Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 262
August 30, 2013
A Word of Thanks
A brief word of thanks to those among you who followed my advice and contacted your Members of Parliament about Syria. I noted that some readers said the matter was foreordained and there was no point in this. I believe they were wrong. This country is not what it was, but still has independent public opinion, free speech and an adversarial parliament whose members in many cases pay attention to their constituents.
I instinctively felt that there was a chance of influencing events. Perhaps the matter was already settled when I wrote, but the closeness of the vote (which in all justice should have been more like 500 to 130) suggests that the usual counter-forces of ambition, cowardice, stupidity and dogma were still very much at work.
In any case, I thank all those who responded, and I thank those MPs who listened. This is the first time in years that I have felt actively proud of my own country.
Arab Spring or Arab Spasm - an article from the American Spectator
Here is an article I wrote recently for the American Spectator about the so-called ‘Arab Spring’
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/08/30/the-arab-spasm
August 29, 2013
A Debate about the Planned Attack on Syria
Yesterday, some time before Edward Miliband found some intestinal fortitude, I recorded the following argument about Syria with Alan Mendoza of the pro-war Henry Jackson Society. The Spectator podcast can be found here
And I Reply to Ms Vere's Reply
I must confess to having been distracted by our government’s almost unhinged rush to war, which is why I have taken so long to reply to Ms Vere’s contribution.
One correspondent suggests I shouldn’t do so, and I see what he means. I, too have, been tempted to refer to various Peter Simple characters during this exchange, notably Jeremy Cardhouse MP and Dr Heinz Kiosk. Alas, I suspect these references will mystify Ms Vere, who seems uninterested in these hinterland affairs. But I promised to reply, and so I will.
First of all, I must ask Ms Vere on what she bases her assertion that Margaret Thatcher had “a hatred of ‘bring-backery’.” I was an industrial, labour and political reporter during most of the Thatcher era – 1979-1990, though I was abroad or grappling with the Cold War story, during her final years in office. I regularly saw her answer questions in the Commons, from the Gallery, I listened to her conference speeches and more than once I travelled in her aircraft on foreign visits, and was able to sit in conversation with her, with a number of other travelling journalists. I have read John Campbell’s two-volume biography of her. And I confess that, if she ever did express a dislike of ‘bring-backery’, I had not noticed it. I’d be glad of some references.
I always had the strong impression that she in fact wished (whether she achieved this is another matter) to restore a number of things which she believed Britain had lost, including a sound economy, patriotism, rigorous education and national independence. You might well describe these aims as ‘bring-backery’ if you were the sort of person who thinks all motion is forwards, and that forwards is automatically good. I do not think she was such a person. Like many of her generation (which was also my parents’ generation, so well understood by me) she had seen our country decline in many important moral and spiritual aspects, was pained by this and regretted it.
On the other hand, Mr David Cameron has said he likes Britain as it is, and is well known for his dismissal of alleged fruitcakes such as me and my friend Simon Heffer for our ‘bring-backery’, though he chose to call me a ‘maniac’, which I think a larger compliment.
Has she somehow confused Mr Cameron and Lady Thatcher? Or has she recreated Margaret Thatcher in her own ‘modern’ image?
In any case, as my more regular readers have pointed out to her, the words ‘Margaret Thatcher’ are not a magic incantation here. I am not a Thatcherite and regard her as a failure, and indeed as someone who never even attempted to reverse the Left’s moral and cultural revolution, though sometimes giving the impression she was, and certainly regretting, for instance, her failure to save the grammar schools.
I think Ms Vere’s obvious ignorance of my political position (which wouldn’t matter if she hadn’t chosen to tweet her baseless jibe about school-leaving) just shows that she is uninterested in ideas. It takes about five minutes on the web to find out what my positions are on most major subjects. That sort of dismissal of ideas is common among businessmen or businesswomen, though in my view unwise. But can it be excusable in someone who seeks to be a member of Parliament? I think not. She should at least know what it is she disagreeing with.
As for the ‘A’ list, as Ms Vere presumably knows, there was never any definitive written list that was published. If she has a copy, I should be glad to see it. But in September 2009, Jonathan Oliver wrote in the ‘Sunday Times’ that ‘The Sunday Times can disclose the eclectic mix of candidates who answered the Conservative leader's appeal for people with no previous involvement in politics to stand for parliament.
‘The 70 names who have recently been added to the approved list of Tory candidates include Rory Stewart, a Harvard professor who set up a charity in Afghanistan and once taught the princes William and Harry.
‘Other would-be MPs include Merryn Myatt, a businesswoman who presented a BBC consumer show, and Colonel Bob Stewart, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for gallantry in Bosnia.
‘The list also includes the Nigerian-born Nini Adetuberu, 29, who helps drug addicts in north London, and Charlotte Vere, chief executive of a charity helping people with mental health problems. Both women are the personification of Cameron's ideal of "caring conservatism".’
I can find no record of Ms Vere complaining about this description at the time.
She then says ‘you bandied the term around as a primary school child might say ‘she smells’; as a term of shame,’
Did I? I think not. I merely said she was ‘one of the fabled A-listers’.
She then adds : ‘…but I am not ashamed. What on earth is wrong in opening up politics to people who are not policy wonks or who haven’t cut their teeth as a Special Adviser to a government minister?’
To which I reply, nothing at all. I deplore the takeover of politics by these cloned, interchangeable careerists, among whom I number the present Prime Minister, her admired leader. Does she disapprove of his path to power?
She then adds: ‘ What on earth is wrong in encouraging those of us who have started businesses, run organisations and frankly know and understand what life is like outside the Westminster bubble? Is this somehow not Conservative?’
To which I reply, that it is not conservative, if the people involved do not have conservative opinions.
It is not conservative if they are instead conscious or unconscious bearers of conventional wisdom, socially and politically liberal, entirely at ease with mass divorce, rigour-free education, radical ultra-feminism, pandemic abortion, state subsidies for fatherless families, uncontrolled mass immigration, destruction of national sovereignty through the EU, and official multiculturalism. Not to mention the increasing invasion of private and family life by the state and by commerce, and the parcelling out of children to misnamed ‘care’ while their actual parents are pressured to abandon them while they do paid work.
The opinions of MPs and candidates are, in my view, decisive. This is not a parish council we are electing, but an allegedly sovereign Parliament, and an adversarial one at that.
Note that I do not use the capital ‘C’. The Conservative Party is now a party of the Left in all but name. It didn’t intend to become one, but it did become one, by failing to understand, challenge or reverse the Left’s programme of cultural and moral change begun by the Fabians and then redoubled by Tony Crosland and Roy Jenkins, before merging with Marxist and Gramscian social thought in New Labour – itself the direct heir of ‘Euro-Communism’ and the journal ‘Marxism Today’. It is the purpose of my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’, to explain the shape of the modern left, and to explain that it has chosen a new route to Utopia, having acknowledged the failure of Bolshevism and of the 1945 statist experiment in Britain.
The Tories, who sought office rather than power, repeatedly compromised with these currents, until they found themselves governing along lines prescribed by the Left. The Tory Party’s broad acceptance of the openly egalitarian and politically-correct Equality Bill (mentioned below) is the single most striking feature of this process. But the Tory Party’s acceptance of comprehensive state education (Labour’s *real* Clause Four, its unalterable equality-of-outcome Holy Grail) is just as striking. This is why ideas matter, why their origins matter and why their history matters.
To respond to any mention of ideas with a yawn is to invite other people’s ideas to fly into your head through the wide and gaping entrance you have provided for them.
My main task in life is to point out this fact, that the Tory Party has gone over to the Left and is no longer in any way the friend of conservative, patriotic people. It never was much. It certainly isn’t now.
