Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 258

Some Thoughts on Ralph Miliband

This article by me about the Miliband controversy appeared in the Mail on Sunday on 6th October.

When I was 17, I was a Trotskyist, a bit like Ed Miliband’s father but with many fewer excuses. I never had to flee for my life from an advancing army. I had grown up, unlike him, in the safest, richest, gentlest age in history. I said and thought  and did things I now remember with embarrassment and shame.

But I long ago made up my mind to be honest about my past. And that is partly because I would not hold the views I now hold, or be the person I am now – conservative, Christian, patriotic – if I had not examined the alternatives and found out what they were really like.

Born in a colonial outpost, the son of a Royal Navy officer, I heard the last faint farewell trumpet calls of Empire and grew up among adults who still spoke in its confident accents. I found out in my adolescence that it was all a shell, indebted, enfeebled, rackety, demoralised, shrivelled from ‘Finest Hour’ to ‘You’ve Never Had It So Good’ in a few years. 

Where could all that homeless  love go now? I needed a new outlet for my loyalties and found it, for good or ill, in revolution.

So let us say I’m not especially shocked to find that others have similar pasts. It’s what they’re like now that interests me. I’ve seldom seen or met anyone less revolutionary than Ed Miliband. By contrast, I find it quite funny watching the modern Tory Party adopting policies, especially on family matters, greenery and immigration, that we Trotskyists would once have thought rather far-fetched.

Then again, I have another reason for feeling a bit sorry for the Labour leader when his father is attacked.

I’m unusual among journalists in having been on the receiving end of my trade when it’s not at its kindest. It’s nearly 40 years ago now, so I feel I can mention here that it was no  fun being called by the News of the World after my poor mother, God rest her soul, had been found dead by her own hand in an Athens hotel room. I knew they were only doing their job, but I can’t say I liked it, even so.

Since that day, I’ve been pursued by a press pack more than once. The first time was after I helped derail Neil Kinnock’s 1992 Election campaign. The second  time was when I dared to research Cherie Blair’s little-known attempt to become an MP.

On both occasions, it was comically impossible to get my fellow reporters to accept I was telling the truth about what I was up to. This was because what they believed  was so much more interesting, and made a better story. 

 

Since then I’ve grown used to being called silly names, and to having my character, mental health and appearance analysed, not always in a flattering way, by other journalists. I almost enjoy it. I might as well.

Yet after all that I’m still completely in favour of a rough-edged, untamed press, because in my journey from Marx to The Mail on Sunday, via communist Moscow and quite a few other places, I’ve learned to love liberty with my whole heart. And you can’t have that without unchained newspapers.

So here we come to the article in the Daily Mail headlined ‘The man who hated Britain’. Much of life is a paradox. It seems quite obvious to me that the more you love your country, the more critical you must be of it when it has gone wrong. The test of loyalty is elsewhere. Perhaps it’s because it involves the Navy, in which as a small boy I used to long to serve, but the picture of the young Ralph Miliband (the image of his younger son), touchingly engulfed in the ill-fitting wartime uniform  of a petty officer, just makes the accusation fade away, for me.

There’s no doubt that people ought to know and care more about the influence on our national life of Marxist politics, wildly out of proportion to the numbers of people involved – though it’s important to grasp that Trotskyists hated Stalin and the Gulag as much as anyone. I myself spend quite a lot of time warning against the penetration of our politics, media, schools and universities by people who really do hate Britain, desire to carve up our kingdom and feed the slices into the Euro-blender, meanwhile burying our traditions under a bland pile of metricated political correctness.

If only they all carried big red labels saying ‘I hate Britain’, how simple things would be. But several of the worst of them are Blairites whose politically correct, multiculti, anti-Christian ideas come from 1980s Euro-communism, and who hate and despise Ed Miliband. And quite a few are in the high councils of the Tory Party. Who, for instance, said, back in 2004: ‘The nation states have had their day as powers. The world must be more ordered and centralised .  .  . it’s unstoppable and irreversible’? Why, Lord Heseltine, David Cameron’s valued mentor, in the midst of explaining why Britain should have abolished the pound without a vote, because Fleet Street would have ‘pandered to the worst and basest instincts of the mass of people’.

To me, that’s a lot more worrying than Ralph Miliband’s dislike of the pre-1945 British class system. He wasn’t alone in that. It wasted many good lives. The conservative, patriotic novelist Nevil Shute loathed English class prejudice so much he went to live in Australia.

George Orwell, who wrote with lyrical love of ‘the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows .  .  . and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings’ was another Trotskyist, who spent 1940 hoping to see Red militias billeted in the Ritz Hotel.

The American poet Alice Duer Miller concluded her 1940 love-poem to England, The White Cliffs, much treasured by many English people (including my mother) in the last war: ‘I am American bred. I have seen much to hate here, much to forgive’, and then added, as so many of us do, this final line: ‘But in a world where England is finished and dead, I do not wish to live.’

By all means, let’s have as much hurly-burly and hard knocks as we can manage. Our politics are bland enough without the press going soft and soppy as well, and how wretched it is that this row has given aid and comfort to the Polly Toynbee tendency, who for years have longed to yank out the teeth of the conservative press. But let it be to the point, and about real live issues.

Our opponents may well be wrong but it does not make them bad. Even revolutionaries sometimes have a point, and many of them – though not all of them – grow up and turn into people like me.

Mehdi Hasan - the Man who Makes me Feel Shy, Retiring and Modest

It’s not true that there’s no English word for ‘Schadenfreude’. That fine old monosyllable ‘Gloat’ has always worked for me. And I am trying reasonably hard not to gloat too much at what has just happened to Mr Mehdi Hasan, an occasional character in the drama of this blog.

 

Many of you will recall Mr Hasan’s way with words, his debating technique, his interesting use of quotations, his mistaken account of my thoughts on the Olympics on a Radio 4 programme, his  controversial musings about cattle. Some of you won’t. If so, all you need to know, including lots of links,  can be found here http://dailym.ai/1fQ5ti6 

 

But now Mr Hasan has achieved something approaching greatness, though not necessarily in a good way.

 

Some of you may have seen him denouncing the Daily Mail, sister paper of my own Mail on Sunday, on the BBC’s ‘Question Time’ programme last Thursday, 3rd October 2012.  My,  did he let rip.  It was almost as if he had been thinking about the subject in advance. He concluded with this version of a now rather frequent format (borrowed, I believe, from a soft-drink commercial of many years ago) . He spoke of the  ‘immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting Daily Mail’.

 

An interesting set of charges, all, shall we say, open to rebuttal. But that’s not what I’m here for today. The following day, the Daily Mail let it be known that Mr Hasan had, in July 2010, written to the Daily Mail’s editor, Paul Dacre,  asking to write for what he calls the ‘immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting Daily Mail’. Nor was this a perfunctory, going-through-the motions letter. Oh, no.

 

Amongst other things, he said the ‘immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting Daily Mail’ was apparently also a paper whose ‘passion, rigour, boldness and, of course, news values’  he had ‘always admired’. Always!  A rather potent word. But it did not apply, apparently,  last Thursday night, when the studio audience were clapping him with all their might.

 

Apparently he also admired the ‘immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting Daily Mail’, for ‘your relentless focus on the need for integrity in public life and your outspoken defence of faith, and Christian culture, in the face of attacks from militant atheists and secularists.’

