Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 254

Oh No, Not again - the 'addicted' babies

A contributor writes :'In January the Mail ran the headline " Drug addict babies: Three born every day are already hooked on heroin and cocaine"

'Since it is a fact these babies are born with an involuntary reliance on drugs and instant withdrawal from the drugs produces severe adverse withdrawal symptons and even death, (fulfilling the definition of addiction) hence the need to wean them off, surely it is true to say that these babies are addicts. They do not have the freedom to choose so addiction is forced upon them. If the condition of these babies is not one of addiction, then what else can this physical dependance be called? In other words, if I assert that these babies are addicts, what is the counter argument?'

 

Let's take this garbage bit by bit:

'Since it is a fact these babies are born with an involuntary reliance...'

 

***Fact? Reliance...? This word is a multiple prejudgement. Their criminal mothers have callously taken dangerous and illegal drugs while pregnant, thus harming their babies. But the babies do not 'rely' on the drug. The reverse is the case. They are endangered by it. They would not choose to take it if they were able to choose.  Since babies in utero and for many years afterwards lack any power of choice, they are not 'reliant' on anything. They are the innocent victims of what is in my view a criminal assault. They have been poisoned and need medical help to recover from the poisoning.  That help is based solely on the need to save their lives and health. I have no idea what the best treatment may be for this condition, but I doubt very much whether it consists of a lifelong supply of either heroin or methadone, or of a procession of 'counsellors' making excuses for their stupid, criminal mothers and urging them to follow their criminal mothers' disgusting examples,  because they cannot be expected to exercise the will to do otherwise.Oh and 'involuntary'. How could a baby be given drugs of any kind, except involuntarily? Itb is astonishing that the users of this argument do not grasp the the significance, for their own case, of the profound difference between the capacities of babies and of adults

 

 

'.. on drugs and instant withdrawal from the drugs produces severe adverse withdrawal symptoms and even death, (fulfilling the definition of addiction)'

*** Really?   How many such deaths take place in otherwise healthy babies?  If they do, then they are the consequence of the mother's criminal irresponsibility, not of the non-existent voluntary actions of an innocent abused child, nor of the actions of those who struggle to alleviate the so-called 'withdrawal symptoms'.

 

As for 'withdrawal symptoms', which I believe can generally be overcome, the language(as in so much of this argument) is once again prejudicial.

The use of the word 'symptoms' suggests that 'withdrawal' is a disease or disorder, when in fact it is simply the human body naturally reaccustoming itself to the normal absence of an unwanted, damaging poison in its organs.  Babies are human, but not adult. They lack the power of choice (see above). They did not choose to take the heroin. They were, in effect, forced to do so. If consulted, , indeed if consultable, they would no doubt have wished not to take it, and likewise would wish to cease to take it. If they were *not* babies, but were adults who had been kidnapped by criminals and repeatedly forcibly injected , they could decide for themselves to cease to take the drug, and easily do so (as Theodore Dalrymple has pointed out, it's really not that hard - if you want to. French Connection 2 is not a documentary). Or I suppose they could moan that they were 'addicted' because they preferred to carry on being drugged, though I doubt this would happen, as the sort of person who needed to be forced to take the drug would not be likely to become a habitual user of it.

 

Because they are babies, and are therefore highly vulnerable, there are no doubt greater risks in abrupt cessation than there would be in an adult. But since the crucial element of supposed  'addiction', the point of voluntary choice at which the 'addict' supposedly became 'addicted',  is absent (as is the point of voluntary choice to stop), how can these tragic cases of abuse possibly be advanced as an argument for 'addiction'?  These babies had no choice. They have no language, no will and no strength to assert it. These are the principal differences between babies and adults, and in this case they are *the* most significant differences. What precisely is the 'definition of addiction' which is 'fulfilled' by the poisoning of defenceless  babies in utero by criminal adults, and their subsequent rescue by doctors and nurses? How many adult heroin abusers were held down by persons twenty times their size and repeatedly  involuntarily injected with heroin?

 

...hence the need to wean them off, surely it is true to say that these babies are addicts.

 

***Why is it 'surely' 'true' to say this? What does he mean by 'addiction'? How can powerless babies, pumped full of poison against their will,  be adduced as evidence for the idea that sentient rational adults with free will have no choice but to pump poison into *themselves*, and to continue to do so indefinitely, and should be sympathised with for doing so? Does he not see the simple logical flaw?Babies don't choose. Grown humans do. Heroin is bad for you. What is done *to* powerless infants offer no guidance to adults in matters of moral choice about what we should do *to* ourselves. Yet even adults can stop taking the filth, if helped by responsible adults.

 

He states ' They do not have the freedom to choose, so addiction is forced upon them.'

 

** This sentence is an outrage against logic. As so-called 'addiction' is alleged to be an adult inability to choose to stop taking a drug which the user chose to *start* taking,  there is no comparison whatever between the position of these assaulted babies and the adult drug abuser.

It gets worse. So-called 'Addiction' is *not* forced on them(because it does not exist, except as an excuse for failing to stop taking the drug, in the adult mind). Only adults, with the power to choose, claim 'addiction' as their excuse for continuing to choose the drug. Babies, paradoxically, have more sense.

 

The thing that is forced upon them is the drug. Aided by doctors, who rightly regard their condition as intolerable, they swiftly cease to have the drug in their bodies (they cannot be said to 'take' it, or to 'cease to take' it as they have no part in the process).

There is no physical reason why they should ever have it in their bodies again, let alone desire this. Were they adults in a comparable position, forcibly injected with heroin by criminals, there is no reason to believe they would want to continue to take it, or that they would be unable to cease to do so.

'If the condition of these babies is not one of addiction, then what else can this physical dependance be called? In other words, if I assert that these babies are addicts, what is the counter argument?'

 

**It can be called 'criminal poisoning of a defenceless infant'. It bears no relation whatsoever the continuing voluntary use of a dangerous and illegal drug by a sentient, rational adult. I hope never to hear this disgusting argument again. I have not bothered to address it before because it seemed to me both contemptible and moronic. It is only because it is so persistently advanced by drug apologists that I have decided to deal with it.

 

As usual, the author is free to reply at length.

 

Marine 'A' is going to jail - but the guilt is all Blair's

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

This is the season to be soppy about servicemen and women. We buy and wear our poppies, and go on about ‘heroes’, a word which embarrasses soldiers quite a lot.

This is typical of our national doublethink about fighting men. The more we gush about how wonderful they are, the less we spend on the Forces and the less we understand what they do.

And the more we treat them as sentimental figures in stained-glass windows, the more we recoil from the unpleasant reality.

As we prepare to shove a Royal Marine sergeant into jail for killing a wounded enemy, we piously intone ‘we will remember them’ at war memorials.

As we do so, do we really think that the wars of 1914  and 1939 were chivalrous affairs, fought by schoolboys, in which we did no wrong? Does anyone really think we never shot prisoners?

We certainly let them die. I still possess somewhere a card signed by the pitifully few survivors of the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst (36 out of  a ship’s company of 1,968). Shouldn’t there have been more? My father’s ship, the cruiser Jamaica, had been sent in, with HMS Belfast, to finish off the burning, crippled Scharnhorst with torpedoes on Boxing Day 1943.

He was quite pleased to have been there, but got a bit gruff about the last bit. They had left quite a few German seamen to die horribly in the freezing water and the poisonous fuel oil, and they could be heard calling out for help.

This is a terrible breach of the laws of the sea. But much like Marine ‘A’, most of the British bluejackets present would have muttered, as they steamed away from the screams, that Hitler’s navy would have done the same for them, if things were the other way round. Like Marine ‘A’, they would have been right. The official reason for this was justifiable fear of German U-Boats.

But I suspect that the Russian convoys, an especially merciless theatre of war, had hardened hearts on both sides. In war, good men are ordered by their superiors to do bad things, the opposite of what they would do in peacetime.

They obey because they can see the sense in it. It has always been so. In which case, their superiors had better know that their purpose is justified. They had better win the war, so that the other side doesn’t drag them before a war crimes  tribunal. And, in all justice, they should not ask too many  questions afterwards.

If our criminal justice system ruthlessly pursued every crime ever committed, then the prosecution of Marine ‘A’ in Afghanistan would be justified and necessary. But we do no such thing. Millions of crimes, some very severe, go unpunished, often for political reasons.

Worse, we now have a political class which likes to go to war solely to make itself look good. Our current Prime Minister so enjoyed his vanity war in Libya that he yearned for another one in Syria.

He models his life and work on Anthony Blair, who knew (if it is possible) even less about the world than David Cameron. This empty person longed to make the planet better with bombs and bullets. The scale  of his failure, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is still not fully clear, but it is colossal, a pyramid of human skulls as big as the Millennium Dome.

