Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 251

Owen Jones doesn't want healthcare distributed on the basis of wealth and cunning. Why then does he defend a school system that does this?

Some weeks ago the ‘Independent’ columnist Owen Jones asserted on Twitter  ‘Anyone who thinks grammar schools would improve social mobility needs to do their homework. They make things worse.’

 

He was one of several people who had attacked the idea of selection that week.  I replied to this offensive here on 13th November:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/11/on-doing-your-homework-a-riposte-to-a-bog-standard-attack-on-grammar-schools.html

 

Since then I have been pressing Mr Jones to give a response to the points I made.

 

Now he (sort of ) has here

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/anachronistic-and-iniquitous-grammar-schools-area-blot-on-the-british-education-system-9013626.html

 

I should have thought it idle to rage over the iniquities of selection by ability in a tiny few remaining state schools when there is a far, far greater problem of ‘selection by estate agent, bank balance and cunning’ all over the country, as described here:

 

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/dec/18/schools-need-to-avoid-selection-by-estate-agent-says-report

 

 

I have never understood how supposed radical socialists can defend a system which blatantly and unstoppably selects by various forms of pre-existing privilege, not least the well-educated parent’s skill at manipulating the system.  It’s notable, in fact, that anti-grammar zealots are very quiet about this issue . They’ll condemn selection by religion, but never by house-price. That, of course, is because so many rich left-wingers buy their children into exceptional state schools, especially in London, by this very method.

 

The Sutton Trust’s supposed remedy for this is something even worse, a lottery for school places which would achieve nothing but equal injustice, and would probably damage quite a few reasonably good schools by bequeathing on them large numbers of pupils who did not want to be at them, and which the school would rather not have. Such is the madness to which Soviet Britain sinks, so in thrall to compulsory egalitarianism that it is prepared to do mad things rather than re-examine its dogma.

 

But back to Mr Jones, who ludicrously describes grammar supporters as ‘the pro-secondary modern brigade’. Surely, it is his side, which has imposed Secondary Moderns on everyone, which deserves this title? After all, the GCE ‘O’ level, at which grammar schools excelled, but which few Secondary Moderns achieved, had to be first watered down and then wholly abandoned once comprehensive education became general. Embarrassingly, the private schools continued to cope well with it. It would be hard to find a clearer indication that the abolition of selection lowered the standards of the better schools , rather than raising those of the worse ones.

 

Let me take his article piece by piece.

 

He begins :’ The chief inspector of schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, could not have been more damning. Grammar schools are “stuffed full of middle-class kids,” he says. Though they “might do well with 10 per cent of the school population,” he argues, “everyone else does really badly.” Refreshing: we normally only hear from those who want to bring back secondary moderns. It’s time to push back, and call for the remaining 164 grammar schools to finally be scrapped.’

 

I respond. Of course selective schools are full of middle-class children. The middle class is not a hereditary aristocracy , nor is it a caste. It is currently an expanding part of the population   (though I think it is set to shrink as we globalise into a low-wage, low-skill economy) which owes its status to merit, academic and professional.  Middle class adults value education as a form of wealth. If you have good schools in an area, you would have to pass a law to keep the middle classes out of them. This is not itself a criticism.They do not, by being there, exclude other talented people. At least they don’t if there is a system by which others may reach those schools on merit. Of course, if there is selection by wealth alone( see above) there is no such system.

 

Mr Jones continues : ‘There’s a good reason why the pro-secondary modern brigade are so loud, with the exception of the two-person campaigning machine of Melissa Benn and Fiona Millar. According to the Sutton Trust, most top journalists are privately educated – for the general population it’s just 7 per cent – so our media is hardly fertile ground to champion the benefits of comprehensive education. “Aha!”, the secondary modernists respond. “That in itself illustrates the failure of the comps!” It actually says more about the fact that if you have parents rich enough to send you to a fee-paying school, they’ll be rich enough to pay you through the media’s proliferating unpaid internships, as well as the costly post-graduate journalism courses that are becoming all but compulsory to so many wanting to enter the media world. Here is a wider debate about Britain’s rigged society that the secondary modern lobbyists are not interested in.’

 

Well, my view is that I am very fortunate to have been privately educated, not that I enjoyed much of it or favour the snobbish parts of it, and even more fortunate to be able to educate my own children privately, as many long to do and cannot. But I am constantly disgusted that the things I pay for are not available on merit. And it is this disgust which motivates my long campaign for selective state education.  I would like to see Eton, Westminster  and Winchester once again educating the bright children of the poor, as they were originally meant to do, as Direct Grant schools ( see below)  accessible to any talented child through competitive examination. I’d want the same for all the independent schools, actually. Several of the great institutions should survive as independent foundations, because they are so old and their traditions are valuable in themselves. But many of the others could become part of a national selective system.

 

Whereas it seems to me that some of the powerful privileged voices raised *against* academic selection are those who have themselves benefited from the secret selection, through wealth and cunning, described above. In what way are they expressing concerns for those who cannot compete in this race of cheque-books and sharp elbows? How, by maintaining a system of grotesque unfairness, do they claim to be helping the poor? I don’t think internships have anything to do with this subject.

 

Mr Jones writes : ‘The debate is also skewed because so few of those written off by secondary moderns made it into the political or media elite. So let us stick to the facts. Grammar schools have never worked. Back in the late 1950s, the government commissioned the Crowther Report into the state of Britain’s education system. They found that boys from semi-skilled or skilled family backgrounds were “much under-represented in the composition of selective schools”, but “over-represented” in the secondary moderns. Most of the “sons of professional people” went to grammars, but only a minority of manual workers’ children did so. As a 2011 British Journal of Sociology study put it, “any assistance to low-origin children provided by grammar schools is cancelled out by the hindrance of secondary moderns”.’

 

The grammar school system was full of faults and problems, and far from perfect. The 11+ was flawed, too early for many, too rigid, in many cases too final. It wasn’t and isn’t the only way of selecting. Germany uses a much softer and more flexible method, which I support.  There were , in most parts of the country, far too few grammar schools. There were  also too few places for girls.

 

But by their nature, the middle classes were (see above) bound to dominate them.  There’s nothing wrong with that in itself. The question is not *how many* children of working class parents went to them, but how many *who should have gone to them* did not go.  Doubtless many did. But that could have been solved by better selection and more grammar schools. It was not solved by abolishing grammar schools. Rather the contrary. I strongly suspect that selection by wealth and cunning excludes and blights many more children from this class than grammars ever did. How would a bright child from a poor family get to, say Camden Girls’, William Ellis, the London Oratory or Cardinal Vaughan? But lots of bright children from elite New Labour families get into such schools.

 

Mr Jones continues: ‘What about the minority of working-class children who did make it to grammars? Generally speaking, they did badly. According to a 1954 government report, out of 16,000 grammar school pupils from semi-skilled or unskilled families, around 9,000 failed to get three passes at O-level. Just one in 20 were awarded two A-levels. And there’s a reason for this: it is broader social inequalities that fuel educational inequalities, not school structures.’

 

What is the reason? I don’t know. Not all grammar schools were good. Not all teaching was good.  Many children from such homes never finished their ‘O’ levels because of home pressure to go out to work  which caused them to leave before they could take the exams.  It is easy to think of ways of reducing such pressure, while keeping academic selection.  The ‘O’ level was a tough exam that it was quite possible to fail. Can we also please have the comparable figures for pupils from families further up the social scale? If he really thinks that grammars didn’t help working class children up the ladder, then he should look at the comments on his own article, many from people recounting just such an experience. Selection by ability wasn’t a magic carpet and wasn’t perfect. Who says it was?. But it was immeasurably better than selection by wealth and cunning. Destroying it did nothing for those who needed help.

 

 

Mr Jones says ‘Peter Hitchens is a passionate defender of selection, arguing that political parties have been “captured by Gramscian revolutionary thought some years ago”. One of his key arguments is that “the grammars and direct grants stormed Oxford (and Cambridge) in the 1950s and 1960s”. This in itself is an odd conflation, given most of the students at direct grant grammar schools were fee-paying. Back in 1964, 37 per cent of all Oxbridge students were state-educated; last year, 63.3 per cent of Cambridge hailed from a state school. As ever, the numbers of working-class students at Oxford and Cambridge – and other top universities, some of whom are even less socially representative – is unacceptably low. That’s why they should be forced to automatically enrol the brightest working-class students, recognising the fact we start from different places.’

