Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 252

PETER HITCHENS: Today's child-snatchers are as evil as Philomena's nuns

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

We are very good at judging the past and sneering at the misdeeds of our parents and grandparents. We are not so good at seeing  or condemning our own faults.

A clever new film, Philomena, is a good example of this. Judi Dench does a wonderful job of portraying a badly wronged woman, robbed of her child by cruel and bigoted Irish nuns in a grim convent, with the complicity of the State and the law.

The story is based upon an actual case. No doubt such horrible things were done. And they were done, as they always are, by people who believed they were completely right.

Film: Philomena, starring Judi Dench as Philomena and Steve Coogan as Martin Sixsmith

Modern audiences walk out of the cinema congratulating themselves that they are not like those nuns, and would never tolerate such things going on in their midst. But as they do so, they are barely aware of a monstrous scandal, similar in every way, now happening all over this country.

Some may have seen the astonishing case of the Italian woman confined to a mental hospital, forced to undergo a caesarean section, and then actually deprived of her own child by the courts.

This is so grotesque that they have probably concluded it is exceptional. On the contrary, thousands of British children are being snatched from their natural parents in secret each year, after totally unfair hearings against which it is almost impossible to appeal or fight.

The villains are not nuns, but their modern-day equivalents – local authority social workers convinced of their own goodness, and dedicated to our new faiths of equality and diversity and political correctness.

They worship the State as fervently as any nun bent before the altar worshipped God, and they view heterosexual married couples with the same glowering suspicion Mother Superiors once reserved for unmarried mothers.

This bigotry is generally supported by wooden-headed police officers, and believed almost without question by the courts. All of them presume  the guilt of parents accused of ‘abuse’, often on the thinnest pretext. But they come from the same professions which so often fail to act on the most outrageous and blatant cases of real physical and sexual abuse.

Perhaps one day a powerful film will be made about this scandal. But by then most of those involved will be dead, as are the villains of Philomena. Let us not wait for that. These unfair, secret snatch squads must be disbanded now, not uselessly condemned 50 years hence.

Nelson Mandela: A great tidal wave of syrup swept across the surface of the Earth as soon as his death was announced

A hero we shamefully ignored

A great tidal wave of syrup swept across the surface of  the Earth as soon as the death of Nelson Mandela was announced. I am sure Mandela himself would have been embarrassed by it. One of the many good things about him was his modesty. Another was his genuine forgiveness of those who had wronged him.

May he rest in peace. It is those who overpraise him  who are my targets here. He simply was not the perfect being they claim.

He chose to adopt the path  of violence. He did not have to. Apartheid South Africa was a political and moral slum, but many fought it without resorting to gun or bomb.

And it is not just nasty, reactionary me making this point. Amnesty International, that great campaign for silenced and imprisoned voices of liberty, took up a then-peaceful Mandela’s case in 1962. But after his turn to violent tactics, the British group reluctantly decided that he could no longer be called a prisoner of conscience.

For years the African National Congress has used Mandela as window-dressing. It’s not a nice organisation. Its armed wing, Spear of the Nation, is notorious for its brutality.

The ANC was dominated at every level by the South African Communist Party, the most rigidly Stalinist movement outside North Korea, and grovelling supporters of Kremlin repression.

This is the real point of the whole exaggerated Mandela cult. Anyone looking at the world in the second half of the 20th Century could see that  the harshest and cruellest regimes on the planet were Left-wing ones, in Moscow, Peking and Havana. But the fashionable Western Left will never admit that. They are interested only in ‘Right-wing’ repression and secretly think that Left-wing oppression might actually be justified.

That is why there was nothing like this fuss on the death of another giant of human liberation, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was at least as great as Mandela – and, in my view, greater.

He never wielded anything more deadly than a typewriter, yet he brought down an  Evil Empire, with all its concentration camps, tanks, guns and bombs. But when he died in August 2008, I don’t recall hours of eulogies on the BBC, or his face on every front page. Ask yourselves why.

Stand back... our Prime Minister's befuddled bonce is about to blow!

I am worried that David Cameron may soon overheat and explode. How can one small head contain so many contradictions?

We all know that politicians can be pretty flexible but most of them maintain some sort of identifiable core. And of course it’s not just possible but right for people to change their minds thanks to thought and experience.

However, in many long years of observing these odd creatures, I have never seen  a person swerve and swivel  so much and so fast. What does Mr Cameron believe?

One minute he wants to commit us to war in Syria, so grieved is he by the plight  of its downtrodden people. The next, he is denouncing the alleged horrors of the Sri Lankan regime.

Then off he goes to China, the world’s largest police state, dotted with prison camps, which also happens  to be the world’s most aggressive colonial power, and his hectoring voice diminishes to a humble squeak.

He denounces ‘banging on’ about Europe, crime and immigration, then he bangs on about them. He moves from condemning wind farms as ‘giant bird blenders’ to being a green zealot, then lets it be known that he is tired of ‘green c***’. He has been down a similar twisting lane on the subject of homosexuality.

Not much of this has any meaning. Pledges to curb immigration have turned  out to be as empty as I said they were when he first  made them. He said he would bring down net migration. It increased, because we cannot stop EU citizens entering our territory. Didn’t he know that? Of course he did. I just don’t think he cares.

