Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 256

Spite and envy will drive the Royal Train into the buffers

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Egalitarian spite has already wrecked
or destroyed quite enough good things. Hundreds of grammar schools, the
House of Lords, intelligent programmes on TV and radio, have all been
sacrificed to the hungry, angry idol of ‘equality’.

And
now the Royal Train is next. It’s obvious that when it comes up for
replacement, the sneering voices of sour resentment will be raised in
bitter protest. There’ll be a sentimental final trip, and then the
knacker’s yard.

The
same thing happened  to the Royal Yacht, mainly because the spineless
Tory Party didn’t dare to replace or refurbish it in time.

The steam locomotive Tornado pulling the
Royal Train. Peter Hitchens says 'spite and envy will drive the Royal
Train into the buffers'

The arguments against the train are
feeble. Its cost is probably smaller than the price of several things
we’d be better off without. How about the methadone programme, for which
George Osborne mugs the taxpayer of nearly £300 million each year, on
behalf of criminal heroin abusers?

To
call this activity ‘worthless’ would be too kind. A pharmacist wrote to
me this week to describe it in operation: ‘We see the same persons year
in, year out with no apparent change to their regimen.

‘These
people are often aggressive, high on drugs, and see the secondary
purpose of their visit as stealing as much stuff off the shelves as they
can get away with.

‘I
have seen with my own eyes addicts rolling around fighting on the
pharmacy floor over a 50ml bottle of methadone, and seen them rush out
of the shop to a waiting car to spit the methadone into a friend’s
mouth.’

I have a
feeling that a replacement Royal Train,  perhaps equipped with a fine
new British-built steam locomotive, like the recently constructed
Tornado, would come in a good deal cheaper than that, to build or to
run. But it would give dignity to the monarch and pleasure to the
people. And we can’t have that in Equality and Diversity Britain.

Maybe
things might be different if it were a Prime Ministerial Train. Like
all supposed egalitarians, our politicians long to usurp the dignity of
the Crown, and yearn for its popularity and status.

The
grandest and most exclusive personal trains ever built were provided
for Communist Mr Bigs. Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito had a splendid one.

The Kremlin’s Khrushchev liked having
six carriages to himself, preceded by a three-carriage pilot train
crammed with secret police. North Korea still maintains a mighty
armoured train for the Leader.

Leftists certainly don’t have any personal objections to such things themselves.

Cherie Blair once quietly used the Queen’s train to host a trip for the wives of visiting leaders at some summit.

One
day I’ll be able to describe how my attempts to break this story (in
another newspaper) were  hampered, once Downing Street realised how
damaging it would be if it were prominently used.

It
did get out, elsewhere, much later and in a less damaging place. But it
was plain that the Blair machine grasped that the journey had been a
serious mistake. It was still too soon for them to be so obvious about
their revolutionary, republican intentions.

It will probably still be too soon, ten years hence, when the train goes to the breakers.

But our Leftist elite reckon that, if they can’t have palaces, trains and yachts, nor can anyone else.

And
the ill-named Conservative Party is too scared of the BBC and the
Guardian to defend such things. So get ready to say goodbye to another
bit of a better Britain.

 

Cate Blanchett as Jasmine in the film Blue Jasmine

I can take or leave Woody
Allen. He was a bit funny, a long time ago, and all his later films
strike me as over-praised and pretentious.

So
please believe me when I say that Cate Blanchett’s performance in Blue
Jasmine (Allen’s latest film) is so superlative that it is almost your
duty to see it.

The
rest of the cast are great, too, but this account of a human being who
has fallen off the edge of the moral universe is as close as we can get
to Shakespeare in modern drama.

The
black truth that lies beneath our flashy modern lives, that the breach
of the marriage vow leads all too often to madness and death, has seldom
been more graphically shown.

Our police: Guilty as charged

Some
weeks ago, I dared to criticise the police here.  I did not apologise
for doing so, nor hedge my attack  on this failed, complacent
nationalised industry by saying that most officers were wonderful.

No
doubt some are, but I hardly ever see any of them, so how would I know?
The response from many officers was coarse abuse, always a sign of a
weak case.

Now it grows
clearer and clearer that the disgraceful treatment of Andrew Mitchell
went far wider  than a rogue constable or two, so much so that the Home
Secretary and the Prime Minister have taken the unprecedented step of
publicly criticising the police.

The
police have been protected far too long by a reputation they no longer
deserve. The time has  come for deep, searching reform, as I have been
urging for years.

Let us hope we get it right this time.

 

Splendid
news from Northern Ireland where the Church of Ireland is flatly
refusing to accept the new God-free promise introduced by the Girl
Guides.

They are demanding that girls be given the option of promising to serve God, as before.

This
is a moving example to the rest of us on the mainland – especially
poignant as it comes from a part of the country our Government  has
betrayed and wants to  get rid of.

 

In
a free country, how can anyone be compelled to permit children in their
care to be given an injection? Come to that, how can the children
involved, quite old enough to have wills of their own, be forced to
undergo it?

Will they
be held down, or strapped, struggling, to chairs? Will police and social
workers enforce this strange,  un-British judgment? What sort of nurse
or doctor would take part in such a grotesque scene?

I know some arrogant, intolerant totalitarians think the MMR jab is a social duty, but this isn’t (yet) a People’s Republic.

Or is it?

 

It is the sober truth that David
Howard, an aide to the mayor of Washington DC, was forced to resign from
his job in 1999 for using the word ‘niggardly’ about a budget.

He
was later reinstated, but only after a public fuss. Nobody is safe from
the wild witch-hunting hysteria of modern political correctness, even a
popular football manager. 

Meanwhile,
there is almost no controversy about the chanting, by Polish fans at
Tuesday’s match, of the words ‘We are Poland. We’re playing at home’.
That’s because it’s true, and because it was them chanting it.

 

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

 

Heresy Etc - a Consolidation

The following is a  consolidation of comments I have posted in comment threads today, on various subjects.

 

Mr Heresy Hunter shows no signs of having actually read the above (especially the link to the Spectator article) [This refers to a posting by the Heresy Hunter, which appeared this morning on the 'Free Riders' thread] . He concentrates on, and wilfully misunderstands, an article I wrote 11 years ago, and does not even read one I wrote last year in which I make clear a change of view - that is, I no longer think the issue of homosexuality important or central enough to be worth arguing about, especially as people such as Mr Heresy Hunter will always misrepresent what I say about it anyway, as he proves most satisfactorily here. I am reminded of my own inner contortions when, as a Cold Warrior, I tried for years to believe that Mikhail Gorbachev was in fact a fraud, and was seeking to strengthen Soviet Power by deceiving the West. I realised that I had been wrong when Gorbachev's silky spokesman , Gennady Gerasimov was teasing Western journalists like me at a Moscow press briefing. He smilingly responded to their suspicious questions with the words. 'Gentlemen. I understand that we have done to you the cruellest thing we could possibly have done. We have deprived you of an enemy'. So I understand why Mr Heresy Hunter's life will be bare and dull without heretics to hunt. I urge him to seek them elsewhere. There must be some Baptist pastor in Nebraska whom he could pursue, who genuinely does believe the things Mr Heresy Hunter so much wishes that I believed. .

**

Mr Wooderson writes to ask if I accept that 'not all atheists are motivated in their unbelief by a selfish desire to be free from moral accountability, and that in fact some are led to their position by a sincere conviction that the claims of theism are false? I'm not sure. They'll almost never tell us (Maugham being a rare exception), and I have no way of making them. Since I was for many years an atheist myself, I can of course consult my own experience, recalling that *at the time* I would not have been willing to admit the truth, and would have angrily resented anyone pointing it out. This makes me smile indulgently at the angry, resentful denials I get from current atheists. It seems to me to be the only possible explanation of what is otherwise inexplicable. I know why *I* go beyond agnosticism to theist belief. I know I don't have to. Therefore I must want to, and it is quite easy to explain why I want to. The same must surely apply to them. They don't want what I want. They want it not to be so. But it's not going to make people love you, when you say you hate the thought that the universe might actually be just. So let's go on about circumcision, or Mormons, or greedy televangelists, or fundamentalists. I'm not sure that a person who has lost his or her faith as a result of a tragedy can be described as an 'atheist'. Do such people go about proclaiming that they 'know' there is no God, and sneering at people who think there is one? Do they welcome the loss of faith? Or hope to regain it? I know of no studies, but see this as an attempt to confuse two different types of person.

He says ' After all, there are many of us who – while perhaps not 'quiet and despairing' – are neither militant nor intolerant, and have no wish to see Christian morality 'dismantled'.' Are there? I don't understand how anyone can arrive at a *conviction* that there is no God without desiring this to be the case. If they desire that, then they *must* be intolerant of Christianity. Nothing in life or knowledge compels such a view, any more than it compels theism. Why are they not content to be agnostics, if their view is not determined by desire? It is quite comical watching these people pretend that they are not motivated by desire, so as to avoid examining their own motives. Why would that be? I should state here, in answer to an earlier comment from someone else, that (as I have many times said before) this point goes both ways, and that *of course* my theism is motivated by desire, most of all a desire that Justice should exist in the Universe, which is of course dependent on the idea (also a very strong desire of mine) that death is not the end of life

**

John Vernau asks an interesting question. (first quoting me) ‘"I suspect militant practical atheism is quite common in...[various degenerate classes] ...Those who spread this idea aren’t as popular as they are in the bookshops for no reason at all." "I am sure that one of the reasons for atheist coyness about their (undoubted) motives is an intelligent fear that their idea might catch on more widely."--PH Hmm. Are there two kinds of atheists, one militant, practical and spreaders of the idea, who have 'converted' the other kind; the dog-in-the-manger types now coy about their motives? Or are the 'militant practical' atheists, fighting to 'convert' only limited numbers (sufficient for banking, cohabitation etc) a different beast altogether from 'those who spread this idea', these spreaders (perhaps not even atheists!) secretly subverting the coy militants by over-popularising their idea? Or is there just the one group; militant and possibly practical atheists who, wanting to 'convert' believers, spread the atheist idea? Their books are popular. But they are coy about their motives, for fear of being too successful. They try, but not too hard. Their fears might be intelligent but their missionary zeal, not so much. I have to admit I'm confused. Perhaps I've been reading too many postings by mononymic contributors and I've addled my brain. ...Cup of tea ... lie down...’