 

Well, I don’t doubt that many of the pupils at direct grant paid fees. But a very large number did not. Look at the history of such great DG schools as Manchester Grammar under Eric James, a radical devoted to helping the poor get good education. They were there on merit, and the schools did exactly what modern governments keep telling the private schools to do – they opened themselves up to state pupils in their thousands. They functioned as part of the state school system in the places where they operated, until 1975 when they were abolished in an act of destructive egalitarian spite.  To classify them as private schools in terms of Oxbridge entry is to mislead greatly.  If Mr Jones examines the state schools which send pupils to Oxbridge now, he will find that they are not typical comprehensives. Many of them are openly selective grammars, and most of the others are selective in other ways, especially by faith. And this figure has been achieved through great political pressure to discriminate in favour of state applicants. Whereas the grammar school pupils in the 1960s received no special treatment, and were disadvantaged by the Public Schools’ long experience of teaching the Classics, then required for Oxbridge entry.

 

Mr Jones again : ‘Where selection remains today, it continues to be largely the preserve of the privileged. Just 3 per cent of grammar school pupils are on free school meals, compared to 17.5 per cent at other schools. They are a whopping four times more likely to admit privately educated children than those on free school meals. Hitchens claims that’s because, with so few selective areas, pushy middle-class types are bound to dominate. But grammar schools’ unrepresentative make-up is consistent with how they have always been, and hardly explains why, as one study recently found, “poor children do dramatically worse in selective areas”, with poor children far less likely to do well at GCSEs in areas like Kent than non-selective areas. In selective areas, the privileged often pay for private tuition to get their kids to pass the grammar school test, which is exactly what they would do everywhere if selection was rolled out nationally again.’

 

I explained at length in my November 13th response to Mr Jones why this is just misleading propaganda. I cannot see how this anomaly in any way supports his assertion that ‘grammar schools’ unrepresentative make-up is consistent with how they have always been', which is just a prejudiced statement of opinion unsupported by anything. A national selective system, open to all, would make it unnecessary for parents to resort to private tutors. Academic children would get into academic schools.

 

Mr Jones ‘And then there’s Northern Ireland, also stuck in the selective age, again championed by Hitchens as a success. That’s odd, because according to the recent Pisa international rankings on maths, reading and science, the Six Counties do worse than both Scotland and England.’

 

Not really odd. PISA rankings are far from reliable, do not compare like with like and are questioned by many authorities.  In any case, this in no way answers my figures (which he has had for a month, and which I sourced for him) , showing that children from the poorer social classes have a greatly improved chance of getting into higher education in Northern Ireland’s academically selective system than they do in any of the mainland systems, which select almost entirely by wealth and cunning.

 

Mr Jones concludes :’ The real issue is social inequality. By the age of five, children from the poorest backgrounds have a vocabulary up to 18 months behind those from the richest backgrounds; no wonder selection a few years later purges so many. That’s why we need far more resources at an earlier age, with more investment in Sure Start and nurseries. Diet, housing, the stresses of poverty: here are far bigger factors, and the reason middle-class pupils tend to do well wherever they are sent. So let’s focus on inequality and good schools for all, and finally rid ourselves of the bewildering anachronism of selection.’

 

No doubt there is something in this, and I’m not against anything that might genuinely improve the lifetime chances of the poor. I’d go for the reintroduction of stable family life, myself, not to mention a counter-revolution in primary schools, to undo the 1960s reforms endorsed by Plowden, which of course hit the poor hardest because their home resources were so much smaller.

 

But if Mr Jones thinks ‘selection’ is a ‘bewildering anachronism’, why then does he lend his support to a type of selection cruel, rigid and indefensible, and one which has the nerve to call itself ‘comprehensive’. Schools must in fact select. They will always do so. The question is, how best to do it . Ability and talent? Or wealth and cunning? I should have thought that for any moral person the choice was easy. He doesn’t want an NHS in which healthcare is distributed on the grounds of wealth and cunning (and nor do I). Why then does he want a school system that distributes schooling by wealth and cunning?

  

Can We Be Friends? I doubt it. But Matthew Perry, Please Read This on 'Addiction'

AS my BBC Newsnight exchange with Matthew Perry (more on this later)  has revived interest in the subject, I take this opportunity to publish here in full ( and I hope he won’t mind) the result of a long exchange I had last March with a blogger who calls himself ‘Citizen Sane’, and who had quite strongly attacked my views on addiction. There'sa  link in the text to the detailed argument. I don’t expect it to convince everybody, but I think that, in making his honourable and remarkably honest retreat, ‘Citizen Sane’ might have something to teach dogmatic believers in ‘addiction’ such as Matthew Perry, who I hope will read this.

 

From the blog of

 

‘CITIZEN SANE’ , March 25 2013

 

The original may be consulted here http://bit.ly/GzI61T

 

‘Further adventures with Peter Hitchens

 

It’s been an unusual week. It’s not often that I get to exchange opinions with a renowned conservative columnist on my blog, but that is what has been happening. Further to my previous post documenting a conversation on Twitter with Peter Hitchens about addiction, he personally responded to my points at great length in the comments section. To which I replied. To which he replied. To which I replied. To which he replied. To which I replied. To which he replied again. It’s all here (http://citizensane.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/youre-gonna-have-to-face-it-youre-addicted-to-peter-hitchens/ ) and makes, I think, for an interesting read.

 

It was also unusual for me in that, after starting from a resolute position on the subject of addiction and continuing with this theme for most of the conversation, I suddenly found myself having enormous doubts about my stance when I attempted to respond to his following request:

 

‘You’re going to need to strip the whole thing down to bright metal, and ask yourself to answer the following question with a clear, unambiguous definition. ‘What is “addiction”?’

 

In short, I couldn’t do it. It slowly dawned on me, while trying to construct a watertight definition, that it wasn’t logically possible. The language involved is either blatantly self-contradictory or intellectually inconsistent.

 

I’ll try to summarise my newly found position. Addiction is commonly understood as being some overbearing and unstoppable illness that renders its victims completely unable to withstand its temptations. In response to his debate on the subject with Hitchens on Newsnight, for example, Russell Brand (famously an ex-heroin user) wrote a comment piece in The Spectator. Here, he wrote:

 

…the mentality and behaviour of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless (my emphasis) over their addiction and, unless they have structured help, they have no hope.

 

But this simply cannot be true from a logical point of view. If addiction really did render addicts “completely powerless” then nobody would ever give up any addiction, would they? Addiction would be a one way destination, impossible to return from. So addiction cannot mean this, we must dismiss that definition. So instead of words like ‘compulsive’ or ‘irresistible’ what should we use? Powerful? Gripping? What we have now is a watered down version of addiction which is self-contradictory. If it is a compulsion then that is absolute. We cannot then say it’s a compulsion that can be defeated – that is nonsensical. Therefore we downgrade it to mean “something that is very difficult to resist”. Difficult, yes. Impossible? No. Either way, we have either a definition of addiction that is blatantly false or a mishmash. The first option removes the notion of choice or will or determination. The second definition contradicts the first and relegates addiction to something that requires lots of willpower.

 

As Peter Hitchens said in one of his replies:

 

‘Of course, as I know well from dozens of these debates, you will now start to redefine ‘addiction’ for *this* part of the argument, saying that it doesn’t actually mean total compulsion. But you will retain the original definition, of an overmastering irresistible power, for the other part of the argument, the one you use to excuse the alleged ‘addicts’. This is called ‘inconsistency’, and in a serious argument it loses you lots of points.

 

‘In this argument, because conventional opinion and majority opinion are behind you, and because you (and intellectual fashion in general) have a deep dislike of the concept of free will and full human responsibility, you can dance around it and pretend that you haven’t committed an offence against reason. Most people listening or reading will applaud you. But you will still have lost the point.’

 

This was the killer blow for me: it clanged like a bell in my head, arousing the dormant logician within. I had unwittingly fallen into a semantic bear trap of claiming that it is a truly powerful force that compels the user to continue but not so powerful a force that it negates free will entirely. It cannot be one *and* the other and I had to acknowledge this.

 

From everything I have read so far on the subject, much of it on Mr Hitchens’ own blog but also elsewhere, similar nonsensical positions are advanced on such a routine basis that it’s staggering that the contradiction is not more frequently pointed out.