Yet while Marine ‘A’ awaits news of his sentence, and prepares for prison, the Blair Creature wanders the world in luxury, advising despots on good governance and trousering enormous fees for greasy little speeches, pausing only to buy more property.

The Chilcot Inquiry, which ought at least to have shown Blair publicly for what he is, is stalled, perhaps forever. It seems it may never report properly. This is because British officials are blocking the release of documents recording exchanges between Blair and ex-President George W. Bush.

We are now being told this is the Americans’ fault. Perhaps it really is. But why are the men who actually created these wars allowed to hide their private conversations, when the unwise remarks of sergeants and privates can be used in evidence against them, to fling them into jail?

The next time you see Mr Blair wearing a poppy, or see any politician simpering about our ‘wonderful Armed Forces’, remember this. Those who did Blair’s bidding end up dead or maimed, or on trial, ruined and in prison cells. He remains whole, at liberty and rich.

 

Is a new Royal Train steaming into sight?

Maybe the Royal Train can after all be saved by steam, as I urged the other day.

The people who built the superb new British steam engine Tornado tell me the Queen has given them permission to name a planned new engine The Prince of Wales in honour of Charles’s birthday.

It’s a replica Gresley P2, for those who understand these things.

 

One of the reasons nasty people like the metric system is that it destroys landmarks and helps them bamboozle the customer. When jam and marmalade were sold by the pound, you could tell when the makers were raising the price.

Now they’re sold by the gram, they quietly shrink the jar instead. And last week, Mars and Cadbury cut the size of Christmas boxes of chocolates (once a reliable two pounds), ‘while keeping prices the same’. That is, they’ve sneakily raised the price.

 

A big grey shadow is stalking Dave

 

Is Sir John Major planning a comeback? The terrible thing is that it is not unthinkable.

The talent pool of British politics is shallow and depleted, and full of small croaking creatures so slimy that you can’t tell if they’re frogs or toads. As a result, Sir John now looks like a gigantic figure.

The father of the Cones Hotline and railway privatisation is mysteriously said to be a ‘decent guy’ when his life history suggests he is a master of cunning and a betrayer of promises.

If I were Mr Cameron, I’d be watching out for him.

Sir John is outraged by our lack of social mobility. He seems to blame this on the independent schools. How odd. Britain’s comprehensive state school system, whose main aim is to make us more equal, condemns most of its young victims to exclusion from the elite, while the private schools, whose main aim is still education, waft their lucky products straight on to society’s upper deck.

An intelligent person (are there any in politics?) would understand the real reason, the closure of hundreds of state grammar schools 40 years ago. Labour started this, but Tory governments smashed up hundreds of fine schools from 1970 to 1974 – and then between 1979 and 1997 failed to reopen a single one. Now it would be illegal to do so (one of the laws we actually enforce).

If Sir John wants social mobility, he can find it in Northern Ireland, where a fully selective grammar school system still exists.

There, children from the lower social classes have a much better chance (roughly a third greater) of getting to university than their equivalents on the mainland.

 

 

 

How Long Can Anglosphere Nations Survive in the Pacific?

I suspect a  lot of British people have a dream of New Zealand, an uncrowded,  unspoiled ideal version of the British Isles, safely hidden away on the far side of the world. We are not surprised that the makers of the film version of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ found it easy to film Tolkien’s Shire in NZ, though the same country also provided the scenery for some much less homely parts of Middle earth.

 

I certainly have such a dream  - literally, for I have a clear recollection of dreaming of finding myself in a stone-built tower amid soft green downland which I knew, as one does in dreams, to be in the South Island of New Zealand, and of waking disappointed to find I was not really there.  I know that the truth is a bit more prosaic, not least because of a close colleague, back in my Swindon Evening Advertiser days, who was a New Zealander and was able to tell me about the disadvantages of his homeland. There weren’t many, but there were some. It certainly wasn’t an unalloyed paradise. By then, in the mid-1970s, it was clear that old cosy relationship  between Kiwi farmers and British housewives – they provided the wool, meat and dairy products, we bought them – was over, thanks to Britain’s treacherous little affair with Brussels. I don’t think, in all my childhood, I ever saw any other butter on sale apart from Anchor Butter from New Zealand, in its brightly-coloured 1930s-style wrapping. Then it vanished for quite a while, to return in recent years more suavely packaged, but one among dozens.

 

And any illusions New Zealand might have had that it was immune from the cold winds of the wide world ended in 1984, when the then Labour Government introduced the so-called ‘Rogernomics’ programme (named after Finance Minister Roger Douglas)  of free market liberalisation , abolition of subsidies, deregulation, floating exchange rates and tight monetary policy. There was also a large reduction in jobs in manufacturing industry.  Does this sound familiar at all? 

 

I bore all this in mind as my flight from Sydney approached its goal . We came into land over the beautiful harbour of Wellington, the capital, whose wooded seaside suburbs reminded me of those of Seattle in the American Pacific Northwest . In fact, I was often reminded of that equally pleasing landscape and cityscape, with its feeling of spaciousness and remoteness,  during my brief visit. It has another characteristic, too, which is more unsettling – a feeling that in this vastness, such idyllic forms of human settlement may ultimately be temporary, depending on the existence of an advanced if grimier civilisation elsewhere, which ultimately sustains it.  Wellington was my only contact with the North Island, which is the more populous and political part of the country. If and when I go back, I’ll have to put that right. I then headed south in a small plane, which flew through clear skies along the East Coast of the South Island, a very lovely prospect and one of those rare air journeys on which you are at just the right height to follow your progress on the map.

 

I cannot offer any more than a very impressionistic, wholly subjective reflection. I’ve written it mainly for my own satisfaction, for New Zealand was one of a very small number of places which I had long wanted to visit but never had (the others are, absurdly, Greece and Denmark, which I have somehow never been to but could easily reach, and Saudi Arabia, and most especially Mecca, which are forever closed to me).  I worked out recently that I have now visited 58 countries, from Iceland to the Falklands , and including the Gaza Strip, which really ought to be enough for most people. I’ve even visited countries which nobody can ever go to any more – East Germany and the Soviet Union.  Until I was invited to Australia this year, I had pretty much abandoned hope of ever seeing New Zealand at all,  as the journey from England is so forbidding. As it is, I was there for no more than three days, which may have to be enough.

 

I headed for Christchurch, the largest city in the South Island, mainly because of my love for travelling by train. NZ’s railways don’t really operate a regular passenger service any more, but they do run a small number of very pleasant tourist runs, two of them starting and finishing in Christchurch.

 

The more spectacular, the Tranzalpine, crosses the Southern Alps through tunnels and high passes. First, it travels through industrial estates and suburbs, then through small towns and alongside country roads, in a cosy, settled landscape much like what you might find in the eastern states of the USA, or parts of Southern England (though I looked in vain for hedgerows, for me the most quintessentially English landscape feature, though they are these days more readily to be found in the Normandy Bocage than in Britain).

 

Then, quite suddenly, the line climbs into a landscape of amazing, fierce ruggedness. On an early Spring day, with a bit of chill and wind in the air, and a few traces of snow on the far-off peaks, it looks inhospitable enough. In true Winter, it must be savage. Yet they built a railway line up and through it, the act of a pretty tough, pioneering people. I think I saw an Eagle.  And there are people living in small homesteads up in these lonely meadows. The astonishing thing is the proximity. It is as if one left( say) Canterbury and an hour later were high up in icy mountains, overlooking vast passes and dangerous-looking riverbeds, the sort that are wide enough to cope with the spring melting of the mountain snow.

 

Yet later in the trip, we were in rail replacement buses ( alas, a tunnel was under repair, and I had no choice but to endure this inadequate substitute) and a small incident suggested that the old pioneering spirit has also been replaced - by modern ultra-safe risk-assessment thinking.

 

As we approached a railway level crossing, we saw that the warning light(indicating an approaching train) was flashing. Now, it was extremely unlikely that there would be a train coming. A few miles West we had passed a long, immobilised coal train astride the single track. A few miles east lay the tunnel through which our own train could not pass. The track, visible for hundreds of yards in both directions, was empty. All the other traffic, pausing briefly to look both ways,  was overtaking us and driving across. But our driver would not do so. In fact, the warning light had been triggered by a small repair vehicle, which was stationary on the line about a mile to our east, as we discovered later. At one stage I offered to drive the thing across myself and take any consequences, an offer which was rejected.

 

It must have taken a full quarter of an hour before we finally resolved to cross. I wondered at one point if we would be there all night. As it was a very remote spot, mobile phones didn’t work, so there was no way of contacting anyone. You either had to use your initiative, or remain, paralysed by regulations, where you were.   I reckon something similar might well have happened in the USA or in Britain, but not (for instance) in the New Zealand of 70 years ago when that line was built, and when tough pioneers lived on their wits and their work,  or in the NZ of 40 years ago, when it was still fairly British and imperial. It was the contrast between the exhilarating, uplifting, lonely landscape and the mentality of a London borough council that was so striking.  