 

Are there two kinds of atheist? Well, in a way. The ‘Practical Atheists’ of whom I so often write, who range the blasted housing estates, probably couldn’t pronounce or spell the word, and if asked would say they believed in nothing. But they are the consequence of the collapse of Christian belief among the British masses during the last century. The ‘New Atheists’, most of whom are prosperous academics or men of letters, living far from these blasted regions and often in some luxury, do not at present connect their beliefs with such people. There was an incident during the so-called ‘riots’ of 2011 when an expensive West London restaurant was invaded by Practical Atheists, who were eventually driven off by the kitchen staff. This may be one of the few recorded instances of the two sorts of Atheist actually meeting (I am presuming that there were such people among the diners at this fine establishment. There usually are in such places, and it is not that far from the BBC). They probably did not recognise each other as co-religionists, but they are.

 If the beliefs of the ‘rioters’, about property, manners, propriety, violence and honesty spread into the functioning core of British middle-class life – so that the walk home from the station was never safe, the trains crashed frequently because the track maintenance workers and the drivers were drug abusers, medical prescriptions often failed disastrously because the manufacturers had watered down the dose or sold time-expired goods to the NHS, food wasn’t safe to eat because those who handled and stored it couldn’t be trusted to stay clean, refrigerators were turned down low to save money and the meat went off, the servants could not be trusted not to steal or to allow thieves or kidnappers into the house, the only way to get good schooling or good medical treatment (or any assistance from the police) was to pay bribes, the surgeons in the hospital were reliably drunk or high on drugs, the taxi drivers quite likely to rape or rob their clients, the sewage came gurgling back up the lavatory, and tapwater wasn’t safe to drink because competence and duty had died out in the ranks of the sewerage workers, the banks and pension funds collapsed and lost all their money because their employees were corrupt and dishonest, letters never arrived because the postmen stole the valuable ones and dumped the others – well, in that case I can imagine these Godless professors and philosophers harrumphing away on the leader page of the ‘Daily Mail’, demanding ‘crackdowns ‘ and who knows what else, to put things right. Of course, they wouldn’t put things right. Crackdowns, by their nature, never do.

 

 That’s what the Third World is like. It’s the heritage and afterglow of centuries of Christianity, and in our case rigorous Protestant Christianity, which guarantee that our lives are still, for a while yet, daily miracles of order, safety and efficiency. I really don’t think the ‘New Atheists’ want that collapse into the Third World to happen anywhere near them. Who would? They’re happy for their abstract ideas to spread among the sort of people they know and like, people whose activities have very little impact on whether anything works or not. And for some years almost any book attacking God has had the certainty of a good and lucrative sale (though I think this is now tailing off). They know in their hearts what these abstractions actually mean in life. They know (as do we all) how to appear virtuous in public so that you can expect the same in return. But they dislike spelling it out, and one reason for that must surely be that they grasp – and fear - what will happen if their own beliefs become universal. As for being afraid of being found out, all moral systems require detrrent punishments for those whose consciences fail. The difference between the authority of God and all others is that the moral person consciously and deliberately chooses to accept that authority, knowing that if he wants the protection of justice, he must accept that the same justice applies to him. It would be a pretty immoral person who imagined himself so perfect that he needed no measure of fear to keep him from doing wrong. As for what I *would* do if I believed there was no God, I do not know. But it is quite enough to recall what I *did* do when I believed this.

 

Why are Atheist opinions worthy of respect when they are so profoundly unpleasant? Because they may be right about the universe, and it is as well that we understand the alternative to what we have. We can only do that if we allow those views to be heard respectfully.  My view is that even if they were right, it would make sense to live as if they were wrong.

 

 

Professor Stevens Patronises Me

Professor Alex Stevens has written here a lofty and patronising blog:
http://www.talkingdrugs.org/alex-stevens/evidence-versus-morality-debating-drugs-with-peter-hitchens

about two recent debates in which we have both taken part. Once again (as with Alex Massie), I shall respond in detail, in case anyone gets the impression that silence means consent or agreement. But it will have to be in parts, as I can’t deal with it all in one go. This is Part One.

 

Professor Stevens writes of the ’80,000 criminal records that are handed out annually for drug possession’, as if this were some sort of self-evident outrage (self-evidence is a characteristic of drug law liberalisers, few of whom are accustomed to meeting anyone who disagrees with them or is prepared to stand up to them in public, a fact interesting in itself when it involves a Professor at a major and reputable university).

 

First of all, let me point out that, according to the existing law of England, the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971,  a law more than 40 years old, which no sentient being can claim to be unaware of, the possession of certain named drugs is a criminal offence. So there is nothing in itself remarkable about people who break this law, and are caught doing so, being given criminal records. What is much more remarkable – as we shall see - is that many more of them, even many thousands of those actually caught breaking the law by the police , do *not* receive criminal records.

 

As Professor Stevens well knows, the number of actual offences of drug possession in this country is now so huge, and growing,  that the police, even were they inclined to do so (and they are not, since the penalties are so trifling that it is usually a grave waste of their time to do so) make no attempt to apply the law against them.  The consumption of the produce of our huge array of cannabis farms would alone account for millions of such offences a year. That does not even begin to address the consumption of imported drugs. Interestingly, his account omits the moment in the debate when I asked the audience to raise their hands if they had used illegal drugs. Almost every hand went up. If the law were seriously enforced, they would not have done so, nor would they have dared to raise their hands in public.

 

Thus, in these  circumstances, 80,000 is not really very many. In fact, to anyone remotely au fait with the state of modern Britain, it is comically small. I also wonder whether I can take credit for the fact that the Professor uses this figure, rather than a larger one, and the phrase ‘criminal records’ rather than the phrase ‘criminal sanctions’.

 

Why do I wonder this?

 

Well,  it’s only three years since Professor Stevens’s ally in the liberalisation cause, Professor David Nutt,  was telling BBC Radio 4 listeners that in the previous year ‘160,000 people were given criminal sanctions for possessing cannabis’.

 

The figure, careful readers will note,  has mysteriously halved since then, and the claim of ‘criminal sanctions’ has been watered down to ‘criminal records’.

 

Could this be because, after Professor Nutt made his claim , I looked into that and found that , while there had been 162,610 cases of cannabis possession, 86,953 were dealt with by the empty gesture (no criminal record involved) called the ‘cannabis warning’. And I also found that this warning is the preferred response to cannabis possession of the Association of Chief Police Officers of England and Wales. So bang goes the figure. And also, bang go the sanctions.

 

For the two government departments involved, Home and Justice, were eventually able to tell me what happened  the remaining cases.

 

 

Another 19,137 cannabis cases were dealt with through Cautions, which expire after a maximum of three months and normally needn’t be declared to employers.  Slightly tougher, but not exactly life-changing, were the 11,492 Penalty Notices for Disorder, which are recorded indefinitely but do not involve a court appearance, a fine or imprisonment. Only 22,748 cannabis cases, slightly more than one in eight, actually ended in court.

Nobody in Whitehall is able to tell me what sort of penalties were imposed or what distinguishes these cases from the others. I suspect that most of these involved persistent offenders, or possession with intent to supply, or were charged with drug offences in conjunction with other crimes, perhaps because they were searched in police stations and the offence couldn’t be ignored, as it would have been anywhere else. 

 

There is no obtainable record of what happened to the remaining several thousand cases. I imagine they slipped through the many cracks in our crumbling, decrepit criminal justice system. As I said in my response to Mr Massie, I also think it likely that in many of these cases, the police used the cannabis laws to prosecute people they could not easily convict for other offences, such as vandalism or burglary, for which they suspected them.  But as criminals tend to be drug users, the police will usually, if they search them, find them in possession of illegal drugs. And as cannabis is so readily available and so cheap in this country, and the penalties for its possession so feeble, cannabis is the one they are most likely to find.  Perhaps Professor Stevens has a view on this aspect of modern policing.

 

 

 

So ‘criminal sanctions’ doesn’t really describe it, does it?

 

Now, Professor Stevens accuses me of writing a book that is ‘selectively researched’.

 

But observe how  ‘160,000 criminal sanctions’ (already pretty trivial, given the gigantic scale of the problem) is now revised down, by the liberalisers,  to 80,000 criminal records – awarded by a cruel state for …breaking the criminal law !

 

Without my opposition and my ‘selectively researched’ research would these (unselectively researched?) figures have been revealed for the twaddle they are, and revised sharply downwards by the liberalisers? I don’t think so. Do you?

