Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 253

Why the 'Addiction' Fiction Matters So Much

I’ll try to sum up here the latest conversation about ‘addiction’. This is the fiction of human powerlessness against desire, however wrong and damaging that desire may be. And it is a belief which is having a huge effect on what is left of our civilisation.

 

The matter is important for two reasons. First, the immediate problem, the indulgence by police, prosecutors, courts and society in general of selfish drug-abusing criminals, whose behaviour is thus made more common.

 

Second, the wider issue, of whether any of us are responsible in any important way for our actions. A century ago, the Prison Commissioners for England defined their task as ‘The Due Punishment of Responsible Persons’. At some point in the last 100 years, the idea of responsibility has been abandoned, and the idea of punishment along with it.

 

There is no limit to this revolution, not least because (by simultaneously abandoning the ideas of just punishment *and* deterrence) it leads to a great increase in the sort of actions our Edwardian forebears would have classed, and punished, as crime.

 

I often quote the Oxford historian Jose Harris (‘Private Lives, Public Spirit, A Social History of Britain  1870-1914, Penguin Books 1994 ) who noted that  ‘… a very high proportion of Edwardian convicts were in prison for offences that would have been much more lightly treated or wholly disregarded by law enforcers in the late twentieth century. In 1912-13, for example, one quarter of males aged 16 to 21 who were imprisoned in the metropolitan area of London were serving seven-day sentences for offences which included drunkenness, 'playing games in the street; riding a bicycle without lights, gaming, obscene language, and sleeping rough. If late twentieth century standards of policing and sentencing had been applied in Edwardian Britain, then prisons would have been virtually empty; conversely, if Edwardian standards were applied in the 1990s then most of the youth of Britain would be in gaol.’

 

Millions of disorderly actions once regarded as police matters have simply become normal, not to mention shoplifting, littering, vandalism, and many other things readers can doubtless think of which used to be punished and deterred and are no  longer considered worth recording at all. Violent assaults,  even rapes, are dealt with by empty ‘cautions’, cannabis possession is dismissed with an unrecorded ‘warning’.  If quite severe crimes, often involving violence, ever reach the courts, they are disposed of with ‘community penalties’ , unpaid fines and suspended sentences, over and over again, until the criminal has lost all respect for, and fear of the police and the justice system. Whereupon he may well be briefly locked up among people like him, long enough to remove his fear of prison as well.

 

Thus, to the injury of ever-increasing disorder and insecurity is added the insult of repeated declarations that ‘crime is falling’, based on a recalibration of ‘crime’ to exclude millions of events which the public regard as crime and the authorities don’t. Where the public are still confused on the matter, and try to defend themselves against what they think of as crime, or to intervene against it in the street, they run a serious risk of being arrested (these days a humiliating and punitive procedure, presuming guilt,  which leads to DNA swabbing etc, even if no further action is taken) and even prosecuted.

 

The police in many other episodes, turn out not to be enforcers of law  and justice. Instead they are social workers in uniform, referees between ‘victims’ and ‘offenders’. The police often believe these ‘victims’ have contributed to their own victimhood by (for example) not fortifying their homes and cars, and by not acting at all times as if they live in a lawless maelstrom about which the hugely expensive constabulary cannot be expected to do anything, as it is too busy answering the phone, driving cars about and typing reports,.

 

Interestingly (and rightly), no such parallel suggestion can be made by the police in the case of rape. Has anyone ever seen a police sign saying ‘Wear longer skirts – rapists operate in this area?’ Have police forces in modern times ever approached any women to tell them that their appearance might make them vulnerable to rape? No -  and it is easy to imagine what would happen if any police force dared to do so.  But I have seen plenty telling me to hide my valuables because thieves ‘operate’ in the area. And police officers have famously climbed through open windows to tell householders they are risking the theft of their valuables.

 

Well, rape is a foul crime. But so is burglary. Why is one inexcusable, and one apparently a fact of life to which we must adapt ourselves with locks and precautions?

I will tell you. Because of the new morality which now has us in its grip. That morality (for various reasons) has a special loathing of any crimes which might be seen to challenge ‘equality and diversity’, hence the attitude towards rape, the special penalties for ‘racially aggravated’ offences etc, etc. The rapist is punished more for his offence against feminism and against ‘equality’ than for his crime of betrayal and violence against an individual subject of the Queen.

 

The thing that’s wrong with this (I need to add, in case the Thought Police wrongly assume something else)  is not that the  rapist or the violent bigot is punished,  but that other evil crimes are not.

 

So ‘addiction’ is simply a symptom of a much wider problem in our system. That is why it is worth discussing at such length. Once we have demonstrated that the concept is itself piffle, much of the rest of the modern propaganda of  liberal criminology likewise dissolves.

 

And it is piffle. This is evident in the extraordinarily feeble and tricksy methods by which supporters of the ‘addiction’ fiction seek to defend it against facts(which do not support its existence) and logic (which does not support its existence).

 

They adduce as ‘evidence’ things which they, wishing to believe in ‘addiction’, *think* are evidence. But they must be aware of the difference between proper evidence, which compels your opponent to change his mind, and quasi-evidence, which allows you to refuse to change your mind, even though you are wrong. 

 

A contributor attempts to attack the whole basis of the argument by asserting: ‘Why does addiction have to be accepted as a proven fact? Mental illness isn't exactly a proven fact, but that doesn't stop Mr Hitchens banging on about cannabis and locked wards.’

 

The attack fails. I know of no relative of a mentally-ill person, and of no doctor or nurse involved in the treatment of mentally ill people, who would accept for a moment the idea that *mental illness* is not a proven fact (though I know that some of my pro-drug opponents repeatedly accuse me of making this claim, though I never have). These relatives, doctors and nurses see, hear, feel and otherwise experience mental illness every day, in the tragically-altered behaviour of those they love and/or care for, who in important areas of life have demonstrably lost their ability (which they undoubtedly once had)  to reason, and in some cases their ability to control their actions or even their bodily functions.  This alteration can be described and recorded, and exists beyond doubt. The problems arise not in establishing its existence, in the definition and classification of mental illness, which remain largely subjective, and in the treatment of it, which is extremely problematic. A parallel: The stars objectively exist. The constellations are a matter of subjective opinion. To question the validity of the constellations is not to question the existence of the stars.

 

Mr Vernau goes on about the hypothetical treatment of a ‘middle-class youth’ found in possession of illegal drugs. I have no idea why he says this. The indulgence of our legal system towards those found in possession of illegal drugs is not confined to middle-class youths . He also suggests that the alternative to indulgence would be ‘Give him a kicking and throw him in a cell’. Who is suggesting either kicking or throwing? Lawful imprisonment of convicted criminals does not involve, and should not involve, any such thing. Nor can I recall any point at which I have argued against the provision of medical morphine to persons in serious pain, as he seems to suggest. I’ll excuse this stuff on the grounds that he’s been unwell, but I do need to point out that the arguments are groundless.

 

I am not suggesting the ‘restoration’ of any meaning to the word ‘addiction’. I think serious people should stop using this term, the meaning of which shifts to suit the convenience of the user (who is invariably using it to excuse the behaviour involved, and never shifts from that. This is why he must use addiction as if it meant an insuperable force, when arguing for leniency, but will quickly admit that it is not in fact insuperable when defining it in any other circumstances). Anyone who uses it should be mistrusted in any serious debate. 

 

I am asked ‘By what authority or precedent does one disregard official dictionary definitions in a semantic disagreement in favour of social interpretation?’

 

There is no such thing as an ‘official’ dictionary definition. Dictionaries are useful in tracing the origins of, and describing the usage of words, but they are essentially descriptive , not prescriptive. Where this involves abstracts, their authority is particularly weak.  They can be propagandist or prejudiced or even mistaken, especially when they are connected to the modern psychological pseudo-sciences, which pretend to rigour and objectivity without actually attaining either.   For better or worse, they alter with time. It is not just legitimate, but obligatory, for intelligent people to discuss the meanings of words, and indeed to question them where the usage appears to be too inconsistent or too vague to be of any use.

 

 

Mr Falls writes: ‘Until modern science (as I think it will) teaches us more about the physiological phenomena of substance abuse I feel it is important we refrain from abandoning the concept of addiction as Mr Hitchens repeatedly urges us to do.’

 

This is a completely illegitimate attempt to use ‘science’ to validate guesswork. Mr Falls may well ‘think it will’ one day teach us more about ‘the psychological phenomena of substance abuse’. That is presumably because he wishes it would do so, as he desires to believe in this thing. This passage ‘the psychological phenomena of substance abuse’ is a wonderful piece of Pseudobabble, full of portentous polysyllabic words (see, I can use them too) but meaning precisely nothing .

 

Mr Falls needs to read Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’.

 

If ‘science ’, the objective experimental process of proof of testable claims, ever does demonstrate the existence of an involuntary drug-induced force which overcomes our will so that we are no longer responsible for our illegal actions, then there might be a ‘concept of addiction’ for me to abandon.