I responded to Ms Vere’s still unwithdrawn false allegation against me because I saw an opportunity to examine, in her, the force and mind of the modern Tory Party. The baseless charge she made against me could equally well have come from any Guardian-reading tweeter or ‘Comment is Free’ warrior.
That is why I suspect she is, unconsciously, an apostle of the beliefs which inform the BBC, the academy, the C of E hierarchy and the major parties. These beliefs are not in any way conservative. For such people, the function of the Tory party is to provide parliamentary representation and office for people whose tribal loyalties and social backgrounds keep them out of the Labour or Liberal Democrat Parties. They embrace policies to obtain office, rather than seeking office to implement policies. They have no principles not because they are unprincipled or wicked, but because they see no point in principles, and do not really understand why anyone should have any.
That is why I quoted Maynard Keynes on the way that ‘practical’ people who profess to be uninterested in theories are usually the slaves of some defunct economist, of whom they have never heard. Just as many people don’t even know they’re speaking in prose, many politicians don’t even know that they are guided by an ideology of which they have never heard, and which they have never studied. Such people don’t really choose what they say or think, and indeed make it very difficult for themselves to do so.
If Ms Vere is so opposed to feminism, as she says she is, why does she join and serve a party whose leading female minister, Theresa May, as I often point out, worked co-operatively with Harriet Harman on the Equality Bill and has (see below) publicly embraced the revolutionary idea of all-women shortlists (both these actions before the last election, in which Ms Vere stood in the Tory interest)?
Feminist is as feminist does. In any case, I am myself a feminist, in that I have always supported the rational treatment of women in marriage, property, education, work, the professions and law, and supported the abolition of unjustified barriers to them.
What we are dealing with, when we encounter Harriet Harman , is something entirely different. This is not feminism but a dogmatic pursuit of a gigantic revolution in the relations between the sexes, with enormous consequences for marriage, child-rearing and society.
It is based upon the (to me, extremely strange) idea that the fact that women become pregnant, and men do not, cannot justify any distinctions between men and women, in law, custom or morality. It also includes a belief that women are ‘excluded’ from various parts of our society solely by irrational prejudice - a belief which justifies the imposition of quotas upon employers and others to ensure that women are ‘represented’ in all occupations, trades and professions (well, almost all, my campaign for women to be 50% of all dustcart operatives has never quite taken off).
Mrs May’s adoption of this position was a very significant moment in British politics, (as is usual in such cases) widely ignored. She did so by supporting all-women shortlists for Parliamentary candidates in an interview with the Guardian on 14th December 2009. She had previously said (to the same paper on 10th November 1995, in an interview with Rebecca Smithers, to which I’m unable to provide a link, though perhaps a more adept user of the web might help) ‘I'm totally opposed to Labour's idea of all-women shortlists and I think they are an insult to women. I've competed equally with men in my career, and I have been happy to do so in politics too.’
Here you may find Mrs May’s U-turn on the subject http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/dec/14/theresa-may-lady-in-waiting
And you will also find that she makes no attempt to explain it. She does not need to explain it to Ms Orr, who is happy to welcome a new recruit into the Guardian’s world. Mrs May has bent her neck to the new orthodoxy, and they are happy enough with that . But if she claims to be a conservative, she needs to explain her adoption of such a belief to conservatives.
And Ms Vere, the alleged critic of Harriet Harman, needs to explain her allegiance to a party in which such a person is prominent, powerful and praised. She cannot attack Ms Harman and support Mrs May. One or the other. But not both.
Ms Vere says ‘I support strong families who are able to take care of their own, socially and financially.’ But families are not just economic units that take care of their own. They are private places of nurture and independent society, where individuals are free of the state and of commerce, and where tradition, morals, manners, language, stories, lore, legend, poetry and faith are passed on from generation to generation. This cannot happen if the adults and the children are largely parted from their children by the pressures of incessant work outside the home, and when Sunday has been abolished as a religious day of rest and turned into a noisy commercialised zone of retail therapy.
Another reader has pointed out, correctly in my view, the significance of the figures Ms Vere quotes on education. They result from militant, equality-of-outcome feminism (something she claims to oppose) in education.
Ms Vere next says :’We must stop pitting the beleaguered and overworked, paragon-of-virtue stay-at-home mum versus the guilty, uncaring, self-obsessed working mum. Both are ridiculous stereotypes which should be banished. And when people like you, Peter, ‘defend’ or ‘attack’ either of these stereotypes, it encourages a hardening in attitudes.’
Do I? Can I see some examples of my doing this? Who’s doing this pitting? I know perfectly well that few mothers have any choice as to whether they go out to work. I do not condemn them, but I condemn the government, and the other influences that push them into this unwanted fate. Ms Vere should read what I actually say She might then learn what I think. But does she care?
Ms Vere says : ‘Supporting dual income households by making a contribution to childcare costs is a win for the family, and a long term win for our country. All parents probably wish that they had an extended family on their doorstep, but life’s not like that and you find new ways of broadening your net.’
The assumption behind this statement is that there are two options – one that subsidised ’childcare’ is provided, the other that grandparents will step in. But what about the third possibility – that the child’s own mother does the job?
No, families of this kind, despite usually being materially worse off than their modern rivals, must be taxed to support those in which both parents do paid work, and to offer an indirect subsidy to the employers who get the main benefit.
As I’ve said, Mr Osborne will subsidise any form of child care except that done by the child’s own mother. The family which makes a substantial sacrifice to raise its own young is actively penalised, to pay for well off families which prefer money to family life, and also to pay to impose a new and revolutionary way of life on many poor families who would rather hold to the traditional way.
This is an active policy, and if I were of Ms Vere’s persuasion I would call it 'discrimination’. What it certainly is, is a policy to encourage one way of life, and discourage another. I do not think that it could possibly be described as ‘conservative’.
Then there’s this : ‘…we should make sure that by family, we mean dads too. Children need parents – both of them – and the assumption that only the mother can be the care-giver or that dividing caring responsibilities between the both parents is oooh a bit modern, is nonsense. Right from birth, the state, the media and many others inadvertently and unintentionally leave fathers out of the conversation.’
This is, once again, a dogmatic point, coming from the farthest reaches of the Sexual Liberation Front, and its claim that men and women are interchangeable. If any father wishes, or has, to be the principal carer, good luck to him. Some have to. General Boris Gromov, of the Soviet Army, who successfully led that army’s ordered retreat from Afghanistan, was a fine father to his children, of necessity, after his wife died. No doubt there are individuals who find this both congenial and good, just as there are women who would rather drive a tank, fight fires or run a corporation than nurture the young. I wouldn’t stand in their way.
But most of us, as we voyage through life, have noticed that men are different from women, and that the generality of men are not as well-equipped, temperamentally and in other ways, to raise children, especially small children, as are the generality of women. It is a sign of the unhinged nature of modern Britain that such a statement of the obvious should need to be made. You might wish to alter this, and you would be entitled to your opinion. But to do so you must embark on a revolution. Why would a conservative pursue such an aim?
Finally, I’ll respond to this : ‘…parents in dual-income households take care of their children too! They do phonics, ride bicycles, bake cupcakes, go on trips, help with homework etc etc. The assumption that going to work results in a complete abrogation of young-raising responsibility is narrow-minded and frankly offensive.’
I make no such assumption. How could I? The great conscript army of wageslave mothers struggle home nightly to try to win back some of what they have lost in the day, and try mightily to do so. They know what they’re missing. But time once gone, especially quantity time with young children, cannot be brought back – a truth that all parents of all sorts know, as they gaze in amazement at their adult offspring and wonder where the time went and how it all happened so quickly.
It just happens to be my opinion, and that of significant numbers of other parents, notably of the various campaigns for full-time mothers which have over the past dozen years been given the brush-off by the Tories, that the presence of a full-time mother in the home is *better* than the absence of one.
