Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 242

In between the Crisis and the Catastrophe - Please Read This

We are currently clattering along the top of the rollercoaster of confrontation, with our silly sanctions against Russia for simply protecting its own interests. What moral basis we have for this action I do not know. We are the bombers of Belgrade, the invaders of Iraq and Afghanistan, the unprotesting allies of Turkey, which still holds territory in Cyprus it seized by force 40 years ago, and whose current regime holds show trials and shoots its own people.  

 

We could still grow up and stop this getting worse.  But we are now at that misleading moment when all appears calm and smooth, before we take the first wild plunge, and the sheer exhilaration of action and reaction takes our breath, and our sense, away.

 

Well, in the interval between the crisis and the catastrophe, let us at least think.

 

I would recommend to you an excellent article on Russia and the ‘West’ by Angus Roxburgh in this week’s ‘New Statesman’, but most of it is not readily available.

 

Instead, I would urge you to read a superb, prophetic and wise article on the problem of Russia and Western Europe, written in 1997 by Sir Rodric Braithwaite, once our Ambassador in Moscow, later a valued senior civil servant and now the author of (among other books) ‘Afgantsy’, a study of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

 

You may read it here. ‘Prospect’ magazine have very kindly brought it out from behind their paywall so that you can. Please repay this favour by studying this rare piece of properly-informed, intelligent consideration :

 

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/bringingrussiain/#.Uywmuqh_t8F

 

 

 

 

 

 

Calling Things by their Proper Names

Time for a quotation from Confucius (Or K’ung Fu-tzu, in the sensible old Wade-Giles transcription),  (Book 13, Chapter 3) ‘If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be conducted successfully. When affairs cannot be conducted successfully, propriety will not flourish. When propriety does not flourish, punishments will not be properly meted out. When punishments are not properly meted out, the people will not know how to conduct themselves.’

 

This early Orwellian statement, predating the Sage of Wallington by 2,500 years, has seldom been more applicable. I’m not sure if Orwell would have been so interested in the punishment issues, but there is no doubt that failing to call things by their proper names is the beginning of stupidity. 

 

And we don’t call them by their proper names. Look at the recent announcement about ‘Child Care’ , in which ‘the government’ was said to be going to pay future so-called ‘parents’ up to £2,000 a year for something called ‘Childcare’ (or (‘Chowdcare’ as it is more generally pronounced in the public-sector classes).

 

Of course the claim is almost entirely false. The government has no money. It will have to tax you and me to find this money. Nor is it certain to pay it, as it will have left office, probably forever, by the time the plan is due to be implemented. Then there are these ‘parents’. The word, I was always told, derived from the Latin ‘pareo’ meaning ‘I obey’, on the assumption that the parents are those who are obeyed by their offspring, and the offspring obey their parents.   

 

As this relation of authority and obedience has been abolished in law, and cannot be enforced by the alleged parents, whose former power of discipline is now increasingly classified as ‘abuse',  these people are not parents in any case little more than related adults. As they are not required by custom or law to be in any kind of stable or permanent relationship, they aren’t necessarily even related.

 

And then again, since both of them  have been compelled by custom and need to work away from the home, during their children’s waking hours, and further compelled by custom and law to hand them over in later life to supposed 'schools' (no time to discuss this remarkable word here); and as those 'schools' (and the 'universities' to which they lead) follow the desires and aims of the state rather than of the ‘parents’, the supposedly ‘parental’ relationship is pretty much vestigial.

 

As for ‘Chowdcare’, all observant people have shuddered with horror for years at the suggestion that anyone they loved might fall into the ‘care’ of the modern state, and ‘caring’ has become, for the informed, a synonym for ‘hypocritical’. Few mothers are so hopeless that a paid stranger will ever care more than they do for their own small child.

 

And this subsidy, by which we are taxed so that we can pay strangers to mind our offspring during the formative hours of their lives, has yet another significance. For, while it is available to couples with a joint income of up to £300,000 a year,  it is absolutely refused to those households (be they never so poor)  in which one parent remains defiantly at home, 'chained to the kitchen sink'. And I am fairly sure that it is also refused to two-wageslave households who receive childminding help from grandparents or other close relatives. You can have the subsidy as long as both parents abandon their children, and as long as the minders are not relatives.

 

I think this is fairly obvious, don’t you? Once all its elements have been properly described,  it is clearly an incitement to disaffection, a bribe of our own money, offered to us in return for following the repellent and greedy opinion that wageslavery is more important than nurture of the next generation, that motherhood is a contemptible waste of a woman’s talents - all the crazed anti-family Bolshevism that poured from the pens and mouths of the wildest leftist revolutionaries in the 1960s, and is – 50 years later – the settled policy of the Conservative and Unionist Party.

 

And still the Left moan that they have been beaten, sidelined and betrayed. Are they too stupid to see that they have won, or too clever to admit that they are winning, while there is still any work left to do? 

   

An Evening with Anthony Wedgwood Benn, now long ago

One or two people have asked me for my thoughts on the recent death of Antony Wedgwood Benn, or Tony Benn as he became later in his life. Mr Benn and I had some friendly dealings a few years ago, when we found ourselves on the same side against the attacks on English liberty then being made by the Labour government.  I still think he was more or less clueless about left-wing tyrannies abroad, but his Puritan, utterly English heritage made him bridle angrily at anyone, from the EU to Anthony Blair, who menaced Parliament or the ancient liberties of Magna Carta. That, and his obvious devotion to his beloved wife and family, were enormously endearing.