 

He was ‘attracted’ by the ‘immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting’ Daily Mail’s ‘social conservatism on issues like marriage, the family, abortion and teenage pregnancies’.

 

Those who want  more details of this rather Dickensian outcome can easily find it out there on the World Wide Web, and there are many laughs to be had in doing so.

 

So which of these two rather distinct sides of Mr Hasan should we conclude is the real one?  

Mr Hasan doesn’t really speak to me these days, so I can’t ask him. I believe that this is a man possessed of enormous self-confidence. He’s always right, and he always knows it.  I love to contemplate him, because he makes me feel so shy, retiring and modest.

 

His allies have been complaining about what they regard as the unfair release of a private letter. I can’t quite see this. If someone gleefully insults your newspaper on national TV, after seeking actively to write for (and presumably be paid by) it, then he’s opened himself to such a reply.

 

And I’d note that, in his recent squabble with me, he made public his version of a private conversation with me, a version he couldn’t actually substantiate with shorthand notes, a recording or witnesses. Whereas I don’t think he’s disputing the wording of the letter.

 

I’d like to think we’d hear a bit less of him in future. But I doubt it. Since he first stormed into my e-mails many years ago, anxious to bombard me with his views of Israel, he’s grown, and grown and grown as a voice in our media. I think he will continue to do so. 

Are the Tories lying to us again? Just ask Mandy!

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column

How good to see that Mandy Rice-Davies is still very much around. Mandy is the most perceptive political thinker of our age, and her wisdom has never been so badly needed.
As an 11-year-old schoolboy, more innocent than it would  be conceivable to be today, I was baffled by the Profumo affair.
What was a call-girl? Or an osteopath? Why would anyone want to go to an all-night Soho drinking club? (I still don’t know the answer to that one.)
But amid the yellowish swirling smog of scandal, Mandy’s pert features and her quick wit appealed to me far more than the smouldering mystery of poor Christine Keeler.
I was immensely delighted by her riposte to a barrister who informed her that some peer or other said he had never  met her. She replied simply: ‘He would, wouldn’t he?’
This was a person who knew how the world worked. Much later she is said to have described her life as a ‘slow descent into respectability’, which deserves to be true, even if she didn’t actually say it.
Alongside Otto von Bismarck’s advice, ‘Never believe anything until it has been officially denied’,
I have made Mandy’s piece of wisdom about people telling obvious lies because it suits them my watchword during four decades of scribbling on the backs of advertisements, my chosen trade.
If it fits, it’s true. And my goodness, how it fits the Conservative Party Conference just ended. I mean, during decades in full power, and during the past three years in coalition, these Tories have had so many chances to crack down on crime, rip up the Human Rights charter, rescue marriage and remove us from the EU.
Have they lifted a fat finger  to do so? Not once. They’ve been too busy legalising same-sex marriage.
But now, with an Election approaching that they will certainly lose, all these things are suddenly being pledged. Do I believe that David Cameron, Chris Grayling or Theresa May really expect (or want) to wake up on the morning of May 16, 2015 and find themselves with the power to do the things they promised last week? Of course not.
Their private polling tells them that they are as likely to land on the Moon that day. But they do have a tiny, pitifully remote hope of forming another coalition with the Liberal Democrats, and it is that which fills their heads.
If only they can save enough seats for a second pact, then they will keep the chauffeured cars, the grandiose offices, the unctuous officials, the large salaries and pensions, and the other baubles that are all they really care about.
And for those baubles, they will abandon everything they pledged to you last week. Mandy’s Law applies as ever. You only had to listen to them  to know that they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Why criminals aren't punished
People who want to get rid of what’s left of our drug laws always make a great fuss when senior policemen join their side, as if this were a hugely important surprise.
In fact, the police have been prominent  in this campaign for years. There are two reasons. One is that the senior ranks of the police are crammed with Left-wing social science graduates.
The other is that the police reasonably see no point in arresting people when they know the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts will not punish them. An arrest, under current rules, can ruin a constable’s whole day.
As the retiring magistrate Alan Bissell rightly pointed out last week, we have pretty much abandoned the idea of punishment. Almost all crimes, from  drugs to burglary and rape, can now be squared away with a ‘caution’, and marked as solved.
It’ll be murder next, once there are so many killings that the police can’t keep  up with them either.

Come on then Ms Flanders, let's here those views
The BBC’s famously unmarried Economics Editor, Stephanie Flanders, has now left the Corporation to work for J P Morgan Asset Management.
Ms Flanders was, of course, officially impartial in her old job, but said after her new appointment that now ‘I will even (shock) be permitted to have an opinion – my own view.
At least, if I can remember how, after 11 years of trying to avoid them’.
Thrilled at the prospect of at last knowing the mind of a BBC star, I emailed a series of questions to J P Morgan, asking if Ms Flanders could now reveal her views on the BBC itself (Left-wing, Right-wing, neutral?), marriage, abortion, Syria, global warming, cannabis decriminalisation, mass immigration and same-sex marriage.
Funnily enough, I have yet to get any answers.
Perhaps Ms Flanders still can’t remember what her views were, when she had them.

The revolt begins at last
Sometimes a really big event isn’t understood as such at the time. For me, the ejection of two magnificent old soldiers from the Tory Conference was such  a moment.
The Tories have been false friends to the Armed Services for decades – my Naval officer father despised them for the mean way he was treated after 30 years at sea, including serving on the unspeakable Murmansk convoys.
But (despite the urgings of my brother to send back his medals) he never could bring himself to open revolt. That invisible barrier has now been broken. If a  full colonel can feel moved to heckle a Tory Defence Secretary, something profound has altered in the spirit of this country and I for one am not sorry.

Sir Michael Wilshaw, head of the ridiculous Stalinist Ofsted, which  tries to improve schools by nagging them, is denouncing private heads for not helping the state sector.
Listen, Sir Michael. Private schools are good because they select on the grounds of ability. State schools are mostly bad because they mostly don’t. The ones that are good are good because they select, openly or covertly.
All the money in the  world can’t change that. But if he wants state- private co-operation, here’s how to do it.
Bring back the Direct Grant, which allowed many of the best private schools in the land to take in thousands of state pupils for nothing, until Labour unforgivably abolished the scheme in 1975.
Oh, but that was selective too. If Sir Michael will campaign to make state-school selection legal again, I’ll listen to him. Otherwise he’s just  Sir Michael Blowhard.

Phillip Simelane, who killed Christina Edkins in a meaningless, random attack on  a Birmingham bus, was plainly unhinged long before this horrible moment. But our incurious  media don’t wonder why.
As it happens, while mad crowds are quite common, individual madness is not. Some external force – poison, unbearable pain or misery, or physical injury – generally brings it on.
So why was Simelane mad? Here’s  a clue. He smokes cannabis, a devastatingly powerful mind-bending drug, falsely believed  by many to be ‘soft’

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What happened at Canterbury, Metric Reflections, Classic Cinema and When Not to Stand up for the National Anthem.

I hope to wrap up (or at least loosely wrap up) one or two continuing discussions here. On the Kent debate, I should remind readers of the 500-word limit on postings. Please keep to it. We very rarely waive it for a contribution of exceptional value, or for a person whose arguments have been attacked to reply at length. But in general it’s a good discipline.