 

In this piece, for example, which heralds a new definition of addiction by the American Society of Addictive Medicine (ASAM), there are a number of inconsistent statements in the very first page: (the words in bold are my emphasis)

 

‘If you think addiction is all about booze, drugs, sex, gambling, food and other irresistible vices, think again. And if you believe that a person has a choice whether or not to indulge in an addictive behavior, get over it. The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) blew the whistle on these deeply held notions with its official release of a new document defining addiction as a chronic neurological disorder involving many brain functions, most notably a devastating imbalance in the so-called reward circuitry. This fundamental impairment in the experience of pleasure literally compels the addict to chase the chemical highs produced by substances like drugs and alcohol and obsessive behaviors like sex, food and gambling.’

 

So the person does not have a choice, they are *literally compelled*. If this is true, if this is really what addiction means, then there is nothing that can be done is there? Once addicted, there can be no way out. But how does this square with the fact that many people do overcome their addictions? Not easily, not without setback and almost certainly not without support – but they do it.

 

There’s more (in this quote the italics are the emphasis of the original article, not mine):

 

In other words, conscious choice plays little or no role in the actual state of addiction; as a result, *a person cannot choose not to be addicted*. The most an addict can do is choose not to use the substance or engage in the behavior that reinforces the entire self-destructive reward-circuitry loop.

 

In the preceding quote, it was claimed that it’s not possible to believe that a person has a choice whether or not to indulge in an addictive behaviour. Yet in the same the article, just a paragraph or two later, they unwittingly water down the definition by saying that conscious choice plays “little or no role”. They’ve let a chink of light in there – they’d just told us that there is *no* choice, but now there’s at least the possibility that choice can play a *little* role. Well, which is it? Such language, in my admittedly limited reading on the subject (hell, I’m no expert, but I can spot inconsistent language, even if I didn’t originally see it in my own) is routine.

 

Peter Hitchens debated the subject recently with Damian Thompson who uses similar contradictory terminology, stating that addiction is compulsive behaviour but it remains a matter of choice. It can be compulsive, it can be a matter of choice, but it cannot – by definition – be both.

 

I have written much more here than I intended to do. Indeed, anyone still reading this rambling post might conclude that I am crazy to a) reach consensus with Peter Hitchens after publicly baiting him about the subject and b) then write a lengthy follow-up post that details just how wrong I now consider my original position to have been. And they may be right. Nonetheless, my exchanges with Mr Hitchens were educational and forced me to forgo my original complacent position and to delve a little deeper into a subject that is extremely ambiguous.

 

My initial exchanges were based on a misunderstanding of what I thought Peter Hitchens meant by saying that he doesn’t believe that addiction exists. I think this is a common misunderstanding by his critics, many of whom, I suspect, choose to misunderstand him deliberately. I initially thought that by denying its existence he was actually denying the reality of being drawn to a substance. But of course he doesn’t mean any such thing (at least, I don’t think he does). Such feelings, cravings and desires are as real as any other. But this isn’t ‘addiction’ in the popular understanding of the term, because it can be conquered by anyone determined enough to do so. Some people won’t overcome these desires, some won’t even try, but others do.

 

At the risk of being accused of wanting to have my cake and eat it I’m still not sure that I would state with absolute certainty that “addiction does not exist”. I don’t know enough about neuroscience or the validity of studies of the brain’s so-called “reward circuitry”. However, I am able to say that I haven’t come across a definition of addiction that stands up to rigorous logical scrutiny and on the semantic point of “what is addiction?” I now understand Mr Hitchens’ argument.

 

If you don’t agree with me, let me know. And if you can conjure up a satisfactory definition of addiction, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.’ (If you wish to comment on the Citizen sane blog, please do go there, the address of this article, once again, is http://bit.ly/GzI61T. )

 

Or feel free to comment here. Or in both places.  

 

Reflections inTranquillity on the Matthew Perry Encounter

At last, I have a quiet moment to reflect on the Great Clash of Monday Night, in which I attempted to argue about drugs and the law with a Hollywood actor, Matthew Perry.

 

I’m grateful for all your many comments about this, most especially the abusive ones from people who can’t think and can’t argue.  These reassure me that I am doing something worthwhile. Asked on Twitter by one such person what qualifies me to have opinions on these matters I replied, ‘Facts,  logic and not being afraid of being abused by people like you’.

 

That’s quite important. Fear of being howled down does influence people. I suspect that human knowledge would have moved much further and much faster if it were not so. As my exchange with ‘Citizen Sane’, which I have re-posted, shows, my position is not contemptible, nor is it stupid. It is certainly contentious, and it requires a willingness to think for yourself even to consider it. But that is often the case in serious arguments about major subjects, as we frequently find here.

 

My only disappointment in all this is that little of the coverage or the reaction has involved anyone saying ‘ah, perhaps this is an issue worth examining’. Conventional wisdom has survived undented. Or has it? Maybe a few tiny seeds have been sown. One must always remember Mandelson’s Law, which states that new ideas have not begun to influence the public mind until long after their promoters are heartily sick of propounding them.

 

Why do I do these things?

 

I take as my text for the day a comment from Neil Saunders : ‘I agree with Peter Hitchens on the issue of drugs, but I think he is profoundly mistaken if he imagines that appearing on mainstream TV shows in debate with ageing good-time boys who acquired bad habits while being paid far too much to appear in achingly PC, painfully unfunny and nauseatingly smug American sitcoms is a good and effective use of his time and talents. He made the same kind of mistake only the other day in Australia, opposite killer-granny Germaine, Dan "Single-Issue" Savage (whose very arguments seemed to be pumped up with steroids) and the other lady, who rather resembled Joan Rivers after a pre-frontal lobotomy. Even Mr Hitchens seemed to acknowledge this at times (e.g. "you've won", "this is a rally!").’

 

Well, hmm. On the Australian matter, the ‘Q&A’ appearance came after a couple of other non-broadcast encounters with large Sydney audiences, in a country where my ideas weren’t until then widely known. It gave me the chance to give several interviews with Australian radio and TV stations, and to write an opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald(in which I now gather the Perry clash features, along with some pejorative quotes from reviews of my book, reviews discussed here some months ago). It also led to my writing a Diary or the Australia edition of the London ‘Spectator’ .

 

I might add that one mustn’t assume that studio audiences, or Twitter mobs, are wholly representative of opinion.

 

It is my good fortune that I enjoy debates, don’t mind a bit of abuse, and am prepared to say things which I know to be unpopular with large numbers of people, if I think they’re true.

 

I suspect quite a few people watching ‘Q&A’ were encouraged by some of the things that I said, and in some cases appalled by the one-sided nature of the panel and of the audience. I know from correspondence that my answer to the question on ‘dangerous ideas', that ‘The most dangerous idea in all history and philosophy is that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and rose from the dead’ resonated with many who had begun to wonder if their own Christian belief had vanished entirely from our culture.

 

I hadn’t expected the question, but when it came, there was no doubt that this is what I must say, and I would have been lacking in courage had I failed to do so.  It’s a statement of truth, which, as it happens, an atheist could equally well have made. What effect it may have had, and where and when, I don’t know. But at the moment I made it I felt that my whole journey to Australia,  a very pleasant if quite exhausting voyage, had been morally justified. There were already journalistic justifications, and personal ones. But this was even more significant. And of course because the statement was greeted with such shock by so many present, the point was made rather well that the Christian religion is in very severe decline, and has lost its power with astonishing speed. It is time the Anglosphere reased this and began to ponder its implications for our civilisation.

 

 

I am (as I’ve mentioned here before) haunted by a Chesterton remark, thrown away in a ‘Father Brown’ story that what we do here matters somewhere else; further, we do not necessarily understand our own actions properly, much like ignorant barbarians who try to puzzle out the meaning of a tapestry by studying the wrong side of it. Don’t necessarily judge this events by first appearances.

 

Something similar could be said for the ‘Newsnight’ episode. Not everyone, I think, felt Mr Perry had acquitted himself very well . In fact I know that some drug liberalisers were embarrassed by his performance. They have no idea what he meant when he said that ‘addiction’ was ‘ an allergy of the body’.

 

I rather felt I demonstrated some knowledge of the drugs courts question, that I held fast to logic and facts,  and that my opponents could not really challenge my fundamental about the deterrent purpose of criminal justice.

 

There was a wonderful three-way exchange which, alas , attracted less attention than it should have done (It’s about 3 minutes and 45 seconds into the Newsnight clip) .