 

It seems unlikely, since the persons involve voluntarily decide to take the drug involved, so axiomatically ruling out the idea of compulsion. Anyway, as there is no such demonstration, I can’t abandon it. There’s nothing to abandon, any more than I need to ‘abandon’ the idea that London is built on an enormous poached egg, and needs to be protected from giants with knives and forks who might come along and eat it.

 

Mr Falls then makes the following puzzling statement ‘Mr Hitchens when talking about cannabis frequently attempts to rebut the scientific evidence used by the legalisation lobby from Wootton onwards which he views as a contributory factor in cannabis use reaching epidemic proportions in modern [society?] by citing anecdotal and scientific evidence to the contrary.’

 

Do I? The Wootton report advances nothing which can seriously be described as ‘scientific evidence’. It predates even the discovery of the principal active ingredient of the drug. Has he read it? I wish there had been anything to rebut.

 

Louis Spencer says ... ‘But, a baby who cries out for milk we call hungry. The milk sustains the baby and later the baby wants more. A baby who cries out for heroin we call addicted. The heroin poisons the baby and later the baby wants more. This is a sad phenomenon but an objective one. What can we call this if not addiction?’

 

I am angered by the continued use of the involuntary suffering of innocent babies in this discussion. Uninformed people will be so full of pity for the babies themselves that they may have the wool pulled over their eyes by what is in fact a very disreputable argument indeed.  It is not these infants’ fault that they have been poisoned by their criminal mothers. Nor can any desire be attributed to them.

 

I think we can reasonably speculate that the temporary unpleasant effects of ceasing to take the poison might well make them uncomfortable and cause them to cry out. But how can we attribute to a baby, which has no idea what has happened to it or what heroin is,  a ‘want’ for heroin.

 

We cannot even attribute a ‘want’ for milk, since babies do not know what milk is or why it is good for them (and could presumably be fooled into temporary contentment by some other similar-tasting substance, and in some ways often are, by the provision of inferior formula milk instead of the much healthier milk of their own mothers).

 

We can attribute an identifiable and proven *need* for it, because of our objective experimental knowledge of human biology, biochemistry and nutrition. Neurology could tell us virtually nothing about this, and psychology less than nothing, since we cannot communicate with the individuals involved.  

 

I think I have to ask here for some unadorned research material on these cases, before they are discussed further.

 

No serious scientist could attribute desire to a voiceless baby whose desires cannot be known to us, and which are so uninformed that they cannot be coherent anyway. A desire for the end of a pain or discomfort which we cannot ourselves experience and whose origins the baby cannot possibly know,   cannot accurately be described as a ‘want’ for heroin.

 

‘Bob, son of Bob’ cites ‘an article in the DM’ to make some extraordinary remarks about ‘anorexia’ (a complaint about which I will not express any opinions here. I have enough trouble already). Can he give us a reference? I find the claims made here for neurological intervention in human will quite astonishingly ambitious and rather disturbing.

 

Mr ‘P’ says, hilariously, that we are ‘addicted’ to oxygen. No, we aren’t. Oxygen is essential to the proper healthy functioning of the normal human body. We would die (and do die) without it.  I am puzzled that this posting (which may or not be satirically intended) has not attracted a storm of mockery. If ‘addiction’ is narrowly drawn to describe those substances without which a normal human body cannot function, then of course no willpower is involved, no drug of choice could possibly be included, and the word would simply be a synonym for ‘absolute physical dependence’. Even if, by voluntarily taking heroin, we made our bodies so abnormal that they were as dependent on heroin as we already are on oxygen (which we do not, in fact, do) , the process would still have been begun by an act of free will and choice, and would not be comparable to our absolute and unconditional dependence on oxygen.

 

In any case, I know of nobody who claims that the subjective desire of the heroin abuser for his drug is morally or practically comparable to the objective need of the normal person for oxygen.

 

Mr Spencer asks : ‘Addiction is a word with so much baggage that we may be wise to deny it check in. However, if we are to leave it at the airport what then do we use instead? "Poisoned" just won't do. It is like calling a thirsty man watered.’

 

No it’s not. Why do people not understand this vital distinction? Thirst isn’t a chosen state. Drug-taking is.  I would suggest instead of ‘addicts’,  ‘people who voluntarily break the law by possessing and ingesting an illegal drug’ (or ‘criminals’). And instead of ‘addiction’ , ‘weakness of will among criminals who enjoy taking an illegal drug’ ( or ‘crime’).

 

We should always begin by calling things by their proper names. 

Computer Games - The Great Debate Rages On - as does the one about 'Addiction'

Here’s an exchange in the ‘American Spectator’ between me and Scott Shackford about the problem of computer games.

 

http://spectator.org/articles/56093/should-we-worry-about-violent-video-games?utm_content=buffer832c1&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer

I'll just add one small point about the debate on 'addiction' which I posted last week. One contributor said that, since so many of those in that debate seemed to accept that 'addiction' was not an overmastering force, but still maintained that 'addiction' exists, I should surely do the same.

 

On the contrary, it seems to me that their position is the untenable one. Let us not go into dictionary or encyclopaedia definitions here, as they establish nothing except the prejudices or assumptions of the compiler.

 

A much better way of dscovering what a contentious or disputed word means *to those who use it* is to examine its actual usage by them, especially in objective areas such as law.  The English legal  and criminal justice system (plus a large number of journalists, academics, clergymen, 'experts' and pontificators) accepts 'addiction' as a mitigating circumstance in dealing with criminal drug abusers.

 

Pretty much without exception, the courts (supported by modish opinion) presume that those who use these drugs require 'treatment' rather than punishment.

 

Why would anyone require 'treatment' for voluntarily undertaking a serious criminal act?

The response is simultaneously totalitarian (trying to alter the individual rather than punishing him for an act freely and willingly undertaken)and incompatible with a general belief in a person's responsibility for his own actions.

 

Those who say that 'addiction' is in fact something that can be overcome by willpower are therefore arguing totally against the common official usage of it, and the common legal, official, cultural, journalistic and academic definition of it. It is they, not I, who are having it both ways, and they, not I , who need to change their practice. Perhaps they lack the nerve to arrive at the logical conclusion of their position and prefer to get off the train at the stop before the end (this , as we know, is not uncommon).

 

Too bad for them, if so.

I'll say it again. There is no such thing as 'addiction, as the word is generally used and understood in our society.  If it merely means 'something damaging that I like doing and find difficult to stop', then the argument for severe deterrent punishment (to stop people starting and to encourage them to stop) seems to me to be even more unanswerable than it already was.

 

NOTE. I now see that the 'American Spectator' link is subscription only. While this is a bit of a compliment to Scott Shackford and to me, I can see that it wll put some people off. I can't get you a cut rate, but it is an excellent magazine and, as always it is amazing how much you get for not very much.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

in Westminster Abbey...Reflections on C.S.Lewis

I don’t often get invited to great national occasions, and was touched to be asked (by the Dean of Westminster) to attend the unveiling of C.S.Lewis’s memorial in Poets’ Corner  last Friday. I was given a rather privileged seat, a cushioned stall behind the choir on the North side. My seat was even labelled, though any delusions of grandeur were swiftly deflated by the fact that they had mis-spelled my name.  

 

Suitably put in my place, as one of course should be in church,  I instead paid close attention to events as we waited for proceedings to begin. I find Westminster Abbey a bit chilly in mood, compared with some of the other great mediaeval churches.  Salisbury Cathedral has much the same effect on me, whereas Exeter, Wells, Winchester, Chichester Canterbury, Lincoln, York and Durham don’t. Have the tourists and the state occasions somehow sucked out the spirit?   Everything in the actual ceremony was more or less right in itself, and the music was of the expected high standard, though I do wish we could have sung John Bunyan’s  original ‘Who would true valour see’, with its giants and lions , hobgoblins and foul fiends, which I was raised on, instead of Percy Dearmer’s milksop revised version. I can’t help thinking that Lewis, who like all Protestant English-speakers of his age would have been brought up to know Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’, and indeed wrote his own ‘Pilgrim’s Regress’,  would have preferred the hobgoblin version. He wasn’t averse to the mention of foul fiends himself.  In fact, what may turn out to have been his best work, The Screwtape Letters, is an exchange between a senior and a junior foul fiend.

 

Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop who is now Lord Williams of Oystermouth, managed to preach a rather good sermon, sweetly self-mocking about his own often fuzzy use of language.  (Oystermouth, amusingly, turns out to be a piece of South Wales more or less indistinguishable from The Mumbles). He made a comparison,  which I have often felt was justified, between Lewis and George Orwell, because both of them saw clarity of language as an outward sign of inward virtue. The opposite is of course just as true. There’s quite a lot about the importance of language in the ‘Narnia’ books (of which more later) in which speech is the thing which separates fully-aware creatures from the others (readers will remember the crucial difference between talking beasts and dumb ones). And Ransom, the hero of the ‘Science Fiction Trilogy’ is a philologist.  But – as Lord Williams said - the point is most crucially made at the ‘Banquet at Belbury’ in ‘That Hideous Strength’ (the third in the Trilogy), in which the enemies of goodness, having rejected the Word of God, become unable to speak coherently at all. But because they and their listeners are so used to lying language, it takes quite a while for either speakers or listeners to realise the curse that has fallen upon them. The story of the Tower Of Babel – one of the most memorable in the Bible, springs to life much more, once one has read this passage.