 

After a conversation on the subject, he asked me for a copy of my book ‘The Abolition of Liberty’, which I delivered to his house in Holland Park by an ingenious contraption (he loved contraptions). As I recall, he responded with a courteous note, though I haven't kept it.

 

Some time before that (in March 2002)  I’d attended one of the successful one-man shows  he was then giving all over the country , and wrote the account below for the Mail on Sunday , which I still think is a fair summary of my attitude towards him :

 

Roll up, roll up! For £10, your only chance to see an honest politician - even if, like me, you disagree with every word he says

By PETER HITCHENS

 

Peter Hitchens sees Tony Benn's one-man show in Telford and watches Labour's old warhorse charm a middle-class audience:

 

‘Although we live in a country where most of us would not go to a political meeting if you paid us, thousands of people are handing over good money to spend hours listening to a politician talk. Tickets for an evening with Tony Benn sell for as much as £16, and many in his audiences would pay more if they had to. Once a fortnight, somewhere in England, he climbs on to a stage with a Thermos of tea beside him, and is himself. He says that if he had known what fun it was to be 77, he would have done it years ago.

 

In Telford last week Mr Benn drew a capacity crowd of 650 to a show lacking sex appeal, bad language or nakedness.

 

There were a few goodish jokes and a few very old ones, but mostly there was serious discourse about the state and fate of the country. For more than two hours, with a break for ice cream, he held them all. Quite a few people would have stayed longer if they could.

 

In the interval they queued to speak to him, to get their books autographed or just to shake his hand. As one middle-aged lady said, it was bit like waiting to see Santa Claus. When you got to the end of the line, there was this kindly old gent in a baggy cardigan, smoking a pipe and dispensing wisdom in that wonderful, gone-forever favourite uncle's voice that sounds as if it is coming out of an old wireless.

 

Trying to explain his drawing power, he mused: 'They know I'm not trying to get them to vote for me, so they don't mistrust me.' But there is more to it than that.

 

Benn is, of course, a star. Lots of his audience still remember him under his old name of Anthony Wedgwood Benn, the man who began the ruin of the hereditary peerage by refusing to inherit his title.

 

He rejoices in his subversive role, saying: 'I do hope my phone is still tapped. It's my last remaining link with the British Establishment.' Others perhaps recall his middle period, when he still hoped to be prime minister and sat boyishly among the podgy old machine men in Harold Wilson's Cabinets.

 

Some are aware that this man met Gandhi and Ramsay Macdonald, and belongs to a great English tradition of radicalism stretching back as far as the Peasants' Revolt.

 

And everybody knows about Tony Benn, the reinvented ultra-Left wild man of the Eighties, ambition almost gone, raging on the further shores of Labour until, defeated in the contest for the party deputy leadership, he became at last what he had always been destined to be, a sage on a mountaintop, old enough to know the meaning of life and free of all desire to be prime minister.

 

Lucky for him and, I have to say, lucky for us.

 

His past fierceness is now clothed in charm. It is impossible to dislike this version of Mr Benn. He learned courtesy in a vanished world that valued manners. He has kept the Christian simplicity of the 18-year-old trainee pilot who wrote in his diary in 1943: 'I consider my death in the RAF as very possible . . . I shall be terrified most of the time but the conquest of cowardice is a personal struggle and I can say that it will never be my policy to be a coward.' Seeing him now, it is still easy to imagine the young pilot, shocked by his comrades' drunkenness into lifelong abstinence, desolated by his brother's death in action.

 

Benn has not aged. His hair may be white and the skull starting to show beneath the skin, but he still has the mannerisms of a young man, sometimes even of a small boy, the old-fashioned sort of English small boy with his pocket full of conkers and scabs on his knees.

 

And he is childishly frank. When someone asked him about smoking, he replied: 'I'm sorry I smoke.

 

‘If I had any courage I would suck my thumb because it would give me just as much pleasure.' It is the frankness and the honesty that do the trick. There is a hole at the centre of British public life, a deserted place where political figures used to speak to us as if we were their equals rather than as an electronic mob to be soothed and tricked. They made speeches with arguments in them, rather than raving about the Internet. They expected opponents to be present in the hall and were happy to deal with them. Mr Benn fills that hole and occupies that space. Even his harshest foes can take pleasure from asking a question and getting a straight answer to it.

 

For instance, I asked him teasingly if he had ever been wrong. Oh yes, he said, and proceeded to list several of his mistakes. They weren't the ones I'd have picked, but you could see they were the ones that worried him most.

 

But on one thing he was emphatic: 'I am not ashamed of having been wrong. I would only be ashamed of saying something that I did not believe.' He remains absurdly optimistic.

 

When asked if people weren't too apathetic about politics, he said: 'I think a lot of people believe the Government is apathetic about them.' At the end of his speech, he said: 'Sometimes I am very gloomy but sometimes I am so excited that I am not sure it is good for someone of my age to be so excited.' There was a catch in his voice as he said it, very near to tears, not false at all.

 

There is still a hint of his old belief that somewhere out there is a socialist majority waiting for a Labour Party radical enough for them. Trying to explain the multitudes who come to hear him, he said: 'For the first time in my life the public are to the left of a Labour government.' But if he had looked more carefully at his audiences he would not have been so sure. They are not rallies of the Left. Nor are they visitors to a freak show. And, while there were Labour and union people there, speaking the instantly recognisable jargon of their movement, most of his audience were neither Left nor Right, but thoughtful, worried citizens puzzled by what is happening to their country and anxious for intelligent debate about it.