I would expect an avowedly socialist or liberal party to scorn such a view. The thing that interests me is that the party which proclaims itself to be Conservative is on that side as well. Ms Vere is welcome to her funky, radical views, even if she doesn’t know they’re funky and radical. But what business has she standing for Parliament while calling herself a ‘Conservative’? That’s what this is about.
By the way, I have never mentioned the 1950s, and I don’t ’hark back’ to any era. I can remember the 1950s, and there was plenty wrong with them, as I make plain in my book ‘the Abolition of Britain’. I yearn for no ‘golden age’. I just yearn for the good in preference to the bad, at all times and in all places.
Loyalty to tribe seems to me to guide Ms Vere more strongly than interest in ideas, their origin and outcome. That’s why she’s in a party that calls itself conservative and isn’t.
As for me being the ‘arbiter of conservatism’ (I am certainly not the arbiter of Conservatism) , I should have thought the test was to be found elsewhere.
I have much experience of the enemies of conservatism, and much of my view of what it is has been formed by finding out in detail what happens when conservatism, in the form of faith, tradition, patriotism, privacy, liberty, limited government and the rule of law is defeated and cast aside.
Ms Vere thinks this is all dull, irrelevant stuff, bring-backery and ‘harking back to yesteryear’, and other silly jibes that belong in G2, on ‘Woman’s Hour’ or in the New Statesman. But I also look for definitions in history and thought, particularly in Christianity, in the ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ of Edmund Burke, on the voluminous work done by such people as Patricia Morgan on the family, and of John Marks and others on education. I may not be able to define it, nor would I want to. I’ve had enough of ideological politics to last several lifetimes. But I do know what it is not, and I do know who its enemies are.
If a party fails to stand up for the rule of law, embraces egalitarianism, sneers at tradition, weakens the free family, threatens national independence and liberty, destroys good things and replaces them with worse ones, tears up our beloved countryside for gain, engages in sordid jingoism and warmongering, then it is not conservative.
There is no trades descriptions law in British politics, or who knows what would happen? But it is surely morally wrong for this collection of social and moral liberals to stand before the electorate and call themselves by that name.
By the way, I have absolutely no idea what ‘opportunity cost’ has to do with it. It doesn’t sound like a principle, or even a disposition. It sounds like the rattling of a desiccated calculating machine.
She is of course welcome to respond here at length.
My Response to Allegations that I am an Apologist for Syria
Some Blairite warmonger on Twitter has accused me of being a ‘shill’ for the Syrian state.
I have gone into the archives to look up what I have written about Syria in the past dozen years or so. I suspect that few journalists in popular newspapers have written as often about that country. Here is a selection. I think it rather undermines this claim. Readers might also notice a fairly consistent scepticism about liberal intervention.
4th November 2001:
Look at the Prime Minister's strange whirl round the Middle East, rebuffed at every turn by alleged allies.
Perhaps the key to understanding the strange state of the world may be found in Syria, that favoured refuge of retired Nazis and wasps' nest of terror. A few smart bombs in the suburbs of Damascus would do more to eliminate terror from the world than anything that has so far been done in Afghanistan. Instead, we go there seeking allies.
Someone ought to have told Mr Blair why relations between Britain and Syria have been strained in the past.
Back in 1986, the Syrian Embassy in London was the headquarters of a terrorist operation which - had it succeeded - would have been as bad as the Manhattan massacre.
A miserable specimen called Nezar Hindawi, aided by Syrian diplomats, tricked his pregnant girlfriend into smuggling 10lb of explosive on to an El Al flight from Heathrow.
Israeli guards foiled the plan at the last minute. Had the bomb gone off, a fully fuelled and loaded 747 would have exploded over London.
Syria never admitted its part in the outrage or said sorry yet it is now being courted by the West as an ally against 'terrorism'.
11th August 2002
As for Saddam being an especially wicked dictator, the whole Middle East is packed with unpleasant, repressive regimes.
Syria, where Mr Blair was recently humiliated by the dynastic despot Bashar Assad, is a nasty anti-Semitic secret police state which massacres its own citizens.
20th October 2002
The Foreign Offices of Europe are constantly seeking new lucrative friendships with Colonel Gadaffi, the Iranian Ayatollahs and with Syria, every one of them an unrepentant supporter of terror.
8th December 2002
(as part of a ‘dossier’ on countries with repressive governments)
How about this? A country with arbitrary arrest and indefinite incommunicado detention, where torture is commonplace - including hanging victims from the ceiling and beating them with sticks and cables.
A country at the centre of the Middle East drug trade which massacred its own citizens in Hama in 1982. It is called Syria. Its leader, Bashar Assad, will be in London on December 16 to meet Mr Blair and the poor Queen. No chance of an invasion there, either, I suppose?
22nd December 2002
THE arguments for the Iraq war are such an insult to the intelligence that the Prime Minister must be signalling to us that he thinks the whole thing is mad. Isn't he?
These scare stories about gas attacks and soft targets are so blatant and pointless that we must be meant to think they are crude attempts to manipulate and panic us. Mustn't we?
And surely the visit to London by Syria's Bashar Assad, Saddam Hussein's closest rival in the evil tyrant stakes, was an elaborate joke designed to draw attention to the ludicrousness of the 'bomb Baghdad' project. Wasn't it?
29th December 2002
If Saddam has dangerous weapons, he can be deterred from using them, as he has been for the past decade. His regime is repulsive, but no more so than that of our new friend Bashar Assad in Syria, sponsor and shelterer of some of the world's worst terrorists.
7th December 2003
(in an article on rendition)
One former prisoner, Shah Mohammed, tells of his arrest and treatment in Guantanamo. The other, Maher Arar, describes his arrest and the way in which he was cynically exported to Syria to be beaten with professional skill by the Middle East's most expert torturers and kept in conditions that would drive many of us insane in a matter of days.
Those who think this is just liberal bleeding-heart stuff should bear in mind that the entire might of America's intelligence services could find no reason to detain either man. Plainly, whatever confessions Mr Arar put his thumbprint on are worthless, as such confessions usually are. But in this case they are so worthless that those who authorised the torture cannot even bring themselves to believe them.
Those who think that difficult times justify desperate measures must ask themselves how useful information will be when it is obtained by a Syrian security man in a cellar, beating a suspect black and blue with electric cable. And who knows how many have been subjected to this treatment, or worse? Who knows if they have survived, or remained sane?
20th February 2005
BECAUSE of last week's bomb in Beirut, you may have learned from the BBC that Syria is illegally occupying the Lebanon. If it had not been for the blast, you'd never have heard about this. The same BBC tells you every week, and twice if possible, that Israel illegally occupies the West Bank of the Jordan. Why is the BBC only interested in the woes of Arabs when they come at the hands of the Israelis?
11th January 2009
FROM what I've seen of him (a friendly chat in a TV green room) I rather like Brian Eno, a pleasant man capable of thought. So it's all the sadder to see him falling for the filthiest propaganda trick of the anti-Israel lobby. This is the comparison of what Israel does in Gaza with what the German National Socialists did to the Jews of Europe.
Reading Mr Eno say 'By creating a Middle Eastern version of the Warsaw ghetto they are recapitulating their own history as though they've forgotten it', was a bit like seeing an old friend suddenly vomit yellow slime in public.
I'm against what Israel is doing in Gaza. But the annihilation of the Warsaw ghetto was utterly different, a conscious, deliberate racial extermination, still unique in human history. Just as soon as the State of Israel starts trying to exterminate Arabs, I'll be the first to attack it for this with all the fury I can summon.
But while it's not doing this, it's a particularly revolting piece of dishonesty (or ignorance) to claim it is so.
Why? As Mr Eno must know, the State of Israel exists because the 'civilised' world (including some influential Arabs) refused to rescue Europe's Jews from Hitler when they could. The great powers were rightly guilty when they found out afterwards what they had allowed. In future, persecuted Jews would always have somewhere to take them in.
