Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 247

I acquire some Unlikely Allies in the fight against Big Dope

Here’s something for the Cannabis Comment Warriors to get bothered about. The poor things patrol the Internet searching for the tiniest expression of dissent against the idea that Big Dope is Good and Must take Over the World, and then descending on the offender with wave after wave of anger-enhanced word-bombs. And I haven’t given the chance to launch a raid here for some time. 

 

Once again a Pay Wall prevents me from reproducing in full, or linking to an interesting article on the subject of Dope. A recent one,  by the London ‘Times’ writer Robert Crampton, is in response to President Obama’s rather relaxed remarks about cannabis, or marijuana as they call it in the USA. I urge you to get hold of it because, although Mr Crampton has swallowed much of the silly conventional wisdom on this subject he has not swallowed all of it. And so he has had enough sense to notice that the ‘soft drug’ propaganda about cannabis is simply misleading.  He thinks it should be harder to get, not easier.

 

He says he has ‘dabbled in’ cannabis perhaps a dozen times, though the experience was less enjoyable the more he did it. (Would a prominent writer for a respectable national newspaper offer such a confession if there truly were a ‘war against drugs’ in this country?).  It made him ‘at best silly and sleepy, at worst paranoid, unstable, offensive’. Crucially, he concluded that it ‘seemed to me to be far more powerfully mood-altering than the received wisdom claimed’  Acquaintances who smoked it a lot were not just tedious and ‘a bit dozy’ but ‘many seemed to be seriously mentally impaired.’ 

 

I can however link to *this* blog by my old adversary, and Unashamed Member of ‘Blairites for Cameron’, John Rentoul of the ‘Independent.

 

Here he is

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/if-cannabis-is-legal-more-teenagers-will-smoke-it--and-that-cant-be-good-9044349.html

 

 

Again, it’s full of wearisome conventional wisdom, including the comical claim that cannabis use is diminishing (that must be the reason for all those busy hydroponic gear shops all over the country, and the pathetically ineffectual yet incessant police raids on a tiny minority of cannabis farms) But I’ll tell you what struck me most about this rather feeble call for inaction.

 

First of all, he spots that the Big Dope legalisers don’t actually have any answer to organised drug crime in Colombia, Mexico and Afghanistan (he ignores, as establishment people always do,  the real answer, which is that this wickedness is financed and kept going by the greed and selfishness of western drug abusers, and the best hope is that those users are deterred from purchase by properly enforced stringent laws. )

 

He writes : ‘Then there is the harm done by the control of the production and supply of drugs by criminals. Yes, it is a problem. But we are mainly talking about cocaine and heroin, if we mean organised crime and drugs, and a lot of the harm in those cases is suffered in Colombia and Afghanistan. I don’t have the answers to that; but then, neither do the advocates of legalising cannabis, who tend not to propose legalising “harder” drugs, yet.’

 

I just love that ‘yet’.  I also quite like the “harder”. Has Mr Rentoul cottoned on to the fact that cannabis may in fact be one of the hardest of all drugs, because of its correlation with irreversible mental illness, surely one of the most dreadful fates that can befall us? I do hope so. It’s about time that the ‘soft’ drug promotion of cannabis, one of the most successful PR frauds in human history, was exploded.

 

And then, in a  few throwaway words he concedes the whole point of the book I spent ages writing, that I have been excoriated and jeered at for writing, which few newspapers have bothered to acknowledge, let alone review, namely that the law against cannabis is a dead letter, and no war has been fought or is being fought against it: he says  ‘the most common legal position all over the world:[is] illegal but not stringently enforced for small amounts.’

That’s not what certain academics seem to think, with their claims of thousands of drug abusers languishing in prison and the implication that these are innocent citizens caught up in some sort of draconian prohibitionary round-up because they have been detected by inflexible police officers in possession of tiny amounts of drugs held for 'personal use'. (Twaddle, by the way).

He also says, very much like Mr Crampton : ‘But it is possible that, in some cases, it acts as a trigger for serious mental illness, especially for male teenagers.’

 

So there you are, see. It isn’t just reactionary, brutal old me. Other people including members of the liberal elite , recognise that the dangers of cannabis are severe, and that legalising it may not therefore be a good idea. And at least one such accepts my point that the laws against cannabis possession are not really enforced (though he doesn’t seem to understand the implications of this for the rest of his argument).

Can Sherlock Holmes survive in this Feverish Age?

