and 'Democratic' ?

He does not offer any counter to what Mr Farage says, simply attacking him for having said it, claiming to be 'astounded' by the expression of a dissenting view,  using the words 'perverse' and 'extreme' and of course suggesting that Mr Farage is therefore a supporter of Vladimir Putin.

I should have thought that in the long tradition of foreign policy debate in this country, tough as it has often been, opposing views have generally been allowed.  Mr Clegg's own party was fiercely in favour of punishing Turkey for the Bulgarian atrocities, in a huge foreign policy controversy of the 19th century,  and several of its prominent members were very much against our participation in the Boer War. These views were not universally accepted, but they were not condemned as illegitimate, I think, or treated as if they should never have been expressed.

In modern times, his predecessor as Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, took an admirably principled and correct stand against the Iraq war, against a tide of Murdoch-inspired flagwaving and war hysteria, not to mention government lying.

 

I think the behaviour of the British media, with their uncritical acceptance of the 'Ukraine Good, Russia Bad' oversimplification, has much to do with this. Far too many ill-informed reporters, who have never heard of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, were at nursery school during the Cold War and until a few weeks ago couldn't have pronounced Simferopol or found the Crimea on a map (many still can't) , have been lecturing the British public about Russian inquity and Ukrainian heroism.

 

But the Deputy Prime Minister, who derives his office from a free parliament with a legal opposition, has a duty to rise above this flood of drivel.

If he disagrees with Mr Farage, let him say why. Did the EU not intervene aggressively in Ukraine, knowing perfectly well that its intervention was unwelcome to Russia, and that Ukraine itself was strongly divided on the issue? Did the EU not know of the existence of parties and factions such as Pravy Sektor or Svoboda, not famous for their tolerance? When Ukraine's legitimate government rejected its association agreement, did the EU accept the position and gracefully withdraw? Not exactly.

 

Did its High Representative for Foreign Affairs not mingle with the anti-government mob, abandonding diplomatic discretion? She did.  Have EU leaders not raised false hopes that in some way EU association will raise Ukraine's standard of living (in the short term, it would almost certainly lower it, by destroying protected industries and agriculture, and the long-term is hard to see, given what has happened to other exonomic basket-cases which have been hurriedly included in the EU. Why, even the supposed 'success story' Poland has had to send hundreds of thousands of young men and women abroad to find work). And what about the deal under which President Yanukovich was supposed to remain in office for his elected term, a deal which collapsed almost as soon as it was made, a deal in which EU foreign ministers were involved as sponsors? Who broke it?   

 

Why is it either perverse or extreme to criticise this reckless diplomatic conduct? Many have died following these events, and some would say they died because of them. Some controversies may have only one side. This is not one of them,  and Mr Clegg should not act or speak as if it were.

 

 

 

Such, Such were the Joys

George Orwell once wrote an account of his years at an English Preparatory School ‘Such, Such Were The Joys’. It portrayed his prep school years as unremitting, squalor,  misery and cruelty  - a version which most people now accept was largely fictional, and certainly deeply misleading. It is also very amusing, and really ought to have been a novel. People have claimed that this school was the model for ‘1984’ , and I know that they mean. There was something more than slightly totalitarian about old-fashioned boys’ boarding schools.  

 

I think many members of the English middle class like to melodramatize their schooldays. From Tom Brown onwards it’s been a branch of English literature.  Even today, I’m always interested by those celebrities who say they were ‘expelled’ from their schools. Does anyone check these claims? I suspect that in most cases they’re not true, though the headmasters involved are probably too dead to confirm or deny . Actual expulsions are quite rare in fee-paying establishments, where the school is not terribly anxious to lose the income or attract the notice. Mutual agreements that this can’t go on any longer ( such as I reached with one of my schools) are rather more common. But expulsion makes the expellee into a sort of hero. And most of us like to cast ourselves as the heroes of our own lives. I can think of one or two recent memoirs form my generation which very much do this, turning (quite interesting) parents into minor and rather cardboard characters in the heroic life of the memoirist.

 

Could it be, I ask myself as I read these accounts, that this is all the wrong way round? That the real heroes and heroines of the story are not the narrator, but others?