 

One (pseudonymous) contributor said ‘From the perspective of any seasoned debater, your performance at UKC was atrocious. Evading of facts and constant accusations of ignoring your points at Professor Stevens really did highlight to us all how out of depth you were when confronted with a current academic on the subject of decriminalisation. You approached the audience at the start and asked us all to keep an open mind. While then proceeding to deny the numerous statistics and studies presented by Professor Stevens, not to challenge, simply to insist that they were false and to refer back to statistics you had from decades ago.’

 

**I reply : This is not my recollection of the event. As there were plenty of witnesses, I’d welcome any other accounts. But in the absence of these, my main disagreement with Professor Stevens was over his portrayal of regimes in this country and elsewhere as being in some way punitive. My whole point, (specifically in this country, though it is equally true elsewhere) is that Western countries have maintained formal legal bans on the possession of certain drugs, while informally abandoning them. They have further camouflaged this behaviour by pursuing noisy and well-publicised campaigns against traffickers, rendered entirely futile by their lack of action to interdict demand. I demonstrated this with statistics about the British response which Professor Stevens did not challenge.  

 

Likewise I successfully (by the use of statistics) challenged his contention that this country’s introduction of a relaxed attitude towards heroin abuse had not been followed by a large increase in the numbers of abusers. We argued a bit about Sweden, which I brought in only as an example of a country which, uniquely in western Europe, had attempted (not, in my view, vigorously enough) to act against possession of cannabis. He attempted to show that the reduction in cannabis use had not been caused by this, since it began before the policy’s implementation. I disputed this logic. There are many factors in such reductions. It may well be that the Swedish policy accelerated a process already under way. I don’t think the possibility can be dismissed. The Swedish government certainly thought so, when it gave evidence to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee some years ago.

 

 

 

My pseudonymous critic continues: ‘They didn't count the votes at the end because it seemed slightly tragic to do so.’

 

***To which I reply, not to me (has he asked the Chairman if this was his reason?) . I thought the position had quite possibly shifted a bit towards me, though not as much as I might have hoped. Given the overwhelming preponderance against me from the start, that wouldn’t be a surprise’

 

He goes on ‘You had lost so overwhelmingly to a room of people who were left not feeling as though they hadn’t learnt anything but had sat in a room for two hours while you led scathing attacks on anyone you deemed to be a ‘pothead’ or ‘doper’. Or God forbid, those who suffer from depression or addiction. At which point, you not only lost the interest of the room but the last modicums of respect from anyone in the audience who came with a truly open mind.’

 

***To which I reply that this is no doubt his opinion and that of several others, but not that of quite  a few individuals who spoke to me afterwards. It may not, therefore, be an incontestable fact.  I don’t actually recall using the words ‘pothead’ or ‘doper’ (only referring to the fictional multinational ‘DopeCo’, which I posited as the putative name of the giant corporation which will arise once the legalisers get their way).

 

He goes on ‘And since you were so keen last night to convince everyone in the room of the falsity that is the medical research benefits of illegal substances, particularly cannabis’,

 

***Actually the subject hardly came up. Though I pointed out that the principal ingredient of cannabis is now available on special prescription on the NHS (which it is) and I dismissed the idea that any medicine could be prescribed except in closely-measured and regulated quantities; and also said that if people seriously wanted to see THC used as a medicine, then they would obviously separate themselves from any campaign to have it licensed as a permitted pleasure drug. If medical cannabis is so urgently needed, then surely the narrower the campaign, the more likely it is to succeed. And yet, in so many of these debates, I find alleged campaigners for ‘medical’ cannabis, sitting alongside, and supporting, campaigners for what I might politely call ‘non-medical cannabis’. This defies all logic, if this is a genuine campaign to relieve human suffering.

 

And I also said that drugs might often have apparently beneficial effects but were unusable because of their other impacts (such as Thalidomide, which when first prescribed was a highly effective treatment of morning sickness in pregnant women, but whose ‘side-effects’ were notoriously appalling).

 

He says : ‘I thought I’d leave a link so you may perhaps update some of your facts and gain a more well-informed opinion. [LINK REMOVED BY MODERATOR] The Centre for Medicinal Cannabis Research, University of California. Here you can see a number of scientific publications and reports which discuss Cannabis’ use for a number of conditions and their symptoms; including MS, HIV and Cancer and the on-going research into its medicinal potential.’

 

No doubt you can. And here you can see a link to my discussion of Keith Stroup’s statement that legalisers would use medical marijuana as a red herring to get pot a good name http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/stroup-keith/ . There is also a long passage on the Stroup affair in my book ‘The War we Never Fought’.

 

On the Metric system, I know perfectly well that it is legally permissible in this country, and am perfectly happy for anybody who wishes to use it, to use it. I just don't wish to have it imposed on me, either by law or by the use of immensely powerful cultural forces such as the BBC.  In these days of near-universal access to enormously powerful calculating engines, incredibly accurate conversions between the two systems are available to anyone who needs them, making it easier than ever for them to co-exist. What irks me is the insistent effort to supersede customary measures, by schools, broadcasters, publishers, map-makers and others, by refusing to mention or refer to them.

 

As has been pointed out here, these measures are human in scale, polished in use like old iron, derive from centuries of use and custom, have English names which resonate in poetry, proverb, scripture and literature, and are much-liked by many. They continue in use long after schools ceased to teach them, in such things as the weights of babies, and our own self-descriptions, in terms of height and weight. This is because they conjure up mental pictures which metric measurements do not, and are part of the actual, spoken, living language of these islands.  BBC reporters often make comical errors with metric masurements (I have sometimes mentioned the wondrous invention, by a BBC Radio 4 nature programme, of some '2,000 metre high' cliffs in the Falkland Islands.  Of course, they are 600 feet high. And, had the scripts said '6,000 feet' , I suspect someone would have said 'really?'. But the use of metres (based as they are on nothing more than a dud calculation made in a laboratory) brought no mental picture to mind.

 

Customary measures (more or less) survive here because we remain (more or less) free, and because we have not been invaded by a foreign power. The same, only more so, is true of the USA.  In all but a very few cases, metric measurements have been imposed on the countries which have them,  by revolutions, by colonial ‘liberations’ or by conquerors. In the few exceptions, the Anglosphere Commonwealth countries of Canada, Australia and New Zealand (and the secessionist ex-Commonwealth country of South Africa) they were adopted as a (now rather ironic) declaration of difference from the former home country and Imperial power, or (in the case of Canada) as a gesture of independence from the USA.

 

I challenge my metrifying critics to tell me at what stage, and by what process, our supposedly sovereign Parliament ever removed customary measures from normal use, and mandated the substitution of metric ones. Permission is one thing. Imposition is another.

 

Metric measures represent an idealistic, top-down,  civil-law approach to society, as opposed to the pragmatic, common-law tradition of the English-speaking peoples. Thai is one fothe reasons why this quarrel has a sigbnificance much larger than some prosaic persons seem to think, and why Steve Thoburn was prepared to risk prosecution rather than abandon thje customary measures he and his customers preferred.

 

The BBC has no mandate from any place to decide that it must exclusively use or promote metric measures. As long as it is financed by a legally-enforced poll-tax, for non-payment of which we can go to prison, it has to serve the whole people, not its own whim.