The law, it seems,  can no longer protect Sherlock Holmes from anyone who wants to use the character freely wherever and however he likes. What a pity.  Those of us who think there is a ‘real’ Holmes, the character created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in a few dozen short stories and four longer ones, may just have to lump it. Millions of people will soon think that the Cumberbatch version, or the noisy recent movies, are the real thing. I think fewer and fewer people actually read the stories. I noticed, on a recent celebrity version of University Challenge, featuring men and women in their 40s and 50s,  that even the cleverest of the contestants had no deep knowledge of the Holmes stories, and couldn’t identify ‘The Speckled Band’ from a plot summary.

 

I for one actively dislike the TV modernisation of Holmes and Watson, in which Benedict Cumberbatch plays Holmes as a sort of detective Dr Who. In fact (I didn’t invent this thought, but wish I had) much of the BBC’s output now seems to be governed by a rule that everything must be more or less like ‘Dr Who’, even the news- postmodern, ironic, fashionably cool, omnisexual,  omnicultural , so slick that slickness may even be the entire point. It uses a great idea without showing it any real respect.

 

How would the programme called ‘Sherlock’ cope if it were not based on the original idea of Holmes and Watson? Not to mention Mycroft and Moriarty and Mrs Hudson?  

 

If there were no basic idea and memory to build on, would anyone care, or watch? I don’t know. Perhaps they would, but I doubt if it could have reached the near-cult standing it has attained with so many TV critics. When I forced myself to watch one episode, in which Irene Adler was transformed into a naked call-girl (I think this is what happened, it was hard to follow) , I immediately resolved to buy a boxed set of ITV’s 1980s portrayal of Holmes, in which Jeremy  Brett got closer (I believe) than anyone else to portraying Conan Doyle’s invention.

 

But he did that by simply sticking as close to the stories as he could. I’ve been reading them since I was about 11 years old. Lately I’ve read many of them aloud to others.  I have a treasured collection of the long stories, the a faded red John Murray edition,  with an inscription from my brother, which he gave to me when I was 13, and various ancient stiff green Penguin editions of the short stories. I was recently given a lovely complete Holmes (after several of my other copies vanished) with many illustrations by Sidney Paget, who really invented the idea of the detective that most people have, particularly the deerstalker hat that Doyle never mentions. I think that ‘The Sign of Four’, with Toby the dog, and Jonathan Small, and the crazy Sholto brothers, is my favourite, the long hunt through Victorian South London as the night pales into dawn, the wit by which Holmes gets information out of people who don’t want to give it to them, the worryingly ambiguous choice given to Jonathan Small in the Agra Fort, all live in the mid as indelible moving pictures.

 

They’re full of the driest wit. Doyle often puts French or German epigrams into Holmes’s mouth and doesn’t bother to translate them . And Holmes has always struck me as something of a late-Victorian Cambridge atheist, a man of cold science and colder reason, dismissing religious sentiment as superstition and worse (there’s a strong undercurrent of this in ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’).

 

I also have personal reasons for feeling especially fond of the Holmes canon. The story of ‘Silver Blaze’, which is reckoned by so many to be the best of all, and which contains the immortal remark about the incident of the dog in the night-time (now alas, overshadowed by a modern novel of that name in so many minds) is set largely in stables near Tavistock, on the edge of Dartmoor which are remarkably similar in position to the 18th century house (with large stable block) in which I spent my formative years at boarding school. We certainly believed that our school was the model for King’s Pyland.

 

By the way, can anyone solve this mystery? In an e-mail exchange shortly before he died, my brother and I puzzled over the journey Holmes and Dr Watson make to Tavistock by train.

 

We examined the Sidney Paget picture of their arrival, to see if we could see any resemblance to either of the Tavistock railway stations we remembered from our childhoods (both, outrageously, are now closed, and the North station, the obvious arrival point from Paddington, would have involved a change of Exeter which isn’t mentioned in the story)  . (Come to that, at which of the Canterbury stations did Holmes and Watson crouch behind a pile of luggage as Moriarty’s special train ‘passed with a rattle and a roar, beating a blast of hot air into our faces’.  I don’t recall an ‘open curve’ of line leading into either of the two Canterbury stations of today.

 

And we found that both of us had also always been puzzled by the following exchange :

 

‘And so it happened that an hour or so later I found myself in the corner of a first-class carriage flying along en route for Exeter, while Sherlock Holmes, with his sharp, eager face framed in his ear-flapped travelling-cap, dipped rapidly into the bundle of fresh papers which he had procured at Paddington. We had left Reading far behind us before he thrust the last one of them under the seat, and offered me his cigar-case.

 

"We are going well," said he, looking out the window and glancing at his watch. "Our rate at present is fifty-three and a half miles an hour."

 

"I have not observed the quarter-mile posts," said I.

 

"Nor have I. But the telegraph posts upon this line are sixty yards apart, and the calculation is a simple one.”