 

It was also very sad to see the state of Christchurch, the city where I stayed, which was devastated by a powerful earthquake in 2011, in which 185 people died. The city’s Victorian cathedral, an amazing achievement so far from home and in such a small, new place, now lies open to the weather, its east end destroyed and its spire demolished. I really hope they rebuild it as it was.  Many other fine buildings were wrecked, damaged, or destroyed. The centre of the city looks much as if it has recently been bombarded or bombed from the air,  with whole areas just missing  and cleared, roads arbitrarily blocked off and many buildings barricaded because they are structurally unsafe.

 

It was unsettling to be in an essentially British cityscape (sometimes too British, with too many bland modern towers and blocks) which was also in a major earthquake zone. I know that an earthquake badly damaged Lincoln Cathedral in 1185, but that was a very long time ago and we generally assume that the worst we can face is a tremor or two.  This was a giant, furious convulsion, in an element we still think is solid. It isn’t. Maybe it’s not as solid here as we think it is.

 

It was also sad to see how long it is taking to fix things. For a moment, I unfairly compared the desolate scene in the heart of the city with the Japanese response to earthquakes, which generally involves a complete rebuilding in about ten minutes flat.  But of course Japan is a highly-industrialised, extremely wealthy and densely populated country in which no square inch is wasted.  New Zealand is prosperous and settled but its population (and tax base)  are tiny compared to Japan’s. It must be far harder to recover from a blow on this scale. The city is still obviously rather lovely, full of pleasing old houses and gardens, with the willow-shaded river and several fine parks, planted with magnificent Oak and Ash trees presumably dating from more than a century ago, and a general feeling of peace, space, order and plenty.

 

As in Australia, I kept marvelling that British ideas had taken root so effectively in a place so very far away, and that there was perhaps nowhere else on earth where they had such perfect conditions in which to do so.

 

And yet I also felt that it was terribly vulnerable. The Christchurch earthquake served as a metaphor for the enormous untamed forces of global power and money which these days leave almost nobody alone.

New Zealand flourished as it did thanks to the Pax Britannica, and then later thanks to the Pax Americana, which meant that the Pacific was more or less safe from any further invasions or power struggles (yes, I know that NZ has indigenous people, who were not safe from us. This fact confirms my sad view that it is the fate of peoples either to have empires, or to be part of someone else’s. From what I have seen, the thing is to have one, but if you must be part of someone else’s,  hope that it’s us or the USA) .

 

For a few decades to come, I think NZ will still be politically safe, though it must be hard to be sure how to stay prosperous in such a fast-changing world. I believe a lot of NZ dairy products now find their way to China ( do they have Anchor Butter in Peking?), and I expect its meat and wine will increasingly go the same way, as long as China continues is upward curve.

 

But I’m told we should all be keeping our eyes on the fate of a small group of islands north-west of Taiwan, known in Japan as the Senkaku islands and in China as the Diaoyu (to make things even more complicated, the Taiwan Chinese call them the Tiaoyutai) .  All three countries claim them , though Japan actually holds them ( after a long post-1945 period of US administration)  . They are close to fishing grounds and possible oilfields, but their main importance may well be as a test of American resolve in the Pacific.

 

For, if Japan defends them against Chinese pressure, the USA is obliged by treaty (Japan-USA Mutual Co-operation Security Treaty, 1952) to come to Japan’s aid. This is a Cold War legacy, from the time when Japan was the USA’s principal ally in the region, and China a chilly Communist foe, its faced turned away from the USA much as North Korea’s is now. Things have changed utterly since it was signed.

 

The dispute is immensely complicated, lost in the mists of history but has recently erupted into   confrontations between Japanese and Chinese vessels. China may well have chosen it as a pressure point in which it can lose nothing important, but might gain a lot.  It has also been entangled in recent anti Japanese outbreaks in China, which are generally believed to be state-sponsored and are a feature of the new Chinese nationalism which is increasingly replacing Communism as the official ideology of the Chinese state.

 

But the real point is this. the dispute allows China to test the strength of Washington’s commitment to Japan. The USA does not want to be drawn into this matter, now that it is pursuing friendship with China and is heavily indebted to China. It has so far left statements on the matter to junior officials and deputies. But if Japan refuses to give way, and insists on America fulfilling her treaty obligations,  the USA may have to make an open choice between backing Japan and letting her down.

 

Backing Japan would be risky. But abandoning her would be immensely significant, a message to China that the USA will not stand up to Chinese pressure for the sake of an ally – and so a message to Taiwan that its principal ally cannot be relied on at a pinch. China longs to secure the return of Taiwan to the national fold, but if she succeeds, it will only be after American power and resolve in the Pacific have greatly diminished.

 

The US Navy is still of course immensely powerful. But is its power still usable? Would any modern US President take the risk of a naval confrontation with China, over Japan’s islands, or over Taiwan?  If not, then China can expect to dominate the Pacific by the second half of this century.

 

My guess is that there will be no direct, sharp confrontation after which it can be clearly said that one power or the other is supreme. My guess is that confrontation will be avoided, again and again, as American resolve weakens, so that it will eventually become clear that the USA is not prepared to back Japan, or in the end Taiwan, but China will be too tactful to assert her new supremacy openly, and Japan too tactful to complain (the loss of face would be severe). It will just slowly become apparent, and China will slowly modernise her naval forces to the point where they can project power all across the Pacific. The US Navy, meanwhile, will slowly diminish its presence and its influence.

 

What has this to do with the state of New Zealand? Some straws in the wind : Chinese warships have recently paid courtesy visits to Sydney and Auckland (the Chinese declared they were nuclear-free) , and the Royal Australian Navy  has even exercised with the Chinese Navy. It’s not exactly the Great White Fleet. But who’d have even guessed at it, in 1945? And it’s only the beginning.  What sort of accommodation will the ANZAC nations make with China, when the time comes. What will it be like, a Habeas Corpus, Magna Carta country in the giant shadow of the People’s Republic? Who will decide the limits of speech and thought, and who will control the flow of population?  My guess is that the Antipodean Paradise may not have all that many decades to run before it is changed into something rather different. But then I always was a pessimist. 

On Doing Your Homework - a Riposte to a Bog-Standard Attack on Grammar Schools

If I could, I would write an article at least once a week calling for the return of state grammar schools. But unlike Emile Zola, who wrote about nothing but the unjust imprisonment of Alfred Dreyfus for years until justice was done,  I don’t own my own newspaper.  So I wait for a good opportunity. And one has just arrived.

 

The fact is that there is huge public demand for selective state education, which has no significant ally or spokesman at Westminster or in Whitehall.  It is up to people such as me to express it, and I like to think that years of hammering away have brought the issue much further up the agenda than it was 15 years ago.

 

But there is still no obvious shift. Despite the occasional wisp of smoke from below the decks, the issue has yet to burst into flames. Why?  All the major political parties, and the official elite, are committed to comprehensive state schooling. All of them, having been captured by Gramscian revolutionary thought some years ago, are dogmatically wedded to ‘equality of outcome’, a policy which demands aggressive egalitarianism in education.

 

At least,  they are wedded to it for everyone except themselves, and the super-rich oligarchs who finance their dead parties. Politicians know all the tricks for getting their children into secretly selective schools,  closed to non-insiders, or they buy their way into the catchment areas of better schools, or they pay fees, as do the Oligarchs and plutocrats. In all cases, this means they do not really understand the terrible position of bright children from poor families, or care about it. I read the other day that Anthony Blair’s youngest child is now attending a London Roman Catholic ‘comprehensive’. There seems to be some general reluctance to say which school this is, so I shall stay silent. But  the school involved is ‘comprehensive’ in the same way that Ten Downing Street is an ‘inner-city terraced house’ – the description is technically correct, but otherwise deeply misleading.

 

 

This miserable hypocritical, self-serving egalitarianism - not some empty piffle about public ownership which was a dead letter 50 years ago- is Labour’s real ‘Clause Four’.  Not only has Labour never abandoned it . The other parties have adopted it too.

 

Some politicians are perhaps not bright enough to grasp this. One of them is probably Sir John Major, the supposed ‘decent man’ and ‘nice guy’ (really?)  who mysteriously rose to the top of politics (by not being Margaret Thatcher or Michael Heseltine), mysteriously won a general election( by not being Neil Kinnock), and was (nominally at least) Prime Minister for an incredible seven years, only ceasing to hold the office because he wasn’t Anthony Blair.

 

Now (and one has to wonder why this is) he seems anxious to remind us all that he also isn’t David Cameron. So this account of a speech he gave on the 8th November somehow found its way on to the front of a Tory newspaper on the following Monday. I wonder how. Sir John is not inconsiderably distressed to find that Britain is in the grip of a privately-educated elite. Has he only just realised this? What was he actually doing when he was occupying all those great offices of state? What has he been doing since? Watching the cricket?.