 

We heard an extract from what turns out to be the only surviving recording of Lewis’s voice, fortunately a  powerful wartime meditation on the dangers of self-seeking ( a transcript and recording can be found here http://www.awesomestories.com/assets/cs-lewis-only-surviving-episode-of-broadcast-talks) , eventually incorporated in ‘Mere Christianity’.

 

The final passage ‘Give up yourself and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Look for Christ and you will get Him, and with Him everything else thrown in. Look for yourself and you will get only hatred, loneliness despair and ruin’, probably couldn’t be broadcast on the BBC now without some sort of post-modern ironic bracketing, or a warning that difficult material was about to follow.

 

This was followed by a goodly chunk of Isaiah (read by Dr Francis Warner, Lewis’s last pupil), the most poetic and mysterious of all the prophets, whose words often seem to be accompanied by the distant sound of golden trumpets,  from the Authorised Version of the Bible.

 

I hate to think what the  modernisers have done to : ‘Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing.’

 

The Nineteenth Psalm (which Lewis rightly said was the greatest of all of them, though this is a very difficult contest) was sung. What a pity it is that the Psalms, which Lewis heard every evening in Magdalen Chapel,  have been subjected to Beeching-style cuts and relegated in C of E services. They are crammed with mystery, beauty and savagery, and are a terrific challenge to the sort of Bible literalists who idiotically proclaim ‘This is the Word  of the Lord’ after some clearly man-made account of bloodthirsty vengeance. I especially enjoy the merciless and wholly unChristian, but also beautifully written,  109th, which almost no choir will dare to sing in full any more. Its whole point is that it expresses the true feelings of the oppressed and cheated against those who have wronged them.

 

And 2nd Corinthians, Chapter 4, verse 5 to the end,  was intelligently read by Helen Cooper, current holder of the Cambridge Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature, which Lewis once occupied.

 

Then Douglas Gresham (Lewis’s younger stepson, whom we now know was rather touchingly offered a home by J.R.R.Tolkien when Lewis was dying) read an extract from ‘The Last Battle’ , which is of course the most explicitly Christian (and in my view the least effective) of the Narnia books,  

 

He read it very well. But as he did so I felt a conviction growing, one that I have had for some time, that the Narnia books will not last much longer. They’re completely accessible to me, as a child of the English middle classes of the 1950s who actually read the Boy’s Own Paper and the Children’s Encyclopaedia, bought treats at Tuck Shops, understands and recognises the appalling, Edwardian jargon  of boarding schools, the spite, bullying,  gangs, sport obsessions and other elements of these places, and also remembers the various sorts of ‘grown-ups’ who moved about on the edge of our savage little society, occasionally intervening.

 

But all that stuff about the term being over and the holidays beginning, and much of the rest of the attitudes and tone of voice in the books, must now be baffling and off-putting to anyone under the age of about 60.  In fact the books now slow down and stumble, for me, whenever the Pevensie children feature at any length.  I keep feeling embarrassed for them.  They are rather more incredible to a modern child, I should have thought, than the White Witch, a pair of talking Beavers, or a Faun. Is it possible that children ever talked and acted like this? (It is, in fact. I saw it with my own eyes. But even I find it increasingly hard to credit). I am surprised that the films have done so well, given this problem and the difficulty of conveying the Pevensies’ transformation, once in Narnia, into almost completely different beings.

 

It’s odd that Lewis should have trapped his principal characters in such specific bonds of class and time (and in the ludicrous school uniforms of that date), since he himself was spared quite lot of the miseries of boarding school, leaving Malvern College early and being taught privately by William Kirkpatrick, probably the original of Professor Kirke in the Narnia books.

 

This used not to trouble me. Until I became a parent I didn’t really grasp just how much of a revolution had taken place in childhood since my own ( does anybody?). It became even more intense in the mid 1990s, when the atmosphere of the whole country changed so fast and so completely. Having spent much of the years 1990-95 abroad, I was struck by this even more fiercely than most people were.

 

Now it really troubles me. ‘The Horse and His Boy’, which hardly features the Pevensies at all, and never strays into English private schools or suburbs, now seems to me to be the best of the books *as a whole* (the others all have fine moments).  ‘The Magician’s Nephew’ , which brings the terrifying enchantress Jadis from the dead world of Charn to late-Victorian London, is a close second. It also has no scenes in mid-20th-cnetury Britain. Modern CGI techniques could do wonders with both. The dead city of Charn, the Wood between the Worlds, the wild rampage of Jadis through the London streets would all now be filmable, as would the great imagined city of Tashbaan, with the terrifying old tombs and the chase across the desert, and easily solve the problem of talking horses.    

 

‘That Hideous Strength’,  however, grows in power and force all the time. It is set in a recognisable era, but not among schoolchildren.  Its depiction of a gruesome totalitarianism growing up unchecked in a free society is extraordinarily accurate. Its portrayal of the corruption of individuals in such times is disturbingly right.  The way in which it locks on to the modern woman’s dilemma about childbearing is prophetic. Its love of weather (all weather) is a joy. And its grasp of the essential principles of a free society (and its furious revulsion against vivisection) is deadly to modern complacency. I’m not so sure about the two previous volumes in the Trilogy . They do contain a lot of powerful narrative and concentrated thought. And they do leave lasting pictures in the mind. But ‘That Hideous Strength’ is far more potent, because it all actually takes place in and around a recognisable English university town, with recognisable earthbound (though not too earthbound) characters.

 

Lewis (like Chesterton, whom I like less, finding a lot of his writing too contrived) has become a sort of cult in the USA. This doesn’t seem to me to do him much good. It’s not good for any writer to be revered so much that people stop reading his works critically.  The film ‘Shadowlands’ (notably more sentimental than the much better TV version starring Joss Ackland,  which seems to have disappeared from circulation) has achieved a sort of personal canonisation of a man who, in many ways,  simply cannot have been all that nice. This is not a criticism. No real person is without human faults. And no cause is served by pretending otherwise. Lewis convinced his hearers and readers in his 1940s and 1950s heyday, because it was easy to tell that he had suffered the same doubts about faith as most normal people suffer, had overcome them, yet remained intelligent, informed and fully human. Had he really been a saint, he would have had nothing to say to the suburban backsliders who were (and are) his audience.  

 

Why should he have been saintly? He was devastated by his mother’s horrible death. His poor brother (whom he seems to have looked after without hesitation) drank to excess for much of his adult life, and must often have moved him to fury and grief, and possibly despair -  as self-indulgent drinkers do to those who love them.  

 

He had to fight in the First World War, an experience which undoubtedly coarsened and hardened him in ways that we of this era might find repellent and frightening. Again in ‘That Hideous Strength’, there’s an Ulsterman (not intended to be a bad character, I think) who exults unpleasantly about the grislier aspects of trench warfare, in a fashion I find more shocking each time I read it.  

 

He played college politics, was the object of severe academic jealousy, and wasn’t unmoved by it.  He long resented Oxford’s refusal to give him a professorship. His personal life before his conversion, and indeed after it, was rather, um,  irregular. Nobody has ever really settled for certain what his relationship was with Mrs Moore, the mother of a wartime comrade, to whom he had promised that he would take care of her.  Not all his friends thought his late marriage to Joy Davidman was a good idea, before, during or afterwards.  Its portrayal in both versions of ‘Shadowlands’ may be a bit idealised.

 

I suspect him of being enjoyably impatient for his pleasures. There’s a wonderful drawn-from-the-life moment in (I think) ‘Out of the Silent Planet’ (like some of my books, the volumes in the Trilogy have been confusingly renamed later in life), in which his hero  gets more and more exasperated with a verbose character who takes ages opening a bottle of whisky. This is because he is the sort of person who cannot talk and open a bottle at the same time. Many people suffer from this problem. In general, they should hand over the bottle to someone who can apply his mind fully to the matter ( as Lewis assuredly could have done). Ransom’s exasperation over the needlessly-delayed dram  is expressed so well that it could almost be Kingsley Amis writing. And not many people would put Amis and Lewis in the same category.

 

I have mixed feelings about the mutual loathing that existed between Lewis and the undergraduate John Betjeman, since a part of me can’t stand Betjeman as a person, and is suspicious of quite a lot of his poems as well, while acknowledging that others are good and that Betjeman saved many fine buildings that would otherwise have been destroyed.   I suspect Betjeman was an insufferable striped-blazered twerp in his Oxford days, and Lewis may have been suffering a rather justifiable sense-of-humour failure at the time. In any case, this encounter wasn’t at all saintly or sweet.

 

And, as a non-theologian, as a loather of literary criticism and as one who abandoned the study of philosophy after losing his way in its arid foothills, I can’t say much about many of the things that dominated Lewis’s working and writing life (others, who know better than I,  have persuasively suggested that he was far better writer, and literary academic, than he was a philosopher or a theologian).