 

Are they? Not any more. Is it? I’ve tried to do it many ways round, and it certainly didn’t seem to be simple, as sixty doesn’t seem to me to go neatly into 1,760, or any of the sub-divisions of the English mile. Is this a joke, a mistake, or something else (there are, famously, errors and contradictions in the Holmes canon, though I’m not such an enthusiast that I can recall what they are)?

 

But oh, for the Holmesian world of steam expresses from Paddington, long, detailed crime reports in vast closely-printed newspapers, flaring lamps,  mysterious butlers, Napoleons of Crime, defrocked clergymen, telegraph wires swooping past  the train window, station-masters, rude noblemen, Baker Street irregulars, and the rest.

 

It is a refreshing, absorbing place in which the weary soul can hide from the cares of the day (I seem to remember that George Orwell’s Gordon Comstock, in ‘Keep the Aspidistra Flying’ could by the end of his period of penury and failure read almost nothing except Sherlock Holmes, hunched in his dismal lodgings).

 

There will always be, to a 20th century person, a fairytale quality about Victorian and Edwardian London, an experience we just missed but saw traces of, that vast ( and largely) peaceful wilderness lent a romance by the dingy fogginess of the days and the deeper mystery of the nights. The railway line from Liverpool Street out through the old East End used (until the 1970s or so) to give a pretty worrying idea of what that London had actually been like. Nowadays it’s been cleaned up beyond recognition.  British towns and cities, even in my childhood, had more or less clear borderlines of class and wealth beyond which you didn’t venture unless you were in the mood for surprises which, even if mild, might not always be pleasant. It’s noticeable how many of Holmes’s best stories begin with a dash southwards into what Joseph Conrad (in ‘the Secret Agent’ ) so memorably called the noisy, dirty, dangerous night of South London’.

 

But it is not just in dank streets that evil lurks. Who can forget this passage (again arising from a train journey) in ‘the Copper Beeches’ : ‘All over the countryside, away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and grey roofs of the farm-steadings peeped out from amid the light green of the new foliage.

 

     "Are they not fresh and beautiful?" I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.

 

     But Holmes shook his head gravely.

 

     "Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there."

 

     "Good heavens!" I cried. "Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?"

 

     "They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside. “ ’

 

The later stories, it is true, are plainly written to meet the demands of magazine editors, themselves pestered for more by a hungry public. All writers of popular fiction eventually face this crisis, from which Doyle (who much preferred his now unjustly-neglected historical fiction) sough to escape by killing Holmes, and was then forced to resurrect him (he was, as they say, never the same again).

 

It is surprising how often Holmes fails to save those who seek his help. Very often, the clue lies in the distant past and far away  - the American west, or in some West Virginia coal-mining valley, or an Australian goldfield. Doyle was a romantic, really, and also very drily funny. The Brigadier Gerard stories are believed by many to have provided some inspiration for George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman, though Gerard was a courageous idiot rather than a clever poltroon. Everyone has forgotten the Professor Challenger stories – including a full-length book ‘The Lost World’ which just happens to describe an inaccessible plateau in a remote part of South America where dinosaurs and pterodactyls survive (ring a bell?).  The moment when Challenger releases a pterodactyl in a London lecture hall is one of my favourite Doyle. moments.

 

Others are to be found in the ‘Conan Doyle Stories’, now hard to obtain, small delights such as The Lost Special, the Croxley Master, the Terror of Blue John Gap and the Horror of the Heights, not to mention the absolutely horrible story of Lady Sannox.

 

If you’ve read all this, then the Holmes stories live even more colourfully in your mind. You begin, just begin, to enter into the imagination of one of  the greatest of all Victorians. Those of us who still read, rather than leave our literature to the TV , will always have this (and Jeremy Brett)  to fall back on. But it is a shame about everyone else. TV first imitates, then devours , then recreates in its own image. 

The Red Army Waters its Horses in Hendon - new light on an old quarrel

My jaw dropped when I watched this ancient recording (from March or April 1994) of a conversation I had with my brother Christopher on the worthy American TV station C-Span, moderated by the inscrutable Brian Lamb. C-Span invited us to do this more than once. I’d take the Washington Metro down from Bethesda, Maryland, where I lived, to Union Station and walk over to the C-Span studios. Afterwards we’d have coffee in the majestic station concourse.

 

Most of it is amusingly ancient, and I was still sadly innocent and  naïve about the British Conservative Party and Margaret Thatcher, along with several other things,. Mind you, if I had not changed at all since 1994, I’d have a lot to worry about. The bit that made me jump is more than an hour into the recording.

 

Why?

 

Rather famously, my brother and I had a terrible falling out in September 2001, lasting for several years, after I wrote that he had once said to me that he wouldn’t care if the Red Army watered its horses in Hendon. I recall this moment with great clarity, know exactly where it happened, not just the post code, but the house and the room, and the time of day (late evening). I have a witness, and would date it to some time between March 1984 and October 1986. I could probably date it more precisely if I really put my mind to it. Anyway, here’s the point.