 

Ludicrously, Sir John blames this bipartisan catastrophe on Labour. Perhaps he doesn’t know that his own Tory Party supervised the destruction of hundreds of fine grammar schools under Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher instead of saving them.  But he must surely know that he didn’t reopen a single one of them in his seven long years as Britain’s helmsman, instead concentrating on an irrelevant scheme to create so-called ‘Grant-Maintained’ schools, which did nothing to address the real problem. He must also know that the softening and dilution of the examination system was largely achieved by Tory governments.

 

The newspaper which trumpeted Sir John’s outburst (see below) has corrected in its online version the claim made in the print version that Sir John attended a comprehensive school, when in fact he went to a grammar school (Rutlish School). One wonders what would have become of the young Major if he really had gone to a comprehensive. But it retains the misleading statement that Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, ‘went to state school’, when in fact Mr Gove won a scholarship to a private school, Robert Gordon’s College,  where he received the most important part of his education. How interesting that a Tory newspaper should get into such a muddle. It used to be considered politically advantageous for Labour politicians to claim to have been less grandly-educated than they had been. Now it’s the egalitarian Tories who do this, notably Mrs Theresa May, who went to a Convent School, and then to a girls’ grammar school which became a comprehensive while she was there (presumably retaining a grammar stream for the existing grammar pupils, as this was standard procedure at the time) ,  but says in a major reference book that she went to a ‘comprehensive’.

 

 

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/10439303/Truly-shocking-that-the-private-school-educated-and-affluent-middle-class-still-run-Britain-says-Sir-John-Major.html

 

This outburst, whose purpose is mysterious, appeared on the same day as this puce-faced assault on the grammar school idea by Mr John Harris of the Guardian newspaper.

 

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/11/grammar-schools-social-mobility-deluded-thinking

 

Mr Harris is particularly annoyed that some on the left are beginning to realise that the return of grammar schools would be a good policy for a party which truly spoke for the poor, as here

 

http://shiftinggrounds.org/2012/06/more-grammar-schools-please-but-open-them-up/

 

This is very interesting and an encouraging sign. But my main business is with Mr Harris and with his comrade-in-arms, Owen Jones (‘The Peter Hitchens of the Left’),  who stormed on to Twitter to declare :  'Anyone who thinks grammar schools would improve social mobility needs to do their homework. They make things worse.’

 

Ah, now, do they, though? Regular readers here will know the trick that is being pulled by these two. But do Mr Harris or Mr Jones grasp that their argument is hollow?

 

The most significant concentration of remaining grammar schools in England (there are now none in Scotland or Wales) is in Kent and Buckinghamshire.

 

 

Both these counties are within commuting distance of London (Other London commuter Counties, such as Oxfordshire, Sussex, Hertfordshire, Essex, Hampshire and Berkshire, have very few grammar schools or no grammar schools at all). The same is true of the outer London boroughs. It is therefore both rational and practicable for families whose breadwinners work in London to plan their lives so as to give themselves access to grammar schools. (In most parts of the UK no such planning is possible, as grammar schools are a remote memory).  Given that the cost of five years of  private single-sex secondary day-school education (comparable to a grammar school education) is roughly £100,000 of post tax income, it is not surprising that parents who value schooling do the following:

1.Buy houses in the catchment areas of grammar schools.

2. Spend money on preparatory school and tutor fees to ensure that their children pass the grammar school examinations. In this, by the way, they are comparable to the many left-wing (but non-RC, for leftist Roman Catholics have another way out) London parents who boast that they use state schools, but spend fortunes on private tutoring to make up for the inadequacies of their children’s bog-standard comprehensives (so also making those schools appear a good deal better than they really are at results time).

 

But Mr Harris doesn’t seem worried by this equally important distortion. Nor is he worried by the behaviour of left-wing luminaries (some of them zealous and noisy campaigners against selection by ability) who move into the tiny and expensive catchment areas of certain nominal comprehensives in North London, which are in effect selective schools. If Mr Harris gets in touch with me, I’ll suggest some lines of inquiry.

 

As for the grammars, this siege of catchment areas, and the linked systematic targeted cramming of course completely distort school provision. But it is a *consequence* of the closure of hundreds of other grammar schools, not a criticism of the existence of the remaining 164, whose continuing survival is loathed by the comprehensive campaigners, because it emphasises the utter and unquestionable failure of the comprehensive project in educational terms.

 

When we had a national selective system, state primaries routinely prepared children for the eleven-plus (which readers here will know I would like to replace with an agreed assessment, on the lines of the ones used in Germany, coupled with more flexibility about the age of transfer). There was no need for people to move house or splurge on tutors.

 

Mr Jones, meanwhile, needs to do *his* homework on the subject of social mobility. People such as me are calling for a reintroduction of a national selective system. The inevitable failure of a localised, pressurised selective system to promote social mobility does not in any way refute our case.

 

The first bit of homework he needs to do is geography. Northern Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom(just) and still has a wholly selective secondary school system (just, despite the efforts of Sinn Fein to kill it off).

 

I contacted the Higher Education Statistics Agency (an independent body set up by the universities)  in Cheltenham, and asked them for the latest figures on the proportion of lower-income entrants to Higher Education institutions, broken up into the constituent parts of the United Kingdom. .

 

This, it seemed to me, would be a good indication of the effect of grammar schools on social mobility, because we could see directly how well lower-income children did in university entrance, in a system which was wholly selective, as against three systems which were either wholly comprehensive or almost entirely comprehensive.

 

I can see no objections to this as a good, objective test of the matter.

 

So, in 2011/2012 the proportion of young full-time first degree entrants,  from socio-economic class 4 to 7*,  to Higher Education institutions were as follows.

(*National Statistics Socio-Economic Classes)

 

 

England…30.9% (Largely comprehensive)

Wales…..29.1% (Totally comprehensive)

Scotland….26.6% (Totally comprehensive)

Northern Ireland…..39.1% (Almost wholly selective)

 

The UK average is 30.7%

England and Wales combined 30.8%

 

So the university chances of a child from a  poor background in selective Northern Ireland are almost one third greater than those of a similar child in largely comprehensive England and Wales, and the advantage of Northern Ireland over totally comprehensive Scotland is greater still.

 

It took me about 45 minutes to obtain these figures. But of course that is because I was already aware of the Northern Ireland exception, which is for many reasons unwelcome to the Comprehensive Zealots. Mr Harris is clearly aware that the Province still has grammar schools, as he mentions it. But he is interested only in the measure of how many pupils receive free school meals.

 

This is of course significant.  But it is not the whole point. It would hardly be surprising if the middle classes, with their bookish homes and educated parents who value education and understand how it works,  *dominated* grammar schools. Such schools do not represent a Maoist new dawn of total equality. The point is that in a selective system they  dominate them by *merit* and by *ability*, not by paying fees or buying expensive houses. And that the schools they dominate also retain an open door to bright children whose parents do not have these advantages, a door which is not closed against poor homes by bars of gold.

 

That is the best we can hope for, and it is much better than the selection by influence, faith,  secret knowledge or raw unadorned money, which we now have.   

 

The second bit of homework Owen Jones needs to do is History. I wish I could reproduce the whole chapter I wrote on this subject in my book ‘The Broken Compass’, later republished as ‘the Cameron Delusion’. But any good library will find it for you for a trifling fee (the relevant chapter is called ’The Fall of the Meritocracy’).

 

This traces the blatantly political, and egalitarian origin of the comprehensive idea as developed by Graham Savage. It also reproduces the figures from the (1966) Franks Report into Oxford University, which noted that in 1938-9, private school pupils had won 62% of places at that University . A further 13% were won by direct grant schools (fine institutions which after 1944 operated as combined grammar schools and independent schools, until stupidly abolished and driven out of the public sector by Labour in 1975 – now they moan that they want the independent sector to ‘help’ state schools, but of course they wouldn’t want that sort of ‘help’, on terms that challenged the comprehensive orthodoxy). And 19% came from other state schools, presumably all grammar schools at that time.

 

By 1958-9 (14 years after the Butler Education Act created the national selective system),  private schools were down to 53%, direct grants up to 15% and state grammars up to 30%. By 1964-5, private schools were down again to 45% , direct grants up to 17% and grammars up to 34%.

 

(The totals do not add up to 100% because of foreign students and home-educated entrants)

 

Until Antony Crosland put a stop to this, this was an accelerating, almost revolutionary process. The next year (the last recorded by Franks) private schools were at 41%, direct grants at 17% and grammars up to 40%. Michael Beloff, a former President of Trinity College, Oxford has said that the state schools were supplying 70% of new entrants to Oxford by the early 1970s, just as the grammar schools began to disappear in large numbers, but (though it seems perfectly possible on the basis of the figures I do have)  I have not been able to verify this.