 

 

Peter Hitchens:

 

‘If this is what you believe, that this is a terrible frightening disease after which they cannot stop taking drugs. If you really believe that…’

 

Perry ‘Yeah’

 

PH'... Then you would presumably think that the best thing would be that they never ever came into contact with those drugs?'

 

Baroness Meacher and Matthew Perry (almost in chorus) : ‘Of course!’

 

PH: ‘….Wouldn’t it therefore be wise to deter them from doing so…

 

Baroness Meacher : ‘Yes’

 

PH ‘…by a stern and effective

 

Baroness Meacher ‘No’

 

PH ‘…criminal justice system, which actually persuaded them it was unwise to take the drugs in the first place’.

 

 

It was at this point that Mr Perry began his direct frontal attack on me.

I love the way they both fell straight into the rather simple elephant trap I laid in front of their feet, and the different ways in which they sought to clamber out of it after they had tumbled in. If addiction is so irresistible, then surely we must protect people from it all costs. Actually, no.  They accept that deterrence is the logic of their position, but when asked to support the sort of measures which would deter, they then peel away.  Would they rather have lots of ‘addicts’ than put anyone in prison?

 

I wonder how many people have now begun to think about this subject when they hadn’t before. And I’m also grateful to Mr Perry for mentioning my book, which has until now suffered from a blanket of silence in almost all major newspapers and magazines.

The Emperor's New Clothes - 2013 Version

After my televised encounter with a Hollywood actor, Matthew Perry, on the subject of ‘Addiction’ , and the reaction to this encounter on Twitter (you’ve guessed, they preferred the actor to me)  I thought I would offer a new version of Hans Christian Andersen’s famous story ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’.

 

Once upon a time a great emperor was approached by two charming and persuasive gentlemen. ‘Your Majesty’, they said to him. ‘We are the possessors of a wonderful new invention which we would like to offer to you and you alone because of your greatness and gloriousness’.

 

The two men explained that they had created a new fabric of almost supernatural beauty, which would make the wearer look superb beyond all previous measure.

 

The Emperor (like everyone else vulnerable to flattery) accepted the men’s offer. He ordered his treasury to pay the men a large sum in gold. The two visited the emperor in his private chambers, asked him to disrobe, measured him elaborately , while larding him with further flattery about his magnificent physique (it wasn’t, actually, but he liked to be told it was).

 

They then departed (with the gold) saying they would return with his new robes in time for his forthcoming wedding with a beautiful princess from a country he wishes to swallow up in his empire.

 

And they returned on the appointed day, bearing richly decorated chests, which they brought to his private chamber. Again, he was asked to disrobe, again they praised his physique.  Then they opened the boxes. There was nothing in them.

 

The Emperor, having paid many thousands of golden ducats, looked at them in some doubt, snapping’ What is this? Where are the clothes? ‘The two men replied that they were only visible to the great and intelligent, and asked him to look again.  Mindful of his thousands of ducats, and of the need to appear intelligent and a la mode, the Emperor managed to persuade himself that the boxes were in fact full of shining raiment, and stood still as the two tailors fiddled about with thin air. As they pretended to dress him, he pretended to be dressed.

 

Then he advanced through the Palace. He stood on the dais of his great hall, telling his courtiers, nobles and army commanders that the new clothes were visible only to the loyal and the good. Word of his declaration spread out into the crowds beyond, even reaching the Princess as she waited at the cathedral.

 

The procession began. The soldiers glared at the crowds. The crowds stared at their naked ruler, willing their minds to believe that he was in fact magnificently clothed. After a few minutes, they had persuaded themselves that the clothes existed. So did the priests at the cathedral, and the Princess.

 

But there is a little footnote. As the wedded pair left the church, a small boy cried out ‘But he’s got nothing on!’, just as the bands and the crowd had fallen silent.

 

The crowd fell on the child and his father, who were beaten severely before being seized by the soldiers, dragged to the palace dungeons and tortured until they, too, agreed that the emperor’s clothes were real. And they all lived miserably ever after.

 

The End

 

I have long thought that Andersen’s parable was wrong. When people delude themselves about reality, those who point out their error are not praised or rewarded. They are shouted down, mocked and silenced . I’ll write more about the Matthew Perry encounter soon.

 

 

Segregating the Sexes on Campus - What it's About and Why it Matters

Here’s today’s exam paper in liberty under the law. There is one question:

Should Universities allow Muslims to segregate men and women at public meetings on their premises?

 

You have ages and ages in which to deliberate on this. But before you begin, let me help you (or perhaps obstruct you)  in a  few small ways. The question is not : ’Do I approve of Muslims segregating men and women at public meetings on university premises?’. It is not even the same question as ‘Is it right or good for Muslims to segregate men and women on university premises?’. It is not even the same question as ‘Are there any circumstances under which men and women should be segregated?’.

 

Personally, I am against such segregation at meetings. I do not approve of it. In fact it came up briefly in my recent conversation at Brunel University with Professor Will Self. I cited the growing number of such segregated meetings as one of my reasons for saying that Islam was becoming powerful in our society. My view is that Islam is so confident in its beliefs, and so determined, and so convinced of its ultimate victory, that it exercises an influence far beyond its numbers.

 

The Christian churches may be larger in terms of numbers, but their numbers mean much less because for the most part they are in an intellectual retreat from faith, more afraid of Richard Dawkins than of God. And the militant atheists have very little idea of the power and force of Islam, having for the most part not lived in or experienced Muslim societies. So they think that by destroying this country’s Christian character, they merely open a space for themselves. In fact, they open a space for Islam, as we shall see.

 

Why do I disapprove of it? Because it seems to me to have something to with what appears to me to be the inferior position of women in Islam, most forcefully summed up by the lesser weight given to their testimony in Islamic law. I also dislike the apparent assumption in many Islamic cultures (also emphasised by veiling, separate entrances and galleries in mosques, separate quarters in houses)  that the two sexes cannot safely mingle.

 

Christianity used to have similar views but has largely abandoned them. I believe (though I can’t put my hand on the reference) that a large and prominent Anglo-Catholic church in Oxford required men and women to sit on opposite sides of the aisle, as recently as the early Edwardian era, just more than a century ago. It was also pretty standard, in most English churches, for women to be required to cover their heads. I think this was formally abandoned in the early 1950s, but again I’m not sure.  Perhaps I should care more, but I find it hard to do so, when the real problem is that so many people never go inside a church at all. Maybe (I sometimes worry) it is by giving way on these things that Christianity has destroyed itself. If a religion isn’t also a way of life, who long can it survive? Then again, I come back to the old point that it was by supporting the First World War that the Churches in this country destroyed their hold on the minds of millions. After a mistake as big as that, hats don’t really come into it.

 

Note, though, that I *disapprove* of segregation of men and women at public meetings. But so what? Am I then entitled to try to prevent it?  I disagree with much that is *said* at public meetings, and with the aims and desires of those who hold them.  A lot of people disagree with the things I say at the campus debates I quite frequently attend.

 

 But these are voluntary public meetings, not lectures or other events to which students are required to go. In a free society, I must tolerate the verbal expression of opinions I dislike. I personally would tolerate more than the law allows, even and permit the expression of opinions which actually disgust me. I don’t think freedom of speech means anything unless it includes things you really, really don’t like.  British law is far more restrictive than US law, which allows everything short of incitement to violence, ‘fighting words’  and the sort of thing best summed up the phrase ‘shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre’. I might add that on quite a lot of campuses certain morally conservative arguments are hard to make in public, and support for the State of Israel can be difficult to express. These restrictions are not legal, but they are powerful.

 

Now presumably, these Islamic gatherings seek to divide men from women in the auditorium because they believe that this is right and proper. It is, in a way, a physical expression of their opinions. And what of them?

 

I have often pointed out that there are, in fact  differences between men and women, so a crude equation of sex discrimination with racial discrimination doesn’t work.  If it did, separate lavatories for men and women would be illegal, and the armed forces wouldn’t keep women out of certain units, or have a longer marching stride for men than they do for women. In my view, the fact that women give birth, and men don’t, isn’t actually recognised *enough* in law.

 

But listening to a speech is not comparable to these things. Women and men are obviously entirely equal when it comes to such an activity. Dividing them must therefore be wrong.

 

So what should we do? Are we entitled to anything except disapprove?