 

The only people missing were the young. Few in the audience can have been under 35, if any. An invisible barrier has come down between the generations, so that those now reaching maturity simply do not know what Tony Benn is talking about or why he bothers to say it. The very language he uses and the voice he speaks with are alien to them. He is not a 'modern man' in the way Tony Blair is. He dates from the times before colour TV, before TV at all in fact, and long before rock music. He smokes a pipe. If you gave him an electric guitar he would not know which way up to hold it.

 

But inside the theatre none of that matters.

 

His audience, like him, come from before the flood that swept British culture away and replaced it with game-shows, so millions now care more about who gets thrown out of the Big Brother house than who joins the euro.

 

Mr Benn has no credibility on the glum streets outside, where teenagers lope about in baseball caps and there is that strange mixture of affluence and squalor which you find everywhere in Britain nowadays. CCTV cameras monitor everyone. The raucous pubs sell expensive drinks to young people in costly clothes.

 

Nobody out here has heard of Tony Benn or knows what he stands for, and if this is the new world he has hoped for all his life, I should be very much surprised.

 

Yet he has helped to make it. The people who care about Mr Benn are the products of the world he did so much to destroy. They went to the grammar schools he has fought to abolish. They grew up in a society of hierarchy, manners, discipline and respect. But Mr Benn worked with all his might to sweep such things away, starting by renouncing his own title.

 

Really, he is the second Viscount Stansgate, and in his final years in Parliament he would have been far more in his element among the more awkward members of the House of Lords than with the mechanised pawns of the House of Commons.

 

But he boiled with indignation at having to take an oath of loyalty to the Queen when he first became a Minister. He was an early spin doctor, masterminding broadcasts by Hugh Gaitskell and secretly writing Harold Wilson's speeches. He even helped to come up with the slogan 'New Britain' back in 1964. And he may laugh about consultants and experts now, but a consulting firm was brought in to the Post Office when he was in charge of it.

 

The world we live in is the one designed and built by the Labour government of 1964 to 1970 which Mr Benn served so loyally. Votes at 18, BBC Radio One, the permissive society, the comprehensive schools, the end of deference - all came on his watch and mostly with his enthusiastic personal support. The generations which have grown up since actually prefer their politicians to be like Bob Geldof or Mick Jagger. They are happy to be fed their politics in bite-sized, fast-food helpings.

 

So in a sense, the Tony Benn roadshow is a farewell tour. Not farewell to him, who looks as if he may be with us for many years, and let us fervently hope so, because they do not make them like that any more. But farewell to another country, a nostalgic opportunity for Middle England to say goodbye to the civilised place we used to be, before Tony Benn helped to ruin it.' 

Why Don't we Want Democracy and Self-determination for Crimea?

I have spent much of the weekend wheezing with helpless mirth at the efforts of members of my trade to disapprove of two things they’ve spent their lives applauding – democracy and self-determination. They have to do this because on this occasion they operate in favour of Russia, a country on which we must all (for some reason) look down with cold sneers on our faces.

 

As someone who has questions about both democracy and self-determination (and is frowned on for being so incorrect), I've found it particularly enjoyable.

 

Actually, I have no doubt that the majority of Crimeans want to be in Russia and that the vote on Sunday expresses the majority will, if that counts for anything.  I found this sentiment strong during my visit to Sevastopol a few years ago (), and it makes sense to me.

 

Crimeans are mostly Russians.  Sevastopol is in any case a sort of Russian Cheltenham, full of super-patriotic conservative retired officers.  In purely economic terms, everyone in Ukraine would now be much better off if they had stayed in Russia in 1991, rather than launching off into the bankrupt chaos they have experienced ever since independence. I remember taking a  family holiday in Foros, on the Crimean coast round the corner from Mikhail Gorbachev’s famous seaside palace, , when I lived in Moscow in 1992, and being astonished by the request of the hotel manager that we should bring as many roubles as possible. The hotel had until recently been a ‘sanatorium’ (you had to pretend to be ill to go on vacation in the old USSR) belonging to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, and still had crude computer games which invited you to sink NATO submarines. The Ukrainian currency of the time was so worthless that the rouble was considered a hard currency. That was how bad it was. Ukraine’s barely-viable economy has suffered hugely from being cut off from its Russian hinterland, and it has also missed out on the oil and gas boom which keeps Vladimir Putin in power.

 

As for the Krim (Crimea) Tatars, whose plight so many reporters have suddenly discovered, it was Moscow, not Kiev,  that allowed them to return from their cruel Stalinist exile in the mid-1980s. You’d think from the way their plight was reported that the Gorbachev regime had expelled them. No, it was Stalin, in 1944. Mikhail Gorbachev let them come back. There’s no logical reason why they should expect Ukraine to treat them any better than Russia would. Has Ukraine been especially good to them? I’ve never heard so, nor can I see why it should be. My experience of Russians and Ukrainians in the 1990s was that they were still, in general, pretty racially prejudiced by British standards, especially against the old USSR’s Muslim and Caucasus minorities. This prejudice was not confined to the ill-educated, but was common among urban sophisticates. Has this changed?