 

Note that the grammars and direct grants stormed Oxford (and Cambridge) in the 1950s and 1960s, without any special provision or concessions, despite the great advantage the private schools had in those days in the teaching of Classics (then essential for Oxbridge entrance). Now, Oxbridge colleges struggle to raise their state intake by all kinds of concessions, striving to fulfil egalitarian quotas, and as a result give huge advantages to applicants from the remaining grammars, religious schools, elite sixth-form colleges and covertly selective ‘comprehensives’  which are in truth selective, but not in fair or open fashion.

 

Mr Harris and Mr Jones are very welcome to reply here at length if they wish. 

One Good Question, and one Wearisome Repetition

I have selected two responses to the Grammar School article for comment – the first (from Mr Mckay) interesting, and the second, (from Christopher Charles), tedious and serially unresponsive.

 

Firstly, here is Joe Mckay:

 

‘I have asked this question for years. Never got a good response. What does a grammar school offer that a comprehensive school (that channels classes into 'top', 'middle' and 'bottom' sets) doesn't? Is hanging around the 'thick' kids on the playground during lunch enough to cause bright kids to fall behind? Is this the key difference between Grammar and schools and Comprehensives? Or is it the traditions of the school which filter through to the kids via osmosis? I am just curious as to what the key difference is?’

 

I suspect there are several elements here. The first is a simple one of ethos and authority, greatly affected by size. Grammar schools, because their intake is almost all capable of ‘A-level ‘  study,  do not need to be as physically  big as Comprehensives to sustain a viable Sixth Form , or whatever the final two years of pre-university study are now called. The personal authority of the Head is therefore more easily imposed through direct  presence and contact.

 

Next, almost every parent is in alliance with the staff to attain the same end, whereas this alliance is far weaker in comprehensives.

 

But I suspect the strongest element is that the nature of the Grammar School is conservative, hierarchical, traditional  and authoritarian, whereas the nature of the comprehensive is radical, anti-authoritarian, discovery-based rather than pedagogical. This used to be, and to much lesser extent still is, enforced though architecture and ceremony, honours boards, teachers wearing gowns and mortar boards, classrooms arranged in rows, ‘houses’ and other public school devices for creating loyalties and identifiable peer groups. Above all, the mixing of the social classes takes place on the understanding that it is desirable to become middle class.  Those supporters of Comprehensives who claim that they favour the mixing of the classes *as such* are not being truthful. They favour this mixing only if the middle classes are encouraged to become less so, and to adopt the patois and attitudes of their working-class fellow pupils.

 

In the early comprehensive era, this division was nothing like as obvious, as many of the first comprehensives, in the 1950s and early 1960s, continued to maintain strong discipline, to have teachers in gowns and mortar-boards, religious daily assemblies, houses and so forth.

 

The difference only really became apparent when the huge expansion of teacher training launched by the Wilson government changed the nature of the teaching profession (incredibly, the Daily Telegraph, not the Guardian, used to be the favourite newspaper of teachers, and the one in which teaching posts were mainly advertised).The paradox of this, of course, is that many of the new radical teachers were grammar-school products. Also the general cultural revolution made it very hard for large, inner-city comprehensives to maintain the old traditions. A single charismatic head could achieve a great deal, but as soon as he or she moved on, the chaotic nature of the comprehensive system took over. My point is that the grammar school idea is institutionally effective, and will produce reasonable results even with mediocre personnel. The Comprehensive idea (being political, not educational, at root)  is institutionally defective and will only work (after a fashion) when exceptional people are in charge, or exceptional circumstances, such as various forms of covert selection,  apply.

 

But the grammar school’s morally and socially conservative nature is one of the reasons why the Left hate these institutions so.

 

Now to Christopher Charles, who says (as if this tired boilerplate is some new-minted piece of brilliant and original thinking) :

 

‘The two words that don't crop up in PH's post are 'secondary modern'. The type of school to which 75% of pupils would go if PH's ideas were to prevail. He seems to concern himself only with the 25% that will benefit; the rest seemingly can go hang. Understand this: I am very unhappy with the way most schools are currently run. But that has nothing to do with their status. I'm unhappy because teachers simply aren't allowed to teach. The stultifying national curriculum has drained all the enthusiasm out of the profession. Kids today are just items that have to be processed. And we wonder why so many of them hate it. I would also like to ask PH [for the umpteenth time because I've yet to receive a properly thought out response] exactly how any political party is going to push through a measure [the reintroduction of Grammar Schools] that is only going to benefit a quarter of the population? Political parties are often corrupt and stupid, but they rarely seek to commit electoral suicide. How would PH sell it to the voters? [If PH is simply going to claim that he's 'right' and leave it at that, then I'm afraid that doesn't constitute an answer. He might be happy to defend elitism on this blog. Try doing it in a party political broadcast.]’

 

I cannot say how many times I have rebutted these points. I cannot understand how Mr Charles can have missed all these rebuttals, though his contribution is written as if I had never made them, and makes no attempt to respond to them. This, then,  is the last time I shall trouble to reply to him on this or another matter unless he shows some sign of engaging with what I say.

 

I will be very simple.

1.Destroying the grammar schools did not make the Secondary Moderns better.

2.On the contrary, it condemned many people who had previously had an escape route from this, to a Secondary Modern education.

3.A large number of modern comprehensives are without doubt worse than the Secondary Moderns they replaced, in terms of discipline, educational attainment , teaching quality, bullying and disorder, etc. If we were able to judge them by a constant measure, rather than through the inflated and worthless examination certificates of modern Britain, this would be quite obvious.

4.Thus, the supposed concern of the ‘Wot about the Secondary Moderns. Eh? Eh? Eh?’ claque is entirely false. They don’t really care about the educational fate of the poor. They just display their phoney woe to obscure the fact that their ideology demands the destruction of good schools. Who can blame them? It is (unsurprisingly) embarrassing for them to acknowledge that their beliefs have had such a stupid and wasteful outcome, and have hurt the poor people whom they claim to champion.

 

Rather than have the academically-able minority provided with good schools, they condemn the bright children of the poor to hopelessness.

 

5. I have many times said, and here repeat, that the 1944 system was in need of reform. I just don’t accept that Circular 10/65 was the right reform.  Here are several reforms which would have been valuable, and which would not have destroyed hundreds of fine and irreplaceable schools.

1. A more even provision of grammar schools throughout the country.

2.More girls’ grammar schools

3. The building and staffing of the technical schools envisaged in the 1944 Act so that such schools were available in every part of the country.

4. A more flexible test for grammar school entry, as applied in Germany.

 

All these could have been achieved well within the enormous budgets expended on going comprehensive, and the subsequent vast expenditure on education in this country, which largely still cannot , in eleven years of full-time education, produce people who can read, write and count.

 

AS to how a political party can get such a proposal past a general election, just give me a political party, a general election, and let me try. How can anyone claim that giving a good education to the poor benefits only those who win places in selective schools? A better-educated country which refuses to waste its talents as we do,  is better for everyone in it – its people are more civilised, its services more efficient, its sciences more alive and inventive, its industries more successful, its media and its political class better informed and wiser.

 

(I will also re-run here the old Randolph Churchill joke which so well illustrates the nature of this question. News was brought to Evelyn Waugh that Randolph Churchill was in hospital for the removal of a non-malignant tumour. Waugh remarked ‘How typical of the medical profession to rummage through the entire vast body of Randolph Churchill, find the one thing in it that is not malignant, and remove it.’

 

 Much the same could be said of the education reformers who examined our school system in 1965, located the one part of it that was working well, and smashed it to pieces).

The Hitchens World Tour Continues

Here are links to a few events readers might like to see.

The first is an account in the Bristol University newspaper ‘Epigram’, of a talk I gave about ‘Why like Vladimir Putin’ (I am still hoping that a video of this will eventually be available)  .

 

http://www.epigram.org.uk/news/item/1670-why-i-like-putin-peter-hitchens

 

 

Then here is a link to the speech I gave about the non-existent ‘War on Drugs’ to the ‘Festival of dangerous Ideas’ in Sydney.

 

It confirms my view that debates are better than straight harangues, but livens up a bit half way through when the questions begin. My favourite question is the one from the police officer.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36L0p2w_jtA&feature=youtu.be&a

 

There’s also this session, in which I and some other panellists discuss North Korea , the Middle East and the modern idea of righteous intervention in other people’s countries.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R1f-BP1ODk

 

 

Going Down the Plughole Anti-Clockwise? Some Thoughts on the Antipodes

I thought, as I tried to re-set my body clock after the vast journey from Sydney to London, that I would post a few thoughts about this Englishman’s impressions of the Antipodes based (with all modesty) on a brief but fairly intense visit.