 

While fondly recalling my then-bearded self, and my late brother when he was still in the full vigour of health, and an era of human history which was a good deal less dispiriting than the one we now face, I was amazed to see that I had chided him directly with the ‘Horses at Hendon’ quotation.  And he had responded not (as he did in 2001) with fury, denial and ostracism, but with laughter and a general statement about the Cold War which placed him( at the very least) firmly in the leftist tradition on the Cold War. I wish I had recalled this exchange in 2001, and found some way of getting hold of it then. It might have ended the feud a lot more quickly.

 

 

The lengthy recording is here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XvcxetSN-U&feature=youtu.be

 

 

The Hendon exchange begins at 1 hour, eight minutes and 24 seconds:

 

PH: 1.08.24 ‘I always remember Christopher saying, I think he denies it now, that he didn’t care if the Red Army watered its horses in Hendon (CH laughs) which is a not particularly agreeable suburb of London… and also telling me that the Soviet constitution of 1936 was a document of great moral force…’

 

CH: 1.09.21.  ‘I feel I should clear my name on the Red Army watering the horses (smiles faintly).  It’s certainly true that I used to quarrel with Peter a lot about it. I regard and regarded the United States as at least morally a co-founder of the Cold War and more than a co-founder of the arms race. I didn’t think of it as a battle between democracy and an evil empire and I don’t in retrospect think so either.’

 If that’s a denial at all, I’d say it was a non-denial denial. Alas, we cannot discuss it again. 

An Empty Government

Please read this extraordinary story in the latest Mail on Sunday http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2541992/Queens-speech-delayed-Cameron-coalition-sexy-tell-claims-Tory-minister.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490 .

 

It says that the Queen’s Speech, supposed to be the opening statement of the government’s annual legislative programme, may be postponed because the government has nothing much to put in it. Imagine, all those years of work, those millions of pounds raised in contributions from worrying millionaires, those carefully misleading speeches, those ghastly brushes with actual voters. And then at the end of it all, you find that you don’t have enough to do, to fill more than four years of Parliamentary business.

 

I have another explanation, and , when you’ve read the  story, you may see what I mean. Since this country gave up its government to the EU, in a sense all parliaments have been pantomimes of pretence, in which EU directives are dressed up as Acts of Parliament or Statutory instruments, and various other minor business is done on top. And every week the silly fake of Prime Minister’s Question Time is mounted, a ceremony as empty of real content as the Changing of the Guard, or that business when Black Rod has the door of the Commons slammed in his face, or the other one, where the newly-chosen Speaker pretends not to want the job and has to be dragged towards his salary and his pension, protesting volubly.

 

The smaller the real difference between government and opposition, the rowdier and more football-crowd-like the MPs get, organised into shameful chanting in unison. Yet in fact they are mostly the same, as shown by  the ghastly standing ovation for the departing Blair creature, urged on by Mr Cameron .

 

But now an even greater fake is in prospect. If it weren’t for the sinister Fixed Term Parliaments Act, which makes it almost impossible for MPs to bring down a government before its time, this Parliament would by now be on the verge of dissolution. But the forces of politics cannot be entirely suppressed by this law.

 

I’m going to repeat here my prediction of what will happen after May 22nd, when the Euro-elections seem likely to leave both the Coalition Parties severely bruised.

 

A pretext will be found for the Liberal Democrats to walk out of the Coalition – they may well get rid of their leader, Nick Clegg, and replace him with Vince Cable. Mr Clegg would then be available to fill the post of UK EU Commissioner, which Baroness Ashton will vacate later this year.

 

But, thanks to the Fixed Term law, their walk-out will not trigger an election. A ‘confidence and supply’ deal, under which the Lib Dems will continue to vote with the Tories on absolutely basic issues, will be struck. Labour (which is in no hurry to hold an election, and is very likely to need the Lib Dems for a working majority after May 2015) will stand by and let this happen.

 

There’ll then be a sort of Lynton Crosby era, during which the Australian alleged genius will feed UKIP-style legislation on Human Rights, immigration and the EU into the Tory Parliamentary Party. They will adopt this stuff in the certainty that it will fail to pass, but in the hope that the dimmer type of Tory voter will be fooled by it into returning from UKIP or abstention.  nyobne who is bamboozled by this deserves anything he or she gets.

 

There will also be a lot of vacancies in government for co-optable, malleable Tory MPs, who can be soothed out of rebellion with a year in office, with a bigger salary and pension, a ministerial car and a red box. Likewise, the young ambitious backstairs apparatchiks, still seeking seats, who were denied jobs in the Coalition, would find well-paid insider work as special advisers.