 

Professor Stevens says:  ‘Hitchens rehearsed the arguments from his ferociously written but selectively researched book, The War We Never Fought. He noted the correlation between cannabis use and schizophrenia. He claimed that strong evidence that the link is causal is bound to emerge. then summarises my argument thus ‘

 

Not quite. I don’t tend to refer to ‘schizophrenia,’ being by no means sure that there is any objective definition of this complaint. It is mental illness that I am concerned about, and I acknowledge the difficulty of diagnosing and classifying it in our current state of knowledge of the brain, though there is no doubt that it exists. I

 

The following paragraph by the Professor illustrates the difficulty of any sort of discourse between me and him

 

He writes ‘Hitchens’ evidence for the beneficial effect of criminalisation is the link between the lowering of punishments for possession since the 1960s and the higher rate of drug use now.’

 

Not exactly. The subject barely came up. I have no realistic belief that anyone in office will ever take any notice of what I say, and regard myself as an obituarist of Protestant Britain rather than as an advocate of legislation. While there is no doubt that drug use has increased greatly since the 1971 Act, I would, if asked , attribute much of that to the change in culture which led to the passage of that act, notably the endless and increasingly open propagandising for drug use by prominent rock stars and others. I found in recent research that attitudes towards cannabis in Oxford in the late 1960s were much as they are now, and that its use was considered to be common, though more discreet than today (as was the case during my time at the University of York 1970-73).

 

The enforcement of the pre-1971 law (the various dangerous Drugs Acts, which did *not* separate cannabis from other drugs, and which did *not* distinguish between possession and trafficking, the principal changes urged by Wootton)  was pretty patchy and lax towards the end of its life.

 

This was was only reasonable given that the Wootton Report, backed by the Home Office and reluctantly accepted in most of its aspects by James Callaghan,  had already decided to relax the cannabis laws to the point of vacuity.  It is often the case that laws which are about to be weakened lose their force some years before the actual legislation is passed. This is invariably the case, for example, in countries which abolish the death penalty . It generally falls out of use several years before its formal abolition, making ‘before and after’ comparisons quite hard to make ( as noted in the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment). I know of no country with a criminal law system or society comparable to our own in which serious efforts are made to enforce serious laws against cannabis possession, or have been so used for decades. We were right.

 

 I personally believe that the establishment which decided to relax the cannabis laws in 1971 did so because it was too spineless to face the quite considerable fight that it knew would have been involved in taking the drug seriously. The Jagger-Richard trial, and the reaction of ‘The Times’ to it, had shown no stomach for a fight in the establishment. Most people of my generation saw the outcome of that as a signal that the drug laws were no longer serious, four years before the 1971 Act.

 

The Professor is patronisingly ‘puzzled’ by my remarks on addiction. I refer him to the following interesting discussion: http://bit.ly/GzI61T

In which someone initially as sceptical and patronising as he is now reached a different conclusion after examiing the matter with that devastating but hard-to-find tool, an open mind.

 

 

 

The above remarks also deal with Professor Stevens’s argument below: ‘ Indeed, he (me) claimed that this was ‘the only thing we need to know’ in order to test the effect of punishment on rates of drug use. Never mind that harsher punishments in the 1960s did not prevent a substantial increase in drug use in that decade. Nor that the 2004 introduction of the cannabis warning (which temporarily reduced arrests and prosecutions for cannabis possessions) was followed by a reduction

 – not an increase – in cannabis use.’

 

(I have always challenged claims by anybody in this country to know how much cannabis is being used. I cannot see how anyone could possibly know, or what reliable research could possibly exist.  I can only say that it seems to me that any statistics which claim that its use is going down do not correspond with any observation of life as it is now lived in this country, particularly the undeniable blossoming of hydroponic cannabis farms and the shops which (legally) sell the equipment needed to run them).

 

Professor Stevens says ‘… international comparisons show no correlation between strict drug law enforcement and lower rates of use. Nor that changes in cannabis sanctions in other countries show no pattern of effects on cannabis use. For Hitchens, such facts cannot be right as they conflict with his moral position that ‘self-stupefaction’ is wrong and deserves punishment.’

 

That is not what I say, I say there is no such place, and no such time, where policies of the sort I favour are in use or have been in use during the modern era, so we are unable to compare  ourselves with it. He heard me say this, as we were ten feet apart,  but it plainly didn’t go in. But it strikes me as likely that a strongly-enforced law against cannabis possession would deter its use. If this were not so, why do so many drug users come here to tell me they hate me so much? they do this because they fear (alas, baselessly) that my ideas might have some influence over the law.

 

Oh, and on the point of my book ('The War We Never Fought' being selective, etc. If he disagrees with my analysis, what does he think of that in James H. Mills’s book ‘Cannabis Nation’ (OUP), which gives a broadly similar description of the course of legal change? Or of the late Steve Abrams, apostle of decriminalisation and progenitor of the famous Times advertisement of 1967, writing here : http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/attachements.cfm/att_53373_EN_emcdda-cannabis-mon-vol1-ch4-web.pdf 

A Different, Kinder, Better World? My response to Alex Massie

I have only just seen a blog by Alex Massie on the ‘Spectator’ site, in which I am personally criticised. You may find it here

 

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/10/yes-of-course-the-war-on-drugs-exists-but-it-shouldnt/

 

I’d hate Mr Massie or anyone else to think that I had no response to it. So here it is. Mr Massie describes my case – that there is no ‘war on drugs in this country’ - as ‘ridiculous’. He seems to think that this is self-evident, as he introduces the following quotation from an article I wrote for the Spectator a year ago (you can read it here http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8666301/high-society-3/)

with the word ‘seriously’, as if inviting his readers to laugh at the obvious incontestable absurdity of my case. I shall come to that.

 

This is the extract from my article: ‘How is it that, in a country where drugs are supposedly illegal — where ‘evil dealers’ are endlessly denounced — that drugs are so common and that little or nothing happens to those who are caught in possession of them? How did the ‘cannabis warning’, a gesture without force or penalty, unsanctioned by Parliament, become the preferred response of the police to the crime of possession? How can Pete Doherty drop illegal drugs on the floor of a courthouse, be caught by a security guard and yet walk free from the building, if we are — as we are so often told — running a regime of stern prohibition?

 

‘The answer is that the official version of events is simply false. Since a momentous Cabinet meeting in February 1970, there has been no ‘war on drugs’ in this country, only the official pretence of one. I beg my fellow commentators, columnists and pundits: please do not take seriously any claims that our drug problems stem from zealous enforcement of cruel laws, or you might find me camping outside your front door in a woolly hat, denouncing you and proclaiming your sins on a bedsheet.’

 

The last line, I should explain,  is a reference to an event described at the start of the article, where I recount the details of a rather funny one-man protest against me, involving a person in a woolly hat with a slogan-decked sheet, on a wet Sunday morning in Southampton.

 

The rest is self-explanatory and is well-known to regular readers here – the 1969 Wootton Report,  with its calls for the law to differentiate between possession and sale (as it had not previously done) and the special classification of supposedly ‘soft’ cannabis, so as to give it an undeserved  separate legal status from the other bogeyman drugs, enacted in 1971 with cross-party support;  the 1973 instruction to magistrates to cease sending anyone to prison for possession of cannabis; the slow but relentless decriminalisation of cannabis in practice, to the point where a former head of the Scotland Yard Flying Squad could refer to it as a ‘decriminalised drug’ in the early 1990s; the further weakening of the laws following the Paddick Experiment in Brixton and the Runciman Report.

 

Nobody who knows about the issue really disputes this narrative. One of my principal sources was Steve Abrams, who masterminded the 1967 ‘Times Advertisement calling for decriminalisation, and later the SOMA campaign which led to the Wootton Report and what followed. Shortly before he died, Mr Abrams (a civilised man and an honourable opponent)  read my book in proof and kindly let me know that he agreed with its facts and conclusions. He approved of the measures,  while I didn’t, but he recognised the facts as correct. Likewise,  Paul Addison ( a distinguished historian of the Left)  points out in his TLS review of my book and of ‘Cannabis Nation’  by James H. Mills (OUP) that our accounts of events are more or less the same. Mills is far more sympathetic to cannabis than I am, I think I can say.

 

So what is the basis of Alex Massie’s assumed superiority? Fundamentally, it is a misunderstanding of what I say. Why an intelligent person (as Mr Massie is) should so wholly misunderstand such a simple case, I can only ask, and so can you.

 

My point is that our decriminalisation is covert and unacknowledged, because international treaties and political necessity currently make open decriminalisation or legislation difficult; also that it is directed mainly at the use and consumption of drugs, not at their importation, cultivation or sale. So far as I can discover, and figures on this are difficult to obtain, the weakening of the cannabis possession laws has been followed by a weakening of the possession laws as applied to Cocaine and Heroin, and also to a softening of sentencing for supply (and the introduction of ‘compounding’ as a way of letting off people importing small amounts of illegal drugs into this country).

 

Mr Massie reveals his own moral position in this interesting formula, ‘…our “drug problems”  - to the extent they exist – are not the consequence of zealous law enforcement. They are, instead, the consequence of the human desire for escapism and the pleasures of losing oneself in a different, kinder, better world. And no laws – at least no proportional or humane laws – can eliminate that. Nor can they defeat that thirst. The appeal of intoxication will always be stronger’.