 

If there are no problems with democracy, what is the objection to this vote? That it is in some way rigged? Well, no doubt the circumstances aren’t ideal(I’ll come to that) But even so, is the result falsified? The USA is pretty relaxed on occasion when dubious ballots take place. The Kazakh government, which shoots its own people in the back and has been caught openly stuffing ballot boxes, still gets allowed to meet senior US officials and is on the list of acceptable countries. The thuggish hereditary regime in Azerbaijan was once praised for ‘performing strongly at the polls’ by a US Deputy  Secretary of State Richard Armitage. This was in  October 2003 . Mr Armitage, congratulated young Ilham Aliyev (son of the country’s former dictator, and one-time KGB chief Gaidar Aliyev)on his ‘strong performance at the polls’, which is one way of putting it.  Ilham had 'won' a presidential election, shamelessly rigged from start to finish, during which at least one man died when police responded with boots and clubs to opposition protests. The following year the ‘strongly-performing’ Ilham was invited to attend a NATO summit. He managed to get himself photographed in the company of a smiling George W. Bush and an even more smiling Anthony Blair. Democracy can be difficult, and even flexible.  especially when it involves your friends, not to mention oil and gas. When it involves your enemies, you can get all superior and principled about it.

 

Anyway, we’ve discussed this difficulty elsewhere. All I’m saying is that the lovers of democracy have a bit of a problem denying that Crimeans want to be Russian. But back to self-determination. This was pretty much a principle of the United Nations during the decolonisation frenzy of the 1950s. I well recall my fellow leftists proclaiming that it was better for African countries to govern themselves badly than for them to be better-governed by colonial overlords. I wasn’t convinced by that then, and I’m not now. But it’s what we said we wanted, which is why I never join in the modish, easy attacks against Robert Mugabe, who sits in Harare entirely thanks to the settled will of the ‘West’, and particularly of Margaret Thatcher.  

 

The matter only grew complicated when anomalies began to crop up. The UN liberators believed (for instance) that the Falkland islands were an oppressive colony, which should be liberated from the British Empire and further liberated by being given to Argentina. A similar view was taken of Gibraltar, which was supposed to be liberated by being handed over to Spain.

 

This was obviously false.  How could people be ‘liberated’ by being handed over to rulers they expressly did not want? When British forces recovered the Falklands from Argentina, they declared that the islands had not been restored ‘to the government desired by their inhabitants’( a truth later confirmed by a referendum). Gibraltar’s people, likewise, voted emphatically to remain British. I imagine you can find people in Madrid and Buenos Aires who will say that both these votes are illegitimate, that the pro-Argentine or pro-Spanish side didn’t have a chance, that the occupation of both territories by British armed forces, and their subjection to biased pro-British media,  invalidates the results. Perhaps they have a case(I’m not sympathetic to it) , but does anyone really doubt that the majority will of the inhabitants was expressed in these votes. Of course not?

 

Then there’s the problem that the opportunity to *hold* a vote at all is only granted very selectively. I can’t see France,  Spain, Italy or Germany looking kindly on attempts to hold votes for independence in some of their regions, let alone Belgium, which would split in two in ten seconds if it were allowed to.  And the results of such votes are not always honoured, even by supposedly nice civilised people.

 

One of the most historically interesting of these votes is the Upper Silesia Plebiscite of 20th March 1921, whose 93rd anniversary is fast approaching, and which most people have never even heard of.  The area was full of valuable coal and industry. Both Germany and Poland were keen on getting hold of it. Under the supposed principle of self-determination of peoples, endorsed by Woodrow Wilson and Versailles, the matter should have been simple. But it wasn’t.

 

The vote, under international supervision but accompanied by some pretty nasty intimidation on both Polish and German sides, was duly held. Whoops! 717,122 people voted to join Germany; 483,514 voted to join Poland. This meant that quite a few Poles had voted to join Germany.

 

It was the wrong answer. After some more violence, and a renewed Allied occupation, the question was ‘settled’ by the League of Nations Council, which awarded the key industrial zones to Poland.

 

More recently, we have the Kosovo independence referendum of 1991, long before NATO’s military intervention on the side of the Kosovo Liberation Army. In that vote 99% voted for independence, on a turnout of 87% . Local Serbs boycotted it, much as Ukrainian speakers boycotted the Crimea vote last weekend.  Here the problem was that the result was premature. Albania alone recognised it. But in 2008  the vote at last bore fruit in the Kosovo declaration of independence,  declared lawful by the International Court of Justice and recognised by 108 countries including the Ukay, the USA, Germany and Saudi Arabia. Russia has emphatically not recognised it. Ukraine, interestingly,  took a neutral position under liberal heroine Yulia Timoshenko, but grew more hostile under the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych. A lucky escape, I tend to think. If the supposed ‘pro-western’ oligarchs had ruled Ukraine a little longer they might have sucked up to the USA and the EU by recognising Kosovar independence. And then they would have set a precedent for the Crimea.  

 

Other curious and ambiguous moments in modern history include the Turkish seizure of North Cyprus in 1974. I’ve always been sympathetic to this action, a reasonable response to a shameful and stupid Greek nationalist putsch in Nicosia, though I am disgusted by the ethnic cleansing and communal violence which followed. Who was to blame for them, though? The Turks, or the moronic Greek putschists who really ought to have known they were playing with fire?