 

This arrangement is wonderful for politicians, precisely because it will be such a fraud on the public. It will help the Lib Dems and the Tories to spend the whole 12 months frantically triangulating against each other.  It will also restore the Lib Dems’ ‘Short Money’ a little-noticed state subsidy, paid only to *Opposition* parties, which they lost the moment they joined the Coalition. The (delayed) Queen’s Speech will be a Tory minority one. The Lib Dems will do all they can to differentiate themselves from it, and from the Tories – and the Tories will be pleased when this happens, secretlyenjoying the abuse and catcalls.

 

For the Tories (paradoxically) badly need a Lib Dem recovery, which can onlyu come if they win back some of their lsot radical voters from Labour. A collapse in the Lib Dem vote will, thanks to the details of our election system, mainly help Labour, which will as a result capture several seats from the Tories. And though all sensible Tories, including Mr Cameron, realised long ago  that they have no chance at all of winning the next election, they a)know that their party may not survive if it is too badly defeated in May 2015 and b) they harbour desperate hopes that they might just be able to cobble together another coalition if they can save the Lib Dems and prevent Labour from winning an outright majority. The second option (of a second Lib-Con coalition)  is incredibly unlikely, but politicians are kept going by such dreams. And a Scottish exit from the UK, which lots of Tories want but none dare openly support, would hugely increase the chances of such an outcome.

 

Anyway, I’ve said it several times since 2010 (the first time, I think, in Autumn 2011) and, as the moment of truth grows nearer, I think it only right that I should stick by my prediction. Not long now. And if it doesn’t happen, I shall be fascinated to see what they do instead. They cannot possibly leave things as they are.

Under a Berlin Moon?

This morning I bicycled to the station by moonlight again.  We long-distance commuters often have to do this sort of thing in the winter months, not seeing our homes in daylight during the week. It is, on my route to work, rather beautiful, with the moon reflected in the floods and casting strong shadows among the leafless trees.

But, if I and others had not prevented the change to Berlin Time (proposed by an outfit that I seem to recall was called the 'Darker Later' campaign), it wouldn't just be long-distance commuters and very early risers who were currently going to work by moonlight (or, more often, in good old pitch darkness).

 

At this time of year, even on clear, sharp days, darkness would still lie over Southern England till nearly 9.00 a.m. You can experience something similar by taking a January trip to Paris, where the blackness of the sky at breakfast time is startling. The French put put with this kind of stuff as part of their deal with Germany, which wins them billions in subsidies, tolerance of a semi-socialist economy of regulation and rigid employment laws, and Germany's happy readienss to humour France's global posturings as a mighty, glorious military and diplomatic power, which it isn't really. The last thing Germany wants is for anyone to notice that the real power in Europe resides in Berlin and Frankfurt. If France wants to pose as a great power, that's just fine. But the century-old German desire for the continent to set its clocks to Central European Time (close to the Berlin meridian) is one of those symbolic acts of obeisance that must be observed. It's a little reminder of the true relationship between Berlin and Paris.   

 

In Madrid, meanwhile, public opinion is moving in favour of dropping Berlin time, as it's so wearing and exhausting to be permanently on the wrong time zone. Let us see how they get on.

 

One of the reasons why the 'Darker Later' campaign, its predecessors and its (wait for it, it can't be long) successors always get such an easy ride in Parlaiment and the British media is because only about one person in 20 understands how time works, or can even remember which way the clocks go in Spring or Autumn. Everyone thinks that messing around with the time will only affect the far north of Scotland. Millions don't even realise that we are compelled, by EU law, to move our clocks forwards one hour on a set date in April, and backwards one hour on a  set date in October, so that compromises such as keeping the clocks on one time all the year round aren't possible).

 

So these poor deluded people are in constant danger of being the victims of a fait accompli, when they discover too late that they must forever trudge to work in the dark on winter mornings, and endure blazing sunshine in late evenings in mid-summer, even while they are watching 'Newsnight' (which will have to be renamed 'Newsday' in Summer if Berlin Time ever is introduced here).  

 

A politician posing with his smiley family - now that's a genuine scandal

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Once I used to care about the sexual wanderings of politicians. Now I don’t. And I am very sorry that I wasted so much time over it.

It was Bill Clinton who changed my mind, and long hours listening to the confessions of Paula Jones. She described in wondrous detail what it had been like to be chased around a room by the trouserless, excited and red-faced future leader of the free world. At the end of it, I liked him more than I had before.

True, he was an awful President, especially because of the keen support he gave to the IRA against Britain. But he was nothing like as terrible as George W. Bush, the invader of Iraq and jailer of Guantanamo Bay, whose private life was comparatively blameless.