 

Well, that’s his opinion. Though I would riposte that nobody expects any law to be universally obeyed. But any law that exists is useless unless it is consistently and rigorously applied. Where laws exist and are not applied, one can safely presume that they exist for propaganda or other dishonest purposes.

 

The point of laws is to reduce the crimes that they prohibit by credible deterrence, not to make those crimes completely vanish.  Their purpose is not to scoop multitudes into the net of punishment, but to scare multitudes away from the illegal act.

 

And, in the case of life-ruining drugs, to provide a counter to the peer-pressure and celebrity advertising which beguile many immature people into risking their mental health, and so risking the ruin of their own lives and the lives of those who love them. Picture, if you will, the plight of the 70-year-old parent of an incurably  mentally-ill 25-year-old, incapable of supporting himself or of any proper social contact, and only able to live from day to day thanks to the ingestion of powerful antipsychotics. I heard of just such a case on Saturday. All involved believe the tragedy was caused by cannabis.  I believe such things are increasingly common in our Cannabis Nation. Victimless crime, you say? Ask that parent.

 

Burglary, one might argue,  is the consequence of the human desire to own what we have not earned. No doubt the burglar imagines the world in which he takes freely the property of others as ‘different, kinder and better’ than the one in which he has to work and save to buy these things for himself. That’s his opinion.(Who but a moral fundamentalist can say he’s wrong?) Likewise, no laws can eliminate it, least of all our feeble ones.  But would Mr Massie want those laws entirely dismantled, or further weakened, even so? 

 

 

Mr Massie then states:  ‘In England and Wales last year there were no fewer than 58,672 convictions on drug charges. In addition to that some 73, 973 “cannabis warnings” were issued.’

 

Yet he does not distinguish between the two. Perhaps he doesn’t understand the distinction (though if he had read my book he would).  The ‘cannabis warning’ is not a conviction or anything like one; it is a decision by a police officer to fail to enforce the law, endorsed by the association of Chief Police Officers of England and Wales as their preferred response to detection of crime of cannabis possession. It carries no penalty nor any criminal record. And its very existence as preferred response makes police intervention in this activity a waste of time. As anyone who attends such events as the Glastonbury Festival or the Notting Hill Carnival  (or a recent pro-cannabis demonstration in the centre of London) well knows,  the actual police response to this offence is to try not to notice it at all. The ’warning’ is only activated when the officer is more or less compelled to take notice.

 

It’s also true that the cannabis laws have a vestigial purpose in police work, allowing police and courts to arrest, charge, prosecute and fine people whom they are pursuing for other offences which they cannot so easily prove against them. As most thieves, vandals and other troublemakers (no doubt in pursuit of a different, kinder and better world)  are in fact almost invariably in possession of cannabis, this often serves to put them in the bag. But it is not evidence of a war against drugs, just evidence of the wider powerlessness of authority.

 

In commenting on the 58,672 convictions on drug charges, one would need a closer analysis to be sure, but I would suspect, from my study of those figures I have been able to obtain (and the various ministries are not very helpful with this) , and my observations of events in  the courts from various local newspapers, , that the great majority of these were convictions for possession with intent to supply, or supply, or for repeat offences, or taken into consideration after conviction for other offences, or charges laid against arrested persons who, having been picked up for other offences, were then found to be in possession of illegal drugs which the police could therefore not ignore. Once again, this is not evidence of an active police pursuit of drug takers, for possession.

 

This should be taken into account in examining the figure which Mr Massie then adduces :  ‘And, in England and Wales last year, some 9,562 people were imprisoned having been convicted of one kind of drug offence or another.’

 

Note, first of all, the contrast between the 58,672 convictions (in a year! In a country peppered with illegal cannabis farms!) and the 9,562 people in prison, many of whom presumably have been there for more than a year. Note the one kind of drug offence or another’, and the ‘having been convicted of’. Interesting that he does not say they are in prison *for* drug offences, a rather more specific statement. Why not? How many of these people were simultaneously convicted of other offences, drug use and trafficking not being unknown among the violent and dishonest? How many were imprisoned for drug offences *alone*? How many were first offenders of any kind? How many were imprisoned for simple cannabis possession on a  first offence?  It’s just possible that smoke and mirrors are being employed here. Contrast these figures with the facts revealed in an ITV documentary this week

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2460163/Half-million-cannabis-growers-UK-homes-Criminals-switching-harder-drugs-lenient-jail-sentences.html

 

which suggested that there are half a million cannabis farms in this country, many of them ignored by the law because sentencing guidelines spare culprits form prison of they are caught with fewer than ten plants (though nine plants can yield an income , tax-free of course, of £40,000 a year) .

 

I always like to note, when discussing the subject of cannabis farms, or principal growth industry,  the blurted remark on this topic of the terrifying Manchester gun murderer Kiaran Stapleton. You may recall that Stapleton killed the Indian student Anuj Bidve, without the slightest reason or pretext, by walking up to him and shooting him in the head. Anyway, Stapleton said that ‘we got cannabis farms all over and more guns than the police’ (reported by the Manchester Evening News in July 2012). Knowing this, I wonder how Stapleton became the sort of person he is. Farmers, I muse,  sometimes consume their own products.

 

Mr Massie urges me ‘Try telling them [the people in prison having been convicted of one kind of drug offence or another] – and their families – that the War on Drugs is a myth.’

 

OK . I say to them ‘The War on Drugs is a Myth’. There. Easy.

 

 

Mr Massie continues: ‘ To put this number in context there are, almost exactly, as many people imprisoned for drug offences as there are for robbery (5,276), sexual offences (3,459) and criminal damage (1,085) combined.’

 

Well, yes, and?

 

Mr Massie partly answers his own question ‘Of course, drug taking and even drug supplying is rather more widespread than these other crimes.’ (I’ll say it is)

 

‘Even so, there are more convictions on drug offences each year than on crimes of violence against the person (39,176 last year) or burglary (24,547). Of course there are more drug-users in Britain than there are burglars (this is a good thing, by the way) but the idea no-one is convicted, far less imprisoned, because of our drug laws is utterly fanciful. You can only believe this if you have an aversion to the facts.’

 

It’s so easy to dismiss arguments other people haven’t made. Nobody , least of all me, said that *no-one*  is convicted or imprisoned. The important thing is who is imprisoned, and who is not. And the distinction ( as my book explains)  is driven by the political need to pretend that we have laws against drugs, when in fact we have none against their possession and use.  We insist on an unhinged difference -  between the treatment of drug abusers (who voluntarily seek out these evil dealers)  as victims, and of drug traffickers as the sum of all evil. If the substance isn’t evil, why is it evil to trade in it? And where is its evil manifested? Why, in its ingestion. So surely the ingestion is as evil as its transport and sale, and should be punished equally (as it was, in law, before 1971)? But it isn’t.

 

I must finally deal with the following demonstrations of Mr Massie’s fashionable inability to understand or properly examine the question.

  

He says : ‘Just because British laws and policing are not as monstrously unjust and stupid as those pertaining in the United States does not mean there is no War on Drugs here. But it is just as futile as the War waged on the other side of the Atlantic.’

 

Is he really unaware of the virtual decriminalisation of cannabis in large parts of the USA (not least the worrying experiment now under way in Colorado) largely conducted under the flag of ‘medical marijuana’? Readers here will know of the statement by Keith Stroup in 1979 (detailed references available from me or from the Emory University library at Atlanta, Georgia, in case anyone attempts, as they will,  to deny this)  in the ‘Emory Wheel’ magazine, that legalisation campaigners such as Mr Stroup planned to use the medical marijuana argument as a red herring to get the drug a good name.

 

Even before this came into effect ( and medical marijuana laws of varying laxness now embrace 20 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia) , the case of Jared Loughner illustrates how liberal US enforcement of Marijuana laws already is. Loughner, some will remember , was the culprit in the mass-shooting in Tucson, Arizona in which Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was terribly injured and six people, including a nine-year-old girl, were killed. US Army recruiting records (they rejected him), the accounts of acquaintances and police records show he was for many years a regular smoker of this supposedly harmless drug (could this possibly have anything to do with his wholly irrational action and his bizarre demeanour after it?). The important detail here is that, when Loughner was caught by police with illegal drug paraphernalia in a car stinking of cannabis smoke, he was let off. Pity. If there had been a ‘war on drugs’, we might have been saved form much. Nor is his the only case of a marijuana user involved in a mass shooting.   

 

Mr Massie then comes up with his final chunk of conventional wisdom: ‘Nor, in any case, is the cost of the War on Drugs confined to this country. It is a war that has helped claim thousands of lives overseas, especially in countries such as Mexico and Colombia. Prohibition is not the only cause of the horrific drug-spawned violence in those countries but it is a serious contributing factor.’

 

Is it? Why?

 

Surely the principal factor is that the Pounds, Dollars and Euros of selfish rich kids in the cities of the First World finance a huge and lucrative industry in the Third World in which criminals have inevitably intervened ( as they intervene in this country in the legal alcohol and tobacco industries)?  But why is it there at all for them to intervene in?

 

Until the people of the western nations embarked on their demoralised rush for chemical pleasure, there was no such problem.  If stupid, selfish, complacent, self-indulgent chasers after ‘escapism and the pleasures of losing oneself in a different, kinder, better world’ did not feed this monster, it would die.  *They*, smug and self-righteous as they so often are, sneering about ‘victimless crimes’ and how ‘I have a right to put what I like in my own body and do what I like with my own body’, *they* are the Mr Big who stands behind the drug trade. How funny that people who drink FairTrade coffee and boycott stores that buy from sweatshops happily give their cash to the most sordid, exploitative industry of all, casually to risk the happiness of those who love them  – and then have the nerve to blame the law for the evil they do. 