 

What I have always liked is the love of language, the steeping of the mind in legend and poetry ( there’s a passage about language in ‘Surprised by Joy’, about Homer’s description of a ship at sea, which must be one of the best passages ever written about the true music of words, and how in their original tongue they mean far more than any translation can possibly convey ). And the sense of a voice, a very powerful, individual voice, in clear, unaffected English, warning us (long before it was too late) of the dangers of the modern world. And ,yes, I did choose the name of ‘The Abolition of Britain’, my first book, after reading ‘The Abolition of Man’. And I wish I could write fiction, for I understand ‘The Abolition of Man’ far better after I had read its fictional counterpart ‘That Hideous Strength’. Lewis knew what his latter-day foe, Philip Pullman,  also knows;  that ‘once upon a time’ is a far more effective way of influencing your readers than ‘thou shalt not’.

Our Chief Industry is the Manufacture of Lying Statistics

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

 

Any reader of this column is usually several years ahead of the crowd. Here, we grasped from the start that the Blair creature was a menace; that the Iraq and Afghan wars were wrong; that joining the Euro would be a terrible mistake; that the Tories are both useless and doomed.

 

We already know that the return of grammar schools – once derided, now increasingly demanded – is the key to education reform.

 

But perhaps above all we understand that all important government statistics are fiddled, and  that the crime figures are so violently massaged that they bear no relation to reality at all.

 

Yet fashionable opinion has until recently denied this truth, accusing doubters of ‘moral panic’. Lofty commentators and social scientists have proclaimed a new era of social peace and order.

 

When normal people, living in the real Britain, complain that this does not seem to be true where they live, they are sneered at as if they were deluded.

 

But last week, we learned the truth. At an astonishing hearing of the House of Commons Public Administration Committee, experts and former police officers lined up to reveal the myriad methods by which the police make crime and disorder disappear from the figures.

 

At the heart of the trick is this simple aim – to pretend that large numbers of incidents which would once have been crimes, are now reclassified so that they don’t appear in the official returns as such. In short, crime has ‘fallen’ because we have now redefined millions of crimes as non-crimes.

 

You may still be attacked or robbed. But it doesn’t count. And this barely touches on another issue, which I plan to deal with shortly, of the vast amount of Internet crime which goes entirely unpunished and unrecorded.

 

The MPs were plainly astonished (for as usual they have not been paying attention). It was clear that the police are under heavy political pressure, from all major parties, to deliver lower crime figures.

 

This is one of two things our country is good at. Our most successful and fastest-growing branch of agriculture is cannabis farming. Our most successful industry is the manufacture of lying statistics, showing that everything is fine.

 

Meanwhile, half the containers leaving British ports are empty, because we make so little and the world does not want it. How long can this go on? Official figures will not be a good guide.

 

******

 

There’s only one problem with the plan for the Tories to re-name themselves the ‘National Liberal Party’. It’s that they’re not in fact ‘National’ in any way.

 

They slavishly do the bidding of the EU (while pretending to be against it). So they actively help to dismantle and dissolve our nation. And at the same time they are more or less dead in the North and in Scotland, where most people would rather Tandoori and eat their own grannies than vote Tory.

 

So why not just call themselves ‘Liberals’, and merge with the Liberal Democrats, whom they currently claim to hate and despise but who are, in fact, their friends and allies in the wrecking of this country?

 

And then the honoured name of ‘Conservative’ , might be freed from the Tory taint, and be adopted by a new party that actually does want to conserve our civilisation.

 

*******

The Disasters Emergency Committee is a fine and necessary body, because it has one simple job – to ensure our charitable donations go to those who need them, without middlemen or delay.

 

So it was dreadfully wrong for them to assert that climate change may have been to blame for the Philippines Typhoon.

 

This is not a fact, but a highly contentious opinion which many charitable people don’t share. It is a misuse of the DEC’s position. If they keep doing it, I fear they will make donors suspicious and less willing to give.

 

Charities have grown too close to government and are far too infested by political lobbyists, using the public goodwill to promote their causes. In the long term, this will undermine all charity.  I hope the Charities Commission rebukes the DEC for this.

 

****

I never wanted to have any Human Rights. But surely the planned revival of Monty Python violates every single one of them? 

 

*****

Here’s why so many cyclists are being crushed  to death on our roads. Many car, van and lorry drivers actively hate them. This is partly because of Jeremy Clarkson, who spread the dangerous falsehood that cyclists don’t pay any tax towards roads, and made ‘jokes’ about running them down for fun.

 

But it is mainly because car owners, forced to crawl along our congested roads, are furious that their shiny toys don’t zoom about as they do in the TV commercials. And the sight of cyclists, moving with comparative freedom, fills them with frustrated rage.

 

Once, you might have said I was imagining this. But we have proof in the Tweet posted by Emma Way (fined this week for her offence) ‘Definitely knocked a cyclist off his bike earlier. I have right of way – he doesn’t even pay road tax.’

 

Her victim, as it happens, survived without serious injury, though that’s no credit to Ms Way. Many enraged motorists feel and drive the same way but have more sense than to say so openly. Jeremy Clarkson should use his BBC stardom to make a full retraction. If he does, he may spare many from injury or even death. If he doesn’t, well, you work it out.

 

Meanwhile, to the other drivers, who treat cyclists with courtesy and intelligence, my profound thanks. And to the stupid cyclists who ride through red lights, or seek an early death by wearing headphones while riding, stop giving the rest of us a bad name.

*************

How can we expect to stay free if we don’t pay more attention?

 

An allegedly coke-snorting Methodist Minister and bank chief is a good story. But this week has seen two frightening developments which have attracted far too little attention:

 

There are serious plans to bring political commissars, by the dozen, into Whitehall, destroying the civil service neutrality which has helped keep us free and relatively uncorrupt for more than a century.

 

And, perhaps even worse, the Crown Prosecution Service is seeking to try two alleged terrorists in secret. The    Prosecutors want to exclude press and public from the court, conceal the identities of the defendants and even ban reporting some of the charges. Why not make the accused wear Iron Masks while they’re about it? Let us hope this sinister plea is thrown out. 

 

*****

 

 

Somebody Else Debates 'Addiction'

Here is an account of the Spectator's recent debate about 'addiction', for those with a continued interest in the subject

 

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeeho...

 

On Liberty - Mr Wooderson's Charges Rebutted

Mr Wooderson contributes: ‘Mr. Hitchens' defence of 'perplexed and frightened individuals against a high-handed and bullying state' in the case of the MMR vaccine is a noble one, but not, I think, entirely consistent with his views on other matters. He very much takes the side of the state against the individual on the matters of what substances one should be allowed to consume, the terms on which individuals may agree to engage in sexual intercourse (i.e. not for money), or divorce, the manner in which one ends one's life, and even – if I recall his comments on the 'Pussy Riot' incident rightly – the circumstances in which one should be allowed to express political opinions (i.e. not in a church). Of course, he may insist that he has good reasons for holding these positions, and I don't deny it, but then supporters of compulsion in the case of the MMR vaccine believe the same, and likewise believe themselves to be protecting children and society as a whole from the selfishness and stupidity of certain individuals. Like most people, Mr. Hitchens is a lover of liberty when it suits him, and an enthusiastic proponent of state coercion when it does not.’

 

I reject the charge of inconsistency. The freedom not to be bullied by the state into doing something you don’t want to do, but which cannot be obligatory in a free society   ( eg, the unceasing panic-mongering propaganda campaign to bully parents into allowing their children to be given the MMR) cannot be equated with the so-called ‘freedom’ to sell, buy, possess and use drugs which are illegal under statute law.  Why not? Well, for a start, the parent is entitled to say that he or she prefers the risk of the disease to the risk of the immunisation. This is perfectly reasonable, and only a totalitarian could force a parent to permit the injection for the alleged common good.  Vivienne Parry, then a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, which advises the Government on the controversial MMR injection, said back in 2007: 'There's a small risk with all vaccines...No one has ever said that any vaccine is completely without side-effects.’

 

She then added :’ But we have to decide whether the benefits outweigh the risks. If we had measles, it would kill lots of children. If you have a vaccine, it will damage some children, but a very small number.’

 

You can read this in context here

 

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2007/jul/08/health.medicineandhealth1

 

My case has always been that the risk of measles has been greatly exaggerated by the authorities, as has the role of immunisation in  reducing the risk. Deaths from measles in this country fell far more in the era before the first measles immunisation than they did afterwards. This is because general improvements in public health had much more of an effect on the disease than immunisation. This conflicts with conventional wisdom, so many find it hard to believe, or to accept. Yet it is so. I entirely agree with Ms Parry’s frank admission that a vaccine ‘will damage some children’, and emphasise that she is and always has been on the other side of the argument from me.

 

Non-parents won’t get this. Parents will. But the knowledge that your personal,  direct, positive and detailed decision *might* damage your small defenceless child is a heavy responsibility, rather greater than a generalised fear of disease. 

 

I am always revolted by the attempt to portray the rich and greedy campaign for the commercial availability of mind-altering poison (which often makes its users into complacent serfs)  as some sort of crusade for liberty. I have explained many times here why use of such drugs is not a ‘victimless’ crime, and why the criminal law has a valuable part to play, in countering the pro-drug propaganda of the rock music industry, and helping the young to resist peer pressure.

