Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 244

Proud to be a Social Worker - a Chief Constable speaks

I have to say I was a bit disappointed with the TV version of my encounter with Durham Chief Constable Mike Barton, shown on Monday night on 'Inside OUt' in the North-East and Cumbria, and viewable for a while here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03wg8hj. While I realise it wasn't the Peter Hitchens show, I had thought that a bit more of my conversation with Mr Barton would be shown . After all, Mr Barton says he wants a 'debate' and I gave him one. Perhaps it wasn't the kind of debate he wanted.

 

Anyway, here is a partial transcript (courtesy of the BBC) of our conversation, in the Debating Chamber of the Durham Union, overloooking Palace Green in that most beautiful of cities.

 

PH : “The problem with cannabis, ever since the late 1960s in this country, has been the steady increase in demand and consumption and the more consumption there is, the more money there is to supply it. So if you don't do anything serious about consumption, then you won't have any effect on the problem in general.

 

"You say, rightly, that Einstein said doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result was effectively madness. Now this is what we have been doing,  but it was wrongly portrayed- and I have to say by people such as you - as a regime of draconian prohibition under which we target brutally the sad unfortunate drug taker, and this is what has failed.

 

 

“What has failed is precisely the opposite, what has failed is trying to tackle supply alone while leaving demand untouched. Now how is it that,  with the support of chief police officers, with the support of members of parliament, with the support of ex ministers, with the support of almost the entire media and academic establishment, this failed policy continues not to be examined seriously?

 

“Wouldn't it be your job rather to say 'look we have a law to enforce, why don't you back us on enforcing the law?' The reason why the police,  it seems to me,  are foremost in calling for the abandonment of the law, is that it is a waste of your time going round arresting people who the prosecution service won't prosecute,  and if they did the magistrates wouldn't punish.

 

MB: “So what's the answer then? What are you advocating that we change ? Because I'm up for it.”

 

PH: "OK, I'll tell you very simply. I'm advocating the pursuit of the possessors of drugs rather than the pursuit of the dealers of drugs. As your prime purpose, if anybody is caught in possession of drugs, they are arrested, they are prosecuted, if found guilty they are punished in the deterrent fashion, both to deter them from future action and to deter other people from possessing drugs. This is what you do not do.

 

MB: “My advice to you would be, is I'm not so sure that would work for this reason. I've got 1,700 registered heroin addicts in my force area, I've got 1,200 cops, so I've got 1,700 registered heroin addicts and that's just heroin, let’s not look at cannabis for the moment, and I've got 1,200 cops. This is such a tsunami of drug taking and sometimes if the law says something is illegal and society, or a significant cohort of society say they are not going to conform with that law, then you can't just say to cops go out there and arrest people until it stops, because that isn't practical, Peter.

"What has happened with drugs is the police have enforced the law and society has not moved with us... we're not talking about something I may have done in my service, we're talking about things that pre-date even my service, as old as I am. So my argument to you Peter is, I absolutely agree with you that we should enforce the law, what I'm simply pushing back in saying, is society has not moved with us and the police cannot do it alone.

 

PH: "No but on the other hand, one of the reasons why society hasn't moved with us, this is because of the incessant celebrity endorsement of weaker drug laws from rock stars, from figures in show business, from figures in the media, constantly saying 'oh lets weaken the drug laws'  and now alas, we have senior police officers joining this. Isn't it rather your job to turn to these people and say 'how dare you promote and make easier this very dangerous activity?'.

 

MB: "I've been soldiering on as a good old honest cop tackling people who are taking drugs, tackling addicts and tackling dealers. What I'm saying is I want somebody else to join me in that battle. I'm not asking for a relaxation of the law, I'm asking for a more sensible law, I'm not going soft on drugs, I'm going sensible on drugs and what I'm saying is if I've got 43 organised crime groups on my patch when I arrived here in 2008, I've destroyed 29, I've now got 35. When I take down a drug gang, I was always thinking 'well I'll curtail the supply for a day, two days, maybe a week', now speaking to addicts and the people we're arresting,  users, what they say is on average it takes two hours for the supply to be reconnected.

 

PH: "Well this is my point, if you pursue the suppliers rather than the consumers, you aren't actually tackling the problem. You have to tackle the problem of consumption, consumption is influenced primarily by two things, the law and its enforcement and by culture. You allied yourself with the forces that make it easier for people to take drugs - they are the people who supply the money which keeps those dealers and those gangs in being, which you then chase after.

 

MB: "I did not ally myself with anybody, I simply asked for there to be a debate. I said some controversial things that I hoped would launch the debate and that's what happened. I cannot control the intellectual weakness of honest debate in national newspapers. I did a noble, honest thing, some would say a courageous thing, because I am a serving chief constable and I've got something to lose, but I was not going to be one of the ex-chief constables who then pontificates about something over which they had control when they were in office, I was not going to be a hypocrite, I was going to be honest about this, so I do not ally myself with anybody, I'm simply saying to you as an honest cop, I have thrown the kitchen sink at drug dealing and drug taking for 34 years and it's not getting any better, in fact it's getting worse, and I'm saying lets have that honest debate. What I'm saying is let’s take the money out of the business.

"Every day, I've got at least four undercover cops buying drugs on open drug markets which are the most corrosive component of the drug issues because they're the ones who make it available for somebody who isn't addicted, so I've made it really clearly I'm going to close down all open drug markets in my force area.

 

 

MB: "I'm doing more now to tackle drugs than in any regime I've served in since I joined the force. I'm laying down a challenge to my professional colleagues to do more than I am in tackling drugs. 

"I want to do my best. What I'm asking you to do to help me, is why don't you campaign and describe how we would strip power and wealth from the drug dealers.

 

PH: "I cannot put right 40 years of legal feebleness by the police and courts on this subject. What I can do is point out when people like you call for the laws to be further weakened. You're taking precisely the wrong direction : you're giving aid and comfort to the worst people in the world.

 

MB: "You're wrong. I'm asking for the law to be strengthened. I said I wanted to strengthen the law. My PCC Ron Hogg actually believes that our stance on strengthening the law against people accumulating vast wealth, of making a much more sensible approach in the way that we encourage people to go in recovery, it's not going soft on drugs, it's going sensible on drugs.

"I've had to sweep up this mess for 34 years."

"What I'm pointing out to people is this - there are people in treatment who are taking methadone and then going out and topping up with illegal heroin. Now what I'm saying is, I think that is dangerous and I don't think that is something we should continue to allow to happen. So what I'm saying is, and we've done studies of this in Brighton, south London and Darlington, which showed that it is helpful with some patients for them to be given injected heroin and then get them off drugs.

"If they do not come forward for help, they are a criminal, if they come forward for help, they are a patient if a nurse or doctor is seeing them, that's what I'm saying.

"Anybody that comes forward for help should be decriminalised because I want to encourage people to come forward and that's how I can protect society."