 

Now, I’ve pointed out that nobody is compelled to go to these meetings. Likewise, nobody is compelled to go to (say) some of the major London gentleman’s clubs, which (even though they are nowadays infested with liberal lawyers and journalists) often continue to refuse membership to women.

 

 

Compulsion is crucial in this argument. If any university started segregating any of its lectures or seminars in this way, or its degree ceremonies, or any other of its wider activities on public premises, then a terrible storm should follow.

 

 That’s simple, then? Not really.

 

The interesting question arises as to what we might think of an Islamic university, similar in status to the Islamic schools, some of them nominally Church schools for historical reasons,  which now exist in the state system (and has anybody checked on whether any of them segregate boys and girls in the classroom?).

 

What if it,  having clearly stated that it was an Islamic institution open to all those prepared to observe the rules of Islam,  then clearly segregated the sexes?  As England’s two ancient universities are in fact specifically Christian from their foundation, have designated ‘University Churches’ and Christian ceremonial, and maintain chapels on their premises, it could be argued - now that we are equal and diverse - that Islam needed a comparable seat of learning. If it had such a university, would Islam be entitled to impose such rules there?

 

And as some of our finest state and independent secondary schools are single-sex schools, and would in many cases argue that they were good because they were segregated, often up to the age of 18,  Muslim educationalists could equally argue that we had no business preventing them from maintaining sex segregation in schools up to and beyond that age. Then we really would face a problem.  

 

Once you have abandoned any real claim to an established national religion, what arguments can you advance for giving privileges to that religion which you deny to other faiths, or denying privileges to any religion which you grant to any group?     

 

Let us imagine that we are on the campus of the University of Watermouth (renowned in fiction ), early on a weekday evening, in need of mental stimulation. We are in the Howard Kirk Building, a spacious example of New Labour architecture, all wood, glass, steel and exposed cables, and we find posters advertising a meeting of the Watermouth University Islamic Society. (By the way, I was recently on such a campus and found, during a stroll,  the premises of an Islamic Society which appeared to have separate rooms and entrances for ‘Brothers’ and ‘Sisters’. I won’t say which campus because I haven’t yet been able to check that I was right).  

The speaker and the subject seem interesting and we drift along. As is often the case in such buildings the lecture theatre has two entrances. One is clearly marked ’Brothers’ and the other ‘Sisters’. Charming bearded young men, and equally charming veiled young women direct us to one door or the other. Once inside, we find that the audience is indeed neatly divided. The organisers have arranged the chairs so that the two blocks of seats are separated by a central aisle, so there is no intermediate zone.

 

Well, if you have arrived as a (male/female) couple, you will already have faced several choices. Should we go in at all? Should we pay any attention to the ‘Brothers’ and ‘Sisters’ signs – and would there have been any tension of a man and a woman had gone *together* through either of those doors? What would have happened if anyone, for any reason, had not observed them? I suspect that a wisely-run university would have said that the doors were public university property and the society had no right to restrict passage through them on grounds of sex.

 

So what if the segregation were only imposed inside? One again, it is hard to see how the organisers could *coerce* anyone into sitting on either side of their preferred dividing line, while on university premises. They would, I think, be entitled to insist on it in a Muslim place of worship and its related buildings. They would be able to do so if they had hired a private building – but not a school hall or a town hall.

 

Then again, if you had voluntarily agreed to go to such a meeting, couldn’t it be argued that, by refusing to be directed into sexually segregated areas whose existence was made clear at the entrance, and making a scene by sitting in the other sex’s zone, you were attempting to disrupt it? I’m trying to think of a parallel, which might be involved in attending any other comparable gathering but I can’t (apart from persistent heckling).

 

The Universities tried to get round this by suggesting that there should also be a non-segregated section. It’s not a bad solution, in a way , provided the organisers are willing (which they might well not be). Though such a section certainly couldn’t be stuck at the back, or otherwise disadvantaged.  

 

If the organisers refused to have such a mixed zone, could they then be prevented from holding the meeting at all? And would that be an infringement of their free speech?

 

My guess is that the outcome will, now and later, depend entirely on the relative strengths of Islam and secularism on our university campuses. And as I expect Islam to grow steadily stronger, thanks to open borders and multiculturalism as supported by Mr Gove and Mr Cameron,  I think we will see, whatever rules we try to make now, that this sort of segregation will spread.

 

The Universities haven’t had much sympathy on this tricky issue. Some people just think it’s feminism versus Islam, which (under the current rules of PC Happy Families) means feminism trumps Islam. But that’s arbitrary, depends entirely on the relative strengths of these two competing radical forces, and may not be the case in ten years’ time.  The very hard left have been trying to square the circle of Islam and feminism for some time, and the rest of us will have to face the problem sooner or later. I find it amusing to listen to leftists explaining how the hijab may in fact be liberating. But some of them have been known to say so. Listen out for the first mainstream voice to make this claim.

 

My old friend Michael Gove, the last Blairite standing and still a believer in battling against ‘Islamism’ with law, rhetoric and (if needs be) force, denounced them for ‘pandering to extremism’. Then the Prime Minister had a rush of blood to the head on the topic (it’s amusing the way politicians turn into columnists, commentating left and right on matters they can’t control,  once it’s plain that they have no real power). His spokesman was authorised to say that he ‘felt very strongly’ about all this, and ‘doesn't believe guest speakers should be allowed to address segregated audiences’. He added: ‘We want to support the universities in taking a tough approach, and if more may need to be done then, of course, the Government would look at that.’

 

Well, the last bit’s what you might call an Unclarion Call. But what about his view that guest speakers *shouldn’t be allowed* to address segregated audiences. Spoken by a man in a pub the words ‘It shouldn’t be allowed, guv’, would have been unimportant. But from the First Lord of the Treasury, a statement that any sort of public speaking ‘shouldn’t be allowed’ is a bit more worrying. Does he really mean that? Was he thinking when he said it?

 

Mr Cameron famously made a speech on multiculturalism in Munich on 5th February 2011 ( you can read it here https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pms-speech-at-munich-security-conference ). This is the usual confused vapouring and floundering about terrorism, Islamic ‘extremism’ which is then to be distinguished from Islam, though I have never seen the instrument which may be used to draw the line. Even the most peaceful and kindly Muslim believes things which, if generally adopted, would revolutionise our society. And definitions of who is moderate and who is militant are famously unreliable, as we repeatedly find. I seem to recall the Head of the Civil Service, in New Labour days,  having to withdraw an invitation (to a Whitehall reception to mark Eid-al-Fitr, itself an interesting event) which had mistakenly been sent to one of these ‘moderate’ Imams, who turned out not to be quite so moderate after all.    

 

As Islam grows in our population, its ideas will become more current and harder to resist, as they are doing.  In areas where Muslims are strongly concentrated, this is even more evident. Those who have long pursued a policy of multiculturalism, combined with more or less open borders, have helped this to happen.

 

As it happens, Mr Cameron’s Munich speech recognised this problem. It contained this passage :‘ Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream.  We’ve failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong.  We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values.’

 

Well, this is true. But what was he going to do about it? By July 2012 he was personally assailing one of his own MPs who had (rightly) attacked the Olympic opening ceremony for being multicultural.

 

Mr Cameron’s  answer lay in ‘banning hate preachers’ and ‘proscribing’ organisations, foredoomed breaches of our own free speech traditions and our new Human Rights,  which won’t work and are in any case very difficult to achieve.  (‘It’s “Abu this and Abu that, and Abu, go away!”/ But it’s ‘”Obey the Human Rights Act!” for poor old Mrs May.’).

 

 And then some guff (how many times have we heard this ?) about National Citizen Service and ‘making sure that immigrants speak the language of their new home and ensuring that people are educated in the elements of a common culture’ . What common culture? After 50 years of multiculturalism, we can no longer agree on what it is. And so the strongest and most organised can dominate.

 

And that’s really the problem. 40-odd years ago, when I was an intolerant left-wing, aethist bigot at university, I doubt very much whether an Islamic society could have attracted an audience big enough to segregate.  It was us, the Trots, who had the big meetings. Now the Trots run the country and don’t need big meetings.  Within 30 years, I wouldn’t be a bit  surprised if the Islamic society is the largest and most influential on almost every campus in the land. And then…

 

A tax break can't rescue marriage: It's been doomed for four decades

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Marriage is on its deathbed. A tiny tax allowance won’t save it. Nor will benevolent old judges such as  Sir Paul Coleridge  urging young couples to wed before starting a family.