Free Riders and Heresy Hunters

I am asked in what way atheists are free riders in Christian societies. In this way:  They expect the benefits of such societies, general honesty in all dealings, self-restraint, sobriety and gentleness in public and private conduct, diligence in work,  marital fidelity and parental responsibility, the tender care of the old (these are examples) to persist after the morality which prescribed them has been dismantled.

 

Practical atheism, as I term it, is common in those blasted regions of our cities where nobody is married, there are no fathers, the remaining shops have steel shutters, the schools are places of dread for anyone who values learning or order, the police only visit to flash their lights for a few minutes before departing (and anyone who calls them is a ‘grass’), the ground-floor windows have bars, and the vandalised phone-boxes are smeared with spittle and littered used needles.

 

It’s also common among many bankers and other businessmen, who get away with what they can; among young people who procure abortions because babies are inconvenient to them, and older people who dissolve marriages because they are inconvenient, who drink to excess, take drugs and allow their children to do so.

 

These habits of mind then spread into the trades and professions where selfishness can cost more than a little self-esteem – the banker who risks his depositor’s money, the police officer who lies in court, or who fails to act when a case like that of Fiona Pilkington comes before him,  the lawyer who fails to protect his clients’ interests with sufficient diligence and attention, the surgeon (or the school bus driver, or the train driver, or the lorry driver)  who has cannabis in his bloodstream while he operates, the journalist who prefers to hack a phone than to do the hard grind of proper reporting.

 

We begin to see this around us. The test is always what people do when they think nobody is looking. Civilisation doesn’t suddenly collapse, any more than our northern Sun suddenly sets. I suspect militant practical atheism is quite common in the aborting classes, the divorcing classes, the cohabiting classes, the banking classes and the drug-taking classes. Those who spread this idea aren’t as popular as they are in the bookshops for no reason at all.

 

They don’t mind doing these things. But as their comfortable world frays at the edges, and they find they can’t rely on the interior goodness and trustworthiness of others, they will (I suspect) angrily complain that things seem to have gone downhill a bit. They should realise that this is because they have helped push them downhill. If you don’t yourself accept that you must be guided in your actions by a just, unchanging authority which knows your secret heart, you can’t expect others to do this either. I am sure that one of the reasons for atheist coyness about their (undoubted) motives is an intelligent fear that their idea might catch on more widely. What if the servants turned atheist?  Atheism’s only any fun when it’s the creed of a safe and smug minority, surrounded, served and protected by believers.  

 

I don’t, by the way, recall Mr Wooderson asking me the question about the bereaved or tragedy-stricken that he says he put to me. Had he done so, I should have said that bereaved people are entitled to think what they like, as we all are,  and it’s obvious that it’s always hard for those who have faced cruel loss to believe in a  benevolent God. But I know of no examples of the modern aggressive, intolerant atheists who have come to their conclusions by this route. The militant intolerant atheists are a different thing altogether from the quiet despairing people who feel abandoned by goodness.

 

 

Our resident Heresy Hunter contributes ‘Mr Hitchens's position on homosexuality isn't as clear as he would have us believe. He says that homosexual acts between consenting adults should be permitted in private, although he also says that gay people who ask to be accepted as normal damage marriage,’

 

**Actually I have publicly and clearly abandoned anything remotely resembling this position (his summary of my opinions being, as so often, twisted out of shape) , having found that it got in the way of the real argument about marriage (http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/7714553/the-gay-marriage-trap/).

 

Heresy Hunter :’so presumably he wants gay people to hide who they really are.’

***Why does the Heresy Hunter presume this thing?  He may be able to get away with this sort of twisted insinuation in the darkened, flickering cellars of his inquisitional trade, but not in the light of day. Can he explain his logic? I have never said, and do not think anything of the kind. I believe in freedom of speech, and leaving people to make their own moral decisions this side of crime. I don’t believe homosexual acts should be crimes. I do think, and have in the past said, that public declarations of homosexuality are incompatible with a conservative moral position, as is encouragement of divorce, advocacy of , or calls for legalisation of illegal drugtaking,  advocacy of cohabitation and the deliberate encouragement of fatherless families. That obviously means that I don't think someone can say these things and claim to be a moral and social conservative. But I can’t stop anyone making them, and wouldn’t want to if I could.

 

 The Heresy Hunter continues : ‘What I am trying to ascertain is a) exactly how announcing that you are gay stops straight couples from marrying and having children’

 

**Me, too. How does it? I haven’t said it does, and don’t think it does. All sexual acts outside lifelong marriage are in my view immoral and damage marriage in one way or another, but that’s an awful lot of acts, and the homosexual ones form a minor, nay,  tiny part of them. Divorce, cohabitation and the deliberate subsidy of fatherless families are the issue.

 

Heresy Hunter again:  ‘b) to what extent does Mr Hitchens think gay people should pretend that they don't exist’

***To no extent.

 

 Heresy Hunter again: ‘and c) how far Mr Hitchens would like this idea to be reflected in the law’.

*** As I don’t espouse the idea, I have no desire to see it reflected in the law, by definition. Even if I did, it doesn’t seem to me to be a matter for the law.

 

 

The Heresy Hunter again: ‘ (which is why I am asking him about Russia, for they have just enacted a law that is similar - in principle at least, but obviously much worse in scale - to that of Section 28, which Mr Hitchens didn't believe to be a bad thing). ‘

 

**Well, if it’s not the same as Section 28, then it can’t be compared with it. If it *is* the same, I suppose I can’t consistently object to it in someone else’s country,  though Section 28 is deader than the deadest doornail - and other people’s countries, as I keep saying,  are none of my business anyway.  I think the teaching of post-Christian sexual morality is not the proper business of state schools in a society founded on Christian morality.  

 

The Heresy Hunter again: ‘Does Mr Hitchens believe that speaking about homosexuality as though it is normal in front of children or teenagers would reduce the amount of gay people? ‘

 

*** I shouldn’t have thought there could be such a crude cause and effect, as life is seldom so simple. But Matthew Parris, who knows far more about this than I do,  has written interestingly on influence and homosexuality (the Times, 6th August 2006). I wish I could reproduce the whole thing but it’s behind a paywall) He concludes ‘Sexuality is a supple as well as subtle thing and can sometimes be influenced, even promoted ; I think that in some people some drives can be discouraged and others encouraged; I think some people can choose. I wish I were conscious of being able to. I would choose to be gay.’ Perhaps he should pester Mr Parris on the subject.

 

The Heresy Hunter continues ‘Would he like to see such a policy introduced in this country?’

**I have no interest in this subject any more. I also have no illusions that anything I say or do will influence any policy, so I might as well propose to alter the courses of the planets as urge the adoption of policies. At one time, I imagined that the 1967 Abse compromise was a line worth defending. I now think I was wasting my time with a futile, trivial diversion.

 

And the Heresy Hunter concludes: ‘And when is he going to answer my charge that he is worse than a bigot, because a bigot's disapproval of gay people is irrational, whereas he deliberately chose to believe that gay people are abnormal and immoral, and to treat them as such, when he chose to live in world with meaning?’

 

***The depth of misunderstanding here is so vast that I doubt I can bridge it, since it is wilful rather than rational. The Christian is commanded to love his fellow men and women, even tiresome, prejudiced Heresy Hunters.  He condemns wrong *actions*, starting with his own, and seeks to ensure that society does not encourage wrong actions in others. The statement that such and such a type of person is ‘abnormal and immoral’ is not compatible with this view, as all fall short and all can also be forgiven. Also, I’m not sure where he has got the word ‘abnormal’. I should have thought anyone with much experience of life would know that ‘normality’ is a bit of an illusion. Nor is it always desirable. As for ‘treating them as such’, what on earth does he mean by this?  What is this ‘treatment’ that he imagines?  It’s tedious to ask, because I know I shall get a response, but am by no means sure of getting an answer. People such as this Heresy Hunter do not seek or welcome  generous rational discussion, though they purport to be innocent inquirers. That said, if he surprises me with reason and generosity, I’ll reply. But if he acts according to his usual behaviour, I shall not.  

Here We Go Again

A note from my 'HERE WE GO AGAIN' Department:

1. I have pointed out here not above a thousand times, I do not think that non-believers cannot have a morality. The 'Golden Rule' is, for instance, open to anyone (though it suffers from the problem that much of what we do, we do in secret and so it actually operates as 'Appear to do unto others what you would wish them to do unto you' . You can see the difficulty.

Yet I am resigned to the same nonsense being repeated over and over again(along with the claim that believers claim to  'know' that God exists, rather than believing this to be the case,  and are all strict Bible literalists, and is often coupled with the weird suggestion (is this stuff now taught in schools?)  that  religious belief is incompatible with 'science'.

The cruder atheists, pitifully uninformed about the nature of faith,  which they have never bothered to investigate, invariably make these charges against believers, usually going on to say that they themselves are 'just as good' as believers. I don't doubt it. Probably better, in the case of this believer. But this is yet another demonstration of their ceaseless missing of the whole  point of the argument, which is 'How do we decide what is absolutely, unalterably good ?'  If you don't believe in a deity, surely the matter is always negotiable. and open to a bit of self-interest. If an atheist says he is 'just as good', as a Christian, then he is actually saying 'I am just as good as you according to a set of standards whose whole basis I reject'.