 

Everyone condemned Turkey, and North Cyprus remains a hopeless anomaly, but I can’t say that Turkey was thrown out of the comity of civilised nations for  using military force to snatch a piece of someone else’s sovereign territory. Turkey has remained a member of NATO and a welcome ally of the ‘West’ ever since. How much of a part Cyprus has played in keeping Turkey out of the EU is hard to say. It certainly hasn’t prevented serious negotiations.

 

Then there’s our own Northern Irish problem. The referendum in which Northern Irish Protestants were browbeaten ( and in my view consciously misled)  into voting for the 1998 Belfast Agreement was manifestly unfair. There was no attempt to ensure that the vote was conducted fairly. The whole thing took place under the unstated but undoubted threat of more IRA murder if it was rejected. I doubt very much if any fair observer could honestly claim that press or media were remotely balanced. I still treasure the memory of U2’s Belfast concert at the height of the campaign, and the Blair Creature’s handwritten promise that no prisoners would be released unless violence was ‘given up for good’, plus the hilarious pledge that ‘those who use or threaten violence’ would be ‘excluded from government’.

 

And yet, at the heart of this agreement lies a mechanism for transferring Northern Ireland from British to Irish sovereignty, following a second referendum which can be called at any time, and can repeated every seven years until it comes up with the right answer (after which there won’t be any more).

 

This was undoubtedly achieved under huge duress, both from IRA violence and from the White House, which sanitised Sinn Fein and compelled the British government to open negotiations with that body. The US administration (famous for its enthusiastic 'War on Terror') has since maintained warm relations with Sinn Fein.  I believe Martin McGuiness was at the White House last Friday (in an early St Patrick’s Day celebration) to meet Vice-President Joe Biden. Whose hands are wholly clean? Whose principles are wholly unsullied? Who hasn't contradicted himself?  And if we’re not acting on principle, what is the basis of our objection here? Why do we so want to make an enemy out of Moscow? We are on the verge of succeeding. Do we really desire what will then happen? 

Does Owen Jones really think the BBC leans to the Right?

Owen Jones, now writing for ‘The Guardian’, has made a daft claim about the BBC. He writes here http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/17/bbc-leftwing-bias-non-existent-myth that the belief that the BBC is biased to the left is a fairy tale which apparently allows ‘the right’ to police the corporation.

 

Well, first, let me go through a number of horse’s-mouth sources which directly contradict him:

 

 

Mark Thompson  (Then BBC director general) wrote in 2010 in the New Statesman that the BBC had suffered a ‘massive bias to the left’ (though this had only been in the past, he added).  I’d been having a number of impromptu conversations with him about that time, as we often shared the same train, in one of which he found it hard to answer my point that the BBC lacked presenters who would be prepared to give a really hard time to Clive Stafford Smith, the noted campaigner against the death penalty.

 

Roger Mosey, another senior BBC executive, wrote later in The Times that he broadly agreed with Mr Thompson.

 

Andrew Marr (who when I first met him was a left-wing columnist on the then ‘Daily Express’, who once devoted most of his column to attacking my opposition to Euro membership) famously described the Corporation  (at one of its own seminars) as ‘a publicly-funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people, compared with the population at large’. All this, he said, ‘creates an innate liberal bias inside the BBC’.

 

John Humphrys  wrote recently in the Radio Times ‘The BBC has tended over the years to be broadly liberal as opposed to broadly conservative for all sorts of perfectly understandable reasons…The sort of people we’ve recruited – the best and brightest – tended to come from universities and backgrounds where they’re more likely to hold broadly liberal views than conservative.’

 

I’d add these enjoyable vignettes. The reporter Jonathan Charles reminisced (on the BBC) on the launch of the Euro ‘Even now I can remember the great air of excitement. It did seem like the start of a new era .  .  . for a few brief days I suppose I and everyone else suspended their scepticism and all got caught up in that euphoria.’ And environmental analyst Roger Harrabin once conceded (hilariously)   ‘I’ve never considered myself a climate-change sceptic.’   There’s much more on the subject in Robin Aitken’s interesting book ‘Can we trust the BBC’. Robin (who now runs the Oxford food bank) was a distinguished reporter on the BBC, and describes its innate, semi-conscious bias from the inside.

 

Owen Jones, I might add, suffers from a problem common in the BBC, He mistakes party-political bias for cultural and moral bias. These are quite distinct, and have been for many years, they are even more distinct since the Tory Party was almost entirely purged of moral and social conservatives – it’s now impossible to imagine such figures as the late Baroness (Janet) Young being Tory cabinet ministers. Making this mistake is like taking Michael Howard at his propaganda valuation, as a sinister right-winger – when in fact on most issues he’s way to the left. Mr Jones needs to learn this important distinction.

 

Take this passage from his article: ‘The truth is the BBC is stacked full of rightwingers. The chairman of the BBC Trust is Chris Patten, a former Conservative cabinet minister. The BBC's political editor, Nick Robinson, was once chairman of the Young Conservatives. His former senior political producer, Thea Rogers, became George Osborne's special advisor in 2012. Andrew Neil, the presenter of the BBC's flagship political programmes Daily Politics and This Week, is chairman of the conservative Spectator magazine. His editor is Robbie Gibb, former chief of staff to the Tory Francis Maude. After the BBC's economics editor Stephanie Flanders left for a £400,000-a-year job at that notorious leftwing hotbed, JP Morgan, she was replaced by its business editor Robert Peston. His position was taken by Kamal Ahmed from the rightwing Sunday Telegraph, a journalist damned by the Guardian's Nick Davies for spinning government propaganda in the run-up to the Iraq war.’