Is it safe to have somebody like this in charge of a government?

 

Seen in Sainsbury’s, a small yellow notice warning that ‘for the safety and security of our colleagues and customers, audio may be monitored and recorded’.

We knew they were watching. Now they’re listening too. Who would have thought that Big Brother would come into being among the yogurt and the biscuits?

 

Last week I received my winter fuel payment. I am supposed to feel guilty about this. I don’t. It’s some of my own money, disgorged  by the Government.

I gave it straight to the Salvation Army. Does anyone really think they won’t spend it more effectively, more quickly and more usefully than the State would have done?

The Deadly Peril of Coffee (Sarcasm Warning)

Andrew Platt writes (of me) : ' One of his (my) chief objections is that illegal drugs are *immoral* because they break the link between effort and reward. An astute newspaper reporter who interviewed him pointed out that coffee also breaks that link. Clearing a fuzzy head in the morning can be achieved by means of a run or brisk walk in the fresh air, or alternatively by sitting on one’s backside and drinking a couple of espressos. By his logic, therefore, coffee must also be immoral.'

I don't see what 'logic' supports this claim. I drink coffee because I like the smell and taste of it, and limit my drinking of it so as to avoid the unpleasant side effects which come with excessive consumption (I do the same with wine). As it happens, I begin most days with a fair amount of moderate exercise, and wouldn't for a moment imagine that coffee drinking was a substitute for this.

 

Coffee, even in excess,  does not provide the unearned chemical exaltation which some drugs provide, or anything remotely like it. Nor does it in any way alter consciousness or perception. If it did either, I wouldn't touch it, and nor would most people.  It is not a psychotropic,  and is simply not comparable with them (at least, it isn't when one is dealing with a reasonable person rather than with a propagandist,or an apologist for drugs). It is self-evidently risible, which is why I haven't until now bothered to respond to the claim.

 

Self-indulgence, like misery, loves company and wants to feel that its transgressions are normal and that everyone else is wallowing in the same swamp. The 'what about alcohol?' claim has a similar origin. But at least it involves a powerful and damaging drug whose use ought to be limited by law, and which we would certainly ban if it were newly-introduced. Coffee is not in the same category. This is obvious to any thinking person, and even more obvious when the claim is examined with any care.

 

The suggestion that coffee is the equivalent of MDMA, cannabis, cocaine, heroin or LSD is insupportable, feeble and rather contemptible, as its purpose is to normalise horribly dangerous substances.  

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

I’m sure I’ve discussed this here before, but at this time of year, my curiosity seems to sag a bit and I like to re-read old favourites rather than slog through (for instance) important but severe studies of East Germany, as I know I should be doing.  

So one weary evening, in need of the mental equivalent of an old, worn, comfortable armchair, I pulled down from its shelf my disintegrating paperback of ‘An Unsuitable Job for a Woman’ by P.D.James, as she then was.  She is now very deservedly Baroness James,  and I only wish she had come to prominence earlier, as she has a wise and sane voice on most subjects and is also a great defender of the 1662 Prayer Book, the beautiful and thoughtful founding document of Anglican England, now loathed and cast aside by the Church whose most valuable possession it is.

 

I don’t like all her books. I’m far from keen on her irritating detective, the chilly Adam Dalgleish, whose joint careers as published poet and senior Scotland Yard detective seem to me to be a fantasy too far. We don’t, as far as I know, ever see any examples of Dalgleish’s verse. No wonder.   Imagine Philip Larkin as a seen-it-all Hull Desk Sergeant, or Ted Hughes patrolling the North York Moors on a Velocette motorbike, or Wendy Cope as a feisty Wpc, battling with Millwall fans between bouts of verse. Mind you, Andrew Motion might make a fairly convincing Deputy Chief Constable in the Home Counties.

 

But I do like several of them, and the two best are ‘An Unsuitable Job for a Woman’, and ‘Innocent Blood’ . Dalgleish flits through the background in ‘Unsuitable Job’ and is absent from ‘Innocent Blood’ (which I won’t discuss here as it is hard to do so without spoiling it for a first reader. Let me just say that, written in an age when adopted children were only just being allowed to discover their true parents, it serves as a warning that such children may possibly get more than they bargained for).

 

Both books are obviously rooted in some bleak personal experiences which Phyllis James must have had , living in pretty tough circumstances, in that largely unvisited wasteland of brick houses on either side of the railway line that runs from London’s Liverpool Street terminus out towards Essex – Forest Gate, Maryland (how bitterly unsuited that name always looked to me on the rather adventurous blue tiled name-plaques which used to decorate stations on that route. You couldn’t be much further from Chesapeake Bay, the Great Falls of the Potomac, Annapolis or the Catoctin Mountains) . In both of them there are evocative descriptions of the bare lives people used to live in the non-golden-age 1950s in un-modernised and uninviting houses (now no doubt knocked-through,  extended, sanded, centrally-heated,  spotlit and IKEA-furnished out of all recognition, and scoured of the smells of cabbage and damp gabardine mackintoshes which used to linger in them.