 

In a way, being in Australia and New Zealand is a bit like being upside down, as in the old joke. There is something particularly unsettling about a society so plainly rooted in our own past, and yet so foreign – as there is in seeing a purple Jacaranda tree among bungalows like the one in the Portsmouth suburbs in which my ancient aunts Daisy and Gwen dwelt among their grandfather clocks and ancient knick-knacks. That’s the theme of the contrast – the British touches all being old ones, the sort that make you think of long-gone August afternoons in Pompey, on the top of a trolleybus carrying you from the Guildhall Square down the Commercial Road, then towards the suburbs past neat municipal parks (with floral clocks) and old men on bowling greens; while modern Australia looks increasingly like Chicago, or Shanghai. And yet the two stand side by side on the same ground, and to confuse things further the brilliant light (especially in early morning) is like the light in Southern China, sharp and unsettlingly clear, so different from the misty skies and slow dusks under which the whole thing originated, and the birds beneath the trees are not pigeons but exotic creatures with nine-inch beaks or peculiar, comical crests.    

 

The clocks are almost exactly reversed, so your internal midnight falls almost at noon. South-facing windows never see the sun, rather than north-facing ones. And autumn is spring. I’ve never been able to make out whether, in the Southern hemisphere,  water goes down the plughole in the opposite direction from in the Northern hemisphere. Whenever I bother to check, the swirling water seems a bit indecisive,  wherever you are. But free, ordered, Magna-Carta-based societies seem to go down the drain in much the same way in any part of the planet. They become so accustomed to their ordered freedom that they think it occurs naturally, like air and light, and that they need do nothing to preserve it. Worse, they think they can do just about anything, and expect ordered liberty just to carry on as if nothing had happened.

 

Of course, Australia has many advantages over Britain. I’ve no doubt that it has a class system ( private education is common, and similar to that in England in many ways) . But it doesn’t have one as troubling as ours, with its dozens of semi-secret codes by which certain people judge others. It doesn’t have our great burned-out industrial cities, lasting scars of an industrial revolution which is not just over but almost entirely superseded, yet cannot be escaped.

 

There are better and worse parts of town, and ill-favoured suburbs, but no cramped slum quarters and (so far as I can make out) none of the East-Berlin-style tower block estates which disfigure every major British city, and are in some ways as bad as the back-to-backs they replaced.

 

Some wearisome nitpickers have seized on my remark that ‘Now they (Australia and NZ) have kilometres and dollars, symbols of globalisation and of US influence’ in their endless search for a chance to catch me out in small things (presumably because they dare not argue with me about big things). Now, if I had said that both these things were the result of globalisation, or both were the outcome of US influence, they might have a point. But if you look, you’ll see that I said one was the outcome of one of these pressures, and the other the result of the other. Both influences operate at once. That is the point.

 

So far, Britain itself has managed to avoid either of them - though I don’t think this can last much longer. Even conservative newspapers now regularly use metric measures they would have scorned only five years ago, and the BBC uses them almost all the time. As for the dollar, I think we should be aware that the Euro hasn’t gone away, and Sterling is by no means safe from a renewed attempt to abolish it within the next ten years. Had  I had more space, I might have noted that Orwell predicted exactly this combination (dollars and the metric system)  in ‘Airstrip One’, the imaginary state in which the action of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four ‘ takes place. There’s the famous scene in which the old man in the pub tries to order a pint of beer and is told brusquely that the barman has never heard of such a thing.  Orwell knew what he was doing.

 

He wrote in ‘Tribune’ in March 1947 :  ‘Another thing I am against in advance — for it is bound to be suggested sooner or later — is the complete scrapping of our present system of weights and measures.

 

‘Obviously you have got to have the metric system for certain purposes. For scientific work it has long been in use, and it is also needed for tools and machinery, especially if you want to export them. But there is a strong case for keeping on the old measurements for use in everyday life. One reason is that the metric system does not possess, or has not succeeded in establishing, a large number of units that can be visualized. There is, for instance, effectively no unit between the metre, which is more than a yard, and the centimetre, which is less than half an inch. In English you can describe someone as being five feet three inches high, or five feet nine inches, or six feet one inch, and your bearer will know fairly accurately what you mean. But I have never heard a Frenchman say, "He is a hundred and forty-two centimetres high"; it would not convey any visual image. So also with the various other measurements. Rods and acres, pints, quarts and gallons, pounds, stones and hundredweights, are all of them units with which we are intimately familiar, and we should be slightly poorer without them. Actually, in countries where the metric system is in force a few of the old measurements tend to linger on for everyday purposes, although officially discouraged.

 

‘There is also the literary consideration, which cannot be left quite out of account. The names of the units in the old system are short homely words which lend themselves to vigorous speech. Putting a quart into a pint pot is a good image, which could hardly be expressed in the metric system. Also, the literature of the past deals only in the old measurements, and many passages would become an irritation if one had to do a sum in arithmetic when one read them, as one does with those tiresome versts in a Russian novel.’

 

This is pretty much exactly my own position on the subject, to which I would add the fact that customary British measures bear the same relation to the metric system as Common Law does to Civil Law. The one has grown like a forest out of slow time and human use, and is a characteristic of a free and independent country. The other has been plonked down on the once-gentle landscape in long, harsh straight lines, and owes its existence not to custom, long use and tradition but to harsh, centralised authority (and an incorrect calculation of the dimensions of the planet).

 

Also the nasty, angular metric words cause the eye and the mind to jump when placed in any line of English prose (and would derail any line of English poetry) . The old words are not just short, homely and forceful. They are part of the language, polished in use, giving off that deep gleam that old, well-used iron gives, so much more pleasing than the showy glitter of silver or gold. I’d also point out what Orwell appears not to have known, that the old Russian verst (500 sazhen or 1500 arshin,  or 1.0668 kilometres) is so close to a kilometre that one sometimes wonders about the coincidence.

 

But I digress. The point being made was that Australia and New Zealand had come under two influences which undermined their monarchist traditions and their Anglosphere traditions.

 

One of the sights of Sydney –and one of its most English-influenced parts -  is the lovely park which leads down to the harbour, much of it a delightful Botanic Garden.  In this park can be found the so-called ‘Fleet Steps’. You might think that these commemorate the ‘First Fleet’ which began the colonisation of the Australian Continent.

 

But they don’t. A plaque at the spot explains that the name derives from the visit to Sydney, in August 1908, of the ‘Great White Fleet’, the first time the whole world learned of the size and power of the modern U.S. Navy brought into being by Theodore Roosevelt, in conformity with the theories of Admiral Alfred Mahan (though there had been a smaller demonstration of the US Navy’s growing for in the Mediterranean in 1906).

 

I have long been quietly amused at the great fuss Britain made about Germany’s Wilhelmine navy, which turned out in the end to be an irrelevant toy, and the lack of interest with which the public and the political class greeted the real challenge to British naval supremacy, the US Fleet, which in the end, smilingly and without a shot fired in anger, drove us into naval obscurity, where we now are.

 

For Australia , it is a more practical matter. The Great White Fleet must have been far larger than any Royal Navy squadron which ever ventured so far south in those days. During the First World War,  Britain largely left the Pacific to the care of our then close ally, Imperial Japan. Washington broke up that friendship, with vast consequences, at the same time as the famous Naval Treaty compelled us to cede our former Naval Supremacy and diminish our naval ambitions. And in the 1920s and 1930s, thoughtful people in Canberra and Wellington must have been increasingly aware that the British naval shield was in reality a weak thing. Certainly they understood this after the sinking of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, and after the fall of Singapore in 1942, at which so many of their soldiers were captured while under British command. 

 

The vaunted Singapore Naval Station had been the Trident Missile of the inter-war period, a vast and grandiose project , designed to impress, which turned out in practice to be of little use in time of war. There were many reasons for this, but the real one was that it did not represent real military, naval or diplomatic strength, let alone purpose. 

 

Who can blame the Australians and new Zealanders when they turned increasingly towards the USA, especially after the Suez catastrophe, and even more so once Britain abandoned her loyal Commonwealth, to woo instead the disdainful continentals of the then Common Market?

 

And who could be surprised if Australia and New Zealand abandoned bits of their Britishness to emphasise that they were now global traders, more and more part of the Asia-Pacific region in which they geographically sat, less and less part of a British Imperial community whose head had lost the will to lead?

 

The first time I went to Australia, during an interesting general election 20 years ago, it was clear that the country was already undergoing a major cultural revolution, had in fact undergone one. Many of its newer migrants (including the Dutch wife of the then premier, Paul Keating) had come from other parts of Europe, or even from the Arab world,  and felt no special allegiance to the British crown. More and more were coming from Asia, especially Hong Kong.  And the Murdoch press, which had for a long time been less than enthusiastic about monarchy or the British connection, were having a powerful effect. For quite a few Australians, especially those of Irish origin, Gallipoli and Singapore represented not a moment f national pride and loyalty to the Mother Country, but instances of British exploitation, if not actual betrayal of our younger brothers across the seas. I am always puzzled by people who think that Mr Murdoch is a conservative, and especially by political conservatives who welcome his support. He has never made any secret of his radicalism since the days when he kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms at Oxford.