There is also an important difference between using the law to force someone to do something contentious, and using it to prevent him from doing something contentious.

 

My view of the Pussy riot case is not exactly as he describes it. My main concern was over the modish selective outrage directed against the Russian state, as explained here (20th August 2012) :

 

‘As to Pussy Riot itself, I’m not keen on desecrating anyone’s religious buildings. There’s something specially selfish and arrogant about trampling on the deepest sensitivities of others in this way. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that you could get into quite serious trouble for doing a ‘Pussy Riot’ type of action in St Paul’s, Notre Dame de Paris, St Peter’s, Washington National Cathedral, and in major religious buildings in many other free countries. I wouldn’t recommend doing it in a Mosque anywhere, free country or otherwise.

 

‘It’s not just free speech we’re talking about here. It’s attention-seeking disruption of someone else’s sacred space, quite easily classified as some sort of breach of the peace in any legal system. Now, for me, a penalty along the lines of six weeks spent publicly scrubbing the cathedral steps on their knees rather early in the morning would be rather more to the point than some penal colony. We should make much more effort, in the world in general, to make the punishment fit the crime.  I don’t regard these women as specially pleasant, let alone as heroines of the struggle for free expression. Struggle to gain attention, more likely. You’ll note that there’s never been any suggestion that the authorities have the wrong people, so if Russian law is in any way comparable to the laws of countries like ours on this subject, and if it unquestionably bans such behaviour in cathedrals, and prescribes certain penalties for it, then that’s not lawless. And if they’d performed their little concert in a Moscow café, I doubt if anything would ever again have been heard of it. It was the location, location, location that did it. They got the publicity. Maybe they underestimated the reaction. And if Putin’s repressive hellhole was as bad as they say it is, how come they did that?  Cause that sort of trouble even in Brezhnev’s Red Square, let alone Stalin’s, and it would have been a guaranteed one-way ticket to the far side of the Urals.

 

‘So, while the penalty is harsh and unjustified, this isn’t really a matter of free speech (unlike Turkey’s behaviour) , and it isn’t a matter of a trumped-up charge because they did do what they’re accused of, and it isn’t lawless, because they broke a pre-existing law.  I don’t think much of Russia’s criminal justice system. But then again, in quite different ways, I don’t think much of ours either, and ours is getting worse all the time, whereas Russia’s has in recent years got a bit better than it was under Communism. Not much. Not enough. But a bit. Press allowed in the court,  for a start.’ (NB, when I wrote this, this country had not begun to hold secret trials of alleged terrorists as is now being proposed by the authorities :  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2508807/Secret-justice-row-revealed-terror-trial-place-closed-doors.html )

 

‘It’s all really a matter of degree. You can think the penalty harsh ( as I do) , without necessarily endorsing the view that this is the most worrying and important  breach of human liberty on the planet just now.

 

‘And in my view, as I’ve said before, Russia gets it in the neck (and loyally globalist Turkey doesn’t) because Russia still stands up for its own national sovereignty (and that of other countries) and the Globalist League, headed by the ghastly Hillary Clinton, want to teach Russia a lesson for that. Hence the ‘New Cold War’, a pointless conflict against a country that’s no threat to us, and isn’t by the (admittedly grim) standards of the modern world outstandingly repressive, and the wild excitement over ‘Pussy Riot’(You must add into this the dubious media delight in,  and the public’s dubious response to,  film and pictures of young women in cages or in handcuffs. Fifty shades of what, did you say?). ‘ 

"Neither a Follower nor a Trender be..." My reply to John Rentoul's Remonstrance

I’ve been distracted from worthier tasks by a strange article about me in today’s ‘Independent’ newspaper, which in all probability very few of you will have seen (though for reasons that will become obvious, it’s attracted quite a lot of attention from the Twitter mob).

 

I’m told off for not ‘following’ anyone on Twitter. My response is to misquote poor Polonius’s (excellent) advice to Laertes in ‘Hamlet’ , and advise everyone else ‘Neither a follower nor a trender be…’

 

As readers here well know, I regard Twitter as a left-wing electronic mob. I go there to respond to the stupid and ignorant attacks made on me, and to publicise this blog. I have plenty of ways of keeping up with the opinion of others, such as reading books, reading the papers and the weekly reviews, listening to the radio, conversing with family, colleagues and friends, speaking in debates. How 'following' someone on Twitter can even begin to compare with, let alone be better than, or supplement these things. I cannot think.

 

Here, anyway, is Mr Rentoul's Remonstrance:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/peter-hitchens-oneway-tweets-8950285.html

 

I’ve said here before that Mr Rentoul is a very useful writer, because he embodies the true spirit of Blairism, and his warm love for David Cameron, and his dislike for Ed Miliband,  tell us much of what we need to know about what we must now (thanks to Nick Boles) refer to as the National Liberal Party. Tony Benn would say of him, I think, that he is a signpost rather than a weathercock, a man who sticks to his positions whichever way the wind blows, and doesn’t mind a bit of derision.

 

Even so, he is a bit young (born in 1958) to understand my political positions, and has perhaps lived in too rarefied a world. I read in Wikipedia that he worked for the small-circulation left-wing weekly ‘The New Statesman’ before going to the BBC, and then to the Independent, perhaps a rather restricted encounter with the University of Fleet Street. He also wrote a biography of the Blair creature, which I would describe as broadly sympathetic.

 

Anyway, to Mr Rentoul’s article. I really don’t know how he can claim I’m ‘not very interested in other people’s opinions’. For a start, I’ve *held* most other people’s opinions in my time, having been a supporter, in the mid-1960, of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and later of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and the Anti-Apartheid movement, then a member,  in turn, of the International Socialists (1968-75), Hampstead Constituency Labour Party (1977-1983) and the Conservative and Unionist Party, Oxford East Association (1997-2003). I still belong to Amnesty International (despite its absurd involvement in campaigns to save murderers from execution in the USA), which I must have joined about 30 years ago. I am also a member of Liberty, and was in the late 1970s a member of Friends of the Earth, not to mention various organisations for the promotion of cycling (an enthusiasm, from which I have never shifted). I have been a member of the National Union of Journalists for about 40 years. All these things cause me to pay frequent and constant attention to the opinions of people who disagree with me.  I am a confirmed and communicant member of the Church of England. I might add that since my university days I haven’t considered a day complete unless I have read at least four national newspapers, and preferably more. I’ve chosen twice to live abroad, once in the USSR and once in the USA, and in both places sought to immerse myself in the local culture and to learn, as deeply as possible, how they do things differently there.  I’ve visited 58 countries, and have there sought out the opinions of prominent and influential people.

 

But I have never joined a club, despite two kind invitations to do so. In the end, despite the lovely Edwardian surroundings, the cosy bars, the warm feeling of being in a  John Buchan thriller or an Evelyn Waugh novel that such places provide, I could never quite bring myself to do it.

 

I think that may be what irks Mr Rentoul - my unclubbableness and unwillingness to be part of any committed faction. I did sort of try this during the late 1990s, and found it didn’t suit me, though I also learned from it just how hopeless the Conservative Party really is. 

Some of us are and always will be cats that walk by themselves. It doesn’t mean we don’t like other people, or aren’t interested in them, just that we’re happy on our own and uncomfortable in crowds or gangs.

 

His little sneer about book reviews shows how uninterested he is in *my* opinions.  I’ve explained a thousand times how an occasional appearance on the seat on the edge on ‘Question Time’ is actually a confirmation of my marginal position in broadcasting, not evidence of my acceptance by the BBC mainstream.

 

As I sought to explain to him (though he plainly wasn’t listening) , the key to influence in British politics is to have an audience that stretches beyond your natural supporters. I don’t need to persuade Mail on Sunday readers of the virtues of patriotism and faith, or of the disadvantages of the cultural revolution. I badly need to persuade the others, and for that, I need at least a hearing. The drowning of my books in silence or ignorant abuse is, in my view, a conscious refusal to allow me that hearing. Most of the Left do not even know what *kind* of book ‘The Abolition of Britain’ is. They think it is a sort of nostalgic ramble, imagine it is of no possible interest to them, and would mostly be amazed if they ever opened it.

 

Likewise, the point of the conversation about social democracy has passed him by. He misunderstands my reasons for not being on the Left any more . I’m sure he hasn’t read my book ‘the Broken Compass ‘ (republished as ‘the Cameron Delusion’) in which I explain this . As it mostly wasn’t reviewed, he’s probably never heard of it. If he has, he probably has a skewed idea of what it’s about.

 

He also probably doesn’t know how important Arthur Koestler, who identified strongly with the German Social Democrats in later life,  was to ex-revolutionary socialists, as a bridge from Bolshevism into civilisation.  Koestler had been hated by the Nazis. Now he was hated by the Communists. That, in the century of the Stalin-Hitler pact, was about as big an honour as a man could hope for.