 

So beware of these miseries. I was certainly not the hero of my own childhood, being pretty careful to avoid confrontation or trouble, in the certainty that he who kept his head down had the easiest time. Nor did I overpower gigantic bullies with my plucky little fists (though I had a good line in delayed and deadly revenge).   I must say I didn’t terribly like any of my boarding schools (I experienced three) , but I viewed them as necessary preliminaries to a satisfying life, and put up with the. In some important ways, I was right. I don’t think I could ever have attempted, let alone succeeded in, several of the most important tasks of my life if I hadn’t endured the early separation from home, and the resulting ability to endure moments of despair in the knowledge that they would pass. Also, a certain amount of minor physical privation – hard beds, chilly dormitories, generally Spartan conditions and a lot of supervision - teach you many useful things, including the fact that discomfort can actually be quite enjoyable, especially if you laugh at it. They also make you more adaptable in a crisis. One of the other things they teach you is the ability to find privacy in the most unlikely circumstances, and to retreat into the imagination when reality is unappealing. The old joke that boarding school veterans can cope quite well in prison is perhaps true, though I suspect the real problem in modern prisoners is the noise and the chaos, rather than the austere diet and the lack of freedom. There was a basic order in these places.

 

I’ve been driven to thinking about this by the news that one of my old schools, a long-established Devonshire institution, is to merge with a neighbouring (much larger) school. I wish the combined schools good fortune, but I can’t help thinking that something will be lost in the process, and that the place which did so much to shape me is about to fade away. I wonder if they’ll preserve the corridor in which departing leavers carved their initials and dates, and where mine are to be found not far from those of a former Foreign Secretary (his inscription is far bigger than anyone else’s. Did he know he was destined for high office?).  It’s the second experience I’ve had in the last two months (I’ll write about the other in the summer) in which a piece of my own life has been consigned to the absolute past. It becomes, in a strange way, unreachable and lost. In practice, this was so anyway, but I somehow managed to keep in my mind the idea that this piece of my life was still accessible, if I could only manage to catch the old Atlantic Coast Express one autumn morning.

 

Of course, the Atlantic Coast Express,  with its dark-green ‘Battle of Britain’ class  locomotives named after RAF squadrons, stopped running nearly half a century ago. And the rails on which it ran have been mostly torn up west of Exeter, or west of Okehampton anyway,  and the track is now choked with weeds and wildflowers. The old 1920s vintage black tin trunk, used by my father in his Naval years, with its vicious sharp corners, which I used to send ahead of me by a system known as ‘Passengers’ Luggage in Advance’, was long ago casually chucked away, one of those unnoticed moments of loss, too dented and scratched to be of any more use.  (There’s a description of this lost moment in every pre-Beeching boarding-school family’s life late each summer, when the trunks came out of the attic, were packed and were sent down to the station for PLA, in Elizabeth Taylor’s novel ‘In a Summer Season’, which I found oddly moving. (No, not that Elizabeth Taylor. The other one. I recommend her work) . It was the first sign of approaching autumn, a warning that the ease and indolence of the long summer holiday – and in those days they went on into the third week of September – were coming to an end).

 

 

 

This physical destruction of daily things, trains,  trunks, older calendars, symbolises rather well the changes which lie between me and then, the impossibility of communicating to any modern person the smells, sensations, sounds and sights of what was perfectly normal to me.  On a visit to South Africa in 1993, just as the old regime was vanishing, I was rooted to the spot when I arrived at Pretoria station from Johannesburg by suburban train (safe in those days) and heard the unmistakable sound of an ordinary, scheduled, steam-hauled passenger express leaving the station. This wasn’t some special trip on a preserved line, or a vintage run, surrounded by cocoons of organised nostalgia. This was the real, everyday thing. I was transported back several decades. I think if I hadn’t been immediately distracted by something else , a whole chestful of memories might have been revived.

 

What was it like? I had a go at describing some of it in my book ‘The Rage Against God’, where I tried to recapture the wet foggy cosiness of the winter term, the extraordinary ceremony of Remembrance Day and the unexpected pleasures of Christmas, or the pre-Christmas week, among strangers.

 

The day of transition from home to school could be tough . I always remember being allowed to call home from the Headmaster’s study an elegant, austere. Edwardian room with a tremendous view of river, woods and hills, usually not entered unless in dire trouble, my brother placing the call through the operator, the brief endearments, the click of the heavy receiver being replaced and my brother, who liked to dramatise things, saying glumly ‘Last link with the outside world’. Waking up the next morning in the hard bed and the chilly dormitory was always the worst bit. But I was too busy to be homesick for long.