 

(MB outlines case of Carl, a 'recovering addict' who had been introduced to drugs by his mother.)

PH : "This is an interesting discussion on social work which may or may not work in some circumstances, and terrific if it does, but your problem is law enforcement. You're not head of the Durham social work department, you're head of the Durham police force, and your job is the enforcement of the law....."

 

MB : "When you say that my job is to enforce the law, between 18 and 22 per cent of my work is law enforcement and crime-fighting. fifty per cent of my work is concern for safety. That's what I'm in, so when you accuse me of being a social worker, I'm proud to be a social worker as well as a tough law enforcer."  

 

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Language, Truth and Logic - Further Thoughts on Kiev

Partly to show that my interest in Ukraine isn’t just a passing fad, I’d like to remind old readers , and draw the attention of new readers, to this article, in which I examine the problem at length in the summer of 2010.

 

 

 

Note that the problem of language plays quite a large part in it. Now look at one of the first actions of the new post-coup Ukrainian , er, regime . Well, it came to power by unconstitutional means, a fact I’ll discuss further later.

http://rbth.co.uk/news/2014/02/23/ukraine_abolishes_law_on_languages-_of_minorities_including_russian_34486.html

 Well, I never, it’s about language, a repeal of a law which would have given Russian (and other languages) a protected and equal status. If you had a big Russian-speaking minority, and you wanted to show them they belonged in your country, why would one of your *first* actions be this?

This is by no means the most disturbing event. The issue of an arrest warrant for Viktor Yanukovych is even worse. Yanukovych very stupidly ensured that Yulia Tymoshenko, his principal rival, was imprisoned on charges which were almost certainly spurious. Mrs Tymoshenko is , like Mr Yanukovych, well short of angelic status (though she looks much nicer than he does). People do not become fabulously rich in the former USSR by being nice.

 

As my old friend Edward Lucas (who utterly disagrees with me about Ukraine) wrote here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2566299/Dont-fooled-angelic-looks-shes-ruthless-shes-corrupt-A-withering-portrait-Ukraines-saviour-EDWARD-LUCAS-Russia-expert-knows-well.html

She isn’t a paragon, and many Ukrainians mistrust her.

 

But the prosecution and jailing of beaten political opponents is not a characteristic of a law-governed state. The pursuit of Mr Yanukovych is as mean and spiteful as was his own pursuit of Mrs Tymoshenko.

 

People will say that the charge is different, and that Mr Yanukovych is responsible for the deaths of demonstrators.

 

Well, maybe he is. But if so the deaths were the result of orders given by a legitimate head of state, while defending his lawful government against an armed and violent mob. This isn’t exactly Tiananmen Square (whose culprits remain safely in power and welcome in all freedom-loving Western chancelleries, palaces and parliaments) . On the contrary, the Chinese People’s Republic really *is * a regime, owing its existence to a violent seizure of power, lawless, despotic, aggressive and sustained by armed force, arbitrary courts, a network of prison camps, fierce censorship and secret police. And the Tiananmen Square demonstrators, gunned down in unknown numbers, were (in my recollection) entirely peaceful.

This sort of thing is, or used to be, covered by the defence of Sovereign Immunity. Frankly, without this defence, no head of state or government is safe from subsequent vindictive prosecution, since all governments authorise violence, usually lethal violence, during their time in office. That is, among other things, what they are for. It is not a question of letting people off. If it a wise device for ensuring that the defeated feel free to leave office. Where it is absent, chaos will usually follow.

 

In proper free countries, the transfer of power from outgoing to incoming government is conducted peacefully and without revenge on the defeated. This is important, because any other arrangement simply encourages embattled leaders to hang on to power at all costs. I am sure that it is the fear of being hauled before some international court which persuaded Syria’s President Assad to fight on rather than flee. I think the same is true of North Korea.

 

Imagine if Harold Wilson, coming to office in 1974, had put Ted Heath on trial for Bloody Sunday,  or if New Labour, in 1997,  had arraigned Mrs Thatcher and her ministers for their conduct of the coal strike. This is the politics of spite and intolerance. It is odd that those who purport to admire Nelson Mandela are so relaxed when his most important example is not merely not followed, but actively rejected by their new heroes in Kiev. Imagine what would have happened if the South African Nationalists had believed they faced prosecution when they left power. They would never have let go, and South Africa would have been inches deep in gore for years.

 

I’ll now take up one or two points from contributors. Neil Gardner said:

‘On the evolving events in Ukraine, your insights and analysis provide a useful antidote to the barrage of spin from the likes of the BBC. However, this seems at odds with a later statement on arms sales to Saudi Arabia. " But our continued (and perfectly justified) dealings with the Saudi despotism ". In what way is "our" arming of one of the most authoritarian states in the Middle East "justifiable" ? ‘

 

I am not sure in what way it is at odds with it. I am in favour of cynical and self-serving foreign policy, as the only route to national survival.  I reject idealist liberal intervention, in this case in some detail because I am aware of the detailed flaws in the mainstream account of events.  Where is the inconsistency?  

 

Mr Godfrey says : ‘The thugs are Christian Right wingers (aka Fascists)’. To the extent that the word ‘Fascist’ means anything, it describes the supporters of Benito Mussolini’s Fascisti. Its wider use to apply to German National Socialists robs it of almost all precise meaning, since these two movements were so different from each other. But I don’t think either the actual Fascisti, or the group which Mr Godfrey seeks to refer to, could be accurately described as particularly Christian.

 

Mr Henry Noel said : ‘Just as there is a point that precisely half the distance between London and Paris, but which no human instrumentality can mark, there exists a point at which the excesses of a democratically-elected government become insufferably tyrannical, to the extent that a people groaning under those excesses have both a need, and even a right, to end them. I don't pretend to know where that point exists, but that it does exist in fact ought to be borne in mind by critics of any popular uprising.’

 

Is that so? I should have thought that,  if it were so, then it ought to be possible to define certain conditions that would need to be met. I would have thought that cancellation of elections, disenfranchising of opposition voters, and similar measures which blocked the use of constitutional means of change, might well be acceptable. But the fact that you don’t like your lawful, elected head of state doesn’t give you the right to oust him or her by violent or intimidatory means.

 

What strikes me is that it was Mr Yanukovych’s refusal to sign the deal with the EU which triggered, very late in his supposedly hated and intolerable presidency, the  actions which brought about his downfall. Had he signed that agreement, does anyone believe that these events would still have taken place? Now, what exactly was it about a not-very-tempting offer of association with the EU ( far less economically generous than the counter offer from Moscow) that so powerfully drew the militant people on to the wintry streets? If the Yanukovych government was so bad, why and how had it survived so long without mass protest, before this particular event?  

 

And I must continue to ask why the open intervention of foreign politicians in the country’s internal affairs was welcomed by the demonstrators? Aren’t these people supposed to be proud patriots? Did they never wonder who was using whom, and for what?