 

Since then, Australia has had its UKIP moment, the brief emergence of Pauline Hanson in the late 1990s as the implications of large-scale migration began to sink in.  This is why David Cameron’s hiring of the Australian spin-doctor Lynton Crosby is so important. Crosby, who was there at the time, knows all about the way in which the Australian Tories (who are more honestly known as ‘Liberals’ Down Under) skilfully outflanked Mrs Hanson’s movement, despite its large initial success.  It attained 22% in the polls at its peak, but fell back to 5%.  If UKIP has any sense, it will look into this episode in depth.

 

But it was an event that took place while I was in Sydney that interested me most of all. Rupert Murdoch spoke to an elite audience in Sydney’s magnificent Edwardian Town Hall ( a building, more British than Yorkshire Pudding,  which would have delighted J.B.Priestley, Keith Waterhouse or Peter Simple’s Alderman Foodbotham). You can find a report here

 

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/media/australias-role-is-as-a-disruptive-economy-rupert-murdoch-tells-lowy-institute/story-e6frg996-1226750825926

 

 

He qualified his call for mass immigration and maximum diversity by saying this openness should embrace all comers provided they were ‘willing to abide by our way of life’.

 

But  large-scale migration makes nonsense of such caveats. When people arrive in significant numbers, the way of life changes to suit them, rather than the other way round - as many British and American  people in high-migration areas know very well.

 

In any case, what is that ‘way of life’? Those who have watched the ABC programme  ‘Q&A’ on which I appeared  will know that Australia’s under-30s are pretty keen on the cultural and moral revolution we have experienced here - perhaps even more so than we are. They think, even more strbngly than we do, that they can have a life free of tradition and restraint, and yet carry on receiving the benefits of tradition and restraint. They want to pay a Third World fare, and ride through life in a First World country.

 

I don’t know exactly why this is so. Perhaps it’s because Australia has always been less deferential than we have, and (for instance) has never had such strong traditions of religion and authority as we have, and (this is just a small illustrative example of the differences between our cultures) simply lacks the quiet restraining force of religious architecture which I believe continues to exert a silent influence on all who live within its reach. It’s plain that the power of Australia’s own older national myth, of Gallipoli and the Menzies era, is fading just as our equivalent has faded.   I read complaints in newspaper letters columns that it was getting increasingly difficult to buy a Remembrance day Poppy(the Australian version, different from ours, looks more like an actual three-dimensional flower ( I was shown one by a friendly curator at the striking and moving Anzac monument in Sydney’s lovely Hyde Park) , but I never saw one on sale. I had taken a British one with me, but in the end felt it would be pretentious to wear it.

 

And then of course there’s just so much more money, and pleasure is so readily accessible, and individuality is endlessly promoted by the electronic toys with which we all spend so much of our time. On a suburban train on Friday evening I had plenty of chances to see that Australians are just as much the slaves of their tablets and i-phones as we are, gaping at those great atomisers of the human race, turning us into self-obsessed and self-seeking individuals who can sit at a café table with five friends, ignoring them completely.

 

I was also struck, in Sydney, by the almost violent eruption on the skyline of new concrete towers, built very close together in a way reminiscent of Hong Kong or Shanghai. There was, I learned later, a lot of discussion about how more and more of the city’s inhabitants must now dwell in blocks of flats rather than in the spacious houses on large plots of land which seemed more usual when I was last there. Meanwhile property prices re climbing towards the mad levels to be found in South east England, though this is partly because of the sharp appreciation of the Australian Dollar since Australia became ‘China’s Quarry’.

 

Who knows why politically correct multiculturalism seems so strong there? I need to know more about Australia to come to a  firm conclusion. Perhaps it was just because it was a very large young audience, exuberant on a warm spring night by the sea, which had been very professionally warmed up before transmission by a comedian, rather different from a much smaller, unwarmed-up, nay, lukewarm gathering of middle-aged British political activists, on a temperate cloudy night in a municipal theatre in Wolverhampton.

By the way, some small comments on that ‘Q&A’, which I have yet to view in full.  I noticed that the Australian leftist blogs and tweets which attacked me afterwards often did so on the basis of things I hadn’t actually said. My only comment on same-sex marriage was that it was a tiny issue beside the collapse of heterosexual marriage. I was also attacked for ‘interrupting’ my fellow panellists. I’m sure I did a bit, but not nearly as much as they interrupted me. This sort of criticism is inevitable anywhere on the planet for the ‘right-wing’ member of the panel, who is assumed to hold views he doesn’t, unless he specifically repudiates them( and even then, may not be believed). I’m told that local ‘right-wing’ support for me on the Twittersphere shrivelled when I was disobliging about Mr Murdoch. So I lose both ways. My natural foes think I am bad whatever I do. And my natural allies think I am bad for holding views which (if they knew about them) might make my leftist foes wonder a bit about my position.

 

Then thre's the complaint that I don't 'make eye contact' with other members of the panel, preusmably intended to suggest some sort of personal disdain.  Why should I? The seating of the panel, ina  row facing the auditorium,  makes it difficult to do this in any case.   I was too busy making eye contact with the audience, to whom I was in fact speaking, As for using the 'third person' Parliamentary convention, I do so when I can, because it discourages ad hominem behaviour, but I will respond to a direct misrepresnetation with a  direct denial, as I did in the case of Lord Heseltine.

 

 

As for the ‘Dangerous Idea’, as soon as I heard the question I knew that I must give the answer that I gave, or forever regret failing to have done so. One or two people have mentioned Mr Beaver’s tremendous remark about Aslan not being ‘safe’, which I think I may well have had somewhere in my mind, having recently been compared (by an Australian friend) with another Narnian character, Puddleglum (a comparison I took as an unmixed compliment).

 

There was one other thing. I felt, watching the bits of the programme I’ve managed to see, that I looked pretty much as I think I look.  Whereas, on my recent appearance on the BBC, I winced with wounded vanity every time I saw myself on camera.  Yet it was the same person in both cases. Perhaps TV cameras work differently in the Southern hemisphere.

 

I’ll return in a couple of days with some other thoughts about New Zealand, a place I had until now only seen in dreams and which I had until recently resigned myself to never seeing in reality.   

I’m so sorry... but I don’t mean it, it isn’t my fault and no, you can’t sue me

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday Column

Why won’t anybody say sorry
properly any more?

The miserable behaviour of the police officers in the
Plebgate affair, questioned by the Home Affairs Committee, is just the latest
example of the strange apology crisis which has this country in its grip: too
few of the right sort; too many of the wrong sort.

Nobody is ever straightforwardly
sorry for what he  has done.

He may be ‘sorry if’ you were
upset, or inconvenienced or offended. But listen carefully. This is just a way
of telling you to stop being so sensitive. It is not an admission of fault.
Watch out for the treacherous little ‘if’, that gives the game away.

He doesn’t regret doing the thing
that angered you. But he hasn’t the courage to say so.  He just thinks it
is tiresome that you are making a fuss about it, and wants to shut you up by
faking contrition he doesn’t feel.

Then there is what I call the
Railway Apology. There are now millions of these worthless things in
circulation, like the old Zimbabwe dollar. They trickle out of station
loudspeakers in an unstoppable, computer-generated flow.

They result from some long-ago
market research, which showed that passengers thought they were due a bit of
penitence for the lateness and unreliability they constantly suffered.

They did, and they do, but what
they really wanted was some sort of readiness to put things right in future.
It’s no good saying sorry for doing something you intend to repeat almost
exactly, within a few hours, and then again and again for as long as you live,
or as long as your franchise lasts.

It’s also no good getting a robot
to do it for you. Real apologies stick in the throat, involve some shame and
humiliation, and are intensely personal.

Perhaps it’s because the Japanese
take apologies so seriously that their railways are so much better than ours.

Imagine the directors of some
wretched rail company lined up in their suits at a big London terminus, bowing
deeply to their customers as they promised to make amends for years of
profiteering, cheeseparing and neglect. You can’t? Nor can I.

Some of this is of course the
result of Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s too little-known legal time
bomb, the delayed action decision to allow American-style ambulance-chasing
no-win, no-fee lawyers to operate in this country.

The 1990 Courts and Legal
Services Act (Section 58) cleared the way, followed in 1995 by the Conditional
Fee Agreements Regulations. These, not ‘Human Rights’ or ‘Health and Safety’,
are the source of the lawyer-infested culture in which we now dwell, in which a
simple, decent and sincere apology has been turned into a dangerous admission
of liability.