Anyway, where’s the hypocrisy in such people treating marriage as pointless, or an empty promise? All modern Western politicians enforce tax, social and welfare policies that have almost destroyed lifelong faithful marriage. They are especially brutal to marriages in which the parents actually bring up the children, instead of farming out the job to paid strangers.

Nowadays, such arrangements are an eccentric, costly lifestyle choice adopted only by the old, the unfashionable or by the very rich. So what’s hypocritical about Mr Clinton, or France’s President Hollande? They’re only doing what they are urging and helping everyone else to do.

 IT would, of course, be different if they headed governments that gave real incentives for marriage, and which penalised the unmarried. But they don’t. So it’s not.

The real hypocrisy of modern times is the way that candidates for high office like to pose as members of ideal, smiley nuclear families (the nanny, of course, is always left out of the pictures). Maybe this is a true image of their private lives. I have no idea and would rather not know. But it’s a completely false picture of their policies – the mad, giant subsidies for fatherless homes, the irresistible pressure on mothers to go out to work five minutes after the midwife has cut the cord, the divorce laws rigged against the innocent.

They should openly live the cruel, inconstant, child-unfriendly lives they force millions of others to follow. And if they’re not prepared to do that, and to let their children suffer the consequences, they should change their policies.

The secret power of Hayley and out 'right-on' soaps...

If I really wanted to influence national life, I’d  try to become the editor of a major soap opera. These dramas have a strange power over the national mind, spreading ideas by stealth, turning unpopular views into mainstream conventional wisdom.

Deprived of real neighbours and real social contact, millions of people now treat these fictional electronic apparitions as if they lived next door. And, just as we were once powerfully influenced by the real people who lived around us, now we want to be liked by the soap characters who have replaced them.

I think there must be large numbers of people now in early middle age who actually think they went to a school called Grange Hill, and recall its characters better than they remember their real schoolfellows.

Adults are equally bamboozled. In 1998, a Downing Street spokesman and the Leader of the Opposition, William Hague, both called for the release from a non-existent prison of the non- existent Deirdre Rachid, a character in Coronation Street.

So if you can make those characters do certain things in a noble-seeming way, or put certain views in the mouth of a popular figure, you can influence and even change public opinion. You can also change language and manners. American TV imports have in the past 20 years turned ‘railway stations’ into ‘train stations’ and caused millions to say  ‘can I get’ instead of ‘please may I have’.

I’ve no doubt that the Coronation Street drama about Hayley Cropper doing away  with herself will greatly help the campaign to extend abortion on demand from unborn babies to ill or otherwise inconvenient children and adults. How long before they, too, can be pressured into seeking death, and then lawfully snuffed out? For Hayley Cropper is a well-liked character, and the sympathetic portrayal of her plight plunges straight into the emotions of viewers.

I think this is insidious and underhand. That’s not just because all such soap propaganda is in the hands of the Politically Correct – though it is. Vanessa Whitburn, who radicalised the radio soap The Archers, once blurted out: ‘To be PC is really to be moral. It is having a correct moral stance.’

The worst thing is that this sort of propaganda by melodrama bypasses wisdom and reason. Those who are manipulated by it do not know what is happening to them. In short, it is brainwashing. It’s so sinister that if commercial advertisers did it, it would probably be illegal.

Does David Cameron secretly hope that Scotland will secede? After all, he can never hope to win a majority while Scots are represented at Westminster. The flabby feebleness of the Government’s campaign to save the Union suggests strongly that Downing Street is hoping for a Scottish exit.

Has the drug law 'hero run away?

Professor David Nutt, the hero of the drug law liberalisers, isn’t such a hero. Last week, he suddenly dropped out of a Sky TV debate with me on cannabis laws. Could this be because he came off worse the last time we met? I couldn’t possibly comment.

These people are so used to being treated reverently on air that they are shocked by hard opposition. They are also dangerously wrong. And if cannabis is legalised, there will be  no going back.

Congratulations to The Independent newspaper for exposing what looks very much like ‘gendercide’ – the deliberate abortion of girls for the crime of not being boys – now going on in this country. I once saw this in action in China, in schools on Hainan island where there were hardly any girls in classes. It’s doubly barbaric, and we mustn’t allow it here.

The left-wing Guardian newspaper (the only one BBC staffers read) rightly takes a firm line against censorship. But when Melissa Kite submitted an article on ‘addiction’, in which she described me as ‘intellectually brilliant’, The Guardian censored the words. Personally, I think Melissa was far too kind, but that’s not the point. She said it. They cut it out.