 

‘Cary’ rightly raises this point

 

‘Peter Hitchens make much of the Ukrainian president being elected, yet he has argued that democracy is the least important aspect of the British constitution, individual liberty and the rule of law being much more important.’

 

Well, yes, but the *supporters* of this putsch believe that democracy is the principal (if not the only) way in which power can be legitimated. I am setting them against their own standards. If they really believe this, then they cannot *on principle* support this undemocratic, unconstitutional, violent overthrow. Yet they do. This is because they do not really believe what they say. In that case, what do they think legitimates power. Increasingly (and one thinks here of the overthrow of Margaret Thatcher by her own party in 1990, the complaisance of the ‘West’ when Boris Yeltsin’s tanks shelled the Russian parliament, the subsequent willingness to accept the shameless rigging of votes in 1996 to keep Mr Yeltsin in office (compare and contrast with maiden-auntish shock at Vladimir Putin’s comparable but in many ways smaller misdeeds),  the invasion of Iraq, the selective overthrow of various Arab despotisms, and the equally selective survival of others) that a general trend towards global governance  is what is really at issue.  Certain types of sovereignty just aren’t allowed any more. Russia’s attempt to get in the way of the EU and NATO, and in fact the continued survival of Russia as a regional economic and diplomatic power, are obstacles to this.

 

I’d also say that the EU pursues traditional German foreign policies, aimed towards the creation of the ‘Mitteleuropa’ concept first put forward by Friedrich Naumann in his 1915 book of that name. Alleged German plans from that period envisaged Ukraine wholly under German economic control, made Georgia (in the Caucasus) a German dependency, and the colonisation of the Crimea. The First Treaty of Brest Litovsk , dictated by Germany in February 1918, created (very briefly) the only modern state of Ukraine before the present one emerged from the 1991 collapse of the USSR. Had it survived, such a state would have been very much in the German sphere. The second treaty, in March, forced Russia to withdraw from Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States (German and Austrian domination of Poland was assumed).

 

Much of this territory was regained by the Soviets in subsequent fighting, after the defeat of the Central powers in November 1918. Stalin seized still more in 1940 – the Baltic states, Eastern Poland, Sub-Carpathian Ukraine, ad a large chunk of Finland.  When Hitler attacked Stalin June 1941, his strongest armies drove into Ukraine, and some did eventually reach the very edge of the Caucasus, for which the Nazis had planned special forms of autonomous, or satellite government. This is, in short, a very longstanding struggle for land and resources, and I do find myself wondering if the people-power revolution has not now replaced old-fashioned armed forces as the most effective way of enforcing a nation’s will abroad.

 

Cary adds: ‘Yanukevich has failed in both of these areas, using his office to enrich himself and orchestrating trumped up charges against a political opponent. He bears comparison with Hugo Chavez or some democratically elected African leader who has used his office for personal power rather than the proper exercise of his constitutional function. None of this is an argument for the West intervening in Ukraine. I doubt the US and EU have had much influence on events there, though they may flatter themselves otherwise, and will not have much influence on the outcome.’

 

I’d be inclined to agree with that, though it is interesting how little effort has been put by the ‘West’ into ousting the Chavez and now the Maduro governments in Venezuela, close though that country is to the USA. I know from direct personal experience that strong legitimate opposition exists to the Caracas government.

 

A contributor with a silly pseudonym wrote : ‘It's all very well bemoaning the overthrow of a 'democratically' elected government but you don't consider the fact that the Yanukovych government changed the parliamentary system such that it guaranteed its re-election. In a poll, 66% of Ukrainians considered the 2012 election rigged. Technically, Hitler was democratically elected (his was the next largest majority in the 1932 election when Hindenburg died in 1934) but would you have complained if a mob had overthrown him?’.

 

Once again, it is not I who claims to stand for and admire ‘democracy’, but the supporters of the putsch. I repeat, I am simply judging them by their own standards.  There’s no doubt that the National Socialists came to power democratically and constitutionally, and continued to rule until 1945 without ever actually violating the Weimar constitution. Had Germany used the British ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system, the national Socialists would almost certainly have commanded an overall majority in the Reichstag. These facts seem to me to be an argument against placing too much reliance ,either on democracy or on constitutions, to protect you from despots. In my view, law,  tradition, monarchy and heredity, combined with independent professions and a  strong and prosperous middle class, are more reliable guarantees. But in the end, if nations wish to commit suicide, there is not much you can do to save them.

 

Would I have supported a mob overthrow of Hitler? I can’t see why not. By 1934, he had clearly closed off, through the Brownshirt terror of 1933 and the later night of the long knives, any possibility that he might be removed by constitutional or lawful methods . Constitutional as it regrettably was the Hitler state had no freedom of speech or the press, no freedom for opposition parties. Under these circumstances, extra-constitutional action becomes, I think,  permissible (I do not think Mr Yanukovych had closed off these avenues) .  Mind you, mobs are difficult things. You can think you are leading them, and then find that you are being chased by them.

 

Gordon Carr, rather annoyingly, says that ‘of course’ it’s legitimate to call the Ukrainian government a regime. Well, now we know he thinks so. But can he please explain why?

 

 

Mr Gibson criticises Mr Yanukovych’s government for cronyism. No doubt this is accurate, but what if the opposition is also guilty of this? I made no mention of ‘paid agitators’, though it is interesting that so many people were able to stay on the square for so long, and were kept warm and fed throughout.   How was this achieved? 

Beware of this nation steeped in blood and carpeted with graves

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

A month ago I warned that simple-minded Western intervention in Ukraine risked provoking civil war  in that dangerous, unstable region.

Now I repeat the warning. Our encouragement of this post-modern putsch now threatens the worst civil violence  in Europe since similar lobbies sponsored the break-up  of Yugoslavia.

Worse may be on the way. Ukraine is steeped in blood and carpeted with unquiet graves. Twice in the past century it has been the scene  of terrible wars, and also the site of a hideous man-made famine and of genocidal slaughter. It is also a great strategic prize – fertile wheat  fields, coal mines, the crucial warm-water naval port of Sevastopol.

Now it is the gateway for the colossal new gas and oil fields around the Caspian Sea.

Most Western politicians and commentators seem to assume that the Kiev mob are democrats. Are they? In what way?

They demanded the resignation of the Ukrainian government, because they said so. They wouldn’t go home until they got their way.

How is that democratic? President Yanukovych is certainly no saint. But he came to power legitimately.

In 2010, Yanukovych won office for five years with 12.5 million votes (48.9 per  cent) against 11.6 million votes  (45.5 per cent) for Yulia Tymoshenko. That’s rather better than David Cameron (10.7 million, 36.1 per cent) did against Gordon Brown (8.6 million,  29.0 per cent) in our 2010 poll.

So what precisely is ‘democratic’ about demanding the immediate removal of a lawfully elected head of state, who has a year of his mandate still to run? It sounds more like mob rule to me.