 

It is, alas, true, that our woeful education system now fails to teach either system properly ( I was lucky enough to be taught both, and my objection to the metric system does not arise from any difficulty in using it. I used it in the Soviet Union, when I lived there. It seemed very well-fitted to that centralised, utopian, regulated, top-down chilly state, and may have found easier acceptance because the old Imperial Verst was quite close to a kilometre in length. I’d be interested to know from those with good Russian what form measurements take in the fairy-tales, literature and poetry of the former era, or whether Soviet editors have inserted metric measures in the tale of Baba Yaga, or the prose of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Lermontov.

 

Those who use street markets may well have noticed the growing habit of selling fruit and other goods in 'bowls', by which what you see is what you get, because so many people now udnerstand neither system. Petrol likewise, is now commonly sold by the Pound Sterling rather than by litre or gallon.

 

I’ll stay away from formal politics at the moment, but I’m glad of the response to my mention of ‘Bicycle Thieves’ . If I have introduced even one person to this moving and thoughtful film, I’m delighted. It is one of the blessings of our times that old films (which few commercial cinemas would ever show) are now so widely available. Just as second-hand bookshops are, these days, often far more interesting than those selling newly-published works, old films have much more to say to us than most new ones.

 

This gives me the excuse to mention the old Scala Cinema (now reincarnated in another form) in what was then a rather scruffy part of Oxford, where I went to see many art-house movies of the kind you can only get on DVD these days. The thing it provided was an audience,  often very engaged, which of course you can’t get when you watch films at home.

 

But what an audience! Those of you who think I’ve imagined the revolutionary attitudes of the sixties university generation would all benefit from reading this fascinating, multifaceted reminiscence by Tariq Ali, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/may/07/1963-beginning-of-modern-era

 from the Oxford of the middle 1960s. I was living in the city then,  then as now an Oxford Townie, and remember that one of my Trotskyist comrades, a Parsee from India who had a large moustache but otherwise had almost no resemblance to Tariq,  was constantly being pulled in by the police who thought he was the great revolutionary. I have long been puzzled that these recollections attracted so little attention when the Guardian published them back in May.

 

Apart from the interesting note about Suze Rotolo (whose classically Marxist influence on Bob Dylan was evident to us revolutionaries in so many of his songs) , do please be sure to read the bit about what happened when Tariq stood up for the playing of the national Anthem - which I can still remember ending cinema performances as late as 1968, the last time I experienced it, at a showing of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’)  

Tuesday Night's drug debate at the University of Kent

I promised to blog about the debate on drugs I had last night(Tuesday 1st October) at the University of Kent at Canterbury. My opponent was that University’s Professor (of Criminal Justice) Alex Stevens, and the motion (proposed by him, opposed by me) that this country should formally decriminalise drugs. I had insisted on the word ‘formally’ since, as all regular readers here will know, actual de facto decriminalisation has been under way in this country since 1971.

 

The arguments would have been familiar to all readers here (most of those on the pro liberalisation side appear to be taught to school pupils in PSHE classes these days) , so I won’t rehearse them. It was a full room, and plenty of questions were asked and answered. I conducted my usual audience survey, and  practically everyone in the audience freely confessed to having used an illegal drug at least once – which of course would not be the case if they believed their own propaganda about prohibition. If such prohibitions existed a) they wouldn’t have done so and b) they wouldn’t have publicly confessed to it. Case closed, really.

 

I’d make a couple of comments. I sometimes win the votes on such debates(more often than not) and sometimes lose them. I am pleased that this is possible sometimes, to win, against the tide of conventional wisdom, the academy (I was arguing against an actual professor, for goodness’s sake, and a professor whose views are shared by chief constables, former cabinet ministers and all kinds of establishment figures)  fashion and relentless propaganda –often from supposedly ‘conservative’ media organs, for the weakening of the drug laws.

 

But last night I lost the vote. The organisers counted them at the beginning but not at the end, so I have no way of telling if anyone shifted. I didn’t care.  I had more or less decided from the start that I was happy to do so. I had a splitting headache all day yesterday, and decided from the outset that I would enjoy myself at this particular debate, in the hope (partly justified) that I would forget the headache amid the joy of combat. I can recall the precise moment at which I decided I didn’t care if I won or lost the vote (when I was asked about ‘addiction’ and, rather than letting it slip by, pointed out that there is no such thing, please see this discussion with 'Citizen Sane' http://bit.ly/GzI61T  for details ).

 

A couple of points. I remain quite amazed at the complete inability of my opponents to pay any attention to what I actually say. Professor Stevens barely acknowledged the existence (let alone the significance) of the Cannabis Warning, the non-punishment devised by the police, without even consulting Parliament,  to decriminalise cannabis. He also seemed to have some difficulty with the enormous increase in heroin abuse which has followed the relaxed treatment of heroin abusers by the law.

 

Nothing, let alone facts,  will derail these people from their rehearsed speeches about ‘criminalisation’ of drug takers (who of course voluntarily criminalise themselves by possessing illegal drugs) , nor from their claims that Britain and the USA operate stern, and draconian polices against drug possession. Unlike the law, which makes a very clear distinction, they seem unable to see that there is a profound difference between the treatment of possession and the treatment of trafficking, let alone wonder why that should be so. Not to mention the demonstrable piffle that legal substances do not attract the attention of criminal gangs, and the inability to grasp that the narco-terror of Latin America is caused directly and solely by the selfish, pleasure -seeking drug abusers in rich countries, whose pounds, euros and dollars provide the fuel for the whole thing. No buyers, no trade, no trade, no gangs. When a drug user asks me who is the Mr Big behind the global drug trade, I tell him or her to go and look in the mirror. It’s you. You are to blame.

 

I know, from several conversations I had afterwards, some with audience members who approached me as I walked back to my hotel, that I succeeded in making some people think.

 

That was my purpose in going - though it is always good to visit Canterbury for any purpose, and to attend Evensong in the Cathedral (that glorious building, one of the greatest expressions of English Christian devotion,  can be seen, beautifully floodlit and serene, from the hilltop on which the university stands. I wonder how many of the students ever go there, let alone attend services there?). Even though the mother church of Anglicanism has absurdly abandoned the Authorised Version of the Bible on which the Church of England is built,  it is always good for the heart to listen to Palestrina, and the psalms, and to know that if temporal hope of truth and justice is in short supply, eternity still offers its consolations, Thank God.    

Bicycle Thieves

Many years ago, and I think it must have been in the old Hampstead Everyman Cinema, I went to see ‘Bicycle Thieves’, one of the greatest films ever made, ranking alongside ‘The Battle of Algiers’ for power and thought .   I have known for years that I ought to see it again – as DVDs make that so cheap and easy. But I hesitated, because I remembered above all that it is also one of the saddest, most distressing films ever made.

 

For those who have not seen it, I will summarise the plot but not reveal the ending. It is in Italian, but you will find that after about a minute you forget that you are reading subtitles. It is in black and white but it is so beautifully filmed that after about a minute you will forget that it is not in colour. It has no great stars, but some of the most poignant, convincing acting you are ever likely to see.