 

People like me didn’t abandon Bolshevism because we wanted to grind the faces of the poor, leave the sick untreated and roofless, trap the poor in ignorance,  or force half-starved peasants to work 90-hour weeks in sweatshops.  Nor did we abandon it because it didn’t suit our careers to be seen as openly declared revolutionaries. We abandoned it because we loved liberty and hated lies, and because we saw that Bolshevism actually did grind the faces of the poor, smashed independent trade unionism, destroyed freedom of thought and erected citadels of privilege as bad as anything in the capitalist world, if not worse. I might add that it was often guilty of racial discrimination.

 

In my long, slow progress from what I was to what I have become, one of the key moments (it’s in ‘The Broken Compass’) involved paying attention to the opinions of the British TUC, and then travelling to Gdansk, to pay attention to the opinions of Lech Walesa, then the incredibly courageous leader of Solidarity.  I still remember with total clarity that foggy, dankly cold morning in the scruffy Hotel Morski, the interview interpreted by a young student to whom I remain everlastingly grateful, who had happened by great good luck to be in the building at the time. That frozen, thrilling, frightening journey was made by me not as a foreign reporter but as a Labour Correspondent, because I had gone to my then editor, a wonderful, modest and generous man called Arthur Firth, and said that the most important industrial story of the age was the Polish shipyard strike against Communism. ‘You’re right. Go there. Get the visa’, he replied.  I went. It changed my life. Here was the right to strike, as contentious and as menaced as in the days of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, being wielded by a poor electrician who was a blazing radical for liberty, and a solid religious conservative on every other issue you cared to name. He tested this combination in action – and it worked. That seemed good to me, and still does.

 

I was gripped, from then on, by the huge melodrama unfolding in the Warsaw Pact countries (I’d already had a much gentler taste of it on holiday in Prague).  I was amazed at how uninterested most people were in this vast convulsion. I paid attention to that paradoxical part of the world, of ‘real existing socialism’, of what it really involved, and I weighed everything and everyone by their attitude towards it. Marxism had not failed because it had been tried in the wrong place by the wrong people, as the Gramscians and the Euro-Communists (who are the intellectual fathers of Blairism) believed. It had failed because it was fundamentally wrong.  I knew, from my own adventures with Trotskyism and from my own hard experience of that lost world of the Evil Empire, exactly why. Very few people had both these experiences.   My great failure is that I cannot seem to explain this to my own generation, possibly because it is just too obvious to me. Or possibly because they don’t want to know.

 

Mr Rentoul is right that I don’t think the Blair creature is in the Koestler tradition. He isn’t in any tradition, so far as I have ever been able to discover (and I did have some slight access to him before he was famous) . He was valuable to the New Labour project precisely because he was not that interested in politics, while his wife was a worry to them because she was, and could (if you looked carefully) be identified with the cultural and moral struggles which now define the New Left. That’s why I got into such trouble for taking such an interest in *her* opinions, and daring to research her forgotten campaign as a Labour parliamentary candidate in Margate in 1983.

 

Pretty stodgy, eh? You can see why someone like me might not be that worried that he was missing Chris Heaton Harris’s Twitticisms.

 

One other small thing. Micah Clarke ( as Mr Rentoul would find if he read that rather good and neglected book) was never a sectarian and always viewed these matters with a broadminded good humour (thanks to his interesting upbringing and childhood). 

The Fiddling of Crime Figures - Vindication of my Warnings

In this world of power-worshippers and gullible believers of propaganda, I get into all kinds of trouble for daring to suggest that authority may not be entirely honest. Having been brought up in a culture which respected independence of mind, and sided automatically with the underdog, I am often taken by surprise by the strength of and virulence of reactions to statements I think are mild and normal.

 

One example of this is the MMR matter, where I automatically take the side of perplexed and frightened individuals against a high-handed and bullying state,  and am immediately falsely accused of a number of things, including making prescriptive statements about the MMR which I have never made. What is wrong with us, that defence of the individual against arrogant power is now actually unpopular?  I don’t care about my own popularity or lack of it, but I do care that the population is becoming instinctively totalitarian.

 

Another is my repeated suggestion that official crime figures, having become politically important, may not be wholly accurate. (the same problem, of course, affects exam results, school performance, unemployment and inflation figures. The state is now so all-encompassing that official statistics are now crucial to the state’s image machine. We have become similar to the USSR in the 1950s, when Soviet statistics were so politicised that those who read them described the manipulation as ‘The Bikini Effect’ – the figures were  more interesting for what they conceal than for what they reveal.

 

I encounter fury and derision when I say this, and my attempts to back it up with the detailed work of qualified researchers are ignored by these scoffers.

 

So imagine my delight when the House of Commons Pubic Administration Committee decided to  investigate the matter, calling a number of expert witnesses to do so, protected by Parliamentary privilege.

 

The session took place on Tuesday 19th November, and can be watched here.

 

http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=14214&wfs=true

 

Some of the exchanges will astonish you, though regular readers will not be as surprised as new ones.

 

I was even moe pleased that several newspapers at last treated this matter seriously. ‘TheTimes’, which I cannot reproduce because it is behind a paywall, led its front page on the matter.

The ‘Daily Mail’  gave prominent inside space to the following story:

 

‘How violent crimes “are made to vanish like a puff of smoke” tricks used by officers

Police chiefs tell MPs that stats are routinely fiddled

By: Chris Greenwood

 

CRIME figures are routinely massaged by police desperate to show that they are making the streets safer, it was claimed yesterday.

 

Serious offences including rape, child sex abuse, robberies and burglary are disappearing in a 'puff of smoke', MPs were told.

 

Police are accused of downgrading crimes to less serious offences and even erasing them altogether by labelling them as accidents or errors. One police analyst claimed that hundreds of burglaries 'disappeared' in a matter of weeks at the Met after managers intervened.

 

The claims were made at a hearing of Parliament's Public Administration Committee. Chairman Bernard Jenkin said he was 'shocked' by the evidence. 'What we have heard is how there is a system of incentives in the police that has become inherently corrupting,' he said.

 

Officers claim they are under pressure to record crimes as less controversial offences or even no crime at all.

 

Pc James Patrick, who analyses crime figures for the Met, said he found robberies being logged as 'theft snatch' in order to get them 'off the books'. The officer, who faces disciplinary proceedings for gross misconduct after writing a blog about the impact of police reform, said burglary figures were also changed.

 

'Burglary is an area where crimes are downgraded or moved into other brackets, such as criminal damage for attempted burglaries,' he said.

 

Pc Patrick said an internal audit found that 'as many as 300 burglaries' vanished from official figures in just a few weeks. 'Things were being reported as burglaries and you would then re-run the same report after there had been a human intervention, a management intervention, and these burglaries effectively disappeared in a puff of smoke,' he said.

 

He claimed that in 80 per cent of cases where an allegation of a serious sexual offence had been recorded as 'no crime', the label was incorrect.

 

Pc Patrick also said numerous other cases were incorrectly recorded as 'crime-related incidents', a category covering allegations made by third parties but not directly confirmed by the supposed victims.

 

He said pressure was put on victims to drop crimes by 'attacking the allegation' instead of investigating the crime.

 

He was supported by Peter Barron, a former Detective Chief Superintendent at the Met, who said victims are 'harassed' into scaling down the seriousness of incidents. They would telephoned and repeatedly questioned on the circumstances of the crime.

 

'Victims were putting the phone down in disgust, harassed by another call from someone trying to persuade them that they were mistaken about the level of force used,' he added.

 

Mr Barron said the Met had been set a target of reducing crimes in several priority areas by 20 per cent. 'That translates into "record 20 per cent fewer crimes" as far as senior officers are concerned,' he said.

 

The Met said it has appointed a 'force crime registrar' to rule on disputed crimes and to ensure the correct policies are followed.

 

TRICKS USED BY OFFICERS Slang police use to describe how crimes 'disappear'

 

CUFFING: Like a magician hides cards up his sleeve, police downgrade serious offences by recording them as non crimes or by accusing the victim of lying. Stolen items could be recorded as lost property or multiple offences as a single crime. For example, a petrol station is told that a fuel theft is a 'civil matter' as the customer may have forgotten to pay.

 

STITCHING: Police 'stitch up' a suspect by charging them when there is little evidence. Officers know the case will not proceed but the crime is said to be 'detected'. Suspects may also be urged to accept a caution, even when there is not enough evidence to prove their guilt.

 

NODDING: Criminals help police improve clear-up rates by admitting offences they may not have committed in return for help such as a letter to court asking for leniency.

 

SKEWING: Forces put disproportionate resources into tackling crimes measured by performance indicators. This often means focusing on crimes easiest to solve.’

 

The ‘Guardian ran this story, again inside the paper:

 

‘Police 'fail to investigate rapes and child abuse'

MPs told of attempts to massage crime figures Lives have been lost, former officer alleges

By: Vikram Dodd, Kevin Rawlinson

 

Police are failing to investigate some of the most serious crimes, including rapes and sexual abuse of children, in an attempt to massage official statistics, a parliamentary committee was told yesterday. MPs on the Commons public administration committee heard evidence from past and present officers who claimed the fiddling of crime figures was done to boost apparent performance.