And yet, on the BBC’s supposedly enlightened and thoughtful World Tonight radio programme, an academic was allowed to describe this government as a ‘regime’ without challenge, and a series of politicians from Eastern Europe were brought on to demand sanctions against Ukraine, while no voice was heard from the other side. Anyway, who are these demonstrators? There is no doubt that police have been injured by petrol bombs thrown from the crowd, and shot at with guns. Yet the reports seldom seem  to ask who is doing the throwing and the shooting.

Nor do they often mention the Pravy Sektor (Right Sector),  a nasty formation of violent football fans, prominent in the riots. These ‘democrats’ consider the larger Svoboda party as too namby-pamby. But you wouldn’t. Svoboda (Freedom)  is led by Oleh Tyahnybok. He was once expelled from the Kiev parliament for claiming that a ‘Muscovite-Jewish Mafia’ controlled the country. Charming, eh? Kiev was the scene,  in 1941, of the Babi Yar massacre of 30,000 Jews by German troops.

Many of the more fervent Ukrainian nationalists, especially those from the Western city of Lviv, are keen worshippers of the memory of a character called Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with the Nazis on and off between 1941 and 1945.

 It is these people who  have been receiving the support of the United States. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland  is famous for her ‘****  the EU!’ statement in a bugged phone conversation in which she discusses naked intervention by the USA in Ukraine’s affairs.

But last December she trotted round the main square of Kiev with a little plastic bag, handing out biscuits and buns to demonstrators. Other outsiders  who have sided with the anti-democratic mob have included German foreign minister  Guido Westerwelle, and the EU’s foreign policy chief, Baroness Ashton.

Didn’t these people realise what effect their endorsement might have? Do they know what ghosts they may raise? If they don’t, they are ignorant and rash. If they do, they should remember what happens to children who play with fire.

Smart move by our Arab Prince

I was filled with admiring wonder by a  picture last week of Prince Charles in full Lawrence of Arabia gear.

Could his trip (one of several in recent  years) have been connected to the  finalising of a contract under which BAE  is supplying 72 Typhoon fighter aircraft to Riyadh? I do hope so.

BAE is one of our few remaining real industries, because (though nobody admits this) we protect it against foreign competition, and work hard to keep it  in orders. The Prince is right to help.

But our continued (and perfectly justified) dealings with the Saudi despotism sit very oddly with our windbaggery over ‘democracy’ in Libya, Syria and Ukraine. One or the other. But not both.

I must Speak up for Bercow

John Bercow is one of  the best Speakers the House of Commons has had in modern times. I don’t like his personal opinions (and he doesn’t like mine), but that’s not the point.

The ancient purpose of Parliament is to question and discomfort the Government. It is not the job of an MP to be a loyal footsoldier of his leader, or of the Commons to be an echo-chamber for the executive. By forcing Ministers to come to the House to answer Urgent Questions, Mr Bercow has, for the first time in decades, made Parliament live again.

It is a good thing for Britain, and a good sign  that Downing Street loathes the Speaker.

Mr Bercow is also dead right to attack the organised barracking of certain politicians. This sort of  thing might have been acceptable in the German Reichstag in the early 1930s (when a third of the deputies turned up in uniform). But it’s wrong here and now.

As for Mr Bercow’s wife, Sally, and her problems,  I just think we should all remember that these  people have young children. Certainly this has no  bearing on her husband’s role as Speaker.

Drug defeatists have taken over our police forces

Why do so many senior police officers want to give up enforcing the law against drugs? Because the police force has been taken over by social workers and defeatists. And because the courts are so feeble towards drug abusers it’s not worth arresting them.

But of course the increasingly powerful drug lobby always whoop and yell whenever a chief constable muses about weakening the laws he  has sworn to enforce. They know that such pronouncements help Big Dope’s campaign, which will one day unleash legal drugs on the high street.

Mike Barton, Chief Constable of Durham, is the latest. He calls for ‘decriminalisation’.

Not long ago, the BBC invited me to argue the matter out with Mr Barton in the debating chamber of the Durham Union. It wasn’t a gentle encounter.

I told him: ‘When people like you call for the laws to be further weakened, you’re taking precisely the wrong direction. You’re giving aid and comfort to the worst people in the world.’

You can see how he answered that, if you live in the North East and Cumbria, on BBC1’s Inside Out on Monday at 7.30pm.

 If you wish to comment, please scroll down

Part of a Debate on Religion

Shortly before Christmas I travelled to Lancaster's hilltop university on a spectacularly windy night (my bedroom windows blew open after one violent gust, like a scene from 'Wuthering Heights') to debate the value of religion to the world.

 

Here is the opening segment of that debate. I am not sure if the rest of it will follow later.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtAAjIBFJek

A Longer Reply to Mr Warner

 

Mr Geoffrey Warner made several points in response to my recent article on the stripping bare of Britain by the USA). As they're all quite interesting, and as I hope very much to get him to respond to my answers, I'm reproducing his questions here, and putting my retorts beneath them, marked ***

 

Mr Warner : 'I'm not quite sure what point Mr Hitchens is trying to make in this brief note.'

***The article was entirely factual and without comment because I thought this was more likely to provoke thought than any furtehr expression of opinion. But if he wants comment, he can have it.

 

 Mr Warner says :'The use of the expression "stripping bare" in connection with the transfer of Britain's gold reserves to North America in 1940 suggests that the latter was an involuntary act on the part of the British government when in fact it was a British decision in order to prevent the gold in question from falling into enemy hands in the event of a successful German invasion.'

***This is an interesting contention. On what does he base it? The payment of coin or notes to those from whom you wish to purchase goods is indeed a 'voluntary' act, but if you do no do it you will not get the goods. So if you need the goods to survive, it is not really very voluntary. It may be that the transfer of gold direct from Britain to Canda( and on from there to the USA) might have been explained subsequently or at the time as a measure to protect it. As I understand it, some gold was shipped to Canada in the same ships (HMS Southampton and HMS Glasgow)  that escorted George VI's entourage there on his May-June 1939 royal visit (the King and Queen went by liner).

 

At this time,  our reserves were under grave strain from military spending (though nothing compared to what was to come). But also at that time most people believed that France was a great military power which was virtually impregnable against German attack, so any possibility of a German invasion of Britain was in the realm of fantasy.

 

So it is perhaps more likely that the May 1939 shipment( £30 million by the values of the time)  was in anticpation of the need to pay the USA for munitions in a war that was evidently fast-approaching by June 1939, rather than for safekeeping.