 

Lord Patten was, it is true, a member of the Conservative Party. But I do not think anyone who has studied his speeches and actions in his long years in politics would view him as a conservative on moral and social matters, the EU, immigration or any of the other touchstone issues. Does Mr Jones really not know that? If he doesn’t know it, he needs to learn. If he does know it, he’s not arguing seriously or responsibly. Nick Robinson’s student Toryism  was, I strongly suspect, of the liberal kind. This used to be reasonably common once upon a time. A recent chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, John Scarlett ( Alastair Campbell’s ‘mate’ ) was also an undergraduate Tory, as we know because at the time he wrote a letter to ‘The Times’, describing himself as a ‘a Conservative’ and criticising police treatment of demonstrators on an anti-Vietnam War protest in Grosvenor Square in March 1968.  I suspect one could work for years for Francis Maude and for George Osborne without hearing or harbouring, let alone displaying, a single socially or morally conservative opinion. It is perfectly possible these days that J.P.Morgan might be a left-wing hotbed. It has been many years since anyone has imagined that wealth or banking were any bar to holding radical opinions. Hasn’t Mr Jones ever met a leftist businessman or banker? Hasn’t he heard of neo-conservatives, liberal on economics and social matters, in favour of mass immigration and often keen on liberal wars? It would appear not. If he gets in touch, I will tell him all about them.

 

Oh, and while it’s true I’m not generally described as a ‘firebrand’, alas, it is unusual for me to be introduced on panel programmes (though I am these things) as an author, or as a widely-travelled foreign correspondent, or even as an anti-war protestor, as I seem to be so often nowadays. It’s unusual for me *not* to be described wearisomely as a former Trotskyist (very former – a Trotskyist is something I haven’t been now for 39 of my 62 years on earth) . On briefer appearances I’m usually identified by reference to my newspaper (at my request, as it swiftly explains who and what I am to most viewers or listeners).  One thing for certain, my occasional appearance on the BBC does not cancel out its vast general bias. Glad as I am that some BBC staff try to uphold the Corporation’s charter duties, an occasional presenter’s slot on Radio 4, or an outnumbered panel appearance surrounded by liberals, doesn’t in any way alter the truth of my contention.

 

Crimea versus Hong Kong - two contrasting transfers of sovereignty

Pondering the curious pseudo-moral outrage over the plan to transfer the Crimea from Ukraine to Russia, very much in accordance with the wishes of most of its people, I have been looking for various parallels and exemplars of such transfers, and mentioned some of them in a previous posting.

 

But the most striking contrast is surely between the Russian desire to transfer Crimeans from the rule of Kiev to the rule of Moscow (endorsed by most Crimeans), and the British transfer of millions of Hong Kong Chinese, from the British Crown to the People's Republic of China (reluctantly but impotently accepted by the Hong Kong people) .

Perfectly reasonably, in my view, the British government was very careful to ensure that no strong democratic institutions ever developed in Hong Kong (although it had a very free press and the rule of law, the things which above all distinguished it from the People's Republic, and it still to some extent continues to do so, though not indefinitely) . The idea that Hong Kong's population might have a say in their destiny was never even seriously discussed, as far as I recall.

 

How could it have been? An honest estimate of the political and diplomatic balance at the time would have led any sensible person to conclude that Britain had to transfer sovereignty. We had no real choice.  A similar assessment ( it seems to me) would tell any intelligent person that Ukraine's existence as a sovereign nation (at least in its current shape) cannot long be sustained, and it will have to fall either under Russian or EU influence, or perhaps (like Sudan?) be divided into more than one country. What's more, it cannot be brought under EU influence without offering a dangerous and provocative challenge to Moscow. And Moscow, under all the normal rules of power and diplomacy, could reasonably be expected to defend its interests against any such manoeuvre.

For Britain to have pretended to the people of Hong Kong that they had any serious chance of influencing the outcome of the negotiations over the colony's handover would have been profoundly dishonest, and very dangerous. What if Hong Kong had voted overwhelmingly for continued links with Britain or for independent status? The end could only have been tragedy, as Britain had no power to grant any such thing.

Do we have the power (or the will) to grant sovereign independence to Ukraine? Would such a goal be worth the risks it entails? If not, what are we playing at? And if we could, without many qualms, hand over millions of people to one of the world's most rigid and corrupt despotisms, what is our moral standing in such matters anyway? 

Why our grandchildren will say we were as evil as slave-owners

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

If I thought the money would go to the right  people, I would be all  in favour of paying huge piles of cash to the descendants of slaves.

I am only against it because we all know that such compensation sticks to the fingers of lawyers and politicians.

The more I know about this terrible thing, the more worried I am that so much of our wealth and safety were based upon it.

The fact that we did not allow slavery on our own soil, and that in the end we abolished the trade, does not wash this away.

Abraham Lincoln wondered, soon before he died, if his country’s gruesome Civil  War might have been God’s punishment for what he termed ‘wringing their bread from the sweat of other  men’s faces’.

Lincoln, being a revered historical figure rather than a UKIP councillor, can get away with this sort of thing, and his words are inscribed in stone in Washington DC to this day.

Do we perhaps pay for it ourselves in various ways? I wouldn’t know. But  I think we should  be careful before dismissing calls for compensation as just another politically correct campaign.