The false claim that Israel is like Nazi Germany is a smear designed to rob Israel of its moral right to exist.
If Mr Eno wants a (slightly) closer parallel with what's going on in Gaza, he should look up what happened in the Syrian city of Hama in February 1982. The Muslim Brotherhood, in many ways similar to Hamas, had violently challenged the rule of Syrian President Hafez Assad. Hama, with 350,000 inhabitants, was identified by Assad as the HQ of the Brotherhood.
After warning that anyone who remained in Hama would be considered a rebel, the Syrian Army bombed and shelled the city for three weeks. Death and torture squads were then unleashed.
Estimates of the numbers killed range from 7,000 to 40,000. By comparison with this, Israel's attack on Gaza looks positively effeminate.
But fashionable showbiz folk have never heard of Hama. Is it all right for Arabs to kill Arabs - and only bad when Israel does it?
27th March 2011
DAVID CAMERON'S war of personal vanity still rages on, its aim and its end unknown. Our ludicrous Libyan allies - who may in fact be our enemies - fight each other as we protect their so-called army from Colonel Gaddafi. If we don't send weapons and troops to help them, they have no hope of winning. Will we? Or will we, in desperation, wink at an assassination of the Colonel, an action that will take us close to his moral level? Or will we, by then, be too busy bombing our way to the Big Society in Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Zimbabwe, China and anywhere else where government doesn't reach our leader's alleged high ethical standards? Nobody knows. Ministers, apparently with no idea of the forces they have unleashed, drawl that it's as long as a piece of string.
Ho ho. Or maybe it's as long as the rope needed to hang themselves. Yet the House of Commons endorses this leap in the dark with a vote so overwhelming that you wonder if they put something in the water, or whatever it is they drink. What are all these costly people for? Last year we worried about their expenses. This year we should be worried about their salaries. We hired them to question and watch the Government, not to do what the Prime Minister tells them. Aren't we still recovering from the gullibility of MPs (and the media) over Saddam Hussein? Do we learn nothing from experience? Are too many of us, and them, just too thick to be in charge of a small nuclear power? It seems so.
MPs should be reminded they are not the employees of Downing Street, but of us. I am quite sure that a huge number of British people do not want this war, and for good reasons. It is not in our national interests. We can't even protect old ladies from rapists in our own country, and perhaps we should sort that out before reforming Africa.
They correctly think it is not our affair. After being told that we can't even afford public libraries, they have to watch Liam Fox burning great mounds of banknotes (provided by us) as he rains costly munitions on Tripoli.
THEY are baffled to see the remains of our naval power towed surreptitiously to a Turkish scrapyard, because we allegedly cannot afford it. And meanwhile, an obscure public relations man who has never fought in a war poses as the saviour of Benghazi.
Where was the British people's voice in the Commons on Monday? I don't care much what the UN, that rabble of torturers and tyrants, thinks. I would cheerfully see it abolished.
I have no idea why we still need Nato 20 years after the threat it was formed to face vanished for ever. The fact that it has endorsed Mr Cameron's adventure doesn't comfort me.
What really troubles me is that Parliament wasn't asked its opinion until after the missiles were launched. It was treated, contemptuously, like a neutered chihuahua, a pitiful yapping thing to be pushed about by the Premier's polished toecap, and patted as long as it fawned. And if it doesn't now revolt against this treatment, then that is what it will have proved itself to be.
I believe that the Government knew by Friday, March 18 that it was more or less certain it would begin military action on the evening of Saturday, March 19. There was time to call a special session of the Commons.
And there was a precedent - the Falklands. The first motion before the House on Monday should have been a censure of the Government for launching a war of choice without seeking Parliamentary approval.
Yet, while the whole engine of British diplomacy was devoted to getting Mr Cameron's war past the UN, Nato and (of course) our ultimate rulers in the EU, Westminster was forgotten.
And so were we.
This is wrong. Those involved should not get away with it. Later on, I shall say I told you so. Just now, I'm telling you so.
17th April 2011
WHY do dictators refuse to quit? Simple. They see what happens to those who give up. Nicolae Ceausescu was killed after a kangaroo trial. Erich Honecker was hounded from country to country until he died of cancer. Slobodan Milosevic was locked up until he died. Egypt's Hosni Mubarak is now under arrest and his sons in jail. Are they wishing that - like the rulers of Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria - they had killed more of their own people and stuck it out? I wouldn't be surprised. If the 'West' really wants Colonel Gaddafi to go, it would be wise to give him an easy exit.
7th August 2011
ACCOUNTS of the trial of Egypt's ex-President Mubarak in Cairo generally seem to assume that this is a good thing.
The same news organisations then report the massacres in Syria as if these are a bad thing.
Can't these dimwits see that their incessant encouragement for the futile and over-rated 'Arab spring' is one of the reasons for the murders in Syria? Syria's President Assad sees Mr Mubarak in prison garb, displayed in a cage, and decides with utter determination that this will not happen to him.
Instead, he kills and kills and kills to stay in power and out of the dock.
August 27, 2013
Charlotte Vere Replies
Here is Ms Vere's response( also posted as a comment on the previous thread) . I shall respond shortly.
Dear Peter,
Lady Thatcher had a hatred of ‘bring-backery’. I have too. And I think
we can say that your recent blog about women, working and motherhood
(see here) has more than a whiff of bring-backery about it.
Rather than make a point-by-point rebuttal of your piece, which managed
to include the GDR, the USSR and other nods to yesteryear, plus a fair
smattering of less than flattering comments about me personally, I’d
like to offer a more sweeping narrative.
It is true. I stood for the Conservatives in Brighton Pavilion at the
last election. I was a reserve to the shortlist and prevailed over five
good candidates in an Open Primary. I was proud to stand, and it will
remain one of the highlights of my life. But Peter, you seem to think
that I was an ‘A-lister’; not true – to my knowledge anyway – as the A
list significantly pre-dated my involvement as a parliamentary
candidate.
But no matter, you bandied the term around as a primary
school child might say ‘she smells’; as a term of shame, but I am not
ashamed. What on earth is wrong in opening up politics to people who
are not policy wonks or who haven’t cut their teeth as a Special Adviser
to a government minister? What on earth is wrong in encouraging those
of us who have started businesses, run organisations and frankly know
and understand what life is like outside the Westminster bubble? Is
this somehow not Conservative, Peter?
Having fought Brighton and lost, I turned my attention to the Liberal
Democrats. Indeed as the Finance Director and a spokesperson for NO2AV I
battled against the unholy alliance of Labour, LibDems and UKIP to
roundly reject the imposition of a voting system used only in Australia,
Fiji and Papua … you will remember the phrase. Is what I did not
Conservative, Peter?
And then I turned my attention to women. More specifically, women in
the economy. For many years, Conservatives and conservatives haven’t
felt comfortable talking about women. Labour and the left have had the
crutch of feminism, and they are welcome to it in my view. Harman and
the like queue up to portray women as ‘special creatures’ and demand
positive discrimination to bypass democratic and meritocratic processes
and shoehorn the favour few into positions of power. Not in my name.
And as I read around the topic I was relieved that the VAST majority of
women reject feminism too. It doesn’t speak for women of today, it
doesn’t resonate with them and it has no time for the views of men.
So how can we think about women today? It is a brave new world where
the prejudices and expectations of just a generation ago seem dated, for
example:
Young women far exceed the number of men applying to university: indeed
if every young man that applied was given a golden ticket conferring
automatic entry there would still be more women than men.
Women under the age of 29 earn more than men: and for most men and women
this is neither ‘good’, not ‘bad’, it just is.
One in three working mothers is the main breadwinner: this fact alone
highlights the enormous contribution to family income from working
mothers.