 

Set in Rome in 1948, it reminds us of why Italy so nearly slipped into the Communist camp at the start of the cold war. Neither victorious nor defeated in the recent Great Moral War, Italy at this time was anything but prosperous. Rome, a city that has always teetered on the edge of the Third World, is shown – for a  poor family – as a place of great bleakness, the brilliance of the sunlight and the grandeur of the buildings only emphasising the bare shortages of daily life.

 

The central character, Antonio Ricci, is unemployed. He has pawned his bicycle to feed his growing family (one small son, one helpless baby). A crowd of jobless men are waiting for news of work at an informal labour exchange. Ricci’s name is called and he is summoned from his small flat in some vast , half-finished housing project. He can have a job, sticking film posters on the walls of Rome. But only if he can provide his own bicycle. Pathetically, he protests that his bicycle is ‘under repair’, too ashamed to admit that he has pawned it. ‘No bike, no job’, the official tells him. Others shout that they will take the job if he won’t.

 

He hurries home. His wife, her face full of a sort of desperate hope, washes and irons the family’s bed-linen, a prized dowry and their only worthwhile possession. They  go to the pawnshop – a giant warehouse which turns out to be crammed to its rafters with other people’s bed-linen, and are humiliated by being told that they will get less because most of the sheets have been used. If these scenes don’t gnaw at your soul, there’s something wrong with you.

 

But what’s worse in a way is the brief period of happiness and optimism that follows, as the bike is recovered, the job secured, and the machine lovingly polished by Ricci’s small son, who is going through that intensely moving stage where boys copy their fathers and admire them unconditionally. At dawn, the two go off together on the bike, able to spurn the crammed bus in which their neighbours are forced to travel into Rome – a scene that reminded me greatly of pre-Yeltsin Moscow and its almost inhuman vastness and seething crowds flowing in the twilight like tides.

 

And then the machine is stolen. Most of the film is taken up with Ricci’s hunt, first for the bike, and then for the thieves. He encounters a great deal of cruelty and disappointment as the day wears on. We see his terrible moral decay as he grows more desperate - and proves yet again that fundamentally good people simply lack the ruthlessness to take to crime themselves, and that without a general level of civilisation goodness becomes almost impossible.  We see life from its underside, the world of the luckless, the workless, the weak, about as bleakly as it is possible to see it.  The worst moment of all is when, in despair and exasperation, Ricci strikes his son. The utter brilliance of Enzo Staioli in the role of the son has to be seen (he grew up, wonderfully enough, to be a maths teacher, and I have a feeling he must have been a very good one) . Child actors are often rather horrible. In this case, the boy is utterly believable and there is no sickly sentimentality at all.

 

The word which occurs, again and again, as I think about this film is ‘Truth’.  We may, for a while, have staved off the harsh truth stated in ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings’ true for societies as well as individuals, that ‘if you don’t work, you starve’. But do we realise how precarious or lives are, or understand the moral forces that enable us to live as we do?   

A similar reminder is given in the great scenes at the start of the Third Man, where the Viennese middle classes are shown hawking their most precious possessions, for money to buy bread. I have seen this happen, in Gorbachevian Moscow and in post-invasion Baghdad, and , in seeing it, wondered if it would ever happen to me. I still do.

 

But it’s not just that. There’s also that rare thing,  simplicity – no elaborate tricks are used, no stunts or special effects, just life filmed as it really happened, in real streets and squares and alleyways. Nobody can watch it without being a better person afterwards. It’s worth 90 minutes of anyone’s time. But it may be years before you can nerve yourself to watch it again. 

Berlin Time, 'antidepressants' and 'Reefer Madness'

My  simple, factual and logical case – that countries should set their clocks according to the natural time at which noon occurs over their territory (i.e when the sun is at its zenith) has an amazing capacity to infuriate certain people.

 

I don’t really understand why they get so cross, unless it’s because they know I’m right and wish I would shut up because they have some shameful interest in doing what they know to be wrong. A lot of people , I think, take this view of me, hence the rages which follow my attacks on pseudo-scientific inventions, which validate poor teaching, bad parenting or lazy medicine and commercial greed,  such as ‘ADHD’, ‘Dyslexia’ - or ‘Clinical Depression’ – as for ‘depression’ see this interesting account: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2437657/Happy-pills-Critics-claim-antidepressants-handed-like-sweets-Now-shocking-experiment-uncovers--The-proof-doctors-doling-happy-pills-asks.html 

 

 

To this day I have yet to see a solid material argument for the mad ceremony of moving our clocks forward just as Spring is lightening the evening skies perfectly adequately anyway. On the other hand, since we have taken to doing this loopy, disruptive thing (invented by a property developer who hated the fact that other people didn’t get up as early as he did, and a bug-hunter who wanted to chase insects through the gloaming, and thought time should be shifted to suit him) , there’s a powerful case for putting them back to where they ought to be in autumn, which appeals to any of the millions who need to get up early for work or school.

 

This habitual idiocy, the pushing forward of clocks in Spring,  has now been going on for almost a century (having been intensified during the semi-totalitarian War-Communism of 1939-45, when such inconveniences were foisted on us to promote a spirit of shared adversity), and now affects much of the world. Perhaps a lot of people object to having this pointed out because it’s embarrassing to admit that you have been doing something daft for decades, and never even thought about it.

 

Well, Spain, which has for some years been on Berlin Time (look at a map to see how absurd this is) is now wondering whether this is a good idea – as you may read here.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24294157

 

My thanks to Darren, from Orpington,  the reader who pointed this out. Alas, we will never hear anything similar from poor France, though it really ought to be on the same time as us(look at a map, once again). But that country’s subservience to Germany in all things is the price it pays for being allowed to pose as a world power and maintain a toy nuclear deterrent.

 

On ‘Reefer Madness’, I am always puzzled that dope campaigners seem to think that mentions of this otherwise forgotten 1936 film, which is plainly of no value in any serious discussion, somehow close the debate about cannabis and mental illness.

 

The film predates (by more than 30 years) the isolation of the main active ingredient in cannabis, THC. It predates the long experience this country now has of cannabis users seeking psychiatric care and the correlation, observed by Professor Sir Robin Murray of the Maudsley hospital among others, between cannabis use (especially in the early teens) and mental illness.

 

Correlation, as we all know, is not necessarily evidence of causation. But nor is it necessarily *not* evidence of causation. It is certainly highly suggestive in this case, and is the subject of so many so-called ‘anecdotes’ that any unprejudiced person must accept that there is reason for concern.

 

Nor would it be surprising that a potent mind-altering drug has the power to trigger mental illness.

 

Due to the extreme difficulty of achieving objective classifications of mental illness (which does not mean that physiological mental illness does not exist ,as some of my thicker opponents have tried to suggest) , or of categorising those mental illnesses that are observed in any reliable way, statistics on this matter are hard to achieve or obtain. But those who mock ‘Reefer Madness’, as if it were the argument of modern campaigners against cannabis,  might do well to turn to Patrick Cockburn’s recent book ‘Henry’s Demons’.  There they may read  what happened to his son Henry *after* he used cannabis as a schoolboy, and see if they still think the subject is risible.  

Game of Drones

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     It is very sad, but some people may actually be influenced by the argument that a UKIP vote at the 2015 election will put ‘Red Ed’ into Downing Street. Of course it will. That’s the whole point of doing it, a negative action misrepresented by expressing it as a positive one.  You can’t keep Tweedledumber out without putting Tweedledumb in. There is no facility for electing no government at all (though given their performances lately, whyever not?). You do it because you really don’t much care who wins, and why should you? You want to punish someone.