The point about slavery is not the one made in the rather strange film 12 Years A Slave, which lingers over whippings and other cruelties, and portrays slave-owners and slave-drivers mostly as homicidal, sexually repressed maniacs or religious hypocrites.

The film says too little  about slavery’s single worst legacy: the casual destruction of families and the tearing apart of wives and husbands, mothers and children, brothers and sisters.

I am sure that this mass tragedy still poisons the lives of many in the USA.

But the most shocking thing by far about slavery is that so many perfectly normal people thought it too was perfectly normal at the time.

When we rightly condemn our forefathers for tolerating it, and for profiting from it, we should pause to ask this: what are we doing today, which we think is normal, which will horrify our great-grandchildren?

Three things spring to mind, and all are very close to home.

The first is mass abortion on demand. The second is our terrible neglect of the old, either left in chilly solitude or crammed into sordid, suspect institutions where they can be cruelly maltreated. The third is our disastrous treatment of small children – indulged with gadgets and sugar, but denied proper family life, handed over to the care of paid strangers  for long, sad hours.

We will pay for all these things, too, I suspect. But why wait for Hollywood to point out that they are wrong?

Sorrow and a fake drugs war

It is always difficult when grieving relatives enter political debates.  It seems harsh and ill-mannered to contradict them.

But, while I am profoundly sorry for Anne-Marie Cockburn, and offer her my sincere condolences on the death of her daughter Martha Fernback, I must beg  her to reconsider what she seems to think about ‘legalising and regulating’ some drugs.

I must also ask her to look into  her apparent belief that there is some  sort of ‘war on drugs’ going on.

Martha died after taking MDMA, an illegal drug that has claimed several victims in the past. She attended a well-known Oxford secondary school (recently recommended to the hard-up posh classes by Tatler magazine).

Before joining any campaigns to  further weaken the drug laws, I urge  Ms Cockburn to ask her daughter’s schoolfriends the following questions.

1: How easy is it to buy illegal drugs in or near their school?

2: Do they know of anyone in their age group who has been given a serious punishment for possessing illegal drugs?

3: How many of them have parents who take drugs themselves, or allow them to be taken under their roof?

4: Does the school ever say specifically in class or elsewhere  that drug-taking is wrong and against the law?

5: What disciplinary measures does the school take against those caught with illegal drugs?

If Ms Cockburn still thinks there’s any kind of ‘war on drugs’ once she’s heard their answers, I shall be very much surprised.

There is absolutely nothing to be said in favour of the Tory Party.

Its leaders secretly admire the Blair creature but lack the courage to admit it.

I see the Prime Minister is yet again claiming he can’t recall saying he was ‘Heir to Blair’. Perhaps those who were present when he did so might refresh his memory.

Far from fixing the economy (a claim accepted by so many who should know better) they have driven us deeper into debt and created a dangerous false boom that they hope will last until the Election. Their promises to reform the EU are worthless and they know it.

So what can they do to persuade their remaining voters to turn out for them?  Why, they can encourage personal attacks on their opponents.

It is all they have left. And that is yet another reason why any honest, patriotic person should shun them.

Each personal attack on a non-Tory political figure is new evidence of Tory desperation.

Michael Gove poses as the foe of privilege, complaining that Etonians outnumber children from poor homes at Oxbridge. But I’m struck by the way he uses free school meals to measure the level of privilege at our  great universities.

Presumably, the same applies to schools. So it’s interesting that at his local comprehensive, Burlington Danes, 67.6 per cent of pupils are eligible for free meals.

But at Grey Coats Hospital School, the elite academy miles from his home into which he has got his daughter, only 14 per cent qualify  for free meals.

The ghost of Roy Jenkins is walking again. How he would have approved of plans to introduce ‘assisted suicide’, which will in time become mass abortion of the unwanted old.  How civilised!

Like so many of the revolutionary 1964-70 Labour Government, Jenkins concealed the personal morals of an alley-cat beneath a smirk, a drawl and  a suit, and also knew that if you can’t  be good, it pays to be careful.

But unlike the Tory aristocrats whose private lives were equally adventurous, Jenkins and his friends wanted to bring the rest of the country down to their level. They did so by  a slippery trick.

Almost all of their revolutionary changes were achieved by so-called ‘private member’s bills’.

In truth, such things can only get through Parliament with huge help from government lawyers and whips.

But the government of the day can disown them, and the MPs of all parties who vote for them have no fear of being punished at a General Election.

Far from being freedom of conscience, a ‘free vote’ is a dishonest evasion of responsibility.

if you wish to comment, please scroll down

A Debate On Russia, in New York City

This should provide a link to a debate on Russia in which I took part on Wednesday evening, in New York City. My hosts were the excellent New York operation of 'Intelligence Squared', which has met a great need by organising debates on important topics in London and the USA.

 

: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy2YnAYn08Q&list=PLf0rUf4fp_RZ4m0GPiUEYMTQVmTzc3UXn 

 

 

 

 

Travelling

I am travelling at present and so will not be posting as frequently as usual. I'll be explaining why I've been travelling in the next few days.

Gove's latest lesson for parents: How to cheat the school system

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Last week the Education Secretary, who runs a school system  in which selection by ability is actually illegal, got his daughter into one of the most selective schools in the world.

But have no fear. No rules were broken. Of course, the Grey Coat Hospital School  does not select by ability. But, like several state schools used by the London elite, it selects  in other ways and continues  to have many features of the grammar school it used to be.