So we do have to approach the issue in a new way.
The concept of
choice, a key Conservative value, aligned with responsibility, must be
part of the conversation. How do we say to a mum OR a dad that in this
brave new world of women and men receiving the same opportunities and
the same education that they have choices? And how do we explain that
as with all choices, there are consequences.
So here, Peter, is my plan for the family:
Most importantly, we have to stop ganging up on each other. We must
stop pitting the beleaguered and overworked, paragon-of-virtue
stay-at-home mum versus the guilty, uncaring, self-obsessed working mum.
Both are ridiculous stereotypes which should be banished. And when
people like you, Peter, ‘defend’ or ‘attack’ either of these
stereotypes, it encourages a hardening in attitudes.
Secondly, we should make sure that by family, we mean dads too.
Children need parents – both of them – and the assumption that only the
mother can be the care-giver or that dividing caring responsibilities
between the both parents is oooh a bit modern, is nonsense. Right from
birth, the state, the media and many others inadvertently and
unintentionally leave fathers out of the conversation.
That must
change, children and families are their responsibility too.
Thirdly, we should recognise that those women and men who choose to stay
at home have the absolute right to do so. As with all decisions
relating to the family, parents must make the right choice for their
circumstances and we must trust them to recognise the pros and cons of
their chosen path, some of which are decades away.
Fourthly, in a statement of the bleeding-obvious, we should recognise
that parents in dual-income households take care of their children too!
They do phonics, ride bicycles, bake cupcakes, go on trips, help with
homework etc etc. The assumption that going to work results in a
complete abrogation of young-raising responsibility is narrow-minded and
frankly offensive.
Supporting dual income households by making a contribution to childcare
costs is a win for the family, and a long term win for our country. All
parents probably wish that they had an extended family on their
doorstep, but life’s not like that and you find new ways of broadening
your net.
Finally, you are right Peter, strong families are at the core of our
nation’s social fabric, so why can’t they be at the core of our nation’s
financial fabric too? As a Conservative, I support strong families who
are able to take care of their own, socially and financially.
What started out as a diverting summer holiday outing on Twitter has
grown into you, a leading journalist, publishing, well, something that
took my breath away.
Aside from the personal digs, Peter, you felt able
to become the arbiter of Conservatism and question my political values.
But I am OK with that. The Daily Telegraph once called me a ‘feisty
Tory’ and, although I have a very ample soft side, I think I will cope.
And I will continue to debate this topic which makes so many
uncomfortable because the landscape is shifting so rapidly and we have a
new generation of parents to serve. Many on the right might benefit
from going back to first principles of true equality, individual and
social responsibility and choice. The concept of women being encouraged
to stay at home building ‘domestic fortresses’ is pure Lady Thatcher
bring-backery, Peter, and you and others need to find a voice for the
world we live in now.
With very best wishes,
Charlotte Vere
A Conservative PS: you will recognise that at the heart of my argument is the
‘opportunity cost’ of stasis and inaction. You will also understand
that ‘opportunity cost’ is what differentiates my views from those of
feminism.
Please Do What You Can Now to Halt this Rush to War
I am moved to
write what follows by a terrible feeling of powerlessness as the government of
my country rushes towards a war for which it knows it has no mandate.
It appears that a
decision has already been taken in Washington DC to launch some sort of attack on
Syria. It also seems that the British government wishes to join in that attack.
The House of Commons has been recalled but the behaviour of the Opposition
Leader (and of the leader of the Liberal Democrats) suggests that they are not
prepared to question this involvement with any vigour. If British people wish
to oppose this bizarre and perilous adventure, it is therefore up to them to
contact their MPs directly.
This posting is
designed to help them to do so, calmly, reasonably, politely and logically
while there is yet time. A decisive vote against British involvement is still
quite possible, and would be an important demonstration of national maturity
and responsibility, as well as a permanent check on the incurable enthusiasm of
some politicians for war and its alleged glamour and glory.
Here are some
arguments which you might wish to use, if and when (as I urge you to ) you
contact your MP in the next two days.
It is being
suggested (as it always is) that the planned attack will be precise, surgical,
proportionate etc etc etc.
The truth is that
nobody ever really knows the final consequence of any act of violence. Violence generally results in retaliation,
which in this case might take many unpredictable forms.
Wars often begin
with minor incidents, minor anyway to start with, which then bleed without ceasing
until they have spread a vast red stain on much of the surface of the Earth.
They are often begun on the basis of mistaken information, or indeed of lies.
They are often begun by credulity, by emotionalism and by the failure of
responsible persons to see through propaganda.
That is why
thoughtful people hesitate greatly before even contemplating such acts,
generally preferring to do them only in self-defence. When the violence
involves a military attack on a sovereign country with which we are not at war,
the matter is still more risky.
Precision warfare
is a myth. On several occasions, supposedly super-accurate airstrikes on Libya
resulted in the undisputed deaths of several entirely innocent people,
including small children. Our attacks on Belgrade during the Kosovo crisis
killed such dangerous persons as a make-up lady at Serbian national TV
headquarters. If our concern is for the innocent, the launch of bombs and
missiles is an odd way of showing it.
The moral clothing
in which this attack is dressed is a mass of rags and tatters. The very same
people demanding punishment for the Syrian state (including the discredited
Anthony Blair) are those who defend or overlook the terrible mass killings by the
Egyptian government. That government, which came to power in a blatant military
coup, has - and I put this at its
mildest – no more legitimacy than the government in Damascus. What is more,
there is no dispute at all about who is responsible for the recent mass
shootings of demonstrators in Egypt. Yet neitehr Washington nor London (who claim to be abe to descry Syria's guilt by some sort of magic process) will even concede that a putsch has taken place in Cairo.
If we are outraged
by governments that kill their own people, our outrage cannot be selective and
aimed at only one government which does this. If it is selective, then it is
false and has another purpose. What is that purpose? We are not told.
At the time of
writing, the United Nations teams have barely begun their investigation into
the episode. The Syrian government deny their involvement. There is no proof
that they are lying. It is far from impossible to believe that the rebels have
resorted to such weapons. In fact, it makes far more sense for them to have
done so than for the Syrian government. That government has the upper hand in its civil
war at present. It knows perfectly well that proof of its complicity in
the use of poison gas will open it to attack. It also knows that such proof will remove the protection it has
had up till now from the UN Security Council and the Russian-Chinese veto.
The rush to take
action before those teams have reported is frighteningly reminiscent of the
rush to attack Iraq, and the withdrawal of Hans Blix’s inspection teams from
that country, which were of course on the point of discovering that there were
no Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Governments simply
cannot be trusted to act wisely or responsibly in such matters. They have repeatedly shown this in recent years. That is why we
have a Parliament and a free press, to scrutinize and question such things.
What is the rush? Why are we having the sentence first, and the evidence and
the verdict afterwards? Mr Cameron should be told he cannot have his war until
he has proof that it is justified, and until he can show that the actions that
he plans are in the interests of this country.
Please do what you
can, while you can. There are many
honourable reasons for opposing this attack. Whether you are of the Left or
Right, liberal or conservative,
Christian, of another faith or without faith, patriot or internationalist, all can unite on
the simple issues of preferring truth to falsehood, calm justice to wild,
flailing vengeance , and careful deliberation to rush to judgement.
Please, do what
you can to stop this.
August 26, 2013
Before we Bomb Syria, Shouldn't we Seek Proof of Guilt?
The pathetic bleating flock of the British political media are helping to beat the drums for war. Yet again.
Late last week, the BBC began blasting the airwaves with stories about a chemical weapons attack in the suburbs of Damascus. Initially, its reporters and presenters were reasonably careful to point out that the videos on which this claim was based were unverified - and in fact impossible to verify. As has since become quite clear, the site of the alleged atrocity is very difficult to reach. This fact would be well-known to those who released the films. Indeed, they are in a position to make the site hard to reach. This is by no means the first such allegation that has been made. No reliable proof has ever been produced of any of them.