 

Former West Midlands chief inspector Dr Rodger Patrick said the failure to investigate serious allegations properly had catastrophic consequences: "I highlighted this issue in relation to incidents involving domestic violence and child protection, child abuse, but the incidents weren't recorded and investigated and subsequently this led to homicide.

 

"That is the extreme end of the risk that people are taking. It isn't just about fudging the figures to keep everybody happy - there are really serious consequences of this behaviour."

 

Peter Barron, a former detective chief superintendent in the Metropolitan police, told MPs that some crime victims are "harassed" by police into dropping allegations: "Many people are persuaded that their pocket hasn't been picked." The former officer said that those who try to blow the whistle on the fiddling of crime figures are victimised: "By and large they are marginalised; if they apply for promotion they are not selected. They are judged to be not a team player."

 

The committee also heard from a serving Met constable who alleged parliament had been spoon-fed misleading crime figures for over a decade. PC James Patrick said figures from his own force on rape were being kept artificially down.

 

Patrick told MPs that his research showed 70% of rape allegations that were classed as not meriting investigation were wrongly dismissed.

 

Patrick told the committee: "A preference had developed to try to justify 'no crime' on the basis of mental health or similar issues of vulnerability or by saying that the victim has refused to disclose to them."

 

Committee chair Bernard Jenkin asked: "This would finish up with trying to persuade a victim that they weren't raped, for example?" Patrick responded: "Effectively, yes."

 

Police massaging of figures on rape involved a practice whereby officers classed allegations as crime-related incidents rather than crimes , meaning the cases were not investigated properly.

 

In 2009 the Guardian revealed up to six boroughs in the Met had used the technique, in breach of the force's policy that all rape complaints should be treated as crimes and investigated unless evidence emerged to the contrary.

 

Rape Crisis England & Wales said it was "very concerned" by the allegations such practices were continuing.’

 

Well, anyone who had read my blog last January here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/01/should-we-trust-official-crime-figures.html

 

or this posting from December 2012

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/11/justice-denied-our-worst-retreat-since-dunkirk.html

 

 

would be wholly unsurprised by this. What’s interesting is that the whole might and power of British journalism has moved so slowly to assess and report this enormous story. 

Owen Jones and John Harris - where are your replies?

I think five days is long enough to respond to a direct challenge, if you’re going to.  I know that it’s too short for some people, but in the case of John Harris of the Guardian, and Owen Jones of the Independent, both experienced warriors of debate,  I think I’m entitled to tap my watch and ask when they plan to respond to my posting here (http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/11/on-doing-your-homework-a-riposte-to-a-bog-standard-attack-on-grammar-schools.html) last week on the subject of grammar schools and social mobility. I’ve told both of them that they are welcome to respond here at length.  I shall, as always, take indefinite silence as a white flag. But I would much prefer a response.

 

I might add that a certain writer on the Daily Telegraph is still mulling over an invitation I offered him to discuss the MMR issue here, many months ago. And yet I seem to be having some influence over him in other matters. I welcome this. The other day he voiced an opinion on Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ (‘Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which the population is blissed-out by a “delicious” drug called soma, looks far more prophetic than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.’ http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100246226/hangovers-and-the-abolition-of-suffering/ )

which is remarkably similar to my own thoughts on soma here ( ‘Aldous Huxley, a far more accurate prophet than George Orwell….”http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8666301/high-society-3/) and elsewhere.  

 

And he will shortly be speaking in a debate supporting the motion that ‘Addiction is not a disease’ (http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/11/the-next-spectator-debate-addiction-is-not-a-disease/),  alongside the excellent Theodore Dalrymple, whose writings on the subject first alerted me to the problems of the concept of ‘addiction’. To be fair, the motion follows Mr Thompson’s own rather odd line that addiction is ‘not a disease’. But this is not, in fact,  quite as radical a statement as it appears. At least it isn't in the form espoused by Mr Thompson. In my view it’s certainly not as radical as what Dr Dalyrmple has written in ‘Romancing Opiates’.

 

Mr Thompson maintains that ‘addiction is behaviour, not disease’.

 

Yet he believes this ‘behaviour’ is still, somehow,  involuntary. As he put it when dismissing my view on the subject: ‘But Hitchens believes that addiction does not exist at all – that it’s an excuse for the illegal behaviour of “selfish” people. This is scientifically illiterate – people can become involuntarily addicted and their brain chemistry changes.’

 

Is it 'scientifically illiterate" What if their brain chemistry does change?  All kinds of activities, including studying for the famous ‘knowledge’ test required for London taxi drivers, can alter the brain in observable ways. But the brain alteration is a *result* of the activity, not the *reason* for it, and it does not *compel*  the altered  person to continue to pursue the activity which has brought about the change, nor make any future actions of this kind *involuntary*.

 

So,  if addiction’s not an objectively diagnosable disease that you can catch or develop (and I agree with Mr Thompson that it isn’t), what precisely is the involuntary process by which this alleged ‘addiction’ seats itself in the body of the alleged  ‘addict’? How do we detect it? And why, in some cases, is the 'addict' able to overcome his or her supposed 'addiction', thus calling the concept into doubt? Is there an objectively measurable difference between those who do, and those who don't? What is it?

 

For those interested in the details of my position on this, I recommend reading this discussion (http://bit.ly/GzI61T ) which I had over several days with a  person who had until then accepted the conventional wisdom on the matter, and who believed that my refusal to believe in the existence of addiction was outrageous. The power of conventional wisdom to stifle thought is great, but it is not irresistible.

A Review of 'The Diversity Illusion' by Ed West

A number of leftist liberals have recently won quite lot of credit by noticing that mass immigration into this country has not necessarily been a good thing for everyone, especially for the poor. I think particularly of David Goodhart.  Well, all right, I’m inclined to be sarcastic about the praise they receive, but I suppose one must welcome any shift away from the ‘All critics of immigration are evil Nazis’ position. It makes it easier for us tolerant, civilised critics of immigration to distinguish ourselves from the  genuine Nazi sympathisers and apologists who unscrupulously involve themselves in these matters, and who might have been created by establishment liberals to discredit a perfectly reasonable case.

 

And I think we’ll find, as the election approaches, that various Labour Party figures will also begin to suggest that they, too, have begun to wonder if they did the right thing about immigration in the Blair years.  Maybe they have, maybe they just need the votes.

 

Some of you will have seen an amusing encounter I had ( here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQaougVHK1g) with Labour MP Chris Bryant on this subject on Andrew Neil’s BBC programme.

 

This has eclipsed what I regard as a valuable book by Ed West. Now, I must say here that Ed has been friendly to me, has publicly written obliging things about me and is the son of Mary Kenny, an old friend and ally of mine from many years back. No doubt I’m influenced by these things in what I’m about to say. But I do think that ‘The Diversity Illusion’ (Gibson Square £14-99 2013) is a much-neglected work, scarcely mentioned in the book review columns of Fleet Street.

 

My copy is scored with notes, and if I mentioned every passage in it that I thought striking or well-put,. I would end up reproducing much of the work. I would mention some quibbles, to underline the fact that I don’t endorse everything he says. He really should know that Sparkbrook is not called ‘Sparsbrook’.  And I have certain disagreements with his position. For instance, I deeply disagree with one assertion, on page 60, that ‘racism, or what anti-racists understand as racism, is a universal part of human nature’.

 

I simply don’t accept this. I think racial harmony is completely attainable, through the unifying force of a shared culture. The utter predominance of culture over ‘race’ is interestingly illustrated in reverse by this episode in Japan, about which I wrote (the full article is here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1192777/Welcome-rock-Hitchens-San-.html ) in June 2009:

 

‘Japan has unintentionally conducted an astonishing experiment that establishes once and for all that culture and upbringing, not blood and genes, determine where and how you fit in and who and what you are.

 

‘Back in 1990, Japan's rulers began to wonder how to cope with an ageing population and a falling birthrate, without destroying the country's unique culture. They needed workers to do the jobs known as the Three Ks - kitsui, kitanai, kiken, or hard, dirty and dangerous. The authorities decided to encourage immigration from Brazil, where many Japanese families had emigrated about a century before and where there are now more than a million ethnic Japanese. The idea was that, being basically Japanese, the Brazilians would fit in. IT WAS not to be. More than 300,000 came from Brazil and Peru. Many of them ended up in Hamamatsu, a neat if dreary industrial city, making TV sets and cars, two hours south of Tokyo by Shinkansen bullet train.

 

‘There, all too many of them did not, would not, or perhaps could not, fit in. Coming from a chaotic, loud land of carnivals and exuberance, they found it difficult to belong in a place where failing to sort your rubbish into burnable and non-burnable items is a major affront to public morals, and modesty is very highly valued. Having been raised in Brazil's outgoing sunshine culture, with perhaps a few words of old-fashioned Japanese learned from grandparents with vague memories of the homeland long ago, they swiftly encountered problems over their graffiti, loud music, unruly children and generally non- Japanese behaviour. Shops, claiming that the migrants stole from them, began to sprout signs saying 'No Brazilians', which were eventually taken down after protests. But the sentiment lingers on and the experiment is coming to a sad end.