Tens of thousands of parents, disappointed in their choice  of school on National Offer Day last week, could only dream  of getting such a schooling for their children.

And yet Michael Gove was not criticised for this. He was praised.

‘All credit to Michael Gove and his journalist wife, Sarah Vine, whose daughter has been awarded a place at Grey Coat Hospital, an academy school in the heart of Westminster,’ simpered the Left-wing Independent, adding: ‘He will be the first Conservative Secretary of State for Education to have a child at a state secondary school.’

Why would that be a good thing, you might ask? Why should we rejoice that Tory politicians are now taking to the same tricks that Labour hypocrites have used for years?

Grey Coat Hospital  is an interesting place. It is totally unlike most state secondaries. It defies egalitarian dogma, and accepts educational wisdom, and so is open  to girls only. Even without its religious requirements it is not simple to get into.

Its admissions rules go on for pages (I have posted them on my blog here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/03/what-sort-of-school-is-michael-goves-daughter-going-to-.html

for anyone who wants to study them). You would have to be a mixture of Albert Einstein and St Thomas Aquinas  to work out what they actually mean in practice.

Why is this sort of filtering allowed, while open, honest, straightforward selection by ability is against the law?

The school is one of several that are well-known to pushy and well-informed London Blairites, such as the Goves, who know paying school fees will damage their images. Others include Camden School for Girls, William Ellis, and (for Roman Catholics) the London Oratory and Cardinal Vaughan. It is amazing what such people will do (one New Labour power couple moved house at enormous cost) to wangle their young into these places, which more or less guarantee Oxbridge entry at the end.

 

Harriet Harman, now in the news for other reasons, also got a child into Grey Coat Hospital, back in 1998. Nobody praised her. ‘Harman Snubs Local Comp for Top Girls School’, said the Daily Mirror at the time and accurately called Grey Coat Hospital an ‘elite’ school.

 

The real question is why Mr Gove’s daughter isn’t going  to a school her father has often praised to the heavens, his  own local comprehensive.  This is Burlington Danes Academy, a few minutes’ walk from  the Education Secretary’s  modest home.

 

After all, both Mr Gove and the Prime Minister have ladled warm words over Burlington Danes and its head, Dame Sally Coates. Dame Sally, once invited to speak  next to Mr Gove at a Tory conference, is shortly leaving for higher things, but surely such schools aren’t wholly dependent on one charismatic head, are they?

 

In 2012 Mr Gove wrote a newspaper article in which he  listed Burlington Danes among schools in which ‘excellence is becoming a universal expectation, academic study a driving purpose’. Later that same year he numbered it among ‘some superb state schools in disadvantaged areas generating fantastic results’. He said of these schools: ‘They do much better in exams than many schools, including private schools, in leafy areas. Their students win places at Oxbridge on merit. All because their heads, from the moment any child arrives, refuse to accept excuses for under-performance.’

 

And Mr Cameron himself, in  a speech in September 2011, commended Burlington Danes, saying it was doing much  better than four out of five  state schools in Surrey and Oxfordshire.

 

Could it be that these salesmen don’t actually want to buy their own product? Could it be that they know in their hearts that their supposed school reforms, which they ceaselessly trumpet to us, are a mass of froth, oversold and boosted by dubious statistics?

 

Could it be that they know that single-sex selective schools, which they deny by law to nearly everyone else, are in fact better than failed, doomed comprehensives that can sometimes be dragged into shape by strong heads, only to sink back again to their former state? If you want to know the answer, don’t listen to what they say. Watch what they do.

 

What are they really aiming for?

 

Left-wing warmongers, who badly want some sort of conflict with Russia over Ukraine, are a mass of contradictions.

 

They say they’re in favour of ‘democracy’, when in fact they are apologists for a naked coup d’etat against an elected government by an armed mob.

 

They say they are against interference in other countries, when they excuse the blatant intervention of foreign politicians on the side of the Kiev rabble.

 

They say that Crimea has no right to secede from Ukraine, when they all supported the secession of Kosovo from Serbia.

 

They say they are concerned about Mr Putin’s undoubtedly squalid and dishonest government. But they never complain about China, which is far more repressive and which is now trampling on the national independence of its imperial conquests in Tibet and Sinkiang.

 

When someone’s not consistent, they’re not telling you their real motives. Interestingly, most of the people who hate Russia also love the EU, and hate this country’s independence and traditions. That might give you a clue as to what sort of people they really are – and explain why I sympathise with Russia.

 

 

Locking up our liberty

 

Anyone who really understands English freedom knows that jury trial is the most important safeguard we have – against corrupt police, against bullying officials and over-mighty government.
Quite simply, it stops the State locking people up because it doesn’t like them.

 

Now, coincidentally choosing a week in which everyone is otherwise engaged, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, says he  wants to scrap the right to trial by jury for many ‘minor’ offences. They’re not ‘minor’ if you’re falsely convicted of them, Lord Thomas.

 

Don’t let him do it.

 

For 'Boris' , read 'Al'

What is it about Boris Johnson? Why do Tories like him, and think he might be any better than Mr Cameron?  His politics are as liberal as his private life. He’s soft on immigration. He’s fundamentally keen on the EU (and Turkish membership of it). He offers no hope of real change or relief.

 

And he’s not even called Boris – it is his middle name, which he uses as a sort of stage name, like ‘Sting’ or ‘Bono’. His family call him ‘Al’. It’s a mystery.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, please scroll down