But bit by bit, this caution lessened. The more the claims were repeated, and the more the films were shown, the more commentators and reporters would say that it was ‘almost certain’ or ‘increasingly likely’ that the Syrian government’s armed forces were responsible for a huge chemical warfare attack on civilians, in the suburbs of the capital city.
In a slow news week, the unpopular papers and then the popular papers, joined in with their own coverage. Even some normally-sceptical writers and commentators were regrettably swept up in proclaiming the likelihood of the truth of the story. It is becoming increasingly risky to voice doubt. What if it’s true? How will the doubters look then? Well, when it's proved to be true, I’ll accept it is true. But until then, I won’t. I won't be frightened into abandoning the rules of evidence, and nor should you be.
If you want absolutely proven atrocities, all you need to do is look at Egypt, where the new military government, lawlessly installed by violence, has openly engaged in several severe massacres of ‘its own people’, in most cases unarmed and defenceless. Yet because these massacres were done with bullets, or for some other reason I can’t fathom, no cruise-missile attacks on Cairo are currently proposed. Ask yourself about this. The contrast couldn’t be clearer. Known, undeniable mass-murders, of which there is no doubt, and whose culprits are known and undisputed, bring no outrage. An alleged mass-murder, whose culprit is not proven, is the subject of huge outrage.
I cannot say how many times I have heard people assert that there is ‘little doubt’ the Syrian government used chemical weapons - in fact I just heard this tricky phrase on the BBC’s radio news.
‘Little doubt’?
How does one quantify doubt? How much doubt does there have to be, when a quite possibly unlimited war is in question? If there is doubt of any kind, surely we shouldn’t be broadcasting or writing as if there were no doubt, let alone talking about embroiling ourselves in a vast and probably endless sectarian war between Shia and Sunni, now rapidly catching fire in the region?
Easy enough to lob a cruise missile into Syria from a submarine, no doubt. But what sort of child imagines it would end there? If the missiles failed to shift President Assad, what next? And there are other horrible possibilities I will leave it to you to work out.
In a criminal trial, doubt simply has to be reasonable to prevent conviction. But where has reason gone in this episode? The ridiculous William Hague, who seems to have become sabre-rattler in chief just as this country has sunk to the level of a third-rate military power, talks and acts as if the matter is settled. Our Prime Minister has abandoned one of his holidays ( and who can blame him? It appears to be taking place solely for PR reasons) to hurry back to London for a meeting of the grandiosely-titled ‘National Security Council’. Not only is this name copied from the Americans. It is a body which we managed very well without for many centuries of free and independent (and secure) existence. Do these people think they are in an episode of ‘The West Wing’, that seductive drama of power-pornography, in which minor politicians imagine themselves as mighty political hunks? I have to conclude that the answer is ‘Probably yes’.
Have I missed something here? I do not (at the time of writing, 1.00 pm on Monday 26th August) recall there having been a single item of independent verifiable proof of the proposition that the Syrian government is responsible for this episode.
There is some evidence, none of it direct, that a chemical outrage of some sort did happen.
But we are a long way short of an independently verified account, with names of victims, proof of the nature of their deaths, let alone any proof clearly establishing responsibility.
We have been told that such things surely couldn’t have been faked, except by incredibly skilled technicians. But the Syrian ‘rebels’ (in fact a salad of Sunni extremists backed by Saudi Arabia and some other Gulf States, and egged on by two major Arab TV stations) are not short of money or propaganda skills.
Then there is the logic of it. President Assad has in fact denied that his government is responsible. The denial is by no means incredible. He knows (for it has been made clear so many times, not least on the precedent of Saddam Hussein’s Halabja massacre, as well as by President Barack Obama’s statement that such an attack would constitute a ‘red line’) that such an attack would provide the pretext for a ‘Western’ intervention in his country.
It would allow the USA, Britain and France to bypass the UN Security Council, and the vetoes of China and Russia against any UN-sponsored intervention. Mr Assad knows that a UN inspection team is on hand in Damascus. He also knows (and so do the rebels) that the fighting in the Damascus suburbs makes it very difficult for that team to reach the site of the alleged massacre. He does not control these suburbs, and cannot guarantee the UN team’s safety( at the time of writing the UN experts have withdrawn after they were fired upon, allegedly by rebels) . If he is to be required to prove his innocence, it will be very difficult. Thus, a media presumption of guilt, readily swallowed by vainglorious and posturing politicians (the sort we mostly have these days) is very likely.
In those circumstances, what could possibly have possessed him to do something so completely crazy? He was, until this event, actually doing quite well in his war against the Sunni rebels. Any conceivable gains from using chemical weapons would be cancelled out a million times by the diplomatic risk. It does not make sense. Mr Assad is not Saddam Hussein, or some mad carpet-biting dictator, but a reasonably intelligent, medically-trained person who has no detectable reason to act in such an illogical and self-damaging fashion.
The rebels, on the other hand (in many cases non-Syrian jihadists who are much disliked by many ordinary Syrians because of the misery they have brought upon them) , have many good reasons to stage such an attack .
Examination of one previous chemical weapons episode, in May ended with Carla del Ponte, a member of the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria suggesting that the rebels, rather than the government, had used chemical weapons. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/uns-carla-del-ponte-says-there-is-evidence-rebels-may-have-used-sarin-in-syria-8604920.html
On that occasion, the White House had its scepticism turned on “We find it highly likely that chemical weapons, if they were in fact used in Syria - and there is certainly evidence that they were - that the Assad regime was responsible,” spokesman Jay Carney said.”
Funny that. The independent Ms Del Ponte, after lengthy investigations, interviews with victims and doctors, makes a cautious statement suggesting the rebels may have been responsible. The White House brushes it aside. But a few months later it swallows whole, without a moment’s doubt, a far-less-verified or verifiable report, from a far-less independent source. Talk about confirmation bias.
Atrocities happen. The Syrian government may be guilty. If it is, I am myself just as much against intervention as if it hasn’t, though I understand that others may feel differently. But it seems to me that there are several reasons to be careful. The first is that we seek to believe evil of those we have already decided to be enemies, especially in democracies where voters must be persuaded to sign the vast blank cheque of war.
The 1914 stories (in the modern world, in the early months of the first great modern war) of raped nuns and babies tossed in the air and caught on bayonets, as the Germans marched through Belgium, were all lies. In fact the German troops did many wicked things (invading troops almost always do this, especially if brave civilians resist them) but not these atrocities. Yet they were universally believed, at a time when disbelief might have been better.
Then there is the case of the mass-rape of German women by the Red Army when they stormed into Berlin in 1945. Nobody now disputes that this horror happened. But because they were our allies, we refused to believe it, or kept quiet about it.
It is said that the only lesson of history is that nobody learns any lessons from history, and I am now old enough to believe that this may be true. But before we sign the current blank cheque, being placed in front of us, (unlimited lives, unlimited money, unlimited duration) for William Hague’s War, I thought it reasonable to ask for proof of the allegations on which the war will be based. Can anyone help?
The Tory who Says I want Girls to Leave School at 14
Any minute now I expect a contribution here from Charlotte Vere, which I will post prominently and at length, and then (I hope) reply to. Why? Who is she? Well, she has grabbed my attention and I thought a full-scale debate here would be better than any more Twitter exchanges, however pithy.
Ms Vere and I have had a squabble on Twitter, which she began by claiming, on the basis of no evidence at all, that I thought girls should leave school at 14. I should state here (absurd that it should be necessary) that I don’t think anything of the kind. My views on the education of women (as I have said more than once before) are pretty much those stated by Virginia Woolf in ‘A Room of One’s Own’. What’s more it seems to me that nobody can be too well-educated for the momentous and hugely influential and responsible task of raising the next generation.