To which my response is, thank you for making the effort, but why do you care, if you really believe what you say you believe? And if it's because you prefer to live in a society ordered by Christian belief, you're a free rider, happy to catch the train, but unwilling to pay the fare.

It's all tediously obvious. But the atheists never, ever get it. Since most of them are perfectly intelligent, this can only be explained by wilfulness, not by stupidity.

Which brings us, yet again, to the question of why they so much want there not to be a God, and cannot accept any doubt or dissent on the matter.

 

2. By the way, on a related issue, isn't it interesting that, even when I consciously steer away from the issue of homosexuality, for reasons I've explained elaborately in the past and can be found in the index, the heresy-hunters petulantly demand that I speak out on it, and draw unwarranted conclusions from my silence. They seek to make a window into my soul. They cannot accept silence. They must have submission. Nothing short of 'I Love Big Brother' will satisfy these would-be totalitarians.

 

It would be hard to find a better illustration of my point. This is that it is a minor issue, not remotely as important as the death of marriage and the mass-killing of unborn babies, the real battlegrounds of the sexual revolution. Yet it is ceaselessly elevated into undeserved magnitude by people who have little concern for the individuals involved, but seek to use the subject to trap naive and unworldly moral conservatives, whom they will then condemn as 'bigots'. They will do this anyway. But I have no desire to help them.

Brooks Newmark MP, the Syrian Regime, and Me

Some of you may remember that, in the frenzied rush to war in August, the Tory MP Brooks Newmark (Member for Braintree) suggested in the Commons Chamber that my writings, in opposition to that war, were 'in support of the Assad regime'.

 

This, as I have shown conclusively, is not and cannot be the case. Here you may read quotations from several past articles by me in which my dislike for the Assad government is made very plain.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/08/my-response-to-allegations-that-i-am-an-apologist-for-syria.html

 

I contacted Mr Newmark as soon as I found he had said this, explained to him politely that he was wrong and asked him to apologise and withdraw.  I reinforced my telephone call with e-mails in which I set out the facts, as referred to in the link above.

He declined to do so. I contacted the Chairman of his Constituency Conservative Association, told him of my concerns, and asked him if he would intervene with Mr Newmark, to persuade him to withdraw the remarks. I believe he did so, though Mr Newmark did not change his position.  I said I would be willing to come to Mr Newmark's constituency and publicly debate the issue with him in front of Association members. So far as I know, Mr Newmark did not embrace this offer.

I contacted the office of the Speaker of the Commons, but was told by officials that the Speaker's commitment to total impartiality precluded his getting involved.

 

On such occasions, I try to behave as far as possible as if I did not have the great privilege of a national newspaper column. I dislike using that column to right personal wrongs, and only made a brief and passing reference to the matter in the Mail on Sunday. So I then felt justified in writing to my own MP, the Rt Hon. Andrew Smith, to ask him if he could help. My main concern was that Mr Newmark's allegation was on the official Hansard record, and that no challenge to it was on that record.

 

Mr Smith (who is a Labour MP, a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury and on most issues very far from being an ally of mine) courteously and tactfully took up the matter, and I here publicly record my thanks to him for his unhesitating readiness to help a constituent, regardless of politics. I can't and won't reveal all the details of his actions, except to say that he was punctilious, diligent and persistent, but I thought some of you might like to read this exchange, which took place in the Commons on Monday afternoon. Mr Newmark was aware that the point of order would be raised, but I do not believe he was present : 

 

Commons Hansard 14th October 2014, Column 451,  4.20 pm

Mr Andrew Smith (Oxford East) (Lab): On a point of order, Mr Speaker. On behalf of my constituent Mr Peter Hitchens, I wish to raise concern about the remark made about him in this House in the Syria debate on 29 August by the hon. Member for Braintree (Mr Newmark), who said, in reference to an article by Mr Hitchens:

“Peter Hitchens wrote recently, in support of the Assad regime, that the Syrian Government were not lying and that it made ‘more sense’ for the opposition to poison and kill more than 1,000 of their own people.”—[Official Report, 29 August 2013; Vol. 566, c. 1503.]

Mr Hitchens has raised this matter with your office and directly with the hon. Member for Braintree, as have I, but it remains unresolved. Mr Hitchens does not support the Assad regime, and it is clear from his articles that he does not. He is concerned that this allegation currently rests on the Hansard record without challenge or correction. I am sure that you would agree, Mr Speaker, that it is important, in debate, that we argue on the basis of what those who disagree with us actually say, rather than what we might choose to attribute to them. I hope through this point of order to have corrected the record on behalf of my constituent.

Mr Speaker: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his point of order and for his courtesy in giving me advance notice of his intention to raise it, as well as for sharing his intentions by letter and e-mail with the hon. Member for Braintree (Mr Newmark). For my own part, speaking from the Chair, I would not seek for one moment to interpose myself in a dispute or altercation between the hon. Member for Braintree and Mr Peter Hitchens. I think that the point stands as the right hon. Gentleman has made it, and I would just like to say that the hon. Member for Braintree said what he judged and judges to be right. He was perfectly entitled to do so, and I make no criticism of him. Mr Peter Hitchens is well known to me. I have been acquainted with him for a great many years and disagreed with him for almost all of those years on almost all matters under the sun, but it is a matter of almost uncontested fact that Mr Hitchens is a man of both provocative talent and unimpeachable integrity. We will leave the matter there.

The Polish Guarantee - Churchill Speaks

The following extracts come from Winston Churchill’s own account of the crisis which led to the Second World War. They are to be found in Chapter 19 of the ‘The Gathering Storm’ ‘Prague, Albania and the Polish Guarantee – April 1939’

 

I concede that ( as those who check the source will find)  Churchill surrounds these remarks by restating his belief that a war over Czechoslovakia would have been feasible and possibly won by Britain and France. I do not think this is true, as it overestimates France’s aggressive capacity, and the defensibility of Czechoslovakia after the Anschluss. He follows it with some emotional bombast about death being better than slavery, which is undoubtedly true, but in my view is a false choice. We were only in danger of slavery because of our involvement in a war we couldn’t possibly win, because we didn’t have the weapons with which to fight it. Armed neutrality posed no such risk.  So my ‘Finest Hour’ critics might do well to note what Churchill himself also says a) about Poland itself and b) about the absurdity of the Polish guarantee.

 

That is to say, at bottom:  Winston Churchill, who was present when it was made, viewed the Polish guarantee much as I do.

 

 

‘And now, when every one of these aids and advantages has been squandered and thrown away, Great Britain advances, leading France by the hand, to guarantee the integrity of Poland – of that very Poland which with hyena appetite had only six months before joined in the pillage and destruction of the Czechoslovak State. There was sense in fighting for Czechoslovakia in 1938 when the German Army could scarcely put half a dozen trained divisions on the Western Front, when the French with nearly sixty or seventy divisions could most certainly have rolled forward across the Rhine or into the Ruhr.’

 

‘But this had been judged unreasonable, rash, below the level of modern intellectual thought and morality. Yet now at last the two Western Democracies declared themselves ready to stake their lives upon the territorial integrity of Poland. History, which we are told is mainly the record of the crimes, follies, and miseries of mankind, may be scoured and ransacked to find a parallel to this sudden and complete reversal of five or six years’ policy of easy-going placatory appeasement, and its transformation almost overnight into a readiness to accept an obviously imminent war on far worse conditions and on the greatest scale.’

 

He added: ‘ Moreover, how could we protect Poland and make good our guarantee? Only by declaring war upon Germany and attacking a stronger Western Wall and a more powerful German Army than those from which we had recoiled in September, 1938.’  

 

And then  ‘Here was decision at last, taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people. Here was the righteous cause deliberately and with a refinement of inverted artistry committed to mortal battle after its assets and advantages had been so improvidently squandered. Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.’

 

 

'Worst possible moment' ...'on the least satisfactory ground'. As I keep saying.

Flashman Revisited. The Genius of George Macdonald Fraser

I promised a few words about the ‘Flashman’ books by the late George Macdonald Fraser. I’ve written about them before, and also (I think so anyway - I certainly should have done if I haven’t) about Mr Fraser’s superb memoir of his time as a soldier in General Slim’s army in Burma, ‘Quartered Safe Out Here ‘(The title’s a quotation from Kipling). This must be one of the best descriptions of what modern warfare is actually like for the ordinary soldier, and is also very moving.

 

I’m urged to include in my praise Fraser’s late-in-life memoir ‘Light’s on at Signpost’. Alas, I can’t. The book’s almost impenetrably allusive title (it’s to do with a little-known feature of the TT motorcycle races in the Isle of Man, where Fraser went to live) is one of many features of it that I didn’t like. Another is the insider-gossip from various film-sets, which is fun if you like that sort of thing, and not if you don’t. I don’t.  In fact, I wrote a critical review of it for UPI, which I shall see if I can unearth. I also never got on with his ‘McAuslan’ stories, and, whle I enjoyed ‘Mr American’ and ‘Black Ajax’, neither of them seemed to me to be anywhere near the best of the Flashman books.

 

And of course these, too, vary.

 

The first five will, I think, endure for many years as near-classics of historical fiction, which also happen to be very funny. P.G. Wodehouse personally endorsed them when they began to come out, more than 40 years ago.