In fact, Sir Paul of all people should understand what the  law has done to marriage. After 1969, in most of the Western world, the marriage vow was legally meaningless.

All those moving promises about ‘for richer, for poorer’,  or ‘in sickness and in health’ (let alone ‘till death us do part’) were cancelled by Parliament. From then on, one party to the marriage could end it more  easily than you can get out of  a car lease.

And if the other spouse resisted, and wanted to stick  to the vows he or she had made, he or she could, in the end, be dragged from the family home by the forces of the State backed with the threat of prison.

For the most part (but of course not always), it was  men who were compulsorily dumped. The law helped this to happen. It didn’t matter how badly either party behaved. Women increasingly got custody of the children, because they were women.

The same went for the family home. The courts didn’t bother to enforce orders allowing  ex-husbands to stay in touch with their children.

 HENCE Willie Nelson’s bitter joke: ‘I’m not going to get married again. I’ll just find a woman I don’t like and buy her a house.’

In the end, the surviving marriages in our society exist entirely because both parties want them to. The  State, the law, the tax system, the schools, the benefits system and our culture offer  them no support and plenty  of penalties.

And if women wonder why they cannot get men to marry them these days, they just need to check the legal position. It  is amazing that so many men still do. The day is coming when the only people in Britain who want to get married will be lesbian clergywomen.

I know you think this is just me being extreme and pessimistic. But it isn’t. One of this country’s finest legal minds, Baroness Hale of Richmond, now sits on our alleged Supreme Court as its Deputy President.

But back in 1982, when she was just the barrister Brenda Hoggett, she wrote prophetically that the efforts of English law to make the sexes more equal had, in fact, destroyed most of the legal privileges of marriage. ‘Family law no longer makes  any attempt to buttress the stability of marriage or any other union,’ she wrote.

‘Logically, we have reached a point at which, rather than discussing which remedies should now be extended to the unmarried, we should be considering whether the legal institution of marriage continues to serve any useful purposes.’

Well, of course, this is Britain and we never stare the truth in the face like that. We are still pretending. But if anyone really wants to save and revive marriage (and there’s not much time left), it is the law they need to look at, not the tax form.

Another tragic suicide. another pile of 'happy pills'

There was something rather startling about reports of the sad death of Kate Barry, a distinguished photographer found dead outside her Paris home, apparently by her own hand.

The French police chose to stress that they found ‘antidepressant’ tablets in her flat.

Have the gendarmes, unlike our own authorities, finally begun to put two and two together about the connection between these dubious pills and suicide?

The evidence at so many inquests shows that those who have taken their own lives did so  after swallowing antidepressants, or suddenly ceasing to take them.

In many cases, their behaviour and state of mind changed completely after they were prescribed, and their families found the suicides inexplicable.

Nor is it any use to say: ‘They were depressed; therefore they were more likely to commit suicide.’

Many of these drugs are associated with suicidal feelings as a recognised side-effect.

In some countries they must carry warnings saying so. I do not know if there is a connection, but I think it is time there was an independent inquiry.

The drug companies themselves are so rich that only the State can regulate them.

Parliament’s Health Select Committee should begin an urgent, deep investigation.

Twice in the last century German power pushed into Ukraine. Twice, red war pushed it out again. The EU,  knowing nothing and caring less about history, now once  again infuriates Moscow with its expansionary arrogance, encouraging mob rule in Kiev to get its way. This will end badly.

Mass hangings as Iraq's real villains go free

Still the Chilcot Inquiry is stalled, and still the authors of the Iraq disaster go unrebuked. And these people still dare to ask critics of their stupid war, ‘Would you rather Saddam was still in power?’

I answer ‘Yes’. For we have merely replaced his tyranny with another. In one of a series of superb dispatches, Anthony Loyd described in The Times last week how as many as 42 prisoners are now being hanged in Iraq’s al-Kadhimiya prison  in 48 hours – five at a time.

None of these men has had anything remotely resembling a fair trial. Many have been horribly tortured, burned, raped with bottles, attacked with power-drills, before being forced into making televised ‘confessions’.

The ‘anti-terror’ article of the criminal code has become ‘a tool for political elimination  and revenge’, according to  one of the few independent defence lawyers, who goes about armed and surrounded with bodyguards.

Meanwhile, thousands die each year in sectarian violence. This (predictably enough) was the outcome of the noble ‘crusade for democracy’ into which we were tricked. When will  the culprits make their televised confessions?

Immigration Minister Mark Harper doesn’t understand his own Government’s policy. Ludicrously, he rebuked a pizza chain boss for not paying his staff enough.

Eh? I thought that low wages were the second most important aim of our mass immigration policy (the other is to turn Britain into somewhere else and ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’).

Why does he think the Minimum Wage has hardly risen in recent years? Why does he think that pay in so many occupations is now set so low that you can only survive on it if you live five  to a room or roost in someone’s garden shed?

While China is turning into a modern industrial nation, we are turning into a  cheap labour state, and our grandchildren (who will work 18 hours a day in sweatshops) will all know enough Mandarin to beg for small change from Chinese tourists.

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Why Don't You Smile More?

One of the many oddities of minor celebrity is that people are inclined to give you advice, they’d probably never offer members of their own family, colleagues or friends (unless they like hospital food, that is).

 

I am quite frequently instructed that I should smile more. There’s been an outbreak of this on Twitter recently, along with various snippets of analysis of my character, suggesting that I am sunk in permanent bitter, hateful  gloom. This is an offshoot of the pronouncement that ‘You Have No Sense of Humour’ to which there is no real reply, and which helps to train me in the self-restraint which I urge on others.

 

While there is no real reply to it, the ‘Sense of Humour’  can actually be rebutted technically. But this is no use at all, as we shall see.  My archive department tells me that I have, on various radio and TV appearances, intentionally caused members of live audiences to laugh on several separate occasions. I have even laughed myself. I know this to be true. I believe that recordings of some of these events can be found on YouTube. But I also know that most people who have watched or listened to these programmes will not recall the laughter, and will still maintain that I have no sense of humour, never smile, etc. The claim actually has nothing to do with my sense of humour. It has to do with the fact that image is more powerful than reality.

 

The same goes for the claim that I never smile. I have to say that my smile is a pretty terrible thing, and people who have witnessed it at close quarters have often begged me not to do it again. But even so, I occasionally risk it, even in public places, and have been caught on camera doing so. I find, when I view these recordings, that I agree with the people who have begged me not to do it again, and so quite often I sit, inwardly smiling, but outwardly thinking of others and keeping a straight face. Occasionally my self-control gives way. But that does no good either.

 

The thing is, my critics ( and indeed some of my supposed supporters) don’t expect me to smile. If I make a joke, they either forget about it instantly or assume it was an accident.

 

Perhaps this is just because they think this anyway, and (as in so many of my conflicts with the majority) they see and hear what they want to see and hear, and don’t see or hear what they don’t wish to see or hear.

 

Or perhaps (and I am being charitable here because it is the Advent season)  this is because of my inner gloom. Those who like to divide the population between introverts and extroverts would certainly place me among the introverts, a significant minority who dislike noise, compulsory jollity, self-abandonment, extravagant displays of affection, paper hats, etc ( An interesting book  recently published, ‘Quiet’,  by Susan Cain, explores this subject).

 

This doesn’t mean we don’t go out, or even that we fear crowds. Introverts can often deal with crowds better than they can deal with individuals. It just means that we don’t necessarily share the pleasures of the majority (apparently the introverts are about a third of the population) . But we are still enjoying ourselves.

 

The fact that I like dark afternoons, melancholy ruins, plainchant, winter picnics, walking in the rain, solitude, swimming in cold seas,  long train journeys, cathedral cities,  second-hand bookshops, ghost stories, museums, wild moorland, mountain rambles, decayed old towns in obscure corners of Europe, sad ceremonies, ruins and so forth (which I do) may be and is baffling to those who like hot beaches, nightclubs, rock concerts and the Glastonbury Festival (which I don’t) . I doubt if I could be found smiling while I enjoyed my pleasures. But that’s too bad.  I do not order or urge other, noisier people to stop smiling, or tell them to appreciate my quieter pleasures instead of their preferred ones. I have never asked anyone to take off a paper hat at Christmas time. So why should they tell me to put one on, or otherwise conscript me into their jollities?  I’ll smile when I want to, not when I’m told, and I might add, hasn’t there been quite a bit of smile inflation since fast food joints compelled their poor staff to grin all the time?  