 

Further small shipments continued (usually only £2 million per ship) through the winter of 1939 and the Spring of 1940, rapidly increasing, with several enormous consignments of £30 million or £40 million per ship ( and one of £47 million) beginning in June 1940 (the time of Dunkirk and the invasion scare) and ending with a few much smaller shipments in February and April 1941.  How the gold cargoes in the USS Louisville got from Britain to Simonstown (or whether it was in fact newly-mined and had never left South Africa in the first place) I do not know and am seeking to find out. I still find it hard to accept that shipping it across the Atlantic in wartime, from Cape Town, was done for safekeeping. 

Mr Warner then says : 'The gold was returned from the USA and Canada subsequently.'

***Was it? When, in what quantities and by what means, in which ships and to which ports? I myself have never seen any account of this return. I would be hu gely grateful if Mr Warner could point me to his sources.

 

Some of the securities were certainly returned, as Alfred Draper records in 'Operation Fish', but have found no reference to the return of the gold in that book. Perhaps I have missed it. My impression was that it had all been spent and so no longer belonged to us.

Also, if the gold was being sent away for safekeeping a) why not send it to Australia, South Africa or New Zealand, then all British allies at least as close emoptyionally and politically to us as Canada, and physically much further away from the conflict and from the dangerous transatlantic sea-lanes? And b) why not keep it in Simonstown once it was there, rather than risking a dangerous transatlantic crossing to New York?

As for the cruiser "Louisville", the United States *was* technically neutral at the time and it was sensible for its commander prominently to display the American flag in order to avoid U-boat attack.

*** I couldn't agree more. Why take needless risks. But the assertion of neutrality, while carrying British gold to pay for American weapons to keep Britain in the war, seems to me to be paradoxical. I suspect that si why Mr Warner feels the need to ask what i am trying to say. the facts speak for themselves. I believe that when British seamen saw Irish ships crossing the Atlantic in the war, emblazoned with huge illuminated signs proclaiming 'Eire' (translation: 'Please don't sink us, we're neutral')  they tended to jeer a bit.

 

Mr Warner adds : 'I use the term "technically neutral" because the US was in fact actively helping the British in this instance and later on became active in the Battle of the Atlantic in support of the British and Canadian navies, as Chapter 11 of the memoirs of Admiral Karl Doenitz, the German U-boat commander, amply demonstrates. Indeed, Hitler would have had good grounds for declaring war on the United States well before he actually did so.'

 

Well, yes, and the interesting thing is how far both sides were ready to accept casualties and bombardment without considering it was a casus belli (justifiable cause of war) . Hitler, who seems to have gone mad after Pearl Harbor (presumably recognising, subconsciously, that he was bound to lose the war eventually) refused to be provoked into war by the US Navy, and Roosevelt refused to be provoked into war by the German Kriegsmarine, which actually sank the USS Reuben James, an antique destroyer, in October 1941 a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, with great loss of American lives. It is a very odd period of history, with two nations in daily naval conflict with each other yet not declaring general war.

 

Mr Warner continues : 'Finally, what was so wrong about Admiral Leahy's appointment as US Ambassador to Vichy France?'.

 

***Did I say there was? It was perfectly rational for the USA,  a neutral country, to maintain relations with Vichy France. That is the point. Had the USA's foreign policy been driven by a principled loathing for National Socilaism, Judophobia or any other aspect of the Hitlerian new order, no such embassy could have existed. But the USA (like everyone else) treated Germany and its allies and vassals as normal countries. The idea that World War Two was a war of principle was invented afterwards.

 

***As Mr Warner says :'The Americans were merely trying to "keep in" with Vichy'.

 

***I am not so sure he's right to say that they were doing so 'in order to prevent it from moving ever closer to Germany.' I'm not sure how it could have moved much closer to Germany than it already was, or would have remained if the New Order had survived. Nor can I see what the USA, in 1941, could have done to separate it from Germany, which after all occupied most of its territory at that time, and was well-placed to occupy the lot in case of trouble.  Once again, I'd be interested in some contemporary evidence (rather than post-hoc self-serving justification) to show that this was so.

 

Mr Warner concludes: 'Like Mr Hitchens, I am sceptical about the so-called "special relationship" between Britain and the United States, as it seems to be a very one-sided one and increasingly so. However, I feel that he is being a little too negative here.'

 

***I really can't see what's 'negative' about stating facts, little-known as many of them are (and why is that?) . It is Mr Warner's reaction to the stated, unadorned facts, entirely prompted  by his own feelings, which seems to me to suggest that I have hit the nail on the head. The USA is a foreign country, they do things differently there, and they have different interests from ours. We must get used to this.

Stripping us Bare - Part Two

Here’s a small, poignant addition to the item I wrote last week about the stripping bare of Britain’s Gold Reserves by the USA before the beginning of ‘Lend-Lease’.

 

The US Navy cruiser Louisville is recorded as having travelled to Simonstown in South Africa, then a British base, on Sunday 5th January 1941. There, she picked up British gold worth almost $150 million at 1941 rates ( at a guess, £1.2 billion by today’s rates) , and steamed to New York to unload it, arriving on 22nd January.

 

I am told (I won’t say by whom just now) that Churchill was more or less instructed to have the gold ready for collection on the stated date.

 

The cruiser is said to have trained a spotlight on her Stars and Stripes flag ,  while passing through U-boat-infested waters, to emphasise her neutral status.

 

On January 8th of that year, it is interesting to note, US Navy Admiral William Leahy presented his credentials (presumably to Marshal Petain)  as US Ambassador to Vichy France.

 

 

Regime or Government? Demonstration or Mob? Who Whom?

I am once again distressed by the BBC’s apparent failure to observe objectivity – this time over the confrontation in Ukraine. I tend to listen to BBC Radio 4 rather than watch TV bulletins, Radio 4 being the most intelligent of the news networks. But in recent days I have heard the anti-government demonstrators referred to by the BBC as ‘pro-democracy’, the Ukrainian government referred to by an invited academic as a ‘regime’(without challenge from the presenter) , and on this morning’s ‘Today’ programme I gathered that petrol bombs had ‘been thrown’ in the centre of Kiev.

 

The passive form is sometimes useful, but in this case it seems odd that the reporter was reluctant to say that it was these ‘pro-democracy’ demonstrators who were throwing them at the legitimate police forces of a government which (for all its undoubted faults) was elected democratically(which is the test the BBC themselves apply).

 

Then again, if one says that the demonstrators are throwing these nasty weapons (or that many of them appear to be armed, and have succeeded in killing quite large numbers of police officers), one runs into a certain amount of trouble.

 

Is it legitimate for protestors to use such methods against a legitimate, elected government? Is it illegitimate for that government to defend itself with force?

I should have thought it was legitimate for it to defend itself, and quite strongly. Yet the BBC reports (and those of many other organs) give the strong impression that it is perfectly reasonable for a violent and partially armed mob to encamp in the centre of a capital city, there to besiege the buildings of a lawful government, demanding that it leaves office well before its lawful term is up The BBC then discussed the possibility of sanctions against the Ukrainian government, apparently for defending itself, and brought on a number of persons in favour of this course. I did not hear anyone interviewed who was against this idea.