 

For the Baroness had a pretty hard life of it ( details here http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/mar/03/crime.pdjames ), denied the university education she would obviously have loved by a combination of genteel poverty and a father who didn’t believe in higher education for girls. Having seen her mother hospitalised for a mental illness, she later married an Army doctor who gave her two daughters but returned from the war severely mentally ill, and then died young, at 44. She had responsibility, maturity and hard work (as a Home Office civil servant) forced upon her very young and very intensely ,and I have always been moved by the fact the amidst all these privations and hard thumps from fate,  she managed to become a distinguished and successful author.

 

This may have some bearing on why ‘An Unsuitable Job’ is so very good. Its heroine is Cordelia Gray, a clever and rather literary young woman, wrongly denied a Cambridge education, working in unlikely circumstances as the junior partner of a private detective agency, alongside a defeated but indomitable and cunning ex-Scotland-Yard copper, who dies on the first page, leaving her a business in debt, a gun and the agency’s first really good case.

 

I wish Phyllis James had gone on to write a lot more books about Cordelia (she did try once, in ‘The Skull Beneath the Skin’, but it didn’t, alas,  come off. Adam Dalgleish had by then pretty much taken over her life). She is one of the most attractive women in modern fiction, with her unconventionally attractive face ‘like an expensive cat’, and her combination of physical toughness and personal sympathy. In this book, it is her growing admiration for the personal goodness of a dead young man that impels her to take terrible risks in uncovering the truth of his death, and then covering it up again when that truth releases howling demons into the world.

 

Almost the whole drama is played in and around Cambridge at the end of the 1960s, when it was, as I well remember (I was at school there from 1965 to 1967), very beautiful and as yet unspoiled by the tourist plague which now soils it so in the warmer months. Her longing for what she cannot have is beautifully expressed in a quotation from one of John Donne’s sermons. ‘The university is a paradise, rivers of knowledge are there, arts and sciences flow from thence…gardens that are walled in, wells that are sealed up; bottomless depths of unsearchable counsels’.

 

If only it were really so.

 

(She doesn’t quote the next bit ‘the waters of rest, they flow from this good master, and flow into him again; all knowledge that begins not, and ends not with his glory, is but a giddy, but a vertiginous circle, but an elaborate and exquisite ignorance’.  But I bet she knows it) . The passage always makes me think of the Oxford Botanic Gardens, which Donne must have seen, and of its newer, larger Cambridge equivalent.

 

 

Cordelia, who has been excluded by the folly of others from this Eden, can only enter it as a private detective, a role in which she proves far cleverer than the wealthy, smart undergraduates who try in turn to get rid of her,  to suborn her and to throw her off the scent of what has really happened to their dead friend (oh, and for believers in the non-existent War on Drugs’ I should note here that this book, published in 1972 and written by a Home Office civil servant conversant with the law, refers to dope being openly smoked at a Cambridge party attended by students and dons).

 

There is much more here, about class, about ambition, about the power of money and also about what England was like, and felt like, at that rather shabby and aimless point in its history, yet before it had tipped down the rather steep section of the roller-coaster on which it now finds itself. James ‘s books are very good social history (I made great use of her debut novel ‘Cover Her Face’ in my chapter on the changing attitude towards unmarried mothers in ‘The Abolition of Britain’. The treatment and status of unmarried mothers as portrayed in this book  is now simply inconceivable and unimaginable for most people. Yet it was so then).

 

But it is also a very good mystery, and the final pages, in which Cordelia meets and fears Adam Dalgleish (I won’t tell you why), are gripping to the last word.  People compare her with Agatha Christie, but that’s unfair to Lady James. She’s more in the class of Dorothy Sayers, and sometimes comes close to Josephine Tey. As with many good authors, the earlier and middle works tend to be better than the later ones. 

An Evening with Professor Self

Here are a few all too brief words about one of the two debates I attended last week – a discussion about the status of Christianity in England, with Will Self, at t Brunel University in Uxbridge. ( Later, I hope to say a few words about a debate I had in Manchester, also about religion, and to say a few things about P.D.James, and her book ‘An Unsuitable Job for a Woman’, and about the recent film ‘Philomena’, and the book on which it is loosely based ‘The Lost Child of Philomena Lee’ by Martin Sixsmith. I have one last debate to do before the end of the year, after which I shall probably be taking on fewer speaking engagements for a while. Enjoyable as they are, they eat time and energy, and are easier to accept, breezily, in June than to fulfil months later when your diary has filled up with other things).

 

I think the people who attended our Brunel debate largely enjoyed it, as it was a pretty thoughtful exchange between two articulate people. Mr Self (or Professor Self as he is up there) was particularly exercised about ‘Faith Schools’, as modern radicals always are, seeing them as in some way morally wrong. I’m fairly sure that this will be the main front on which the secularists will advance in coming years. The ordinary state schools have over the past 70 years marginalised or removed most traces of Christianity *as a faith* rather than as one of a number of bizarre anthropological curiosities.