I , for instance, am not one of those who say there’s absolutely no difference between the parties.  I actually think that Labour wouldn’t have dared to smash up the armed forces the way the Tories have done. It’s a sort of Nixon and China point, not a moral plus for Labour. But it’s a fact. And I am astonished that the intervention of two ex-soldiers at the Tory conference on Sunday did not get more coverage than it did.

 

Did those present not see that they were witnessing a gigantic earthquake of Krakatoan proportions? A Tory Defence Secretary heckled by moustachioed and medal-hung ex-soldiers, for cutting the armed forces? And this in the days of supposedly total security, when all dissenting opinion is sniffed out and excluded, and none but the vetted get within a furlong of the conference hall? Lucky for the Tories that these decent old coves went quietly.  If you want to know why the Tories are bound to lose, then there’s your answer. If they can alienate such people, they’ve alienated their deep core. Yet the sketch-writers seemed more interested in a tawdry stall of Thatcher knick-knacks.

 

I was reminded of the curious events at a Tory rally in Blackpool in October 1958, recalled at length in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ (first published as ‘The Broken Compass’).  At this event, supporters of the League of Empire Loyalists were violently ejected from the hall for heckling Harold Macmillan. They were expressing or defending positions (on immigration and the winding up of the empire) similar to views that had quite recently been expressed by none other than Sir Winston Churchill, in the Cabinet Room of Ten Downing Street.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/aug/05/race.past

 

Which raises the amusing question of the Tory party’s incessant parading of Sir Winston as their exemplar and hero for the past 60 years or so, and conjures up the mental picture of the old boy being summarily ejected from a modern Tory Party conference by stone-faced stewards with plastic badges, to be handed over to ‘Security’ staff and then passed on to modern police officers with pepper sprays, Tasers and the usual paraphernalia of baseball caps, sub-machine guns, visible handcuffs and flexi-batons. Never in the field of human conflict, I’ll say.

 

Several distinguished journalists - no friends of the Empire Loyalists (no more am I) -  were appalled at what happened to the Empire Loyalists on that long-ago Blackpool Day. They perhaps didn’t realise the real significance of it.  

 

The Tories have always been ruthless in the pursuit of office, but the late Reginald Bosanquet, then a reporter for Independent Television News, testified later in court that the violence used against the Blackpool hecklers had been ‘excessive’. So did the late Bernard Levin, who said he had seen one of the hecklers marched into a room by uniformed stewards, whereupon  ‘I heard cries and the door was repeatedly banged from the other side. When he came out he was very distressed’. Mr Levin also testified that the man was bleeding heavily from the nose, and his shirt was torn. This was, in a way, the Tories’ version of Labour’s far gentler ejection of Walter Wolfgang from their conference many years later. But it is largely forgotten because nobody much liked the Empire Loyalists, whereas old Walter was quite appealing.

 

This sort of thing really cannot happen now, thanks to TV, and I must admit, thanks to the Internet, which would spread images of it around the country so quickly that it would be politically impossible. 

 

But I think it showed, even then, the truth – that the Tories had entirely accepted, by 1958, the Fabian reordering of Britain between 1945 and 1951, not to mention this country’s epochal defeat and humiliation by the USSR and the USA  at Tehran, Yalta and Bretton Woods, and were prepared to enforce the change with all necessary ruthlessness.

 

Now they have entirely accepted the Blairite (ie EuroCommunist and Gramscian) reordering of the country between 1990 (the true beginning of Blairism) and 2010, and the German reordering of Europe since 1989  . And Michael Howard (the man laughably believed by some to be a ‘right-winger’, who created David Cameron and hugely centralised power in his party) and David Cameron himself were prepared to go to amazing lengths to reinforce this.

 

Their greatest enemies, in this project, are the loyal members and voters of their own party, who must be bullied, cajoled or otherwise persuaded into voting for and supporting governments which are hateful to them. The loathing is mutual, which is why I recently said on television that David Cameron did many of the things he does because he hates his own party. Of course he does. It's his job.

 

There’s only one answer to people who are wholly ruthless in the pursuit of office – and that’s to deny them office with equal ruthlessness. They will suffer far more from this  than the voters will suffer from putting the ‘wrong’ party in office. Who (on either side of the political divide) thinks there has been any vast difference between the Coalition or the Blair-Brown, in their effects on daily life, living standards or human freedom?  Or foreign policy? Or anything else?

 

Those who didn’t like the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock, and so abstained or voted for other parties in 1992, were not so thick that they didn’t grasp what their actions would bring about. Lo, John Major, perhaps the most unlikely victor in British electoral history, became Prime Minister. It wasn't that anyone much actually wanted him. It was that they didn't want the other one (much the same process put Ted Heath into Downing Street in 1970, after the famous 'unpopularity contest' between him and the by-then-discredited Harold Wilson).And the Labour Party was, for good or ill, forced to change, into something rather like John Major. 

 

UKIP voters (and if you feel you must vote, which I don't, that’s the way to do it) can hardly believe that Nigel Farage is the national future. Even Mr Farage (and all credit to him for grasping it) knows that is not going to happen. But he also knows he can do a lot of mischief, and his latest plan, to offer individual Tories UKIP support, is very mischievous. It's absolutely not a pact(which would destroy UKIP) . But it could force a lot of blowhard 'Eurosceptic' Tories to show what they're really made of, or more likely what they aren't made of.

 

These UKIP  supporters may genuinely hope to change the Tories, though the only way to change them is to destroy them utterly and replace them with almost anything else, perhaps a blob of plasticine. I mean, anything, anything would be better than this intellectually and morally bankrupt rump of deeply unattractive, ignorant and not-very-bright persons. Game of Thrones? More like a Game of Drones.

 

There’s a good chance that a Tory failure in 2015, especially if combined with Scotland voting to stay in the Union, will bring about the long-needed split and collapse of the Conservative Party. Scottish secession is in fact David Cameron’s only remaining hope of a Westminster majority. I am baffled and flummoxed by the number of commentators and politicians who claim, with straight faces, that the Tories can win an absolute majority in May 2015. On what polls are they basing this? It is virtually unknown for a governing party to increase its vote or share of the vote after five years in government – the March 1966 election, in which Labour got its absolute majority, followed a sort of probationary period of 18 months in which the voters decided (foolishly) that Harold Wilson was to be trusted after all. The 1983 Tory election triumph was brought about by the Falklands, and the 1987 one by the Alliance splitting the left utterly.

 

UKIP voters, many of whom feel as I do that the whole purpose of their vote should be to punish the Tories, need to go a step further. They should seek to destroy the Tories, so knocking down the great wall of flannel and conventional wisdom that keeps this country from discussing its own future, or influencing it.  So what if ‘Red Ed’ gets in? Or a Lib-Lab coalition? Will you really be able to tell the difference?  But five or ten years afterwards, we might have a proper British government again, which quite possibly may not happen, but will certainly never happen as long as the Tories survive.

A Review of 'Cannabis Nation' by James H.Mills

As I’m hoping to debate the subject of cannabis decriminalisation in Canterbury on Tuesday evening , 1st October (at the University of Kent , thanks to the Classical Liberal Society), let us return, in a rather stately way, to the subject of dope. The comment warriors will doubtless come, like bluebottles to a dead cat, but we have learned to ignore their angry buzzing , and the sound of them bashing their heads repeatedly against the windowpanes.