 

I have no special liking for Mr Yanukovich, nor for his government, and don’t doubt that there are many who hold legitimate grievances against it,  but it seems to me that this simply isn’t objective reporting.  Might it not, when reported back to the demonstrators, encourage them?

Our Duty to Oppose the Warmist Inquisition

Sometimes it’s well worth arguing about arguing. In my silly student days we used to mock philosophy for its apparently footling approach, asking caricature questions such as ‘what is the meaning of meaning?’, which now seem quite sensible to me.

 

Many of the Warmist responses to the previous post about Anthropogenic Global Warming seems to me to miss the point of what I said, almost completely.

 

Most bizarre of all is Mr Stephenson’s strange rejection of my assertion that the use of the word ‘denier’ is intended as a smear. Having said that I’m wrong, he then provides a detailed argument in support of my point. Is this comment for the sake of comment?

 

Then there is the inevitable dud-grenade from the anti-religion faction, this time in the shape of ‘Oscar’, who writes ‘Funny how, on the one hand, Peter Hitchens is eager to moralise and extol the virtues of faith - Christian faith - and yet, on the other hand, uses faith to criticise the hugely evidential and well-supported theory of global warming - opposition towards which, whether he forgets it or simply does not care, garners universal scientific mockery, disdain, and suspicion. And quite rightly. In using faith both as a virtue and a vice, he creates an embarrassing rod for his own back.’

 

Mr ‘Oscar’, who we shall probably never see or hear of again , at least under that name, hasn’t troubled to read what I say about religious faith, repeatedly, emphatically an unequivocally . I say that it is a choice. That it must be a choice *precisely* because objective science cannot determine the answer to the question of whether there is a God, let alone the further questions which arise for those who believe.

 

I make no attempt to condemn anyone for choosing to believe there is no God. It is a reasonable choice which any intelligent and educated person is free to make, as is belief in God.  I say - repeatedly – that the interesting part of the disagreement is not *what* people believe, but *why* they believe what they do. This is just as true of AGW.

 

And it would remain true, regardless of ‘universal scientific mockery, disdain, and suspicion’, even if there were such a thing. I think Mr ‘Oscar’ will find – if he troubles to look – that scientists are divided on questions of faith and of AGW. Even if every scientist on the planet agreed on the subject, and mocked, disdained and suspected dissenters, it wouldn’t matter a farthing, *unless* those scientists  possessed an objective,  testable, falsifiable proof of their contention. The fact that they *are*  scientists does not give them any more right to ignore the rules of scientific discover than it gives to anyone else. In fact, it gives them an even stronger obligation to keep to those rules.

 

Once the hysteria has faded (as it undoubtedly will over time), our descendants will find it strange and shocking that scientifically trained people allowed themselves to be conscripted into this majoritarian attempt at mob rule. Even if its members are all wearing scientific lab coats,  a mob is still a mob, and is to be distrusted by any serious person.

 

It is interesting that Mr ‘Oscar’ has in fact not grasped the point I am making, and has simply answered that point (or rather, utterly failed to answer it) by doing exactly what I have criticised the AGW fanatics for doing – namely, trying to resolve scientific questions by non-scientific methods.

 

I’ll allow myself a very slight digression here in the hope that at least one Warmist will, for once, attempt to answer it.

 

It is about the practicality of the carbon control, windmill-building programme, as a solution to the problem they claim to have discovered. I won’t name the very prominent BBC broadcaster on this subject who has said to me in conversation that the measures being taken to control carbon emissions are – if he is right – far too small and far too late to do any good. It wasn’t clear that the conversation was on the record. But he was quite unflinching about this. The world has simply failed to reduce carbon emissions anything like enough to ward off the crisis which he believes we face.

 

I tried to make this point in my first article. What is the point in our closing down (as we have ) Didcot 'A’ Power Station, because it burns coal, when China, in the same period, has opened several similar stations each of which which alone probably emits rather more carbon than Didcot 'A' each, and all of wehich emit far, far more collectively? All we are doing is pointlessly crippling our own energy grid (and just wait for the power cuts) in the pursuit of an irrational, unscientific faith.

 

A civilisation which behaves like this cannot jeer at peoples who sacrifice animals in the hope of a good harvest. There’s no fundamental difference, except that sacrificing  sheep probably causes less total harm(if that’s your measure of goodness)  than the needless closure of a power station in a country with a shortage of power.

 

I now turn to David Linacre, who calls me ‘purposefully contrarian’. Well, I’ve always objected to the word ‘contrarian’, as it suggests a person disagreeing for its own sake. I don’t do this. I scorn those whom i suspect of doing so.  I can’t imagine anything more pointless.  The best riposte to such an accusation is to show that there are good reasons for disagreeing. These are, that I am very worried by the measures being taken by our government (the EU) in response to the alleged crisis. They are immensely economically damaging, both in the form of taxation and the form of crippling power generation. They are also very damaging to the countryside and the seascape, planting them thickly with useless windmills and with the power lines needed to carry their pitiful, intermittent electrical product into the national grid.

 

He then goes on to assert :'In simple terms, there is a consensus on AGW which goes beyond the 'consensus' on many other issues in science (such as vaccines, ADHD etc.) where again I admire Peter's scepticism. To believe that despite the undoubted biases, perverse incentives and groupthink which may exist on this matter, the consensus view is mistaken, is hubristic and naive. I don't know climate science and nor does Peter. Unless he is going to publish a paper arguing against the consensus I don't really see how he can claim any credentials.’

 

In what way does the ‘consensus’ go beyond the equally bogus ‘consensus’ on many other issues? Where is the objectively testable proof that climate change is caused by human activity? How could any scientist disprove it? One can have no opinion on whether it is mistaken or not, unless it exists. It doesn’t exist. In that case we are simply not obliged to believe in it, or act accordingly, and are entitled to protest at attempts to make us believe it through derision or other forms of pressure, and to object to costly and damaging government actions taken on the basis that it is true.

 

 Once such testable proof exists, if it ever does, it won’t matter what the consensus is (just as it didn’t matter what the consensus was once Galileo had shown objectively and testably that the Sun does not move round the Earth, or John Snow had shown that Cholera was not spread by a miasma of ‘bad air’ ).

 

 It is not for me to publish a paper ‘’arguing against the consensus’, because ‘consensus’ forms no part of scientific proof. There is no proof against which, or anyone else, can argue.  It may *follow* scientific proof. But it cannot substitute for it.

 

To pretend that it can is to return to the intellectual conditions of the 16th century, when it was wise to believe that what authority said was true, and experiments which might show otherwise were ill-advised.

 

And this is what we are increasingly doing, with AGW, ‘ADHD’, ‘Dyslexia’, and ‘antidepressants’  (to name a few) . Consensus, a polite name for fashion or mob rule, is cited as a sufficient argument for believing in something which has not been proved.