 

 

The food was mostly awful (that is to say, I thought it was ; it was perfectly wholesome but unattractively presented and uninspiringly cooked, but adults of that era reckoned that plentiful food of any kind was a luxury, and were understandably baffled by fussiness ), and I contrived not to eat most of it (there were always others ready to help) , though the breakfasts, with plenty of fried bread and frequent kippers, were excellent, and I survived on them. There was semolina. There was gristle.  I think there were prunes, but not in the virulent, militant and aggressive form so wonderfully described in the Molesworth books of Ronald Searle and Geoffrey Willans, which are works of genius, funnier by far than Wodehouse,  for those of us who went to such places.

 

We were made to work in several different ways. We learned a lot.  The teachers, mostly male ex-servicemen, were figures of fear, not because they ever struck us or were otherwise cruel, though they would throw bits of chalk at our heads (with painful accuracy)  if we failed to pay attention, were ruthless about marking down bad work, and correcting mistakes. They always insisted that work set to be done in the evening was handed in on time, and always marked it swiftly. So itwas always done.  But their real power flowed from the awful authority of the headmaster who stood behind them. He was given to explosions of wrath (usually about people leaving their games clothes on the floor of the changing rooms, a thing he seemed unable to abide) which rumbled through the school buildings like man-made thunder, and could be detected from far away, and sniffed, like ozone, as one entered the building after a day away.

 

To us small boys these moments had the atmosphere of a purge in a totalitarian country with sudden, arbitrary unexpected summonses to the headmaster’s study, where beatings were reasonably rare, but certainly not unknown. And there would be collective punishments – no toast at Saturday teatime unless the culprit of some offence owned up, often accompanied by terrible, guilty silences Again, it is amazing how seriously we took all this. Something of the overanxious, intense atmosphere of such schools is described in the early pages of L.P. Hartley’ s remarkable book ‘The Go-Between’.

 

We also worked in other ways, formed into work gangs to sweep the floors, polish the doorknobs etc after breakfast – a few privileged boys had less demanding tasks , the checking of the rainfall gauge and thermometer in the Stevenson Screen, the checking and adjusting of the majestic barometer in the front  hall. At weekends we would clear fallen branches in the extensive woods, or pick stones from the newly-levelled fields which were constantly being converted into playing fields, collecting them I huge catering-sized jam tins. Over time, I learned how to avoid much of this, when to disappear and how to stay out of sight. Any sort of idleness or inactive time was regarded as sinful, another feature of totalitarian utopias. But surveillance was lax, and haphazard. It seldom occurred to anyone even to look into the library, a room I usually had to myself. And footsteps can be heard a long way off in uncarpeted wood-floored corridors.

 

There were compulsory sports. I wasn’t any good at them (except that I could run quite fast in rugby) , and learned early on that an old-fashioned leather football in the face (especially in wet weather) can spoil your whole day. But I learned to swim, and I could have learned to sail on our small lake if I had had the sense. There was also a fully-equipped darkroom, where the camera club learned to develop film, enlarge and print in the strange glow of a red light-bulb, skills now wholly useless. My love of, and interest in architecture was learned from the headmaster, who would give special classes on the subject in the evenings. The place was to some extent domesticated by the presence of his dog, a large and rather grumpy golden retriever called Winston.

 

Occasionally (nothing like often enough) we were read to. Sometimes there were lectures or recitals by celebrities – Peter Twiss, the first man to fly at over 1,000 mph, came to visit. So did Leon Goossens, the great oboist. There were occasional film shows, often the headmaster’s own films, but almost no television –  except for Winston Churchill’s funeral in January 1965, when the headmaster’s private set was brought downstairs and placed on a high shelf in one of the dining rooms. We had daily prayers, with hymns and lessons from the Bible (I know dozens of hymns thanks to this daily exposure). These were enlivened by what for many years I wrongly imagined was a roll-call, in which we answered ‘yes’ in piping voices to our names. It was only much later that I discovered that we were being asked if we had been to the lavatory, an inquiry I thought then and think now was improperly intrusive. This was revealed to me when a boy called…oh, I had better not say, even now, though as it happens his is one of the few names of my schoolfellows I can still recall with complete certainty, anyway, he said, in a voice of strangled gloom ‘No!’ , and (after a storm of laughter)  was hurried away to be dosed with Syrup of Figs by our terrifying matron, whom we all thought must be called ‘Gertrude’, though in fact I later learned that she had another, quite different Christian name, which didn’t suit her nearly so well. Did she know we called her ‘Gertrude’? As in all totalitarian societies, it is impossible to know how much the rulers knew of what the ruled really thought of them.