 

I still remember my first encounter with them, as an indentured apprentice living in a bedsit in Swindon, and being lifted out of the commonplace drudgery and disillusion of daily life in that most provincial of provincial towns. I’ve re-read many of them since, but one by one, on various long journeys where I knew for certain they’d keep me from tedium as the plane ground slowly through the night.

 

But a few weeks ago I thought I’d have a sustained go at them, not being in the mood for anything new or difficult.

For those who haven’t yet read them, I absolutely stand by my recommendation. Everyone should read these. I should say here that I seldom meet women who enjoy them, any more than I meet men who like Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall sequence, which, to me, is akin to being made to eat cold wallpaper paste without any kind of seasoning. This is particularly odd since I very much like Miss Mantel’s earlier, shorter books ‘A Change of Climate’ and ‘Eight Months on Ghazzah Street’  (the latter is tremendous, and a very rare fictional portrayal of Saudi Arabia). Mind you, I had to give up her sprawling tome about the French Revolution ‘A Place of Greater Safety’, which seemed to be a love-letter to (of all people) Camille Desmoulins, and in which, as far as I can recall, nothing ever happened.  Maybe it happened in the bit after I gave up. Then again, maybe not. As I am very interested in the French Revolution, it was quite an achievement to drive me away.

 

But I digress.

 

I am of that generation which did still actually read books such as ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’. We even had the ‘Boy’s Own Paper, which persisted well into my childhood and was composed of quarto pages of dense black print. I have tried to re-read ‘Tom Brown’ since but could not do so. I can only conclude that I must have skipped a lot of the early stuff or ‘read it’ by doggedly processing the words and pages while taking none of them in, for the opening chapters raise no memories in me at all. I certainly got on to the torture of the fags by Flashman the bully, and rejoiced at his downfall. I now realise that as a child I read surprisingly little fiction, much preferring to bury myself in the dense, cosy pages of Arthur Mee’s ‘Children’s Encyclopaedia’ , or his earlier’ ‘Children’s Treasure House’, steeped in Edwardian security,  or old volumes of ‘Punch’, from which I obtained the sepia-tinged, steam-powered, dreadnought-patrolled view of the world which was to be so thoroughly shattered in the era of the two Harolds, Macmillan and Wilson.

 

So I could never have been fooled (as ten American reviewers actually were when the first book came out) in to thinking that this was a genuine collection of the memoirs of an actual person.

 

It was just a brilliant conceit, to take Flashman as a foul, cruel, cowardly adolescent, at the moment of his shameful expulsion from Rugby by the great Dr Arnold, and imagine his later life in Queen Victoria’s world.  After all, Thomas Hughes had put the real Dr Arnold, and the real Rugby school,  in his fictional account of ‘Tom Brown’.

 

 I realised when I read Keith Waterhouse’s ‘Billy Liar’ that my boyhood habit of imagining and populating an alternative world, preferable to the real one, was not mine alone. I was always very grateful to Keith Waterhouse for that, and for many other inspirations. But Fraser’s creation of Flashman was far superior to that. It was a complete map of the Victorian world, into which any reader might enter and be enchanted. Perhaps the double perfection of this was to take the fictional Harry Flashman into Anthony Hope’s equally fictional  but entirely glorious thriller ‘The Prisoner of Zenda’ (origin of the word ‘Ruritania’) . And then, in tying this clever double-knot of fantasy, to use this device to put Flashman in the midst of the Schleswig-Holstein question of which Lord Palmerston famously said only three people had ever understood (‘One has gone mad, the other has died, and I have forgotten’). And in the midst of this we encounter both the young Karl Marx (at a distance) and Otto von Bismarck (very close to).

 

By making him a soldier, he could place him repeatedly at the heart of events about which we all think we know everything, but in fact know next to nothing. The detailed, well-researched truth about historical events is often absolutely astonishing. Fraser obviously longed to tell it, and, by putting it in the mouth of a fornicating, treacherous, drunken coward who has somehow survived undiscovered but, at the end of his life, doesn’t care if his descendants (his son is a Bishop) come to know the truth about him, did so in a way that would make hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, see these events as if they had been there. The books, I should add, are meticulously and wittily footnoted, with genuine references to proper factual accounts, which sometimes cast doubt on Flashman’s own memory. Oh and Fraser, like me a supporter of customary English weights and measures, is careful to use pounds and stones, yards, feet and inches, pints and gallons, and (that handy but oft-forgotten measure, unless you go horseracing) the furlong - very useful in describing cavalry actions. For those poor folk trapped in metric ignorance, a 'kilometre' is an ugly, unpoetic way way of describing five furlongs. Note that it takes an extra syllable to do so.

 

Most of what I know about the First Afghan war, the Sikh Wars, the Indian Mutiny, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Taiping Rebellion, and Otto von Bismarck, I owe to Fraser’s Flashman.

 

Some of his descriptive passages – the loading of broken-hearted slaves into the ships that would carry them away to misery, the horror of pursuit by slave-catchers, the poignant departure of the ‘Forty-Niners’ on their perilous journey to the California gold rush, the siege of Cawnpore, the day of Balaclava, the wrecking of the Summer Palace at Peking, the Indian camp just before little Big Horn, the retreat from Kabul, and several moments of terrifying, evil treachery, whose victims only slowly realise that they are doomed to die (he seems to have a special interest in this) have the power to conjure tears or send shivers not just up and down the spine but into the heart.

 

Once or twice he turns aside to reminisce from the point of view of a very old man who has seen most of those he knew go off, as he puts it, into the dark (where he will soon be going himself). This conveys a very powerful sense of the past as both a living thing, and as something irrecoverably lost, which can bring a lump to most throats.  There are one or two considerable surprises, such as his genuine grief at the death of ‘Scud’ East, whom he tortured at Rugby School, and whose manly, clean-limbed Christianity he cordially despises. There are two moments in the books where Flashman candidly reveals himself to former Rugby schoolfellows as a brothel-going, adulterous, fornicating pagan. He takes pleasure in the shock, and in the open sneering challenge he makes to their Christianity. He often condemns Christianity, quite explicitly, hating it as a truly selfish and worldly man, fully-developed and unrestrained, is bound to do. I have never been entirely sure how much of this was also Fraser’s view. He was of the generation which had lost their piety thanks to two great wars. I can’t recall him writing about it in his memoirs.

 

There’s a lot of sex, but cleverly described by allusion and euphemism, rather than in the bizarre anatomical detail favoured by so many modern authors. Flashy is clearly foul-mouthed, but his profanities are cleverly toned down by fictional ‘editors’, including a prissy sister-in-law, who plainly doesn’t understand most of the sexual allusions, and so leaves them untouched,  but carefully removed the word ‘damn’ where it occurs.

 

I do find, on re-reading, that the repeated use of the n-word (though entirely justified by time, context and the loathsome character of Harry Flashman himself) , is much more obtrusive than it was when the books were first published. I suppose it ought to be. Perhaps future editions could asterisk it, in recognition of that change.

 

For one of the things I found when I re-read them was that this usage did actually date them. It is a problem when you’re my age, to look back at the 1970s and 1980s, when I was young, tireless and unwise, and to realise how deep they have sunk into the past. So much so that they will quite soon be entombed in history, and my own recollections will be dismissed in favour of whatever some Oxbridge whippersnapper and BBC favourite will by then have decided what actually happened, what mattered and what didn’t.

 

The mere act of reading them again takes me back into that age, when many people, important in my life, were alive who are now dead, buildings standing which are now demolished, roads open which are now closed,  institutions, even countries,still in being which are now eviscerated or destroyed.

 

But that shouldn’t put the new reader off. The books are not outdated in style, are written so beautifully that most readers won’t notice the immense hard work that has gone into making them flow (thus fulfilling the old Hemingway rule that ‘It reads easy because it was writ hard’).  Fraser was, for most of his life, a journalist by trade and knew what to leave out. But he also had that unfathomable gift, impossible to analyse or synthesise, that of the born storyteller. Is there any other kind? I think it begins with a deep love of the story you want to tell.

Nor should anyone be bothered by the increasing problem which Fraser had, that Flashman is not really the poltroon he claims to be. He cannot be, or the stories wouldn't work.  On several notable occasions, he actually behaves quite courageously (that is to say, in his position I should certainly have run away rather than do what he does). He’s even a cricketer, a game he is said to have adopted because he was scared of Rugby Football. Well, I have always found cricket a good deal more frightening than rugby, having been introduced to it in the days before face guards and hard hats. In rugby, you can at least run away from the enemy, and, if you run fast enough while holding the ball, you may even get applauded for it (or so I found). The first two or three times you read the stories, you won’t notice this problem. When you do, you’ll wonder at how long it took you to notice.

 

He has some marvellous villains – the Russian intriguer and sadistic megalomaniac, Count Ignatieff is one. The slave-ship captain and Latin scholar John Charity Spring ( his ship is called the ‘Balliol College’, and I’ll leave you to find out why) is another. And he (Flashman, that is)  has a real-life loathing for Lord Cardigan (whose appearance in Flashman’s marital bedroom is one of the best comic passages ever written in English, and for Benjamin Disraeli (Flashman, unsurprisingly, is a Judophobe on top of all his other unrestrained vices). Though he has a great admiration for Abraham Lincoln, who, in a telling scene, lets Flashman know that he has seen straight through him. Only one other historical figure, the great Sir Colin Campbell, is credited with the same perspicacity.