 

I find this disturbing and frightening, a regression in the human mind, away from the hard austere search for truth of the past four centuries, and towards faith in matters where faith really ought not be employed. This is because we already have considerable objective knowledge which enables us to act rationally on the subject. It is rational to avoid pollution by minimising the use of cars ( as I try to do), because pollution is itself bad, because of the measureable damage it does to air quality and health.  But in this age of superstition, I receive no credit for my action. A person who drives a powerful car on short-distance journeys when he could have walked or bicycled - but who believes in AGW - is deemed morally superior to the walker or cyclist (such as I am) who does not believe in AGW. This small contrast demonstrates the absurdity of our beliefs.

 

Worse, these modern faiths often lead us to act irrationally on a very large scale – crazy economic and power generation policies;  dosing healthy people, even children,  with chemicals whose supposed good effects we do not understand, cannot explain and cannot reliably measure,  but which can be shown, by correlation to be associated with many very worrying side-effects; avoiding the need for major school reform;  reintroducing parental discipline and protecting children from excessive stimuli from TV and computer games etc.

 

What drives these measurably damaging faiths? What and who protect them? In the late middle ages, the Church was afraid of science because it feared that it threatened its monopoly of knowledge.  Kingly power was afraid of anything which weakened religion, because it relied on religion for its legitimacy.

 

Now, what do we see? Huge lobbies, which want state funding for their projects, or state contracts for their products, or simply want their failures protected from scrutiny, now seek to steer us away from hard, testable scientific truth, and substitute cloudy, foggy, untestable ‘consensus’ .

 

It is our duty not to be frightened into joining this shameful retreat from knowledge into conformism. If these people admitted that theirs was a faith, and went to Warmist conventicles each week to sing Warmist hymns and say Warmist prayers, and listen, rapt, to Warmist sermons, who would mind, if it made them happy? But they do not do so. Instead, they ceaselessly attack (often in very nasty terms, such as ‘denier’), those who don’t share their faith.  We wouldn’t allow any church to do that in 21st century Britain. Why then do we allow this Warmist faith to behave in this way?

 

 

There is nothing ‘contrarian’ about opposing this new intolerance. It is deadly serious. And the most shocking thing is that the principles of science are being attacked in the name of science. Mind you, it was ever thus. Those who want to destroy freedom have always claimed to be its apostles. Those who bring war generally claim to be in favour of peace. And those who offer us prosperity are in fact the harbingers of bankruptcy. 

Warmism versus Science

I have said for some time that there really isn’t any fun in Atheism any more. It’s so fashionable that religious believers are beginning to look like exciting dissidents.  The Churches, meanwhile, have long ago abandoned the thumbscrew and the stake, and have resorted instead to the cup of tea and the biscuit. Approach the average Christian priest or pastor with Atheist sentiments these days, and he (or she) will welcome you with a smile, delighted to find someone who is even interested in God, even if they hate Him and simultaneously say he doesn’t exist. For them, hostility makes a pleasant change from the usual shrugging indifference.

 

If you want to run up against real, hard,  brainless faith-based intolerance, there are other things which offer far more of a challenge. Last week I was subjected to a personal finger-wagging by the new Statesman’s resident Headmaster figure, Peter Wilby (I picture him running one of those alleged Comprehensives, crammed with the children of left-wing middle-class parents who imagine that their  offspring are undergoing  a genuine egalitarian experience) for failing to make any comment on the recent bad weather. The assumption is that, having occasionally wondered if the failure of the temperature to rise casts doubt on the warmist orthodoxy, I have a duty to say that a lot of rain confirms it).

 

 

I then noticed lost of other leftist commentators, scientists, leaders of the opposition and even cartoonists, writing or daubing away on the similar assumption that the current wetness is prima facie evidence that man is wrecking the climate.

 

This is very odd. There is no proof that this is so.  Why have the Warmists exposed their soft underbellies in this daft fashion?  

 

The greatest and most intolerant faith-based orthodoxy of our time  is the movement which propagates and relies on the theory of Anthropogenic Climate Change . On its basis, national governments and supranational bodies, huge companies, schools , universities, local authorities, quangoes and the rest have all embarked on vast, expensive courses of penal taxation, and the construction of startling ineffective means of generating energy without the use of carbon-based fuels. Recently they began to close down perfectly good operational coal-fired power stations in this country (an act mad in itself, but madder still when set beside the unending increase in the use of such coal-fired stations in China, whose carbon emissions pour into the same atmosphere, and cancel out the trivial effects of our self-harming gesture many times over).

 

 

 

This Faith (for such it is) used to be called Global Warming, but had to be rechristened when the Globe stopped getting Warmer. Then it became Man-made Climate Change, but that (I think) turned out to be Sexist. So we have AGW.

 

Now, my own view on this is quite straightforward and reasonable. It is obvious that the climate is changing. It has always done so, as history shows. Whether it has done so in my lifetime, I am not sure. My childhood winters seem to me to have been colder than the ones we get now, and the summers seem to have been wetter. Whether this is because I lived through the Big Freeze of 1962-63, when I lived near the sea and it froze, or whether it is because I spent a lot of my childhood in the famously soggy South-West, or whether it is because I grew up largely deprived of central heating, I don’t know. If your summer holidays took place in Fife, Devon, Cornwall, the Sussex Coast and the Isle of Wight( with one very adventurous trip to Jersey) you would have better reason to recall the disappointments of rainy days. I also remember with extraordinary clarity the unbroken summer of 1959, day after day of temperate blue skies, not too hot thanks to cooling breezes, still in my memory the acme of English summer weather, which I was lucky enough to spend in a high-ceilinged Edwardian house on the edge of the Sussex Downs and close to the sea at West Wittering (later to be made famous by Keith Richard – as he then was – and Marianne Faithfull).

 

But, even if things have changed since then,  does this short period of planetary history betoken a real change? In my Bolshevik days, I  remember being warned against an error called ‘opportunism’. Like most Marxist categories, this is not what it sounds like. It meant, more or less,  mistaking a very gentle curve for a straight line, and assuming that a brief and apparently observable development would continue in the same direction forever.

 

Climates, it seems to me, change over very long periods. You’d have to have a long,  consistent observed pattern to be sure that such a thing was happening, and what its nature was. Even then, another century or two might show you were mistaken about the direction of things. Weather changes hour by hour, and week by week. And we forget it, or remember it wrongly. No doubt the recent heavy rain has been exceptional. But it is not unique (I’m told the winter of 1929-30 was considerably wetter) , and it has an immediate cause (the shifting of the Jetstream) , whose greater cause we do not know. This is similar to the phenomena known as ‘El Nino’ and ‘La Nina’ which have had great effects on weather elsewhere on the planet during the past 20 years or so.