My ‘I told you so’ department would like to point out that the UK Statistics Authority has now finally caught up with this column and noticed that crime figures are fiddled. Well done, the UKSA. Who’s next?

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The Sky's The Limit, or Curiouser and Curiouser

I now have my own personal copy of the full Sky News drug debate, mentioned here yesterday (kindly supplied by Sky themselves). It contains the first section of the discussion, which is missing from the one on the Sky website. But I cannot, alas,link to it here for insuperable technical and other reasons.  I find that Professor Val Curran spoke without major interruption from Adam Boulton and with *no* interruption from me for approximately 90 seconds.  Mr Boulton did briefly interrupt her twice, but not in a hostile, chiding or hurrying fashion. Nor did he describe her statements as ‘assertions’ , nor did he directly challenge them, nor did he invite me to contradict or question them.

 

I have no objection to being questioned or doubted or asked to substantiate my points, or to being told that my version of events is different from that put out by the government (or other establishment body), or to having my opponent encouraged to question my statements (though it is nice, if so, to be given the chance to do so in full). That is all normal and desirable.

 

But I am concerned when this happens to me and my opponent is not subjected to the same treatment. You may judge if this took place. I couldn't possibly comment.

 

Mr Boulton interrupted me (not helpfully) within 12 seconds of my starting to speak (though this first interruption took place before the website version begins).  Val Curran interrupted me when I had been speaking for about 45 seconds.  Less than 30 seconds after that, Mr Boulton started saying ‘OK’ incessantly to try to shut me up. Having finally succeeded in stopping me, he said that I had made ‘a lot of assertions’ (also true of Val Curran, though he never said so, the question in both cases being whether we could justify our assertions, or whether they stood up to indpendent analysis).

 

The website clip doesn’t actually begin at the beginning of my remarks, as it appears to do, but some time after I had actually begun.

 

The truncated version leaves out my opening words, in which (amongst other things) I give the title of my book and so point out (what the presenter has not mentioned)  that I have written a book on the subject and so have some standing in the matter (it’s not just miserable hack scribbler versus lofty professor). I  began by saying (rough transcript only, no time to revise fully)  ‘You start from the wrong place. In my book, which is called the War we Never Fought,   I point out that for the past 40 years there has been no war against drugs ‘. I was then interrupted, after which I restarted my argument by saying ‘Here’s the point…’ which is where the website version ( see earlier posting) begins.

How Are Opinions Formed?

One thing after another has kept me from blogging this week. On Thursday I found myself at Radio 2, discussing the ‘Special Relationship’ on the Jeremy Vine programme, with Edward Lucas of the Economist. Edward is a very old friend, who was enormously helpful to me when, in the winter of 1989, I set out for Eastern Europe armed with little more than enthusiasm and excitement as the Communist world tottered.

 

That autumn and winter of adventure took me to Prague, East Berlin, Budapest and Bucharest and eventually to Moscow, and then on to Washington - and I suppose I could easily have ended up on the same side as Edward, who is the author of ‘The New Cold War’, remains far more sympathetic to the USA than I am,  and preaches mistrust of Russia. 

 

Why did we diverge? I don’t know.  We’ve been in much the same places. Perhaps my abandoned Marxism caused me to care much more about the Communist side of Russia’s problems, and to be more forgiving of those difficulties which arise from Russia being Russia, and Russians being Russians.  Perhaps it was a matter of eras. I lived in Moscow during the final twitches and death-rattle of the Communist Party. Edward was there mainly during the Yeltsin years.

 

Perhaps it’s just a different disposition. Also, one of my key formative experiences was the wooing of Sinn Fein and Gerry Adams by Bill Clinton, which became personal for me, and was enhanced by the tremendous analysis of the whole affair which Conor O’Clery, of the Irish Times, kindly shared with me. Conor’s sympathies in the matter were quite different from mine, (though we both tried very hard to respect each other’s patriotism) . But above all things, he is a superb reporter. I first met him in Moscow where he had bravely set up a bureau on a shoestring, and was one of the best correspondents operating at that time (even though he lacked the money and staff the bigger bureaux possessed)  . His understanding of the how and why of the Irish triumph over Britain in Washington in those crucial months was far superior to that of anyone else outside the West Wing of the White House. And that fact in itself, that tiny Ireland was able to outmanoeuvre the mighty British Embassy, tells you much that you need to know about the alleged ‘Special Relationship’ an expression which, ever since, has caused me to snort with derision.