 

This is in fact a breach of an agreement made at the time, but it goes completely unpunished, even though it quite often involves direct defiance of statute law. I suspect that many of the church schools have reduced it to the very minimum, as they come under increasing pressure to dilute their religious nature. That pressure, dressed up as a war on privilege, and combined with a supposed concern to prevent ‘indoctrination’ of the young in ancient follies, will now increase. The Church of England will probably not fight it that hard. I suspect it sees its formal bureaucratic grip on a  large minority of schools as being more important than the actual religious upbringing of the young. Some of its prelates have made remarkably weak  and confused statements on this lately. The Roman Catholics may possibly be tougher. But in the end, a confrontation is certain between Christian teaching on such things as marriage, and the equality and diversity agenda promoted by the National Curriculum through personal Health and Social Education.

 

I said that I was quite happy to see state-backed schools of any faith, if there was a demand for them. Professor Self claimed to doubt my sincerity on Islamic schools, which he is welcome to do, but I assure him that it is genuine. I would very much favour the setting up of actively atheist schools as well, if there is sufficient demand. I would very much like to see this strange, shy, reticent yet aggressive creed taught as a belief and celebrated with Godless singing at morning assembly. We would see how they got on. Perhaps parents from all over the neighbourhood would clamour for places, and the egalitarians would complain that Atheist schools had too low a proportion of pupils receiving free school meals.

 

An experiment on these lines would test the other question I couldn’t ( as I recall) get Professor Self to answer – namely – what is the source of authority in schools, or anywhere else, once you have abandoned adherence to Christianity? In schools this is particularly important, as the question arises of where the individual teacher’s authority comes from, how the subjects for instruction are selected and how they are approached, as well as the purpose for which education is intended. Most people never think about this, and I suspect this is one of the reasons why secularised British state schools are often so bad, whereas their private rivals, which (so far) retain quite a lot of the character given to them by their largely religious founders, are not.

 

 

 

Despite this, Professor Self alleged that I was ‘intolerant’. I repeatedly challenged him to justify this accusation, but it’s my recollection that he never did. I also teased him for his position of ‘radical agnosticism’, saying that it was an oxymoron much like ‘razor-sharp sponge’, which did not go down well. I would have liked to stay behind and hammer it out at the bar, but alas, I had a pressing engagement elsewhere – as I do now. 

Peter Hitchens on the Legal Drugs Alcohol and Tobacco

It is amazing, isn’t it, how the old ‘what about alcohol?’ argument keeps on coming back. I am increasingly sure that it must be taught in schools. What I most love about those who put it forward is their belief that it is both original and devastating, and that they always say to me ‘You never write about alcohol’ , though I have done so here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/03/a-serious-answer-to-a-silly-argument.html, http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/02/the-continuing-crisis-and-some-responses.html

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/03/in-defence-of-prohibition-and-other-matters.html

 

and many other times in passing.

 

If cannabis, cocaine and heroin were on legal sale, as are alcohol and tobacco, our society would be devastated, whatever ‘regulation’ existed. As I also point out over and over again, tobacco and alcohol , though legal, are trafficked or manufactured by criminal gangs in this country on a large scale, largely to avoid duty. Does anyone seriously imagine that our desperate exchequer would not tax these drugs, and heavily, the moment they were legalised.

 

I will also be told that legalisation would make it harder for the young to obtain them. This has, demonstrably, not been the case with legal alcohol and tobacco, both of which are widely consumed by under-age children. Why should it be with cannabis or cocaine?

 

 

 

 

An Interesting Man

Having spent a lot of the 1990s abroad in various places, I missed much of the Major era, the forerunner of the Cameron age. So I occasionally do a bit of digging in the files to improve my understanding of this fascinating time, and its continued influence on British politics.

 

Today’s episode is stimulated by the presence of Lord Chadlington, formerly Peter Gummer, in the Prime Minister’s entourage on his visit to Peking and other parts of Zhongguo. It is quite well-known that Lord Chadlington is a close neighbour of the Camerons in an idyllic hilltop hamlet in Oxfordshire. But I have long thought it an interesting reflection on British political journalism that so little was written about this obviously very important man. Here are a few notes from the library.

 

Peter Gummer, as he once was, was for many years in charge of Shandwick PR, ‘the world’s largest PR company’. He is now boss of Huntsworth PR,  is the brother of the more famous John Selwyn Gummer (now Lord Deben). The Times, reporting on the Tory search for help in its 1992 election campaign,  in 1991, said that Chris Patten, then Tory chairman, had asked Peter Gummer to draw up a shortlist of possible advertising agencies. The Times also reported that Peter Gummer had advised the Foreign Office on media relations during the (first, successful) Gulf War.

 

In the same year the Mail on Sunday’s ‘Black Dog’ insider column said ‘I am watching with interest the PR activities of Peter Gummer, younger brother of Agriculture Minister John and boss of Shandwick Communications. After giving his advice to the Foreign Office during the Gulf War, Mr Gummer was also involved in advising the Ministry of Defence and the Arts Council.

Now the enterprising Mr Gummer has turned his gaze on the Department of Health and I hear that his excellent connections have even won him an entree to 10 Downing Street and a tour of the place conducted by the Prime Minister himself.’

 

The Times, reporting on an apparent smoothing of John Major’s image in late 1991, said ‘But most attention is being focused on Peter Gummer, head of Shandwick Public Relations and the brother of the agriculture minister, who has quickly become part of the Downing Street inner circle. ``Peter is in and out a lot working on the presentational skills of many cabinet members,'' says one who admits to having benefitted from his attentions. ``I cannot believe he has not also given the prime minister the benefit of his advice.''’