 

So it is just plain silly to call me  a ‘Climate Change denier’, as I don’t deny that climate changes.  It is also a trick and a smear. The trick is to mix up disagreement with a contested theory about causation (a disagreement which I happily acknowledge) with  disagreement with the idea that climate is changing (which I don’t challenge at all). The smear is to equate reasonable disagreement about the validity of a speculative and unproven theory with an evil attempt to pretend that a recorded and undoubted historical event never took place.

 

As the expression ‘denier’ was first used to describe, and for many years used for no other purpose than to describe  those people who do actually deny the known recorded historical fact of the German National Socialist massacre of the Jews between 1942 and 1945, its application to dissenters from an unproven theory is especially repellent and a menace to free thought and speech.

 

The other thing that is going on here is to try to pretend that a majority view among scientists is the same as objective, demonstrable proof. Scientific majorities have repeatedly been wrong, or science would never progress. Every really major discovery in science, from Galileo to Einstein,  has overthrown an orthodoxy held by a majority. It has done so by the compulsory process of disproof of one theory, and the substitution for it of another theory, which is both capable of disproof by future experiment, but has yet to be disproved.  This does not mean that majorities are always wrong. But it does mean that they are not always right, and that they prove nothing in themselves. We don't know what is causing the climate change that we are experiencing. We should not pretend we do, or base policy on speculation.

 

In fact, given the increasing political and commercial pressures on science, and the bizarre admission into the Scientific pantheon of  diluted disciplines such as ‘neuroscience’, the lay person has all the more rightand cause to demand objective testable proof for any statement made in the name of science. 

We ask the Scots to be 'loyal' - but we're the ones betraying Britain

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

I think we have lost Scotland. I felt it the other day, a disturbing sensation like that moment when the tow-rope parts, the strain too great for its rotten, decayed fibres to bear.

The sulky, puzzled feebleness of the London politicians’ arguments sounds desperate and defeated. Alex Salmond has already won the September referendum. Tell the Scots they can’t keep the pound, and they’ll just think quietly: ‘Oh, yes, we will. Try and stop us.’

And just imagine the reaction in a Scottish home when a friend or a relative phones from south of the border (as urged by David Cameron) to persuade them to vote against independence. Laughter would be the kindest response.

As for the Prime Minister’s threat to take the whole Cabinet to Scotland, the actual sight  of this squad of third-raters  and phonies on the streets of Glasgow or Stirling should make a Nationalist victory certain. What has Scotland to fear by declaring independence from this unprincipled, mumbling shambles?

As it happens, I am more grieved about this approaching divorce than most Englishmen will be. My earliest childhood memories are of the lovely coast of Fife, of Scottish voices and Scottish landscapes. I even like the sound of bagpipes.

 And I grew up, in a Navy family, in that bleak but cosy era soon after the  war, which had brought us all together in a warm Britishness that has now evaporated. I think we belong together, are stronger together and could defy the world together if we wanted.

But this does not stop me seeing what has happened. And I am amazed that so few have noticed the real problem. The leaders of the United Kingdom cannot argue for Scotland to stay in a country they themselves are working  so hard to abolish.

Mr Cameron’s allegiance to the European Union (which  is total and unshakeable) automatically makes him the  enemy of the Union of England and Scotland.

Let me explain. The EU’s purpose is to abolish the remaining great nation states, carving them up into ‘regions’ that will increasingly deal direct with the EU’s central government  in Brussels.

Paris, London, Berlin, Madrid and Rome are allowed to retain the outward signs of power. But it is a gesture. All the real decisions are already taken elsewhere, from foreign policy  and trade to the collection of rubbish and the management  of rivers. Under this plan, England itself will cease to exist. The European Parliament gave the game away a few years ago by publishing a map of the EU in which all the regional boundaries were shown, but the word ‘England’ was not mentioned.

Meanwhile, the smaller nations of Europe are indulged by the EU, because (unlike  the big countries) they are no threat to it. They are happy to be allowed a flag, an anthem, a well-paid political class, a little pomp and circumstance – and no real power.

Like many of the EU’s smaller members, Scotland is not big  or rich enough to be truly independent. It can never hope to have its own free-floating currency, or its own armed forces capable of projecting power – the true indicators  of sovereignty.

In truth, ‘independence’ will mean that Edinburgh becomes a cold vassal of Brussels, instead of a warm friend  of London.

But since London itself has surrendered so much of its power and independence to the EU, this isn’t the major change it would once have been. If Scotland is going to be run  from Belgium anyway, why let the power and money flow through London, rather than direct to Edinburgh?

Britain has given up its own national independence and sovereignty without a struggle. It is not a proper country any more. Having betrayed our own flag, we can hardly ask the Scots to be loyal to it.

'Happy pills' won't help penguins... or anyone else

Stories that Humboldt penguins in Scarborough have been dosed with ‘antidepressants’ turn out – I am very glad to say – to be mistaken. The poor things have in fact been given Sporanox, an anti-fungal drug.

This might affect the creatures’ ability to drive or operate machinery, in the unlikely event that they wanted to. But it is not an ‘antidepressant’. And a good thing too. There is little serious evidence that these dubious pills do any good to humans, and a worrying correlation of their use with suicide and irrational violence.

This daft story was believed and spread only because most people have swallowed the drug industry’s myth that we have invented a medicine that will cheer people up when they are sad.

I suppose that if such a thing existed, it might work on penguins too. But as it doesn’t, it won’t.

One ray of hope in the UK's demise

You might think (and I do) that the  Tories secretly want Scotland to secede, cynically imagining that – by removing Scots MPs from Westminster – they will save themselves from otherwise certain defeat in the Election of May 2015.

I wonder if this plan will work? I hope not. I think the shock of actual Scottish independence will be huge when it comes. And I think the government that loses Scotland will not be readily forgiven.

People will be amazed at how quickly  our world standing will sink. The departure of Scotland will alert the whole planet to how much we have in fact declined in the past 50 years.

You would be amazed how many people abroad still think we are the well-educated, well-governed, economically successful civilisation we were five decades ago. A border at Berwick, and the compulsory redesign of our national flag and our Royal Standard, will make them look again, and see what we have now become.

I think this will lead to some pretty radical changes in England. One of them might be that English people will at last grasp the true extent of the Tory Party’s treachery and incompetence. That would be one good outcome.

Ever wondered why certain politicians and other public figures always look overweight, sinister or shady on TV? Well, maybe they’re like that really.

But there could be another reason. A friend, who worked for years in current affairs TV for  an organisation I won’t name, tells me that cameramen would ask, before each interview, ‘Are we shooting for or against this person?’

There are many tricks, but basically the rule is ‘Shoot from above, and the  interviewee is flattered. Shoot from below and he or she is uglified.’

Watch out for it.

Prime Minister’s Question Time has had its day. It’s far too long anyway, but only works when the leaders facing each other across the Despatch Box actually disagree.

When, as now, they don’t, they can only waste our time with flatulent fakery. For real debate, try the House of Lords.

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