 

Look, the best thing you can do is begin. The first book ‘simply called ‘Flashman’(set in Afghanistan) is the essential starting point. You might as well stick to chronological order after that , ‘Royal Flash’ is the Schleswig-Holstein one; ‘Flash for Freedom’ (in my view the best of all) the one about slavery. ‘Flashman at the Charge’ takes him to the Crimea and then on to the shores of the Aral Sea (now almost vanished thanks to Soviet greed) and the banks of the Syr Daria river, where (many, many years after first reading this book) I later found myself, gasping with astonishment that I, a suburban Englishman, should have ventured so far from home. ‘Flashman in the Great Game’ plunges him into the Indian Mutiny.  After that, well, you’ll probably want to read the lot, but the only one of the later books that holds to the standards of the originals is ‘Flashman and the Dragon’ set in China at the time of the Taipings.  In it, he comes closer than in any of the other books  to being exposed as what he really is, and your marrow will be frozen by the way in which he averts disgrace. He’s also captured something of the simultaneous wonder, terror and beauty of China, which I found to be absolutely right when, long after I had read this book, I came to travel extensively there. I do not know if he got this from his marvellous imagination, or from direct experience (Lionel Davidson, for instance, never went to Tibet, yet I am told by those who have that his evocation of it in 'The Rose of Tibet' was superb). I just know that he somehow grasped the heart of the matter.

A Guide to Selfism

There is nothing more dispiriting than an English middle-class audience, especially one in the gentler, more prosperous parts of the country.  They calmly believe all kinds of ideas which menace, most profoundly, the lives they lead.

 

Oxford, I think, is worst of all - though I once faced a roomful of supposedly crusty Tories in Windsor, all of whom had been brainwashed (presumably by newspapers they erroneously thought to be conservative) into believing that cannabis should be decriminalised. That  was when I realised how bad it has got. The word ‘demoralised’ now has a rather weak meaning, weaker than I intend to convey. But forget its modern connotations, and use it literally, and I can think of no other which so exactly describes what has happened to this class of person. Perhaps ‘corrupted’ conveys the strength of what I wish to say, but that too has a different meaning in current usage.

 

The majority of the audience who came to a rather odd debate about drugs at Cheltenham on Saturday night were, for instance,  immovably committed to a policy on the subject which will inevitably destroy the efficient, clean, prosperous and ordered society whose benefits they currently enjoy.  At one point they actually applauded a nice middle-aged lady, not for her sensible remarks on trying to deter her own children from drug taking, but because of her confession that she had herself used illegal drugs in the past.

 

After the discussion, just one person bought my book.  It was one more than I expected, given the waves of scorn and dislike which had beaten upon me and on my doughty ally, Kathy Gyngell (who is much nicer than I am, but that didn’t make any difference. An enemy of drug liberalisation is, to such people, an apostle of repressive reactionary wickedness). Students, I‘m pleased to say, have much more open minds on this issue than my fellow-members of the Sixties generation.

 

My own generation’s view on most subjects is, I think, usually a manifestation of what I have decided to call Selfism.

 

This is nothing to do with Professor Will Self, whose name, after all, is not his own fault.

 

Selfism is the real force behind the undoing of our society. I sought for years for some sort of coherent theoretical explanation for our multifaceted cultural, social and moral revolution. I found Fabians hiding in the rhododendrons, Gramscians lurking in the pantry, Euro-Communists behind the curtains.  I even chased the Frankfurt School though a long labyrinth of polysyllables, and discovered Wilhelm Reich, George Lukacs and Herbert Marcuse doing something naughty in the Orgone Box.

 

They’re all there, these people.  They had or have influence, even power. They exist or existed.  They all work (or worked) , night and day, for the overthrow of bourgeois capitalist morality, etc etc. And then there are the many female liberationists bashing away at the traditional family,  and all the legions of equality merchants and open-borders enthusiasts, and of course the militant atheists, who hate God, claim he doesn’t exist, and want to stop us telling our children about Him, in case he does exist.

 

But I don’t think they have a High Command. There’s no eye-patched villain in combat gear, in a hollowed-out mountain, directing their operations in sinister whispers as she strokes a white cat. Some of them understand what’s going on better than others. Some are mere instruments, too dim to have any idea what they are doing. Most have little idea of the significance of what they and do, beyond their immediate surroundings. They’re in all the political parties, including in dear old Dad’s Army. Only one invariable test exposes them for what they are.

 

It’s that the policy they support has a self-interested aspect, based upon the idea that each of us is autonomous in his or her own body, and that, as they always militantly rasp ‘Nobody has the right to tell me what to do with my own body’.

 

It’s an interesting rule, and it appeals readily to the unimaginative, which in this age is an awful lot of people, most of us having had our imaginations removed or de-activated in infancy, by TV sets, unceasing background noise and computer games. And if any feeble shoots of imagination still remain,  they’ve been shrivelled up by the conformism of a society in which remorseless fashion polices speech and thought. And, as most of us know, a thought that can’t be spoken is like a plant without sunlight. It will shrivel and die.

 

The best instance of this militant Selfism at work is the strange, ferocious campaign which calls for abortion to be more or less wholly unrestricted. It’s logically barmy. If you’re sovereign over your own body, then you can’t be sovereign over anyone else’s – but abortion is the violent destruction of someone else’s sovereign, autonomous body.  Rather than admit this obvious difficulty, they pretend that the other person’s body is somehow not really a person or a body, but they must know as they say it that this is a slippery dodge.  Actually, many of the supporters of this campaign hesitate about taking their position to its logical conclusions, which are, of course, post-birth infanticide and the euthanasia of the gravely ill, its limits defined by the needs of the ‘community’ as embodied by the state.

 

Hitlerian Germany’s flirtation with eugenics and the systematic killing of the mentally ill has, for the moment, discredited a view that was once common among enlightened left-wing folk. But I wonder how long this inhibition will last, especially as the problem of the aged gaga parent, sitting on (and consuming) a large inheritance, persists among us.

 

In any case, let us return to the real problem . It was the strange association of the free abortion campaign with feminism that alerted me to it. Now, it is  clear that in China and India, and bit by bit in this country, babies are being aborted in increasing numbers purely because they are female. China, where I have observed it in action, give some indication of how things may develop here, as people realise it is wholly legal, and , what is more, uncondemned by fashionable opinion (http://dailym.ai/1alaiwz  ) .

 

This is blatant sex discrimination of the crudest and most indefensible type. Anyone who was genuinely concerned for female equality would denounce it in the strongest terms. Yet, from most of the extensive and uninhibited chorus of articulate female (and supposedly feminist) voices in the media, politics and the academy, there has been no such protest.

 

I think this is one of the most fascinating collective silences of modern times. It demands an explanation. Here is an absolute breach of all they purport to hold most dear. *And they will not attack it*. I’ve given them weeks and weeks to do so. A tiny few have mumbled a bit. But most have remained quiet.

 

Therefore these people cannot in fact be feminists in principle. Their concerns have another explanation. They want, for their individual selves, cultural, moral and if possible legal assistance in climbing career ladders and entering professions. But it ends with them, individually. They have no unbreakable solidarity with other members of their sex, who will never sit as judges, get into Parliament, or into  a boardroom , or even a newsroom , because they were dismembered in the womb for being girls.

 

I can see no way out of this. It is one of the most classic hypocrisies of our times.

 

In which case, what is the rest of their position about? Is their attitude to marriage to do with female equality, as such, or with the freedom to earn a big salary? The same surely goes for the state-funded childcare, the maternity leaves and the rest.

 

Note that in the current era of cheap servants from abroad, the salaried mother who works outside the home is uniquely able to get her domestic chores done by paid strangers. But it is not so long ago that such cheap servants were not available, and an inconveniently-timed baby was a career disaster. Step forward the abortion clinic. Maybe this will be so again, before long.

 

But if a baby can be got rid of on such a thin pretext (supposedly a threat to the mother’s mental health, when in fact it’s a menace to her income) then it is plain that the same law must allow the killing of a baby for being the wrong sex. No law could be devised which allowed what might crudely be called career-preserving abortions, and yet forbade abortions on the grounds of sex.

 

If you want to protect unborn girls from girl-hating parents, then you must make abortion very difficult, or well-nigh impossible, for everyone. And the alleged feminists, actually Selfists, can intuitively see that.

 

That is why they have been silent.

 

And then you must ask yourself how it was that abortion on demand ever became a feminist desire. What exactly does it have in common with campaigns for women to vote, to have full property rights, to stand for parliament, to be allowed into universities and the professions?

 

The answer is that it has nothing in common with these demands at all, as it has now absolutely proved, which is why I can consistently support all these demands, and absolutely oppose abortion.

 

But Selfism cannot campaign under its own true colours, which are stained with blood and other horrible things. It has to dress up in nobler garments, and appropriate the clothes of truly moral campaigns, to advance its ends.

 

So the abortionist campaigns as a feminist; the drug liberaliser campaigns as the friend of civil liberties;  the adulterer campaigns as the rescuer of the woman trapped in an unhappy marriage; and so on.

 

And above all there is the person who hates the idea of real, absolute morality, who fears that there may, after all, be a deep,  unalterable law which condemns his or her desires and which – mourning even over a fallen sparrow – cries out in terrible grief at an aborted baby. That person furiously asserts that there is no God, and no such law, and angrily denounces those who believe there is.