 

 

Things have moved on a bit since we last discussed it. For one thing,  I have been brought, willy-nilly,  into the company of a man called James H. Mills.  This was the work of the Times Literary Supplement, which caused that fine historian Paul Addison, to review my recent book ‘The War We Never Fought – the British Establishment’s Surrender to Drugs’ (Bloomsbury £16-99)  , together with Professor Mills’s  ‘Cannabis Nation – Control and Consumption in Britain 1928-2008’ Oxford University Press £35).

 

 

James Mills (whom I have never met) is Professor of Modern History at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare Glasgow at the University of Strathclyde, and Director of the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare Glasgow at the University of Strathclyde. According to the Strathclyde University website, he also teaches Indian history. He is the author of 'Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade and Prohibition 18001928' (Oxford University Press, 2003) and 'Madness, Cannabis and Colonialism: The 'Native-Only' Lunatic Asylums of British India, 18571900' (Palgrave, 2000). He has co-edited 'Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post-Colonial India' (Anthem Press, 2004).

 

So far as I can see from his book, he is (unlike me) relaxed about cannabis and suspects it may have genuine medical properties. So I doubt very much whether he would have wanted to be coupled with me in a TLS review. But here’s what was interesting. Paul Addison, being a learned and civilised person, did not do as some other reviewers, and subject my book to a shouty, furious assault, leaving it lying, seeing stars, in the gutter.

 

On the other hand, he disappointingly accused me of claiming there was a ‘liberal conspiracy’ against the enforcement of the cannabis laws, a term I nowhere use and a theory I don’t believe.  There was without doubt an organised and brilliantly-directed campaign for its effective decriminalisation, which I describe in detail using the recollections of Steve Abrams, that campaign’s key activist, and of some others. It’s a matter of record. It’s quite wrong to describe an accurate account of an open campaign as a claim of a ‘conspiracy’.

 

He wrote nothing which I could easily stick on the cover of the paperback as a recommendation. He simply described the history of cannabis in Britain, following the narrative of Professor Mills’s book, rather than that of mine, and then (while noting that we differed in our views of the dangers of the drug) concluded ‘Strip out the value-judgements and his (my) account of the  political manoeuvres surrounding the Wootton Report is strikingly similar to that of Professor Mills.’

 

That might almost be a compliment. Basically, he thinks I’m right. But he then, alas, has a go at me for being a puritan ( as indeed I am, and proud of it) , and for allegedly making ‘an illusory contrast between an idealised past and a dystopian present’, which is TLS-speak for accusing me of believing in a ‘Golden Age’. Which, as all readers of this blog well know, I don’t do. But there. It’s nice to have attracted his attention at all.

 

And – crucially - he’s right about our similar narratives, though, while I think Professor Mills has done a very fine job in the archives, of which I am extremely jealous,  I think my account is better and fuller on the political side of things, and particularly on the bipartisan nature of the legislation, and the amazing Labour cabinet meeting at which the working class ministers took a conservative line, and the university-educated ones took a liberal one.

 

But, as the ‘manoeuvrings’ around Baroness Wootton’s  1968-9 report were the key to everything that has happened since, and as my narrative and the (how shall I say, more liberal?) Professor’s narrative agree, then that suggests that we are both on the right track, and certainly that my book , whose main purpose is to show that there is no ‘war on drugs’ is not the contemptible, hysterical farrago that some have claimed.

 

Anyway, OUP have been kind enough to let me have a copy of the Professor’s book for review, and I can thoroughly recommend it. I learned from it several things I didn’t know, and wish I had. In general, these things tend to confirm me in my view of what has happened.

 

There is a lot of history, not least the ambiguous position of the British Empire, which tolerated and taxed cannabis in India, while stamping it out with vigour in Egypt. This taxation might also explain the fairly relaxed attitude of the famous Commission on Indian Hemp (whose ancient pages the Wootton Committee studied diligently in the course of reaching their relaxed conclusions). I have increasingly taken the view that the reason for political weakness on drugs is the unstated hope of politicians that a new source of tax revenue could be created , just as I am sure some businessmen are sure that legalised cannabis will make them even richer.

 

Professor Mills argues on several occasions that cannabis was a symbol, both for its supporters and those who would suppress it, of other things. He believes it has racial connotations as well as cultural ones. I wouldn’t necessarily argue with that – though in my view the modern age of cannabis in Britain began when it stopped being the drug of ethnic minorities,  and became instead the drug of the liberal-minded young – multiculturalism in a spliff. I have always argued that its consumption became, for the sixties generation, a sort of communion rite for the new secular, post-Christian generation. After all, like the Communion Chalice,  it is shared and passed from mouth to mouth. No blasphemy is intended here, just an interested comparison.

 

He also zooms in on the key to the whole campaign, noting (on p.147) that the ninth meeting of the (Wootton) sub-committee agreed that legislation *’should differentiate between cannabis and other drugs in the Dangerous Drugs Acts’* This is the key to all that happened afterwards, the official endorsement of the falsehood that cannabis is somehow ‘soft’ and not dangerous , which has led so many people into tragedy, and still does, and has encouraged the weakening of the law against it over time, so that it has now all but vanished.(The great paradox is that the weakening of enforcement of the cannabis law, far from – as always claimed -  ‘freeing up’ resources for pursuit of the supposedly harder drugs, has led to the weakening of disapproval of drugs in general, and the widespread enfeeblement of all enforcement of drug possession laws of any kind) .

 

 

 

He reveals, by the way, that one member of the committee, a Scottish prison governor, sought to resign but was dissuaded from doing so by officials. Had the resignation been accepted, history might have been very different. Divided committees find it much harder to get their way than united ones.

 

He also finds that, quite soon after Wootton’s ideas were put into practice by the Misuse of Drugs act 19071, the alleged ‘persecution’ of cannabis users was already so rare as to be non-existent. In fact, the police and the courts may well have anticipated the act by some years ,sensing that the establishment was already moving against interdiction of demand.

 

On pages 156.157 he notes a study by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs( set up by the Act), which found that just 6% of those convicted for cannabis offences had been given custodial sentences (compared with 25% in 1967) . Even then, most were fined less than £50 and cautions were already in use, though only in a handful of cases.

 

By 1979 a further study found that fewer than 80 of the 772 prisoners in jail for drugs offences were there for simple possession. In the period 1973-79, roughly one fifth of those convicted for drugs offences received custodial sentences.

 

The professor writes ‘ When further investigation into figures  for cannabis was made, it was discovered that “there was at most one first offender… awarded an immediate custodial sentence in 1979 for a single offence of possession of cannabis’.

 

He concludes that ‘the process of educating magistrates not to send offenders to prison for simple possession, first advocated by the Wootton Committee and then adopted by governments early in the 1970s had been a success’.

 

On the other hand, the police were becoming more enthusiastic about arresting and charging, and (as the Professor correctly notes) the number of users was rising.

 

This would lead ( in my opinion) to the Paddick experiment in Brixton, the Runciman report and other developments, which would bring the police into line with the views of the civil service, the politicians and the magistracy.  If I have read the professor aright, one important difficulty with that has been, and continues to be the usefulness to the police of cannabis possession as an arrestable offence which allows them to pull in people who they really want for other reasons, but who have obliged them by possessing an illegal drug.  