The idea that full-time motherhood is a matter of kitchen sinks, scrubbing, and cleaning behind the fridge is a hostile defamation of a vast task of nurturing, teaching, example, moral instruction, protection from danger, patience, constancy, trust and loving discipline, which in each home where it takes place has more power to do real good than almost any paid job you can think of. It is largely thanks to the Greerite and Friedanesque disdain for this noble occupation, and our culture’s unceasing slandering of it, that the Chief Rabbi feels the need to complain about a society without trust.
Ms Vere constructed this worse-than-baseless accusation (which she has declined to withdraw) in response to my recent column defending full-time mothers. This pointed out that the one form of childcare the government does not subsidise is care done by the child’s own mother. It also explained why so many families gave up great material benefits (so defying the spirit of the age) to give their children this benefit.
You can read it here
Who is Charlotte Vere? Well, by her own description (if I’ve fathomed the rather odd punctuation of her Twitter biography) she ‘s executive director of the Girls’ Schools Association, on the Development Board of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, and ‘Trustee of something she refers to as the ‘Fatherhood Institute & NYAT’. Or, as she displays it : ‘Exec Director | Girls' Schools Association, Dev Board | Oxford Mindfulness Ctr, Trustee | Fatherhood Inst & NYAT and VC of Governors. Tweets own, obvs.’
Obvs.
Make what you will of all that. I do. But what interests me more about her is that in May 2015 she stood as Tory candidate for Brighton, one of the fabled ‘A- listers’. She came third in the general election behind Caroline Lucas (apologies for getting this name wrong and thanks to the reader who pointed it out) , then leader of the Green Party, and the Labour candidate. She was picked as Tory candidate in a very close vote in an ‘open primary’, though the actual votes were never revealed. Just 80 people attended the selection meeting. It sounds like an interesting evening, with a cliff-hanger ending.
Well, it’s hard to define a Tory these days (look at Louise Bagshawe, as was, now Louise Mensch, the woman who wandered in and out of New Labour before becoming Tory candidate for Corby, winning the seat and then wandering off again, who knows whither, in mid-Parliament).
But in what way is she a conservative?
Let’s take a look at some of our exchanges:
She assumed (why? She claims not to be statist) that my article was a plea for state subsidies for full-time mothers, which it isn’t. I don’t, for instance, favour the much-dangled plan for a marriage tax allowance, believing it to be a silly gimmick.
My column was just a plea for the government to stop penalising full-time mothers by a) acting as if they’re a stupid nuisance, a feeling actually voiced by Patricia Hewitt (who said they were a ‘problem’) but implicitly endorsed by the policies of all modern British governments for some years, and b) taxing such families to subsidise child-care for double-earners. And on top of that taxing such families to subsidise the many thousands of fatherless families created by 50 years of deliberate state policy. I want the state to stop encouraging rivals to the independent ,free, married family, and to stop making those free families pay for that encouragement. That’s all.
It was also pointing out that the present government’s attitude towards women who raised their own children was strikingly similar to that of the old East Germany (I quoted from one of my favourite possessions, a propaganda booklet on the GDR in which that horrible state boasted of its advanced and enlightened policy of cramming women into wageslave workplaces, and simultaneously cramming their children into nurseries. The GDR, by the way, had a Tory Party (Christian Democrats) and a Liberal Democrat Party, each allowed 52 seats in the 500-seat People’s Chamber, provided they agreed with the Communist Party about everything. Remind you of anything? It also had universal comprehensive schools.
I had also noticed that the old USSR had a very similar policy. In fact, when I lived in Soviet Moscow, this arrangement – under which a single income simply couldn’t meet the budget of a normal household, and there was universal ‘childcare’ so that mothers of young children could be marched into paid work as soon as possible after giving birth, was one of the most striking features of that society. So was mass abortion (abortions –openly practised as a form of contraception - outnumbered live births in many years in the USSR) and pandemic divorce. When I returned home a few years later, I was struck (and remain struck) by the similarities between this horrible travesty of a human society and the grisly, family-free, privacy free, marriage-free abortionist utopia we are now building in Britain.
The intensifying battle between the state and the family (also dealt with in Ferdinand Mount’s work ‘The Subversive family’) was one of the chief themes of my book ‘the Abolition of Britain’, which I am still hoping some of my critics will one day read, rather than assuming wrongly that it is a tract about central heating..
(If Ms Vere won’t read my book, surely she can read Ferdinand Mount’s, as David Cameron’s mother is Ferdy’s cousin (Ferdy is really Sir William Mount, Bart, but is too nice to mention it ))
Of course the point is this – that the state and the family are rivals. In this struggle, any conservative must surely be on the side of the family and private life (and of private property) against the state. But for those people who confuse economic liberalism with conservatism, there is a confusing new element. The state has now been joined by a ferocious ally, namely global, corporate business, which – as the cleverer Marxists have long realised - has turned out to be one of the most revolutionary forces known to man. Both the state and the corporations dislike the close-knit married family. Such a family requires a proper weekly Sabbath of some kind, where both parents stay away from work and the family is together in its own home, undisturbed by work, or commerce, and is in general resistant to regimentation, advertising and demands for long working hours. The state is suspicious and jealous of such privacy. The corporations are jealous of the time which they would rather we spent in the shops or in the workplace.
Business also prefers women workers to men – amongst other things much less likely than men to be unionised (note how many men have ended up unemployed, and indeed unemployable, since the sexual revolution really got under way and the commercial women’s magazines and the popular newspaper agony aunts started spouting the sort of ideas once restricted to ‘Spare Rib’).
This state-family battle, not some forgotten tussle between unions and bosses, or some ancient dead row about nationalisation, is the real clash in our society at the moment. A terrifying alliance of state and commerce is arrayed against the family and is rapidly destroying it. Of course, this alliance cannot see any virtue in the unmeasured benefits of full-time motherhood, as compared to measurable, GDP-enhancing wage-slavery. Nor would it be interested if it could see any such virtue, despite some politicians’ propaganda claims to be concerned with Gross National Happiness or General Wellbeing. These people have no idea how must of the world actually lives.
Individualism and personal autonomy (once known as ‘selfishness’) are major constituencies now, as the post-Christian society takes its grim shape in the second Century of the Self. And individuals, hypnotised by the latest gadget and allowed almost limitless credit to spend, are the ideal consumers, the ideal wageslaves and the ideal passive, compliant citizen in the beehive state.
Many of the advocates of female wageslavery are of course very well-off themselves( I have no idea of Ms Vere’s personal circumstances) and so are spared from almost all its consequences. That’s often why they can’t see any disadvantages in this arrangement.
If all wageslave mothers were Nicola Horlick, or Cherie Blair, or Samantha Cameron, well-paid and rewarded with great status, then the position might be different (though to me there is something sad in a child being brought up by an employee, however wonderful, while that child’s mother goes out to an office) .
But they aren’t. For most of them it’s a grim job in a call-centre or an assembly plant or a shop, while their child competes for attention in a teeming nursery, what I call a day-orphanage. They do it because they have to, not because they want to. If they had the choice, and if the government stopped pushing them into wageslavery, they’d raise their own young, and do it much better.
Here are some quotes from what Ms Vere (who apparently dismisses any discussion of political theory, its origins and nature, or of the importance of ideas an history in political debate) has had to say on this general subject . (As to this attitude I recommend that she notes what Maynard Keynes once said ‘Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”)
At one stage (14th August), she rather enjoyably said that au pairs cost £20 a week ‘cheaper than after-school club’ – later in some embarrassment raising this figure to £20 a day.