 

I wasn’t too keen on the American arrogance towards Russia after the collapse of Communism either. I saw it as a second-rate repeat of Versailles, a short-sighted triumphalism, combined with a nearly mad belief that Russia, given the ‘free market’ and ‘democracy’ would become just like everywhere else. You’ll have noticed that this hasn’t happened. How could it have done? Those osf us who had travelled through the Evil Empire by train had seen that the USSR’s economy was a great heap of rust,  that it was far more disastrous than Western businessmen, fooled by the glitter of Yeltsin Moscow, could possibly grasp. As for ‘democracy’,  what Russia lacked had always lacked, was the Rule of Law. Without that, ‘democracy’ might well end ( and on one occasion nearly did) with the return of the Communist Party with a legitimate majority.

 

Most normal Russians yearned for the days of Leonid Brezhnev, a fool’s paradise, true enough, but one where most of them had lived better than at any time before or since. They called it ‘the Golden Time’. A huge bronze plaque to Brezhnev, I was amused to see the other day, has now been restored to the building in which I (and he)  lived in Moscow, the majestic and gloomy 26 Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Brezhnev’s plaque had been ripped down in the Gorbachev era. The wise and distinguished Mary Dejevsky, then the ‘Times’ correspondent, once described to me how she had watched it being uncermeoniously unscrewed and scornfully flung into a lorry. Where did it then go? At one stage it turned up in (of all places) the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin. Now it’s back, next to the matching plaque to Yuri Andropov, the KGB man who became leader, which Gorbachev allowed to remain, as Andropov had been his patron. My first assistant and translator, the mysterious Alla (provided,  in my view, by the KGB to see if I was a spy, and  withdrawn when they eventually realised the idea was absurd) would often put flowers on the Andropov monument as she came to work.

 

Anyway, whatever the key difference is, Edward thinks Vladimir Putin is a global threat, and I think he’s not. In fact I think he’s less of a general menace than Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish leader, whose internal repression is probably worse than Putin’s, whose country’s corruption is comparable to Russia’s, and whose intervention in Syria has had bloody and terrible consequences. Yet Edward’s newspaper, the Economist, is always hard on Putin but soft on Erdogan, whom it misleadingly calls ‘Mildly Islamist’, when in fact the truth is he’s cunningly but strongly Islamist (or was, until he went wild over Syria, and wilder still when the Istanbul crowds dared to protest against him). This inconsistency, like all such inconsistencies, might help us explain what the real problem is.

 

Both of us more or less agree that Putin’s a domestic tyrant with a nasty regime at his back, but our explanations for this, and our concerns about it, are different.

 

And yet we enjoy each other’s company, and I for one think highly of Edward’s work.

 

Disagreement, you see, can be a civilised pleasure. But not always.  I’m not sure it was at a student debate on drugs I attended on Thursday night, where I felt that the meeting was so unfairly organised that I threatened to leave, to ensure some semblance of fairness. I must admit to being bored sick, and deeply angered,  by the repeated, dishonest claims of the liberalisers, and their utter irresponsibility. I think I have probably come to the end of this argument. Yet, at the end, my side appeared to have won. If so, it was mainly thanks to my fellow anti-legaliser Josephine Hart, whose direct personal experience of the hell which invades your life when a person you love takes to drug abuse,  has convinced her of the need for law, and who is (under the circumstances) miraculously patient with the other side.

 

Blairite openly endorses Cameron

The Blairite commentator John Rentoul has now openly said that he would rather David Cameron remained in office after the next election than that Ed Miliband took his place.

 

The details are here http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2014/01/17/blairite-for-cameron/ and I urge you to read them.

 

The key passage is this :'So I had to say what I think, which is that it would be better for the country if David Cameron were to continue as Prime Minister next year.'

 

He goes on to qualify this (and to make some typically unconventional remarks about the much-derided Ed Balls, whom it is now fashionable to dismiss).

 

But he knows what he is doing when he says this, and he knows which bit is going to be quoted. Mr Rentoul, biographer of th Blair creature and longstanding Blair enthusiast, is now an open Cameroon.

 

Many such people, in politics and the media,  have been secret supporters of the Cameron project since Gordon Brown became Premier. But this explicit declaration is something new.

 

I have argued for many years that the Tory party has been captured by Blairism, because its only purpose now is to obtain office, and-having no moral, philosophical, economic or other critique of New Labour - it seeks to do so by copying the machine which repeatedly thrashed the Tories at elections from 1997 onwards.

 

Very interesting times are coming. once the results of the Euro-elections are known in May. Expect a lot of realigning. But the pretence that the Conservative Party is a conservative, patriotic formation surely cannot be maintained much longer.  

Clear Blue Sky

Sky News have very kindly given me this download FOR USE ON THIS BLOG ONLY, in which those who wish to can see the full discussion between me and Professor Val Curran, moderated by Adam Boulton, which was broadcast on Sky News on Wednesday. Please do NOT reproduce it elsewhere.

 

https://www.hightail.com/download/elNMNnFCZEtwaFNGa2RVag