 

In the same month, the London Evening Standard ran a joint profile of Selwyn and Peter Gummer, under the headline ‘The Blue Brothers’. Both men, it seems, originally wanted to go into the Church. Their father, a Welsh miner who himself became a priest, is said to have sold collections of his sermons to pay his sons’ school fees.  Later, Peter Gummer ‘wanted to be rich’. He thought it would be ‘wonderful’. At the time of this encounter, he had recently handled the PR for McDonald’s in Moscow (What a job that must have been . Few will now believe what an extraordinary and fascinating moment it was when the incarnation of global consumer capitalism opened its first outlet in what was still a Communist capital). He was said to be worth £12.5 million. Interestingly, Peter Gummer was a newspaper reporter on the Isle of Wight before switching to PR, a useful training  which many people in public life would have benefited from.

 

The Daily Mail called him ‘John Major’s favourite PR man’ in 1992, soon before the election of that year. He had some business troubles ( and overcame them), and was talked of as a possible chairman of the Arts Council ( and did become chairman of the Council’s lottery Advisory Panel). He won a contract to promote Cambodia as a tourist destination in 1994,  became Chairman of the Royal Opera House in 1996 and was also involved in advising to Tories on how to combat New Labour in 1996, just before getting his peerage in August of that year at the age of 53. Lord (Maurice) Saatchi was in the same list. There was a bit of a fuss about this. Left-wing papers got cross.  In a rather chilly leading article, even the Daily Telegraph asked if he would have enough time to devote to parliamentary work.  Others said that Peter Gummer was jointly responsible for the notorious ‘demon eyes’ campaign showing a demonic Mr Blair above the slogan ‘New Labour – New Danger’, which in my view wouldn’t have been a bad slogan at all, if anybody could have worked out at the time exactly what the danger was.

An amusing footnote was provided by the late, great Alan Watkins, one of the most astute and observant political writers of the age, who  said in the Independent on Sunday that Peter Gummer had once told him he was in fact a Labour supporter.

By 1998, Lord Chadlingtn and the other veterans of Tory PR had been told by the new post-Major leadership of William Hague that their services were not required. By 2003 he was said to be in an ‘advisory group’ helping Iain Duncan Smith, a hopeless if chivalrous task. Edward Bernays himself, the founder of the science of PR, could not have saved IDS from his own party.  I am not sure if Lord Chadlington was active during Michael Howard’s leadership. Given Mr Howard’s great helpfulness towards David Cameron, it’s not impossible that the two co-operated. But I can find no mention of it.

 

In 2005, he was musing helpfully about David Cameron’s selection as Tory candidate at Witney (which he attended as President of the West Oxfordshire Conservative Association): "He was the only candidate out of 20 who delivered his speech off by heart in front of the lectern,'' he says. "My guess is he is very self-analytical and hard on himself - he always wants to do better.''. "David and Samantha were good-looking, they had lots of friends and fantastic careers''.

 

In September 2005, he was one of five senior city figures who write to the Financial Times to say: ‘Sir, Britain needs the Conservative party to get back on its feet, rediscover a sense of mission and then get out there and put right the problems that the current Labour government has created. Voters will back a Conservative ticket only when they really believe that the party is bold, in it for the long term and has a leader who they believe has got the courage to take the hard decisions and inject the energy needed to get things done. When it comes to choosing their next leader, Conservatives must think about the future. The country cannot afford them to drift. We have listened to all the potential candidates but one stands out above all the rest. David Cameron has conviction and a sense of direction coupled with the energy and dynamism to get things done. We believe he would make an excellent prime minister. Roddie Fleming Sir Tom Cowie Lord Harris Michael Green Lord Chadlington’ (He was by now Chief Executive of a new PR firm, Huntsworth).

 

A few weeks afterwards,  afterwards, he did it again, writing to the FT with a different group of colleagues : ‘Sir, The Conservative party needs a leader who can deliver economic stability and carry out the necessary reforms to make our economy more competitive. It is our view that David Cameron is the candidate most likely to deliver the dynamic economy on which all else depends. He shows an impressive grasp of the factors that contribute to a strong economy - namely competitive tax rates and good public infrastructure in areas such as transport and education. He is the only candidate to have gone beyond simplistic platitudes when it comes to deregulation - recognising that to cut regulation we need first to tackle this country's risk-averse culture. And he has been prepared to face up to tough decisions on long-term problems such as pensions, university finance and road-building. We sincerely hope that the Conservative party has the foresight to elect Mr Cameron as its next leader. Simon Wolfson, Chief Executive, Next; Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover, Former Chairman, J. Sainsbury; Lord Kirkham, Former Conservative Party Treasurer; Lord Harris of Peckham, Founder and Chairman, Carpetright; Michael Spencer, Chief Executive, ICAP; Sir Jack Harvie, Conservative Fundraiser and Donor; Jonathan Green, Founder, GLG; Lord Chadlington, Chairman, Huntsworth .’

 

The Sunday Times recorded in April 2007 that ‘Cameron's neighbour Lord Chadlington, brother of John Selwyn Gummer, owns the magnificent Queen Anne manor in this Oxfordshire village, and also its little farm and the pool in which the Camerons are invited to swim.’