 

As he says on p.222 ‘the licence afforded to the police to stop and search people on the pretext of looking for cannabis, and to arrest them even where offences detected are minor, has provided officers with discretionary powers that enable them to pursue all manner of agendas and strategies. Cannabis laws have not always been deployed, and indeed may rarely have been deployed, to stop people using the drug’.

 

His references to and extract from (pages 177-9) to Sir Kenneth Newman’s  ‘The Principles of Policing and Guidance for professional behaviour’ is tremendous evidence for my view that the police themselves have, whether they like it or not, become some of the most powerful campaigners for a softening of the laws on possession.

 

After all, what is the point of exerting yourself to enforce a law which the courts and the state clearly do not want to be enforced? It will only cause you needless trouble and waste of time. In which case, some might conclude,  shouldn’t the law be closer to the wishes of the state?

 

There is also (on p.195) an account of a fascinating exchange between the ‘Drugs Tsar’ Keith Hellawell, and the then Home Secretary Jack Straw, which I commend to all those who can remember that odd era, of ostensible toughness and real weakness. That is what we still have. Stern inflexible speeches. Feeble, gutless actions.  

Why the Blairites back the Tories against Red Ed

 This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Why are Peter Mandelson and the Blair
Creature trying to help David Cameron win the next Election? Like all
sensible people, I take no sides in the louse versus flea versus bedbug
contest that British politics has become.

But I believe the remaining deluded, tribal voters should be urged to think hard about what they plan to do in May 2015.

If
it is really true that David Cameron is in any way conservative, why
would Lord Mandelson and Blair of Baghdad be so keen to help him? They
obviously are very keen. Both men submitted themselves to a fierce
discipline in the days before 1997, vowing that nobody at the top of the
Labour Party would attack  a comrade in public. Those  who broke this
rule were severely punished.

So, when Ed Miliband came out
with his energy price freeze, Lord Mandelson’s immediate public attack
on it was a conscious, deliberate, thought-out attempt to wreck his own
party’s Election chances in 2015.

Then
along came Anthony Blair, who could easily have hidden himself away at a
self-help congress for loo-roll makers in Malaysia, or in the
first-class compartment of a long-distance jet. But no, he was instantly
available, to refuse to comment in such a way it was clear he, too
wanted to torpedo his own party.

Well,
Mr Blair has always done what he was told, by Lord Mandelson and
Alastair Campbell and George W. Bush and anyone else who could offer him
glory in return for obedience.

But
Lord Mandelson, right back in the days when he still had that
moustache, was always the beating heart of the New Labour project.

And the New Labour project
came out of Marxism, just as he did. His Lordship remains very cagey
indeed about his time in the Young Communist League, just as Blair was
evasive about his time as a Ban-the-Bomber during the Cold War. They are
cagey because it still matters. It wasn’t a youthful indiscretion they
shook off. This is important.

Silly,
unobservant people on Left and Right missed the point of the Blair
government. They judged it by outdated measures, such as union power or
nationalisation. But the intelligent Left had long ago moved on from
that.

The real project was
much more revolutionary: The plan  to ‘rub the Right’s nose in
diversity’ with irreversible mass immigration; the rapid deepening of
our commitment to the EU; the constitutional and legal reforms which
removed many traditional safeguards for law and liberty; the sexual
revolution; the legal ban on selection by ability in schools; the
stupid  liberal wars; the huge expansion of public spending; the writing
of political correctness and Human Rights into British law; the
break-up of the UK.

This
wasn’t just an attack  on everything conservative-minded people hold
dear. It was also an attack on old-fashioned British socialism, which
for all its faults cared about the poor.

Instead
of worrying about unemployment, council housing and low wages, New
Labour actively worked to turn this country into a low-wage, globalised
economy, floating on a wave of credit.

A
lot has been said about how the Blairites accepted Thatcherism – which
is true. Thatcherism wasn’t conservative either. Much less has been said
about how the Tories, under Michael Howard and then David Cameron,
accepted Blairism.

It was only when they agreed
they would not try to undo any of the Blair legacy that they won the
approval of the Blairite BBC, and the Blairite Murdoch press, and were
allowed back into government.

And
so now we find that Mandelson and Blair view David Cameron as a far
better Heir  to Blair than Ed Miliband. So  much so that they’re
prepared to wreck their own party to say so.

If the Tories offered you any hope, Peter Mandelson would hate them, not help them.

Another awful massacre – and another killer on ‘happy pills’

Last week I speculated that
the Washington Navy Yard mass killer, Aaron Alexis, might have been
unhinged by cannabis. I still think it possible. This very dangerous
drug is virtually legal in much of the USA and Britain, and is strongly
correlated with severe mental illness.

But
I have now learned from the New York Times that Alexis was certainly
taking a  so-called ‘antidepressant’ called Trazodone, nowadays
prescribed for insomnia.

These
powerful pills are given out by doctors who often don’t know anything
about them,  on the weakest of excuses. There’s no hard evidence they do
any more good than sugar pills, but lots that their so-called
‘side-effects’ can be very severe. The US National Institutes of Health,
in an ‘Important Warning’, ringed twice in red on their website, say
that people who take ‘antidepressants’ (especially teenagers and young
people) can become suicidal.

They
add: ‘You should know that your mental health may change in unexpected
ways when you take Trazodone or other antidepressants even if you are an
adult over age 24. You may become suicidal, especially at the beginning
of your treatment and any time that your dose is increased or
decreased.’

Again
and again, these mass killers are found to have been taking such pills.
How many more must there be, before we have a proper investigation?

The General Medical Council, which
hounded Andrew Wakefield out of the profession for an honest,
well-intentioned mistake over MMR, has given up efforts to discipline
doctors allegedly involved in the mid-Staffordshire NHS scandal, in
which many died. What scale of values is in operation here?

The BBC’s relentless campaign to make us metric continues apace.

A Radio 4 report on Rolf Harris’s court appearance last week said  he walked ‘50 metres’ from car to courtroom. Did he?

Did they measure it exactly? Wouldn’t most people say ‘50 yards’?

Apart from anything else, it’s quicker, and yards are still in common use on road signs all over the country.

The Corporation is protected by a special exemption from Freedom of Information requests on this subject.

But
all the circumstantial evidence points to a policy to use metres,
kilometres, kilograms and other foreign measures, wherever possible. By
what authority do they do this?

Having spent some formative years in
the charming Devon hamlet of Crapstone, and then in the lovely Sussex
village of Funtington, I feel for the people of Varteg, South Wales.

Their
village faces a name change at the hands of Welsh language zealots, who
argue the letter ‘v’ doesn’t exist in Welsh and so must be replaced by
‘f’.

I’m all for
preserving Welsh. But wouldn’t it have a better chance if it adopted
some extra letters – not just ‘v’ but ‘k’ and ‘x’, so Wales could have
banks and taxis like the rest of us? In return we English could adopt my
favourite Russian letters, ж (zh), (ch) and Щ (shch), which would brighten things up a lot. (Apologies for an incorrect Cyrillic letter appearing here earlier. This error was not in the original copy or in the MoS, and will be corrected when some Cyrillic engineers are available)