 

‘To me, these rather tragic people look completely Japanese. But my Japanese guide could immediately tell they were different. Even the set of their faces, formed by speaking Portuguese rather than Japanese, marked them out. So did their very different diet. Even when they spoke good Japanese, their accents instantly gave them away. Now many are on the dole, which, in Japan, means relatively generous unemployment benefit for a few months, followed by severely means-tested and regulated minimal benefits reserved for those who really cannot work - in practice, for many, nothing at all. Late in the evening in a bare and harshly lit café, in the corner of a Brazilian supermarket selling specialities from Rio and Saõ Paolo, I met Shuichi Shimomoto, who has lost his job in a TV plant and hopes to find new work before his benefits run out.

 

‘But what if he doesn't get another job? He wants to stay, but knows it will be difficult. 'A lot of my friends have already gone back to Brazil,' he admits. The authorities are offering £2,300 to anyone who goes back to South America, provided they stay away for three years (to begin with, the money came on condition you never came back at all but the terms have now been softened). Like all the Brazilian-Japanese I meet, he is confused by the 'soccer test', and doesn't want to say if he supports Brazil or Japan. Many also have Portuguese names as well as their Japanese ones, and are delighted when I thank them by using the Portuguese 'obrigado' instead of the Japanese 'arigato'.

 

‘Early the following morning, I see an even starker illustration of Japan's unembarrassed belief that to be Japanese is to have won first prize in the lottery of life, while others just have to cope as best they can. The Hamamatsu labour exchange, like all such offices in Japan, bears the jaunty name of Hello Work. But it might equally well be called Goodbye Foreigners. It has two queues - one for Japanese citizens and one for the rest. Both are alarmingly long but the non-Japanese line looks somehow more dispirited. It contains a few Koreans (another awkward minority here) but is mostly made up of Brazilians, who say their circumstances are much worse than those of Japanese citizens. After a few minutes, an official emerges from Hello Work and instructs me to stop asking questions.

 

‘Even the children of the Brazilians, many of them raised and educated in Japan, will find it very hard to be naturalised. They gain no rights from having been born here. Koreans who have lived here for five generations were only recently spared from forcible fingerprinting. An earlier experiment in allowing mainland Chinese to work in Japan on 'apprentice visas' resulted in unpleasant friction, with Chinese workers complaining of being singled out by the police as crime suspects. Many of the leaders of a recent anti-Japanese campaign in China were former residents in Japan. With the Japanese birth rate well behind the death rate, and a recent TV projection suggesting that in a few hundred years there will be only two people left in the country, the pressure is on to go multicultural. Or it would be if the economy had not shrivelled. As it is, there are more Japanese than jobs, and it grows worse every day.’

 

However, a few pages before thus, Ed West says something absolutely correct, and provides an interesting quotation to back it up.

 

This occurs on page 58, where West says ‘The New Left movement that emerged in the 1960s shifted the aims of Marxism from the economic to the social sphere. While European socialists were traditionally concerned with the plight of the workers, following the increased prosperity of the 1960sthe emphasis moved towards the ‘New Social Movements’, feminism, gay rights, third-world liberation struggles and the light of minorities and immigrants in the West. The African-American Civil Rights movement caused a major shift in the left, with non-whites in and outside the West replacing the workers as the agents of social revolution’.

 

This is dead right, and I remember, as an Oxford Townie, witnessing the transition as the university revolutionary Left , while still seeking vainly to gain support among largely apolitical industrial workers, and even more vainly to galvanise contented, dope-addled and pampered undergraduates into revolt against their conditions, began to engage in what is now called political correctness. I remember especially how they trooped up the Cowley Road to picket a small hairdressing shop which had been accused of discriminating against black women, an event which escalated rapidly into a major event, nearly rivalling the Vietnam war as an issue.  

 

West (who has read very widely for this book) then quotes Chris Dillow, author of ‘The End of Politics’:

 

‘Inspired in part by Hobsbawm’s essay ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted’ many on the Left gave up the idea of the working class as a revolutionary force, and looked instead to what they called “new social movements”, women ,blacks and gays. Allied to this was a growing lack of interest in economics, and a rise in interest in cultural theory’.

 

Cultural revolution, West writes,  ‘was a far more attractive idea for the middle-class radicals who comprised the bulk of the New Left. Economic radicalism is not just evidently unsuccessful, but involves financial sacrifice, and shunning wealth is often necessary for personal credibility. Political radicalism costs nothing; the benefits are to middle-class cultural revolutionaries, while the risks and costs are usually borne by people far away’.

 

The ‘people far away’ could be Latin American guerrillas, or American black activists, or, in these modern times, the remnant of the British working class among whom the new migrants tend to settle. Leftist radicals experience the migrants as cheap nannies and cheap waiters, not as competitors for work, housing, transport, school places,  and social services.  

 

If you ever wonder why old-fashioned Labour radicals, such as Tony Benn, seem to have so much more integrity and appeal than their modern successors, this may provide a clue. Benn, though far from poor, really does live a rather austere and unluxurious life, content with his pipe and his teabags. The same was true of Jack Jones who to my personal knowledge lived in a glorified council flat,  and took his holidays in a caravan in the West Country (this is why I’ve always scorned suggestions that he took Soviet money. What would he have spent it on?  If Jack was an agent of Moscow, and I strongly suspect he was an agent of influence - his wife Evelyn was undoubtedly a Comintern courier in the Stalin years - he did it because he was a revolutionary, not for pay).  Blair, by contrast, no doubt harbours every fashionable thought about every fashionable cause, but has no love for dogged old trade union leftism, and  has become a very rich man indeed through his political engagement.

 

There’s also this very important point(p.158) ‘The universalist idea of the nation being a collection of people with ‘similar value’ or interests is itself less liberal than the traditional nation state . Clubs made up of people sharing similar interests are voluntary associations where membership depend on like-minded views.

 

‘But most people do not choose their nations, any more than they choose their families, and where they do, as in the United States, the society has to exert strong pressure to integrate. England’s self-image as a land of eccentrics may be rather exaggerated, but not entirely so; that being English meant not having to conform along political, cultural and religious lines was a strength derived from its traditional homogeneity. The bond of the nation, irrational though it was, was strong enough to make people submit to the will of the common good without the need for authoritarianism.

 

‘Vastly diverse countries, in contrast, must force that submission on the people, whether through legislation, illiberal policing or other areas of greater state intervention’.

 

And of course, who better-placed to construct a ‘benevolent’ new authoritarianism than the new Left, whose belief in their own goodness authorises them to do things which they would fight if others did them?

 

The connection between open borders and authoritarianism is a fascinating one, which I had until recently seen as a simple practical connection. West explains why it is so much more than that, and why an increasingly diverse society is likely also to be a narrower and more repressive one.

 

West has a good section on the Andrew Neather affair, often mentioned here (rubbing the Right’s nose in diversity’), the one occasion on which a New Labour insider has ever lifted a tiny corner of the curtain which hides the real, revolutionary  nature of the New Labour project. He records MigrationWatch UK’s discovery of an unedited policy paper, in which it was clear that Blairite immigration policy had economic and social objectives, and that ministers knew of possible disadvantages that might arise out of immigration.

 

I’ll mention( leaving much undiscussed) two other small points worth considering .This first one confirmed by recent studies by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which found as many as 40% of voters considering abstention at the next election:

‘As diversity increases, democracy weakens. Faith in democracy declines when people see they cannot make a difference., and mass immigration, a policy clearly and consistently opposed by most people and yet which no mainstream politician will speak against, has shaken the public’s trust in politics. Since politicians will not listen to people’s concerns, they come to the conclusion that politics is pointless’.

 

As someone with serious doubts about the virtues of democracy, I might be thought to be indifferent to this. But most people believe that democracy, rather than inheritance, tradition or religion, legitimates our state. If democracy becomes obsolete too, then there will be nothing left to legitimate our state, except force.

 

Then there’s this sad footnote, another episode in the slow, silent disappearance of Christian Britain. The Charities Act 2006, West writes, removed from various Christian institutions (mainly but not wholly the Church of England) the presumption that they were acting charitably,  which had previously been assumed by a Christian government of a Christian country. As of that moment, 13,000 Parochial Church Councils, many of the 43 Anglican dioceses, and countless other Church-linked bodies now need to satisfy the Charity Commissioners that they are of public benefit. The purpose of this change was of course to modify the law to suit a multi-faith nation.

 

The book is often mordant,   (for instance , on p.149) ‘All the arguments for multiculturalism- that people feel safer, more comfortable among people of the same group, and that they need their own cultural identity – are arguments against immigration, since English people must also feel the same. If people categorised as “White Britons” are not afforded that indulgence because they are a majority, do they attain it when they become a minority?’.

 

It is unusual in understanding the nature of the modern left, as so very few conservatives even begin to do. Because it is written  by a child of the modern anti-racist age who has no colonial guilt, and was rightly brought up to believe that racial prejudice was a grave wickedness, is far less coy about the subject that the various liberal epiphanies on the same topic.  

 

Please read it. It will, at the very least, help you to think about this important subject.