 

In January 2009, the Times wrote that Lord Chadlington had ‘bankrolled Mr Cameron’s leadership bid’. The Independent On Sunday reported in July 2011  that  ‘When Cameron came to the [Witney]area 10 years ago, he rented a cottage from Lord Chadlington, the brother of John Gummer, before buying a farmhouse in the hamlet of Dean when he won the seat of Witney.’

 

In May 2012, Mr Cameron famously dressed down, in an ordinary suit rather than spongebag trousers, while attending the wedding of Naomi Gummer, Lord Chadlington’s daughter. More recently, a Chinese PR company bought a large stake in Huntsworth, which perhaps brings us back to where we started, on the plane to Zhongguo.

 

The thing that interests me about this relationship is that it tells us about a side of Mr Cameron the political reporters seldom trouble with – his past as a professional PR man, his strong links, through business and personal connections, with a part of Britain which is personally prosperous but not especially socially or morally conservative. I suspect that its members, thanks to their backgrounds and educations, generally regard themselves as naturally patriotic in a sort of ‘God save the Queen’ way,  and are puzzled by any suggestion that their adherence to the EU might call that into question.

 

I have no idea, by the way, what Lord Chadlington’s detailed politics are (though I am amused by Alan Watkins’s mischievous suggestion that he is or was a Labour supporter). We know, of course, that  his brother John Gummer is on the Heathite wing of the Tory Party, especially on EU issues. But people at this level of professional politics often do not have much interest in policies as such, or in the struggle between competing ideas. Office for people like them is what they want.

 

 It also, in my view, shows that the Major version of the Tory Party, a largely depoliticised machine for winning office, survived the Hague and IDS era and has now reasserted itself. But how times have changed since 1997. Now they can only hope to keep the Tories in being. Presumably ready for the new era of proportional representation which the Lib-Lab Coalition of 2015-2020 is likely to bring in. 

Without Comment

Here is a transcript, without comment,  of an exchange on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme which took place at roughly 7.36 a.m. on Tuesday 26th November 2013. It will be available on the Radio 4 iplayer for a few hours here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03j9ypd, but not after that. I believe it to be accurate.

 

After a series of anonymous interviews with young women at South Bank University about women’s changed views on promiscuity,  John Humphrys introduced Professor Kaye Wellings, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, to discuss her report on more relaxed attitudes to sex. After some preliminaries, the following exchange took place at roughly 7.36 a.m.

 

Professor Wellings: ‘We’ve got a major change in the status of women over the last 20, 30 years which you would expect to carry through into their sexual lifestyles. You have also had in the last half-century a severance of sex from its reproductive consequences And then of course there’s the …

 

JH ‘Well once the Pill came along, obviously that changed everything…

 

KW: ‘Yeah, sure.  And other things, assisted reproduction, medical abortion and so on. But as your young women at the South Bank said,  it’s also about the media and social representations of women’s behaviour so that the old divide, the old double standard between a man as a super-stud and a girl as a slag is eroding’

 

JH: “Oh, that’s interesting, yeah and, and good…. …I mean that.. that... hardly necessary to make a value judgement on it, but , but quite encouraging in a sense, but if that is what’s happening women it means that women are no longer being regarded in the way they were once regarded, which, which had to change.’

 

 

 

 

 

The Liberal Elite Shifts -Two Important Speeches on 'Rights' and Open Borders

It’s harder and harder to be sure that newspapers or the BBC have given the right priority to news items. Some things obviously demand the top slot on any running order, and the front page of every newspaper. But there’s a growing number of days when nobody can agree.

 

And then there are startling and important developments which, though covered, are to be found at the bottom of inside pages where only the determined reader sees them.

 

I was struck, last week, by two events which seemed to me to attract less attention than they might have done. One was a very interesting speech  by Lord (Jonathan) Sumption, a Judge of our ill-named ‘Supreme Court .It’s not Supreme at all. In fact it’s Unsupreme twice over.  It *can’t* overrule Parliament, but, like Parliament, it *can* be over-ruled by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg This is not the same thing as the Human Rights Court in Strasbourg, though the two are quietly converging (this is relevant to what’s coming).

 

Lord Sumption (who may have attracted less attention because he was speaking in Kuala Lumpur rather than London) said two things One was that ‘the expansion of the empire of law’ had been needed to fill the gap left by the failure of religion and morals.  He said that during the Blair decade, 3,000 new criminal or administrative offences were added to the Statute Book.

 

‘Restraints on the autonomy and self–interest of men, such as religion, have lost much of their former force, at any rate in the West. The role of social and religious sentiment, which was once so critical in the life of our societies, has been largely taken over by law.’

 

And then, after rather oddly praising the European *Convention* on Human Rights for what he called its ‘admirable text’, he laid into the European *Court* of Human Rights for its interpretation of that text.

 

He said it had ‘become the international flagbearer for judge-made fundamental law extending well beyond the text which it is charged with applying. It has over many years declared itself entitled to treat the [European Convention on Human Rights] as what it calls a “living instrument”.’