Facts, Opinions and Conformity - on Being Proved Right

A further reply to Mr Platt, who claims that I choose my opinions first and my facts afterwards.

 

What exactly is a fact, in a matter of controversy? Can facts be arranged to mislead? Can authority so arrange them, consciously or unconsciously? Can supposedly sceptical journalists, academics and politicians accept (for political reasons) misleading arrangements of facts?

 

It is perfectly true that when an idea is conventional wisdom,  there will be a great array of journalism, broadcasting and academic writing supporting it. And so the sceptic will be portrayed as mad, stupid, factually incorrect, or a number of other things. 

And so the person who finds that what he is being told does not accord with his own experience, or runs counter to historical experience - or has other good reasons to challenge orthodoxy -  will lack the backing of the academy or of the state. And of course he will be doubted and criticised by the regrettably large number of people who take the side of authority against scepticism.  And so he may need to fight Goliath with a sling.

 

Goliath (and the conformist, conventionally wise crowd which stands behind him) will usually laugh with scorn, and denounce his challenger with lofty disdain.

 

And yet , this morning, as I sat on my delayed train (which the train company involved will no doubt massage into punctuality before it reaches the Passengers’ Charter statistics) , I encountered no fewer than three newspaper stories in which positions which I took against orthodoxy were vindicated by later events. Did I choose these opinions before I chose my facts, as Mr Platt says?  Or was it rather that my broad understanding of history, politics and society equipped me to doubt the propaganda I was being fed?

 

On all of these matters I was subjected to something very close to personal abuse for raising them at the time when orthodoxy was different. On the Euro, I was called rude names (‘Little Englander’ being the most common), for simply pointing out that it was a political, not an economic measure. I remember my brother Christopher, in the shadow of whose brilliance I am supposed to cringe, making a great fool of himself on the issue on the only ‘Question Time’ in which we appeared together. I also remember my then fellow-columnist on the then ‘Daily Express’, Andrew Marr, writing a full-page denunciation of my reactionary folly in opposing the Euro.  Mr Marr later became impartial, when he was appointed the BBC’s impartial politics editor, and later its impartial interviewer on its impartial Sunday Morning political interview show.  Dozens of supposedly expert businessmen were endlessly paraded, claiming that British membership of the single currency would be of great benefit.

 

On the grade inflation in examinations, I was repeatedly attacked for being cruel and horrible to the hard-working children who had received their absurdly high grades. I remember this nasty, cheap line of attack being followed by a senior impartial BBC journalist on impartial Radio 4, whose name I do not give because I have no access to the recording.

 

As for crime figures, to this day I still meet people who believe them, and regard me as borderline insane for suggesting that they may not be entirely accurate, or that there might be a reason for that. And in our current controversy, over the dangers of cannabis and the feeble enforcement of the laws against it, I comfort myself that Truth is the Daughter of Time, and that being unfashionable isn’t the same as being wrong.

 

 

Hitchens’s Law, that all politically sensitive figures are fiddled, and Otto von Bismarck’s injunction ‘Never believe anything until it has been officially denied’, are far better servants than open-mouthed acceptance of whatever the establishment happens to think at the time.  The truth is not always the same as the facts, and the facts are not always the same as the truth

 

 

Here are the three examples of which I wrote:

 

THE EURO.

 

‘ONE of the world's leading economists will today admit he was wrong to back the creation of the euro - and call for it to be dismantled.

Sir Christopher Pissarides, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2010, was once a passionate believer in the benefits of the single currency.

But in an extraordinary change of heart, today he will warn the euro is creating a “lost generation” of unemployed youngsters and is “dividing Europe”.’

 

EXAM INFLATION

 

Sir Michael Wilshaw, distinguished former headmaster, now OFSTED chief  and an education establishment figure  told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: ‘There is no question that grade inflation has been operating in our schools. We have been fooling ourselves.’

 

 

CRIME FIGURES

 

THE fall in crime levels has been "overstated" because of mistakes and dishonesty in the way offending is recorded by police, MPs were told yesterday.

 

Prof Mike Hough, of the Crime Statistics Advisory Board (CSAB), told an all-party committee it was impossible to say how much crime was dishonestly recorded by officers trying to improve clear

 

And…

 

The police force that reported the largest fall in crime in England and Wales last year failed to follow Home Office guidelines on recording crimes, an internal review has found. Half of a sample of incidents reported to Gwent Police were not recorded in line with proper procedures.

 

The disclosure came as MPs and academics cast doubt on the accuracy of police figures showing crime falling in England and Wales. Members of the Crime Statistics Advisory Committee said that there were questions to be asked about the extent to which police were "manipulating" crime figures.

 

 

  

The Lost Child of Philomena Lee - a 20th-Century Tragedy

My home town is lucky enough to have a proper old-fashioned cinema, built in the Edwardian age and until recently so unmodernised that the projectionist had to climb into his seat by ascending a ladder on the outside of the rather lovely front entrance. I often find that audiences are rather sparse, but  the owners have been fighting hard to re-establish it and I was impressed the other night to find every seat taken for a showing of ‘Philomena’. Anyone who has yet to watch the film (or read the book ‘The Lost Child of Philomena Lee’ on which it is based)  is warned that what follows will reveal almost all the story and the ending. I don’t approve of much of the film’s message, have criticisms of its approach to the facts but must admit that it is well-made, well-acted and worth seeing.

 

I had some slight personal interest in this story. I slightly knew Martin Sixsmith, who is portrayed in it, and I also know Conor O’Clery, who is credited at the end of the film for his help with research. We were all Moscow correspondents in the early 1990s. I’d also met Martin, during his later period as a (civil service) government spokesman (he was working for Alastair Darling, who had come to a dinner at my then newspaper’s office, and we astonished Mr Darling by conducting a brief conversation in Russian, Martin’s notably better than mine, and I should think so too).  I think he was pretty badly treated by New Labour in the incident with which the film begins, his absurd dismissal for saying something completely reasonable.  I was very pleased to see him do well with his radio series on Russia, and with the accompanying book.

 

I wasn’t so pleased to see him being played in the film by Steve Coogan, who doesn’t really resemble him in any important way. But if anyone ever makes a film about me, which will only happen if things get very bad, I suspect I’ll get Timothy Spall, doing a reprise of his 2005 portrayal of Albert Pierrepoint, the hangman.

 

But the film was very easy to watch. Its plot is a clever combination of interesting things. First, there is the sad yet heartening story of Philomena Lee, whose child was taken from her, and whose attempts to find him again in adulthood were wrongly obstructed, as were his parallel attempts to find her. Then there is her indomitable personal generosity (the best thing in the film or the book, an immense willingness to forgive and see the good side, and I’m glad she was played by Judi Dench, which is a sort of reward for that).

 

Then there is the contrived but enjoyable mismatch between the Oxford-educated, metropolitan Martin, and the utterly opposite Philomena, which allows for a sort of ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ tension between the two.

 

For me there is the fascination of watching a cinematic recreation of the era in which I was born and first saw the world.  I’m not sure if it’s the lighting or the cutting, but somehow the scenes set in the early 1950s are made to look gloomy and sunk in backwardness, like a dead historical era.  As one approaches the grave, one can expect one’s own era to look like this to more and more people, especially in an age where all change is worshipped as ‘progress’ and the past must be portrayed as frightening and grim. Heaven knows there were grim aspects to it, though we coped somehow. There were also some rather pleasant aspects. The difficulty, as always is in knowing whether we could have kept the good while reforming the bad ( I think we could) , rather than just erasing the whole thing.

 

Yet people lived in that era and were much like us, happy for much of the time but not for all of it, and it did not seem especially dark.  The film version of the convent itself, with its severe wrought iron gateway, looks a good deal more menacing in the film than it does in the pictures of the real place, in the book.

 

And finally there is the absolutely astonishing story of the late Michael Hess, as Philomena’s adopted son Anthony became, whose childhood, education and adult life provide a miniature social history of the USA since the Eisenhower years. You see, Michael (having been brought up in a prosperous all-American Roman Catholic family in a pleasant St Louis suburb) turned out to be homosexually-inclined, and at the same time had a highly successful career as a lawyer for the Republican Party.  His work, the (just and necessary)  redrawing of Congressional district boundaries (like our constituency boundaries) enabled the Republican Party to achieve the majority in the House of Representatives which it eventually won in November 1996 after decades in the minority. There is a little in the film (and a lot in the book) about the contradiction between Michael’s far-from-conservative private life and his public work. So much so, that I wonder if it really bothered him that much.