I am truly sorry about that. But
it’s not my fault.

A lovely
sign that Dave's in trouble

You can always tell when the
Prime Minister’s poll ratings are in trouble, for photographs of Samantha
Cameron, looking lovely, will soon appear in all the papers.

And this time she looked lovely
in her sari, left. But is this sort of thing really wise?

Our Indian community are a great
asset. But so are many others, from whom the Camerons might seek votes.

Will we see Mrs Cameron in a
hijab, attending a mosque? And why is it only the womenfolk who go all the way?

How about the premier in a
shalwar kameez?

Come to that, when things get
really bad, will  we discover that our head of government has quietly
slipped out of the back entrance in  a burqa?

I knew we were well on our way
down the plughole when, aged nine, I watched our last battleship, HMS Vanguard,
being towed out of Portsmouth to the breakers on a sultry afternoon in August
1960. She ran  aground on a mudbank, just  to make it worse.

Now poor old Pompey is to lose
its shipyards. This is sad for so many reasons. That battered old city has
suffered quite enough in the last hundred years. But there’s also this point.

Nobody is supposed to mention it,
but defence contracts have always been a quiet way of protecting our own
industries and jobs from foreign competition.

Everyone’s supposed to be in
favour of free trade, though you can be sure the French, the Germans and the
USA look after their own all the time. But we won’t do it. We abide by rules
our rivals mock. And so the dole queues lengthen, and we lose the skills to
recover.

How funny that we are being
accused of spying on the Germans from our hideous new embassy in Berlin’s
Wilhelmstrasse.

It reminds me of a much more
interesting unsolved case, revealed by that mysterious but authentic writer of
spy thrillers Alan Judd. He says a British diplomat was once caught spying on
us, on behalf of the European Union.

The wretched traitor’s reward was
to have his photograph secretly taken with Jacques Delors, then president 
of the European Commission.

Australia's
losing its past AND its future

I HAVE been spending a  few
precious days in Australia (my first visit in  20 years) and New Zealand
(my first visit).

It is still very moving for a
British person to experience these two civilisations, which are rooted in our
ideas of justice and liberty.

Would either place be so happy
and free had they been colonised instead by China, Japan, France or Germany? I
don’t think so. Yet the link is weakening.

Thrilling as it is for me
to  see Australian warships flying ensigns very similar  to our own,
and moving as  it is to see the Queen’s head on the coins, these
things  are vestiges.

The British elements are all old,
from the age of the floral clock, the war memorial, the silver sixpence, the
domed Guildhall and the bowling green. Now they have kilometres and dollars,
symbols of globalisation and of US influence. Political correctness has swept
away the old tough male Aussie  ideal, as I learned in detail when I
appeared on the local version of Question Time.

And in Sydney the other day,
Rupert Murdoch urged mass immigration on Australia, much as he has supported it
here. If he gets his way, Australia will become ‘the world’s most diverse
nation’, though Britain under the same policy must be competing  for that
dubious title.

I hope he doesn’t succeed. If Australia
just becomes another money-making multicultural desert of concrete and plastic,
its origins in our misty islands forgotten, it will lose much more than it
gains.

To comment on this article, please scroll down

 

An Australian Encounter

Some readers may be interested in watching last Monday night's 'Q&A', Australia's equivalent of the BBC's 'Question Time', on which I appeared with (among others) Germaine Greer.

 

Here it is

 

  http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3868791.htm

 

It has some interesting differences from the British version.

 

 

 

 

If judges ban religion from our courts, guess who gets to play God...

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

We all now know that our money is based entirely on faith. There’s nothing like enough gold or dollars or even land to back up the fantastic promises made on all those banknotes.

Nobody dares to think about what might happen if confidence dies, as it so nearly did  in the last great crash.

Given that faith in paper money sustains our entire banking and currency systems, isn’t it odd that faith in  a Christian God is generally viewed as eccentric and outdated?

For what exactly is it that holds up the law? Why should parents have charge over their children, teachers over their pupils? Why should we stop  at zebra crossings if we’re in a hurry? Why give a seat to a pregnant woman or an old  man? Lots don’t. Why pay your debts or your taxes, if you can get out of it?

Authority, and the test of  what was right or wrong, used to come from the Christian religion. But Sir James Munby, a distinguished High Court Justice, is the keenest of several judges to say that is all finished now.

He says ‘Once upon a time, the perceived function of the judges was to promote virtue and discourage vice and immorality.’ But he adds: ‘I doubt one would now hear that from the judicial bench.’

I doubt it too. Lord Justice Laws said back in 2010 that providing legal protection to one religion over another would be ‘deeply unprincipled’. ‘This must be so, since in the eye of everyone save the believer, religious faith is necessarily subjective,’ he remarked.

Of course, that’s so in a way. Faith is a choice. But the respect given to Lord Justice Laws and Sir James Munby is much more subjective, as is the set of beliefs which seat them on the Bench and pay their salaries.

In 2011, Sir James was one  of two High Court Judges who said that it was not yet ‘well understood’ that British society was largely secular and that the law had no place for Christianity. It’s pretty well understood now. Yet I don’t recall Parliament ever passing an Act saying we had stopped being a Christian country, or revoking the Coronation Oath, or removing the dozens of Christian elements in the law, right up to the cross on top of the crown on every police cap badge. Can it be that the judges have decided to replace God with their own views? It sounds like it.

Sir James seems to have some personal goodness calculator concealed in his robes. Amazingly, it seems to accord with fashionable opinion on everything. Will it still work if its verdicts are unpopular with the liberal elite? Likewise, he’s against things done by a minority of Muslims (though not actually Islamic) which he says are ‘beyond the pale’, including forced marriage, female genital mutilation and so-called ‘honour-based’ domestic violence.
But if he’s so secular and multicultural, as he says he is, what exactly is his objection to these actions? Some cultures are rather keen on them.

It’s all very well saying ‘All are entitled to respect, so long as they are “legally and socially acceptable” and not “immoral or socially obnoxious” or “pernicious”.’

But isn’t deciding which is which, as Lord Justice Laws might say, ‘necessarily subjective’? Dig through the first layer of judges to find out what’s acceptable this year, or what’s obnoxious this week, and you’ll find that it’s just judges all the way down. There’s no bottom, just the modish opinion of today, which may not be the opinion of tomorrow.
What’s ‘immoral or socially obnoxious’ in 2013 may be ‘legally and socially acceptable’ in 2043. Who would have believed, in 1983, that we’d be where we are now?

Three decades on, ‘Equality and Diversity’ will have gone, much, much further. Just as we no longer have money, just a pocketful of promises, we no longer have laws, just the current opinions of a self-satisfied, not very thoughtful elite.

   ....................................................................................................................

So who was the more irreverent, Lou or me?

I dared last week to suggest (on Radio 2) that the late singer Lou Reed had not been perfect.  I said that singing about heroin abuse and male prostitution might just have helped to normalise such things.

How he must have laughed when the BBC used one of his heroin songs in a promotion, and failed to spot the references to, er, unconventional sexual practices in Walk On The Wild Side.

It was his deeds I criticised. I even said (and meant) ‘God rest his soul’. But out in the moronic, howling wastes of the Twittersphere, dissenting from the Selfist religion of our time (I don’t mean you, Will) meant I was immediately attacked, often by the sort of people who used to love my Leftist late brother’s verbal muggings of the newly dead.
The really funny bit was that they thought I had been irreverent.       

   ....................................................................................................................

I am more and more sure that the HS2 railway line should not be built. Of course I like the  fast trains of the Continent, and often use the Eurostar to Paris and Brussels. The distances justify it. But Britain is smaller and more crowded than France or Germany. The trains to Birmingham and Leeds seem fast enough to me.

And if you travel on normal French trains, you’ll find that the TGV has sucked money out of ordinary lines, so that quite important towns have wretched, infrequent and slow services.
If we finally have money to spend on railways, renationalise the lot – so saving billions in needless payments to private operators – and put back what we stupidly shut in the 1960s, especially the marvellous Great Central line, which would actually do most of the things HS2 says it will do, and won’t.

    ....................................................................................................................

The BBC presenter Jeremy Paxman says that ‘nine times out of ten’ people obey him  when he asks them to pick up their litter. I hope his run of incredible good luck continues, but could it be that he’s a bit selective about whom he asks? Or maybe there aren’t many weapon dogs round where he lives.

  ....................................................................................................................

Barbed wire fences have begun to appear along Russia’s once-open borders with Georgia and Ukraine. Both these states have chosen to rely on American  and EU promises and seek to break their historic links with Moscow. I hope for the sake of Ukrainians and Georgians that those promises are kept. But something tells me that Russia will still be there, waiting, when the EU is a memory and Washington has lost interest in anything east of Cape Cod.

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

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