 

He paid special attention to the ECHR’s creative interpretation of Article 8 of the convention - the ‘Right’ to private and family life.  This had been ‘devised as a protection against the surveillance state by totalitarian governments’. But now, he complained , it had been stretched ‘to cover the legal status of illegitimate children, immigration and deportation, extradition, aspects of criminal sentencing, abortion, homosexuality, assisted suicide, child abduction, the law of landlord and tenant, and a great deal else besides’.

 

As he correctly said: ‘None of these extensions are warranted by the express language of the convention, nor in most cases are they necessary implications.’

 

As the excellent Steve Doughty reported in the Daily Mail, he went further, saying ‘To give the force of law to values for which there is no popular mandate is democratic only in the sense that the old German Democratic Republic was democratic.’ This may even have been unfair to the GDR, which, as we see in the survival of the German ‘Links’ or ‘Left’ party, did actually command some popular support among its population. He said that Strasbourg uses the word democracy merely as a term of approval for its decisions,  and quoted George Orwell’s remark that  'if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought'.

 

Lord Sumption pointed out that new laws made in Strasbourg were 'in practice incapable of being reversed by legislation, short of withdrawing from the convention altogether' . This is a very interesting and important point, which had not directly occurred to me before, and which leads to all kinds of alarming conclusions.

 

Lord Sumption( who is a historian as well as a lawyer)  democracies were ‘rarely destroyed by a sudden external shock or unpopular decisions'. The process was usually more 'mundane and insidious' as they were 'slowly drained of what makes them democratic by a gradual process of internal decay and mounting indifference’.

 

Right enough. Kierkegaard’s point that revolutions which leave the buildings standing, but destroy the spirit, laws and ideas of a civilisation, are the most successful, occurs to me when I read these words.  As I’ve so often pointed out here, the only written protections worth having are terse unambiguous limits on state power, such as we used to have, but are been allowing to fall into disrepair, or actually destroying . For example :

 

Habeas Corpus, the answerability of the sovereign to the law, jury trial, the right to silence, the rule against double jeopardy, the prohibition of torture,  the freedom to bear and keep arms, the inviolability of property, the prohibition of search or arrest without proper warrant, the enforcement of open trials, *these* are things worth having. By comparison, the ECHR is a counterfeit currency of fake liberty. And worse, it is a licence for judicial interference.

 

Interestingly, the one we don’t have – the US First Amendment safeguarding freedom of speech and the Press – is so unambiguous that neither Congress nor the Supreme Court can overcome it. But  we cannot have it in the American form (‘Congress shall make no law…’) as long as we also have a sovereign Parliament which cannot bind its successors. Some other form needs to be found.

 

‘Human Rights’ not only don’t protect us. As Lord Sumption nearly says, they can be used by Judges to reduce our freedoms.

 

Now, I have said many of the same things myself. I say frequently that the death of Christianity has weakened our morals, made us more disorderly and in turn made us far too ready to accept a Strong State. I have many times attacked the Human Rights court as Lord Sumption has done,  though I would go one important step further - I think Britain was extremely incautious to help give birth to the original Charter, whose airy, flowery sentiments lend themselves to so-called ‘broad interpretation’ . In fact I think Lord Sumption’s ‘Charter, good – Court, bad’ position is incoherent. A Charter that couldn’t be litigated wouldn’t be important or worth remembering. And if it can be litigated, it is by its nature a tool of judicial meddlers.

 

But isn’t it pretty startling that this very senior figure in our elite is about 80% in agreement with the Hated Peter Hitchens, that foaming reactionary bigot?

 

And then how about this? Chris Patten is not exactly one of my allies - though I find his splenetic performances before Parliamentary committees increasingly enjoyable as theatre. He’s got something of the 18th century about him.

 

He has, anyway,  been for years a darling of the liberal media.

 

But for how long? He’s been speaking out abroad, too – in Paris. Europe’s national leaders, he said in a speech delivered in our lovely embassy in the City of Light, are more and more powerless to control immigration.

 

He didn’t say they had brought this on themselves by abolishing so many frontiers, and failing to control the ones that remain,  but they have.

 

‘Today, with porous borders, the amount that politicians and political leaders can actually do on their own is very limited.’

 

Alluding to the ‘dark side of globalisation’ (is there a bright side?), which he blamed for the spread of organised crime, drugs and epidemic disease,  he said national politicians were increasingly reluctant to tell the truth about just how impotent they are.

 

'I think it's astonishing that politicians are so reluctant to say we're not any more facing a series of challenges which are manageable within our own space…

 

'It's proved extremely difficult for political leaders to tell people what they may not want to hear and get elected. And the general consequence has been that political leaders only tell people a bit of what they don't want to hear, which doesn't entirely prevent the growth of populism and parties on the extreme but can just about secure their election.’

 

Again, this is very close to what I’ve been saying for years, but emerging from the mouth of a major elite figure. Shouldn’t these speeches have attracted more attention and more discussion?

PETER HITCHENS: The question is not who is taking drugs, but who isn't

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

It must be 35 years since I flung an old friend out of my tiny North London flat for bringing cannabis into my home. I was still pretty modishly Left-wing about most things in those days. But I felt (as I feel now) a special disgust against drugs.