 

The book describes his personal life in some detail, and is pretty frank about how he presumably became infected with HIV, and eventually died of AIDS. The story is told from a completely liberal point of view, and in a narrative style which pretty much requires the reader to sympathise unquestioningly with the sexual revolution of the era. I don’t intend to get entangled in that old argument. I’m just saying it’s so. Like any such stories, it is inevitably enormously selective, and leaves a number of things unexplained, and a number of knots untied.  While factual, it is not exactly documentary.  In fact, the book is completely dominated by Michael’s tragic yet impressive life story and is therefore totally different from the film, which is mainly about Philomena herself. In the film, we barely see Michael except as a tiny child, in some family home movies, and in cleverly-recreated photographs.

  
I read the book because I felt so many of the events in the film did not make complete sense. I still have some problems. Philomena herself did make serious efforts to find her son. But she did not know his new name or even roughly where in the USA he was, so the nuns’ repeated refusal to help left her stuck without recourse.  Sympathetic as I am to the Church against its attackers, I really can’t find it in my heart to excuse this.

 

It is true (and well detailed in P.D.James’s book ‘Innocent Blood, referred to here last week) that secrecy about adoptive parents and children was seen as desirable at the time by plenty of people who were not strict Irish nuns. In secular Britain,  until the mid-1970s, adopted children very rarely found out who their natural parents were, as huge legal obstacles were placed in their way. The same, presumably, applied to parents seeking their children. So we should not necessarily use that aspect of the case to make ourselves feel so superior to the allegedly benighted and priest-ridden Irish. In fact, I can see an argument for adopted children never even knowing that they *were* adopted, because of the feeling of ultimate rejection (much-discussed in the book) which the knowledge may well engender in the adopted child.  But that’s not the only issue involved, as we shall see.

 

The book reveals that her son did in fact find out Philomena’s real name, after getting a sight of his original adoption papers, and I have to wonder why this prosperous and well-educated lawyer never put an advertisement in the Irish newspapers, asking for information about her, Ireland being such a close-knit society.

 

There are also all kinds of other peculiarities in the film – the strange failure of Michael’s adopted sister to reveal facts she must have known (this storyline is not borne out in the book), and the even stranger refusal of Michael’s former lover to talk to Philomena until she confronts him on his doorstep (also not borne out in the book).  But you can see why they might be useful as plot devices.

 

Michael’s early life in America  is wonderfully recreated in what appear to be old home movies (I think they are clever reproductions rather than the actual originals, but they are so well done I am not sure).

 

His early life in Ireland, and his mother’s grim plight in the convent, must be influenced by the films, documentaries and books about the ‘Magdalen Laundries’, where unmarried mothers worked for their keep and expiated their sin. I am told, and have no direct experience to bring to bear, that the alleged wickedness of these places may well have been exaggerated, though the whole concept of them is more or less incomprehensible to the modern mind. These days we prefer to inflict cruelty on children and mothers through abortion, divorce, neglect, indulgence, chaos and moral laxity, while congratulating ourselves on having ceased to inflict other more direct and active kinds of cruelty. The real question is what sort of exchange this really is, and whether we will be judged as harshly by our descendants as we now judge our forebears. But the Roman Catholic Church is now so discredited in Ireland that people will believe almost any bad thing about it, including the melodramatic scene at the end of the film in which an ancient, crabby nun is confronted and denounced by Martin Sixsmith. The scene does not appear in the book.   

 

What I find most worrying is the nuns’ former practice of letting a mother continue to see her child for long months after the birth, and *then*, when the two had formed a living bond, to give it away for adoption. This seems to me to be pretty hard to defend. Separation, after love has begun to grow, must be almost impossible to bear.  I should have thought an immediate parting would be better, if the mother or her family cannot support the child and have accepted that an adoption is better. I can see a strong case for adoption as being far better than abortion. I can’t see a case for a punitive regime against unwed mothers, though whether it was as bad as portrayed I cannot say.  

 

The film is worth seeing because it will make you think, and because it contains some excellent acting and writing, and informs the watcher about things he or she might previously never have known. The book, likewise, is worth reading because you will be more fully human after you have read it.

 

But the undoubted heroine of the affair is Philomena herself, whose life has plainly not been especially easy, who was parted from a beloved child and kept from him while he still lived by rigidity and dogma. Yet her forbearance, humour and willingness to forgive are exemplary. One interesting point arises, which is her completely unshocked and uncensorious attitude when she learns of her son’s homosexuality.

 

I think this breadth of generosity is a characteristic of her as a person, but what if, in real life,  she had been distressed and dismayed by the discovery, as some mothers of her generation would have been?  And what if she had not accepted that sexual orientation is genetically determined, and had suggested that Michael’s later sexual choices were perhaps influenced by his treatment by the nuns? That would have been a much more complicated story for modern enlightened persons to tell, and to hear. We all like our morality tales nice and simple, just as so many people want the past to be uniformly bad (or uniformly good). It is not so. There was no Golden Age then, and there is no Golden Age now, and there never will be one. All we can do is to try to to improve what is within our control, and to resist those forces which press on us to behave badly. And for most of us, we shall have to do good in minute particulars, not grand gestures – as Philomena Lee has done in her forgiveness, which was offered privately and personally but in the end turned out to be a mighty deed, and an example to us all. 

Secret Courts Etc

I note that some contributors here are seeking to suggest that there is no evidence for the attacks I make on the courts, social workers and police who so frequently remove children from their parents in this country.

I have cited the extensive work on this subject by my friend Christopher Booker, which I am sure can easily be researched on the Internet. I have also noted the recent strictures by Lord Justice Munby on the extraordinary powers of these courts. On the 13th November he told the Society of Editors: 'We must be open to the world — much more open than at present — in what we do both in the family courts and in the Court of Protection.'  The whole speech is here http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/Resources/JCO/Documents/Speeches/pfd-speech-society-editors-11112013.pdf

But these passages are particularly striking: '...with the state’s
abandonment of the right to impose capital sentences, orders of the kind which family judges are  typically invited to make in public law proceedings are amongst the most drastic that any judge in  any jurisdiction is ever empowered to make. When a family judge makes an adoption order in relation to a twenty‐year old mother’s baby, the mother will have to live with the consequences of that decision for what may be upwards of 60 or even 70 years, and the baby for what may be upwards of 80 or even 90 years. We must be vigilant to guard against the risks.

'This takes me on to the next point. We strive to avoid miscarriages of justice, but human justice is inevitably fallible. The Oldham and Webster cases stand as terrible warning to everyone involved in the family justice system, the latter as stark illustration of the fact that a miscarriage of justice which comes to light only after the child has been adopted will very probably be irremediable.'

and this :(quoting and reiterating his own past statement ):'… We cannot afford to proceed on the blinkered assumption that there have been no miscarriages of justice in the family justice system. This is something that has to be addressed with honesty and candour if the family justice system is not to suffer further loss  of public confidence. Open and public debate in the media is essential.'

 

He also gives a robust, adult and wise defence of the freedom of the press to report such matters, which I commend to all readers.

I should also like to draw attention to the notable and admirable work done on thsi subject by Camilla Cavendish, of 'The Times'. Much of her reporting is, alas, behind a pay-wall, but I quote this brief sample of her writing for anyone who thinks that this problem does not exist, or that I am exaggerating it.

'IMAGINE A COUNTRY where parents accused of child abuse are assumed guilty unless proven innocent. Where secret courts need no criminal conviction to remove their children, only the word of a medical expert, and rarely let parents call their own experts in defence. Where even parents who are vindicated on appeal cannot see their children again, because they have been adopted.

'And where the "welfare of the child" is used to gag them from discussing the case ever after. I live in that country.'

NB: I would not like anyone to think that I take the accounts of the behaviour of nuns as portrayed in 'Philomena' (a fictionalised account of real events) at face value. I am aware iof a general campaign against the influence and reputation of the Roman Catholic Church, with which (as an Anglican Protestant) I do not personally sympathise.  I plan to write at length about the book and the film on this case very soon. But I think it idle to claim that the religious orders in Ireland and elsewhere always behaved with kindness and openness.