 

How did we put up with the shared bathwater and the dormitories named after Great Seadogs,  with their hard beds and windows open in all weathers.? Well, we did. It seemed normal.  

 

There was also an elaborate Sunday service which must have been conducted according to the Book of Common Prayer, though I wasn’t then aware of it. Each of us was given a threepenny bit from small pocket-money accounts, which we would put in the collection, for some good cause. And on Saturday afternoons we were allowed to stuff ourselves with toffee (does anyone else remember Palm Toffee Bars and other tooth-wrecking comestibles now vanished) , provided we also bought some fresh fruit.

 

It also helped that the place was a physical paradise. The core of the school was a jewel of an 18th-century gentleman’s house, built on a west-facing hilltop so that it shuddered in the Atlantic gales, but also commanded marvellous views deep into the ‘old brown hills’ of Cornwall, and down into the charming little town into which we rarely ventured. At the back, though much messed about by extensions, was a beautiful stable block, with clock-tower,  kennels and mounting block, coach house and stalls. Behind them lay another semicircle of workshops and store-rooms from the old estate. Behind that a high beechwood sheltered us from any east winds that blew down across Dartmoor, whose mysterious Tors and bogs, full of adventure and beauty, began almost immediately after the back drive ended. A small but lively river marked our northern boundary, the sort of river where the water has run off a peaty moor and is the colour of tea, and chatters over large mossy stones and there was a spot where you could watch the salmon (I think they were salmon) leaping upstream, using a specially constructed ‘ladder’. We were taken for adventurous expeditions on the moors, or in thhe Headmaster's ancient yawl (or was she a ketch?) up the Tamar or out into Plymouth Sound, then still crowded with men of war.  

 

There were the enthusiastic young temporary masters, not much older than us, fair and with a ruddy countenance withal, with varsity scarves and optimistic manners, a bit like sporting heroes from Frank Richards books.  One of them,  famously, had driven a great black Rolls-Royce funeral car all the way to Moscow. There was  the retired army sergeant (at least, we always assumed he was )  with the thick Devon accent and the withering reproofs, who chivvied us mercilessly through PT on frozen mornings (what would today be called ‘PE’, but for us and for him it was definitely ‘training’) taught us how to shoot straight in an old attic, , and then instructed us in the joys of carpentry.

 

The whole thing was, like so much of my childhood, a window into the past. I often compare it to that strange feeling you have if you find yourself  (as I did a few months ago in New Zealand) on a train where you can look out of the window at the back, watching the landscape fly away backwards and the rails lengthen out behind you towards a horizon that was the here and now only a few minutes before. UI may not have known  was seeing the past disappearing, but I suspect I did. My non-electronic, cane-haunted, hard-learning, sexually innocent schooldays , whose textbooks were often 30 or 40 years old, and whose teachers had grown up in the days when Stanley Baldwin vied with Ramsay Macdonald and telephones were a novelty, had far more in common with the schooldays of a 1930s English boy than they do with those of any British child today. We read and learned scripture.  We knew the names of the English counties and  the names of the great battles of the British empire, and we knew which tree was which. We were at one with the English landscape. The objects we used tended to be made of wood, leather and brass rather than plastic and chrome. Things were heavier, used, older, harder. Also people.

 

I refuse to complain about it. I have benefited from it in a lot of ways.   I didn’t wholly enjoy it, but I enjoyed a lot of it (certainly far more than I enjoyed my subsequent two years a public school) and was encouraged and given huge opportunities .

 

I have yet to recover from the shock I encountered when, after being nurtured in this rough but safe place, I was pitched, aged 13 into the middle of the 1960s. When people ask how I became a revolutionary Marxist, the best explanation I can ever come up with
is that the gap between the world I had been brought up for, and the one that actually existed, was the source of such an enormous disillusion that I needed a new home for the passionate disappointed patriotism and faith with which I had been brought up.

 

I’ve been back once or twice. The place is much, much nicer than it was when I was there, as well it might be or modern parents would never send their young there. But it cannot be as much of an adventure as I had. Am I glad it’s all gone?  Sort of. Am I sorry it’s all gone? Not really? Am I glad I was born early enough to see it before it departed? Very.