How could it not be wrong  to deliberately dim and dull your senses? If you don’t  like the world as it is, then change it. Don’t numb yourself into apathy.

I have to say that when I told him to get out, I thought I was expressing a pretty conventional opinion. It only dawned on me later just how out of tune I was with the times.

Not that it’s a bad thing to be unfashionable. In fact it’s more or less a duty, if your mind is alive.

People have told me since – and they were only half-joking – that Harriet Harman and I were probably the only two people at the University of York in the early 1970s who didn’t smoke dope.

I know directly of several outwardly respectable figures who take drugs and let their children do the same.

And, while I feel a wave of hatred beating against me whenever I walk into a BBC studio, it is never so strong as when I have come there to argue against the weakening  of the drug laws.

In fact they have pretty much stopped asking me to discuss this at all, since I dared to give a hard time to their favourite advocate of drug law relaxation, Professor David Nutt (how long before he gets his own show?).

Drug abuse, you see, isn’t just a minor fringe activity. It is the secret vice of the whole British Establishment.

I wonder how many government and media buildings would get through a thorough search for traces of cocaine, for instance.

That is what has mainly worried me about the allegations now being made against the Rev Paul Flowers, and against Nigella Lawson. I have no idea if the charges are true.

But is anyone really surprised to hear such claims? And how much further does it go? Let me share with you two other revelations from recent days.

The first is that, in Brixton Prison in London, the jail’s Government-sponsored Independent Monitoring Board reported that inmates are smoking so much cannabis that the clothes of prison officers and of volunteer staff stink of the drug.

Remember, this is a prison, a place supposedly for the absolute enforcement of law. Yet the drug law has broken down totally, in a building under the direct control of the State. If this is so in a prison, what about the streets?

And then there was this interesting comment, by the insiders’ favourite insider, the political columnist Matthew d’Ancona.

He wrote that an ‘unspoken agreement’ had been reached between the main parties about drugs, saying: ‘It was clear that a campaign of inquisition, digging into every senior politician’s university past, would leave the front benches more or less deserted.’

University past, Matthew? I think we are talking about much more recent events than that.

As he added, a Tory researcher had claimed to him, before the last Election, that ‘some of the teams within the party were notoriously better at acquiring drugs than others’.

He says this sounded ‘outlandish’ to him. It sounds like the sober truth to me.

This widespread secret illegality is a form of corruption. Fearing personal exposure if they act or speak against  drugs, our political class let  this man-made plague rage through our society, fuelling all kinds of crime, driving young people mad and debasing our whole society.

I suggest we offer our ruling elite an amnesty. All crimes confessed to within a set time to be forgiven – on condition they now enforce the laws they were elected to preserve, protect and defend.

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Poor Robbie's got a new Ed of hair

Even I feel some sympathy for Robbie Williams, spending all that cash on a hair transplant, then finding he looks startlingly like Ed Balls. Talk about unintended consequences 

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The biggest pay-day loan in Britain has been taken out by David Cameron, frantically promising to do conservative things after the next Election.

How terrified he must be of actually winning in 2015 and having to pay up. He dreads a majority. The idea is to shore up his collapsing vote and stay in coalition.
 
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It's such a pity that nobody knows any history, or it would be quite obvious what so-called Scottish ‘Independence’ is about.

Our continental enemies sought for centuries to detach Scotland from England, to weaken us. Now they’re doing it again.

If Scotland breaks away from England, it won’t be run from Edinburgh, but from Brussels and Frankfurt, and Scots will discover what it’s really like to be someone else’s subject province. I’m sure they’ll have more sense.

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Children pay the price for our ‘fluid’ lives

So to the continuing PR problems of our banking industry, alluded to by Nigel Lawson and the Archbish of C last week.

Sir Ronald Grierson, the distinguished financier, has lobbied since the crash for a change in the nomenclature of our financial institutions.

He says only places that bother to put their customers first, and which sedulously protect their deposits, should be allowed to call themselves ‘banks’.

Other institutions, with demonstrably less interest in this service – who, like RBS, are accused of drumming customers out of business – should term themselves ‘companies’. The Chancellor isn’t interested.

Here’s my solution, as I don’t think the word ‘bank’ is fit for purpose. Institutions that look after and grow people’s money – rather than the casinos that play with it on a high-risk, high-reward, fat-bonus basis – should be entitled to call themselves ‘depositories’.

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Would-be UKIP voters are browbeaten by Tories telling them that they’ll ‘let Labour in’. This  is false in so many ways. First, the Tories are politically identical to Labour.

Do you really find  it hard to imagine Theresa May or Liz Truss in a Labour government? Or Chuka Umunna or Rachel Reeves in a Tory one? It’s only the tribal label that’s different.

No, the people who should be scolded are those who still plan to vote Tory, after all the evidence that the Conservatives cannot win, and would continue with pro-PC, pro-EU and anti-British  policies even if they did.

Vote Tory and get Labour.
 
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How about plain packets for political parties?

hey’d be forbidden to advertise and accompanied everywhere by hideous photographs of what happened to people who believed them in the past.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

BBC's 'The Moral Maze' discusses the police

Some readers may be interested in this edition of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Moral Maze’, which discussed the police.

 

My contribution can be found about 20 minutes into the programme.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03jdw6y