Then she declared that ‘Motherhood does not mean out of work and cleaning behind the fridge’ (13th August)
She tweeted ‘Yawn’ in response to my pointing out the similarities between Britain and the USSR, and also referred to ‘constant harking back to yesteryear’ (when and where was this harking?).
In response to my characterisation of ‘childcare’ as ‘paid strangers’ she said ‘Strangers! You have never used childcare clearly. These people become part of an extended family’ .
She also Tweeted ‘You have given me no hope that you respect a woman’s right to work outside the home’. Once again, I have no idea where she gets this from. I wouldn’t dream of stopping anyone from working outside the home if she wanted to. I just want to stop people being conscripted unwillingly into wageslavery and abandoning her children to the care of paid strangers.
Challenged to withdraw her claim that I want girls to leave school at 14, she did not do so, but repeated it, saying ‘ I still think you would like girls to leave school at 14 to build ‘domestic fortresses’’
She declared ‘A dual-income family’s main goal should be financial resilience.’
And she gave an example of her rhetoric when she said ‘Pro-family? Absolutely. Why does that have to include the women scrubbing the hearth?’ .
Then there was ‘Enough of the ‘bring-backery’ of the Daily Mail . there is a future to seize and 1950s views don’t help’
Most of these sentiments could easily have come from the pen of a radical leftist. Indeed, I have experienced most of them from that direction already. The point here is that they are coming from the pen (or perhaps the hand-held device) of a person who has stood as a Tory parliamentary candidate.
When I pointed out that the Tory party, for which she had stood as an official candidate, had helped the passage of the Equality Act, the central pillar of political correctness and the work (though originating in an EU directive) of Harriet Harman (with whom Ms Vere says she disagrees) , Ms Vere responded by saying Theresa May had ‘little option’ but to go along with Ms Harman’s Equality Bill.
I should have thought Mrs May would have had little option but to oppose it, had she been a conservative. As it happens, she told Ms Harman back in 2008 (Hansard, 26th June 2008 col 501 ) 'I look forward to working constructively with them [the New Labour government]on ensuring that we have workable and practical legislation to provide for a fair society.' Ms Harman responded (Col 503) 'I thank the right honourable lady for her broad welcome for the package and for our endeavours. I also welcome the fact that she has ignored the cries from her own backbenchers that the proposals are rubbish.’
August 24, 2013
Hash made Dame Sally hallucinate - and she still can't see straight
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
Ever since poor old Ann Widdecombe tried to tighten the dope laws rather mildly a dozen years ago, lofty Establishment figures have taken to confessing that they took drugs at university.
Half of William Hague’s Shadow Cabinet did so, in what looked like a well organised scheme to destroy Miss Widdecombe’s plan.
These confessions are rarely coupled with any expressions of shame. They ignore the growing correlation between cannabis use and incurable mental illness, and the thousands of quiet personal tragedies that have resulted, and will result, from this.
Any intelligent person must surely see what the effect will be when a prominent figure reveals such a past crime and does not condemn it.
It will weaken the enforcement of the anti-cannabis law (already feeble), and fuel the potent and well-funded international campaign to make this frightening poison legal.
So what should we make of the behaviour of Professor Dame Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer of England?
She went on to BBC Radio 3 (so civilised!) to discuss her taste in music.
In the course of this, Dame Sally admitted she was shy of giving interviews. Yet it was clear from the conversation that Michael Berkeley, the presenter of the programme Private Passions, knew she was going to talk about drugs. In fact, about halfway through the discussion, he made it clear that the subject would come up later.
Is it possible that this had actually been negotiated? Who can say? Dame Sally, a member of the 1960s campus radical generation, also revealed that she had been ‘very lively’ in student politics. Tell us more, Dame Sally. And then it came – the confession that Dame Sally, a virtuous non-smoker of tobacco, had guzzled a number of hash cookies, until, rightly alarmed by hallucinations, she ceased.
What conclusions did she draw from this? That drugs are a medical problem rather than a legal one, together with some excuse-making guff about ‘addiction’, something for which there is no scientific evidence at all.
This just happens to chime with the line being taken by every lobbyist for weakening what’s left of our laws against drugs, especially the unpleasant alleged comedian Russell Brand.
This is the sort of company the opera-going, fine-wine-loving, smoke-free Dame Sally is keeping (though she says she is careful not to be photographed holding a glass of wine, lest she sets a bad example).
She did accidentally manage to say one genuinely moving and powerful thing, quoting her late father, an ordained minister of the Church and Professor of Theology at Birmingham University for 26 years, who warned her: ‘Drugs decivilise you. You stop being a civilised person.’
They also decivilise those societies that allow them to spread, as we see every day.
If people like Dame Sally won’t stand up for civilisation, who will?
Now Labour has joined the Lord Sutch loonies
Politicians are such cowards and fashion victims that no major figure will dare oppose Labour’s plan for votes at 16. It means, among other things, 16-year-olds on juries, and if that doesn’t alarm you, then I can’t help you. The Liberal Democrats, now in government, have backed this lunacy for years.
I suppose we had better comb through the 1960s manifestos of the late Screaming Lord Sutch and see what other stupid, laughable schemes we find there. They too will probably come true before these islands finally sink, doped and giggling, into the sea. Sutch, whose National Teenage Party first proposed this plan 50 years ago, at least knew that the idea was barking mad, and dressed accordingly. Now it is the serious policy of the suited political class.
Since our economic, defence, foreign, education, immigration and criminal justice policies are already so infantile, and more or less based on mass bribery, it won’t make all that much difference if we just skip a generation and bring in votes at five. Just offer them lollipops instead of welfare entitlements.
Stop talking rubbish, Mr Pickles
I have a soft spot for Eric Pickles, a man who once complained to me that months of hard dieting had only succeeded in making his feet less fat. But I think he should stop helping David Cameron to pretend to be a conservative.
Here’s an opportunity. Mr Pickles is far too bright not to have known that the abolition of the traditional weekly rubbish collection was forced on this country by EU directives. Yet he pretended he could reverse this.
Now the truth is out, though the announcement was left to the obscure Lord de Mauley (who sounds like a character from the old Billy Bunter stories) in the middle of August. We have no choice.
Mr Pickles should confess all, and tell the truth to this autumn’s Tory conference.
He should say – which is true – that a country that cannot even decide when its dustbins are emptied is not independent, and that the only honest positions anyone can take about the EU are ‘leave now’ or ‘stay for ever’.
The REAL reason Ed's under fire
Those who think that things get into the media by accident, and dismiss all other explanations as ‘conspiracy theories’, surely need to ask why the past few months have seen so many press and broadcasting attacks on the Labour leader, Ed Miliband.
Some parish councillor mutters that Mr Miliband isn’t doing well, and it leads the bulletins. Or an entire opinion poll is expensively commissioned, in which people are invited to say Mr Miliband is no good. Opinion polls, as I point out from time to time, are devices for influencing opinion, not for measuring it.
Even odder, why has this attack – which benefits nobody but David Cameron – come largely from the sort of people and organs who used to lick the boots of Anthony Blair?
Simple. Mr Cameron really is the Heir to Blair. By adopting Mr Blair’s policies wholesale, he has won their admiration and support.
When Mr Cameron (who is also no good) finally flops too badly to go on, these people will all switch back to Labour.
I see that scientists have found out what snails do in the dark by attaching tiny lights to them. Apparently they like to slither along each other’s slime trails. A pity a similar research project cannot be applied to the dozens of publicly funded political spin doctors or ‘special advisers’ who tell the media what to think about the great issues of the day.
As a footnote to the Sally Davies affair, I must just mention that, while high-handedly rejecting a complaint from me about (another) blatantly pro-drug legalisation item on BBC radio, a Corporation official said to me that the requirement to be impartial didn’t apply, as the reform of the drug laws is not an ‘active controversy’ in Britain just now. You could have fooled me.
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